Category: Original Commentaries

Sanitized Injustice

On By madderkaIn Original Commentaries1 Comment

Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

— Angela Davis

Operation Streamline embodies this quotation.  I saw it in action today in a courtroom in Tucson.  Operation Streamline resulted from the creation of a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, in which people entering the US for the first time without documentation are charged in criminal court with a misdemeanor, and people entering for the second (or third or fourth) are charged with the felony of reentry after deportation.  The “Streamline” part of the Operation is that 70 people are tried and sentenced in the space of 2 hours, in the same courtroom, within days of being detained.  If that doesn’t sound constitutional to you, well, it doesn’t to me, either. Apparently the courts that have addressed the constitutional question have said effectively, “no harm, no foul, let Operation Streamline continue.”  The Supreme Court hasn’t said anything about it. Yet.

“Special proceedings” like Streamline happen in a large courtroom.  There is an eerie sterile nature to the courtroom.  Hand sanitizer pumps are all over the room, on every table.  The ceiling is brightly colored because someone thought that would be appropriate for a desert courtroom.  I sit in the back corner with the other Border Studiers. The people on trial that day sit in the gallery and in the jury box, the chains at their wrists and ankles clinking as they shift in their seats.  Between the vaulting ceilings and the muffled whisper of the Spanish/English interpreter speaking into her microphone, the judge’s words are lost. I can’t really hear him, though I do notice that he calls the defendants, “gentlemen and lady.” 

He calls groups of eight forwards. They are chained at the wrists and ankles, wearing the same clothes they were detained in, earphones for the Spanish interpretation dangling from their ears.

The process is fast: they say “sí, sí, no, no, culpable, no,” affirming their names, giving up their rights, admitting their guilt, and away they are led, through a door, but not before their attorneys pull the earphones out of their ears, because most can’t reach, thanks to the chains. Most are sentenced to time already served.  They will be deported.  Others are sentenced for any number of days: 30, 60, 100.  Afterwards, they’ll be deported.

At one point, the prosecutor speaks up.  “Your honor, this defendant has past charges; the state requests that he be sentenced to five days in a correctional facility.”  The judge grants the request. 

Why? Why bother? What does five days in a jail matter?  Or 100, for that matter?  What’s the mentality behind sentencing these people to prison or deportation for entering the country illegally?  These people aren’t coming to play a sneaky trick on the citizens of the United States. They’re walking through the desert for days to find jobs to feed their families, because it’s the only way to have some hope of survival, thanks to the US decimation of the Mexican economy. Incarceration doesn’t solve the problems of economic policies like NAFTA allowing the US to flood the Mexican market with subsidized corn, outcompeting Mexican farmers and leaving them with no means of income.

Operation Streamline meets no logical end to an actual problem.  Instead, what it does is feed the prisons – prisons owned by for-profit, public corporations, which depend on the US government paying them millions of dollars per month to hold inmates.  These corporations can build huge correctional facilities and then lobby for new legislation that fill their beds. The legislation is popular because it “fights crime” and builds the economy. The southwest economy is built on border militarization.  Prisons and law enforcement agencies and the US Marshall create jobs.  Jobs that rely on racist and dehumanizing operations like Streamline.

6 Hours

On By madderkaIn Original Commentaries1 Comment

There aren’t many people who meet with Border Patrol agents in Nogales, Arizona and people preparing to migrate at a shelter in Altar, Sonora within the same 6-hour period.

And it’s hard to figure out what it means to be one of the few who has.

I saw a lot and I heard a lot in that period.  At the Border Patrol, I mostly heard them telling us that they were out there trying to stay alive.  They showed us the rocks that “rockers” had thrown at them, and asked us pointed questions: “Would you throw that at me?  Do you think that could do some damage?” And pointed to a picture of 14 Border Patrol apprehending 140 people trying to cross: “10 to 1, they outnumbered us.  Who do you think would win, if they decided to turn on us?  Think about that.”  The agents showed us all the guns they could bring in the field.  We got the chance to hold them.  They wanted us to be excited about getting the chance to shoot their “less than lethal weapons.”  They told us about all the drugs they apprehend.  They told us they had seen the effects of immigration “in their communities” but didn’t elaborate on what those effects were.  They wanted us to be scared of the people crossing the desert.

I think the tour was designed to make us leave there feeling psyched about the Border Patrol, and how awesome their guns were, protecting them from the migrants who were going to assault them at any chance they got (They actually said this – “Any chance they get to assault us, they do.”)  I left feeling shaken from being confronted with the grim reality that protecting a country that is “free” involves heavy militarization: M-16s, x-ray vision goggles, drones, huge detention facilities, and whatever else the Federal Government decides might be useful.

About ten minutes passed between leaving the Border Patrol and arriving at First at Kino Border Initiative, an organization for people recently deported, just on the other side of the border. We heard stories from two women there, each of whom was desperate to find a way into the United States: one, to be reunited with her family, the other, to escape from the husband she had been forced to marry.  The stories they told starkly contrasted against the Border Patrol’s narrative of migrants being violent and aggressive, and revealed a different truth of people wanting to get to the US in order to survive.

