Well, it's hot June in Carolina del Norte and I having been watching okra get ready for its season on the farm. Peaches will soon be here, and we have all been enjoying the beginnings of tomato season. Lightning bugs are out in full glory and somewhat humiliated by our voyeuristic needs to put them in jars to see their bums light up. I wear the humidity every day like a polyester suit coat and know I will be ready for whatever heatwave Maine will ever dish out. Farming is near impossible for me, and the chigger bites and poison ivy that were my hazing into the south are still making my skin crawl. I went out into my garden today on Arnette Ave. and marveled at all the creatures in our hammock. Then decided i would have nothing to do with them.
I have been in North Carolina one month longer than I had planned. I have fallen for the South because it pokes and provokes me. Durham has been a wonderful place from which to explore other areas in the South, and to come home to, dragging my tale between my legs as I evaluate everything I ever knew about people and organizing. What I have learned into my hands about the farm and the legacy of this land has been further planted in me as I share in stories of resistance and a deep, immediate kind of pain rooted here, a pain renewed by the reality of immigrants as slave labor in the South.
I wouldn't want anyone to think that I came here, found community, and lived out my days in peace. The south isn't about peace. Its dance is a furious one, fire and passion. We only sit on porches in between. The South is a train barreling through towns, lurching and sweating out fumes, screeching, "Are you ready to get on?" I can't tell yet, if I'm getting on, but I sure am doing some of the deepest analysis of power and privilege I have ever had to do.
So there are places on this trip that I don’t realize I need to be until I find myself speeding down the interstate in their direction. I want to tell you about a few of them.
I. The Highlander Center
I was pretty sure after one month in North Carolina that I was receiving a clear message to go to Florida. Every activist and labor organizer that I had spoken with agreed that there were rad happenings south of where we were. The Immokalee farmworkers have just won a fight against McDonalds and are the highlight of southern Florida activism for farmworkers.
But after a couple attempts at trying to arrange farm work and visits to the peninsula it was clear: if I wanted to do farm work in Florida I would have to haul watermelons, tomato season being over, and also I wasn’t really ready for Florida in the middle of the summer. Besides, the season was over and most of the organizers had scattered and were actually working on seasonal crops in the Carolinas. Finding anyone would be like stitching a quilt without a needle.
So five minutes after I had set my sights west on Tennessee, home to some 40 anti-immigrant proposals, I marched down Arnette Ave to my friend Tony’s place(a collective house where I am now living) and he immediately said, “you have to go to this conference at the Highlander Center.”
Who up North knows about the Highlander Center today anyway? When we think of labor organizing many of us think of local unions, protests at Wal-mart, our own local meat and seafood processing plants.
The Highlander Center is sacred space. Perched atop a hill in the valley of the great Smokies of Eastern Tennessee the spirit meets the struggle.
The Highlander Center has been a nexus of popular education and labor organizing in the South since the 1940s, although many people identify it with the Civil Rights movement, because it was one of the first safe spaces for black and white laborers to organize together.
Still ringing in my ears are the songs of resistance from the Civil Rights Movement that initiated my days at the conference. "I woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom". This has been one of the blessings of southern organizing. Every conference maintains this tradition of song. During a music circle at Highlander, I heard Guy and Candie Carawan, two seasoned musician activists tell stories of songs from the movement, from the coast of the Carolinas to Appalachia, songs like good friends carrying the load.
Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize", and "We shall Overcome" that people perpetuated in frightening moments in the dark, or happily over supper. This inherited drumbeat of revolution awakened my commitment. Oh, let us always remember to sing.The other blessing in our organizing work is the progressive language access movement in the South. I came to the Highlander to participate in a training entitled," Interpreting in the social justice movement". I have seen some of the finest activism here around organizing interpretation and been involved in bettering my skills as a simultaneous interpreter for ally work in the immigrant justice movement. I believe that if I truly want to create change I need to step back and trust in immigrant and indigenous leadership; using my language privilege for good and assuming the role of interpreter at these events may just be the most radical way of using my voice.
So I have been volunteering to interpret at many events, sometimes getting paid, and seeing some amazing discussions take place. I went to a forum on immigration in the South, a local conference for Latinos in NC, and have offered to interpret at the US social forum in Atlanta, GA. Most of these conferences work from popular education models disseminated by Highlander. More power to our peeps.
The focus of the immigration work we are doing is to frame the movement within the larger context of racist politics and apply a popular education model to create strong communities that question our basic values around immigration. We are building a "multi-racial movement".
The immigration conference I attended was at University of North Carolina, the oldest public university and perhaps the reason for NC being the more progressive southern state. One of the participants said he felt the South was unique with a more settled population of Latinos we are changing the paradigm because the minority is organizing itself, instead of being organized by others.
One of the moments I remember most is a woman from Paraguay sharing how when she came to the United States she was in four years of darkness.
Eastern TN is an amazing place. I loved resting in the mountains at a place where MLK, Paulo Friere, and other people came together to share ideas that are still seen as so radical. I took a walk down a country road at one point and decided I would come back here in July. There must be something else I need to see.
