Saturday, June 09, 2007
Nowhere to Run
Cornering the real estate market and enslaving indigenous, black, or poor whites is as old as, well, the Founding Fathers, but while this was once accomplished by force of arms, nowdays we are run off the land by legal concoctions like NAFTA. As Narco News reports, the system of such colossal dealing in stolen property south of the border, is now planned for New England. But before we talk about that, you might want to hear what has happened to the family farm in Mexico since American agribusiness invaded ten years ago.
The first thread to be ripped from the societal fabric as a consequence of NAFTA was the Mexican family and collective farm. In Mexico, that has also equaled a kind of genocide: the vacuuming of indigenous farmers (still speaking 62 pre-Hispanic languages and fighting to preserve ancient customs and knowledge) from the land they have stewarded for millennia. It is an assault that intensifies each day.
The destruction of the family farm also brought radical impositions upon the family unit: Millions of fathers, broke and with hungry kids, left home to find work in Mexican cities, or in the agribusiness fields of the US and Canada, or in the service industries of all three countries. The young men soon left, too (in many parts of Mexico, high school classrooms have mainly girls as students; the boys have followed their fathers northward), and, increasingly, young women have joined the economically imposed pilgrimage. Children are typically raised by single moms, or by grandmothers or aunts, in fatherless households, and may never get to meet their brothers and sisters born “on the other side.” Entire regions once dedicated to farming are now dependent on funds wired back from the US and Canada. Bereft of young adults, the population of the Mexican countryside has aged by default.
As there is nowhere to run from the murderous greed of a market freed of social responsibility, we either choose to fight alongside the indigenous uprising, or we choose to lose. It's that simple.
The first thread to be ripped from the societal fabric as a consequence of NAFTA was the Mexican family and collective farm. In Mexico, that has also equaled a kind of genocide: the vacuuming of indigenous farmers (still speaking 62 pre-Hispanic languages and fighting to preserve ancient customs and knowledge) from the land they have stewarded for millennia. It is an assault that intensifies each day.
The destruction of the family farm also brought radical impositions upon the family unit: Millions of fathers, broke and with hungry kids, left home to find work in Mexican cities, or in the agribusiness fields of the US and Canada, or in the service industries of all three countries. The young men soon left, too (in many parts of Mexico, high school classrooms have mainly girls as students; the boys have followed their fathers northward), and, increasingly, young women have joined the economically imposed pilgrimage. Children are typically raised by single moms, or by grandmothers or aunts, in fatherless households, and may never get to meet their brothers and sisters born “on the other side.” Entire regions once dedicated to farming are now dependent on funds wired back from the US and Canada. Bereft of young adults, the population of the Mexican countryside has aged by default.
As there is nowhere to run from the murderous greed of a market freed of social responsibility, we either choose to fight alongside the indigenous uprising, or we choose to lose. It's that simple.