Finally, as I was sitting down at the end of the conference, waiting for my ride and watching a perfect afternoon end in the mountains, a woman I had been trying to connect with in Immokalee, FL walked up the road with her huge backpack. I also met a group of people from New Orleans who offered me a place to stay and information. A woman who talked about dead bodies in the streets and handing out respirators to clients only to see them two seconds later be rounded up by immigration, respirators on the ground. She will need someone to cook her good meals and remind her to sleep. Sometimes the less we organize something, the more available we are to receive it in gift form.
II. Greensboro, NC
One restless night a couple of weeks ago, while tossing and turning and like a bear, scratching an itchy belly full of swelling chigger bites against the sandy texture of my bedsheets, I dreamt I lived in Greensboro in the week of February 1, 1960.
Maybe I had been thinking about how to talk about race, maybe I had been troubled by the lack of struggle for immigration reform in NC in the past few weeks. I don’t know. But all of a sudden I was transported into Greensboro and was being led by a young defiant black woman into the side door of the local Woolworth building, the site of the start of the Civil Rights movement, when black university students sat down at the lunch counter and demonstrated until they won the right to equal service.
I do not remember much of this dream, but I do recall being led by the hand and while my guide sat at those same stools, I hung back at the end of the counter, observing some books on nearby shelves. I awoke with the thought, “what kind of ally will you be?”
Somehow it just felt important to me to go to Greensboro. I learned during my life in Bolivia that places of resistance can be very sacred sites. I felt that this place might inform other areas of my trip.
Greensboro is a graceful step into the past. Old tiled buildings, streets lined with antique shops promising wonders untold to window shoppers who chance into their caves of bedframes, wagon wheels, and soda fountains. I played the part of the mosaic artist, gathering tiles for a future project, peering into alleys and looking at storefronts to imagine their story. Red velvet and lemon cakes behind glass cases and milkshakes and fountains…a quaint downtown with no idea as to why I have come.
I paid homage at the Woolsworth building, which is boarded up and awaiting restoration, along with the Civil Rights Museum next door. According to the tourist center folks, the museum has already received a lot of funding, which apparently has been mismanaged. The folks at the other historical museum up the road said there had been a lot of water damage. Hmm. So I made the hard cement sidewalk outside my museum and paid tribute to this home to courage and resistance.
We are sure going to need it in New Orleans.
III.
Most recently I was at a Barnraising for a Malcolm X Radio Station in Greenville, SC, chaperoning a group from the Youth Noise Network, a radio station in Durham powered by high school youth. The term barnraising implies building something in a short amount of time. For our project, it was building the Low Power Station, WMXP,in a weekend.
The goal of this weekend was to provide Greenville with the resources to create the station and to empower attendees in general by offering technical skills in all areas of radio as media activism. They reported that African-Americans in general only own 3.4% of US radio stations. The hope was to diversify the voices. Greenville, SC was chosen because it is a very conservative southern town. A walk downtown during the "Scottish Games" (can you imagine wearing a wool kilt in a heat wave? thou shalt not kilt!) offered a reference as to who owns the streets in some of the more wealthier area.
We did stop to pay tribute to a statue commemorating the students in Greenville who were a part of the movement to end segregated public spaces. But from this moment on, the struggle we witnessed was disjointed and pretty segregated.
The event we participated in offered no collective analysis and response to privilege and power and appeared at the outset to be another attempt of folks from the North, mostly white and mostly male, coming to educate folks from South to be more "progressive". In many ways, it backfired because of this. In summary, the project exploded in the end into disorganized dialogue brought forward by a committee of well-meaning folks who unfortunately created even more problematic layers.
What I have learned from the South thus far is that there is real pain here that I may never be able to understand.
It is not a carnaval ride. As a Yank with white skin privilege I cannot just buy my ticket and hope on. I need to keep challenging myself, for I am an imposer as much because of my northernness, as my white skin. There is trauma here that I have not lived, not in NC, not in New Orleans, not in anywhere I have hope for. I have struggled with questions about my role as an ally, my privilege as an ally, and my own spiritual journey. I have explored questions about my travel and the impact of my presence in communities not my own. There is a responsibility to doing work in the South, to educating myself without putting that burden on people of color, to knowing the community I travel to and why I am going there. Although I always want to support all people traveling freely, esp women, the work that I will continue to do as I travel through to the border is to look at the privilege I have in being able to make this trip, and how to use that privilege to turn around racism.
Regarding New Orleans, I am taking longer to get there because I feel it an enormous responsibility. I want to know if being another white person there can be at all helpful or even more oppressive.I've been asking myself why I'm here, how I think I can be a good ally, and what are the questions I can bring home. When I get that squirming feeling in my belly (the kind that isn't left over from Bolivian chicha) I need to sit with it,figure out what feels wrong, and meet the challenge. The impact of this place is that i am just doing that naturally. Sometimes we white folk get all stressed when we don't consider something; I'm working to challenge myself despite my need to be perfect and adored. I have also been interviewing my elders here on how they approach the role of ally in this space because whatever work we're doing, we all need community.
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