From Kino, we continued on to Altar, a hub for migration further south of the border, where people meet up with Coyotes to guide them North across the desert.  There we met men with a huge array of stories.  Some had tried ten or fifteen times to cross, trying to get North to find work, any work.  Others had been deported after putting down deep roots in the States, and were trying to get back.  They all wanted to contribute to their families in some way, whether it was by working to send money home, or to go back home and reunite with their loved ones.

It’s hard to figure out what it means to be one of the few who has met migrants in Altar and agents at the Border Patrol in a quarter of a day.  What do I do with this sort of perspective?  I write about it here, and I hope that you also see the major discrepancy between the narratives of the “dangerous illegal aliens” that pervade through out the US and the narratives of the actual people who are trying to live.  And then I continue to be here, and I continue to listen, and I continue to learn, and write and ask questions. I try and find the place where I fit in the powerful work for resistance happening in Tucson to secure a future where some day people will be able to live in community, on either side of the border, without fear.

First Glimpse of the Wall

On By madderkaIn Original CommentariesLeave a comment

I couldn’t help but think of the Truman Show when we crossed the US/Mexico Border in Nogales on Thursday.

I’ve seen the Truman Show exactly once, in seventh grade English class, I think as part of a unit on 1984.  The finer details of the movie escape me, but the concept of being in a manufactured lie of a world, oblivious to the world outside, stuck.

I don’t want to push this metaphor too far, because it’s certainly not a perfect parallel, but arriving at the US/Mexico border in Nogales felt like reaching the edge of a bubble that the “People In Charge” didn’t want me to find or know was there.  Because if more people could see this border town, with the border fence undulating along the hills, more people would surely be asking the question I asked, which was are you kidding me?

This wall, which isn’t a wall any more, because they replaced it with a 25-foot iron fence last year, makes it extremely hard to cross the border in the urban area of Nogales.  It is see-through, so the border patrol can more easily see what’s going on on the other side.  They are allowed to shoot through it.  To me, it seems like an instrument of violence, a roadblock for people who cannot survive on the Mexican side, pushing them out to the desert to attempt to cross, and quite possibly die.

It’s hard to wrap my head around, and to attempt to comprehend how we got here: to a place where a country which claims to promote freedom around the world has a fence around it.  It isn’t the first time I’ve wondered something like this, and I’m damn sure it won’t be the last.

Awe and Fear – An Introduction

On By madderkaIn Original Commentaries1 Comment

I’m here! I made it to Tucson.  After a slight hiccup in which we had to deplane and replane a different plane in Minneapolis, I have arrived.

Last night, before we all crashed from travel exhaustion, we drove up to the Tucson Mountains to scramble up a field of rocks and watch the sky change and the clouds roll in as darkness settled over the desert.

I was not expecting to be as excited and exhilarated by the landscape here.  Imagining the harshness of the desert made me nervous.  I’m used to my relatively wet, relatively cold East Coast mountains which roll into each other and confuse my friends from Colorado who can’t figure out the difference between what we call a mountain and what we call a hill, and don’t think our mountains qualify as mountains anyway.  I’m used to feeling nested between mountains, contained by them.  Here, the mountains seem to punctuate the vast openness.  They jut up out of the flat plane, and when you go up to the top, you look down the other side at more vast openness.

I sat there, perched amidst red mountains and cacti, watching purple rainclouds meet pink sunset clouds, and then one of our teachers said, “Good thoughts to all those who are trying to cross the desert tonight.”

While preparing to come here, I had a difficult time with the paradox that kept presenting itself as people constantly told me about how beautiful it is here at the same time as I read about how many people die trying to get here.  I was particularly struck by that last night, as I found myself caught up in the joy and awe of seeing this landscape, while also trying to imagine what it must look like to embark across it on foot, without the shelter of an air conditioned building with a running tap to retreat to.

I think this is going to be a semester of paradoxes.  Let the grappling begin.

Hearing Silence

On By madderkaIn Original Commentaries1 Comment

I walked the streets of DC yesterday, and I was horrified.

The last time I walked here, just over five years ago, I was awestruck, mesmerized by the grandeur of marble buildings housing my government and paying tribute to my country’s history.  I swelled with pride in what it was supposed to represent: freedom, liberty, democracy, and a citizenship and government equally invested in each other.  My government was big and powerful, and that’s because it was determined to do what was right.

This time, after two years of studying oppression and structural violence, organizing to smash patriarchy, and reading extensively about the impact of American and paternalism colonialism within and outside its borders, I saw something different.  I saw mammoth buildings and a city plan designed to intimidate. I saw museums selectively documenting a history dotted with injustice and tyranny.  And as I walked past the US Customs and Border Patrol building, tucked behind the EPA, just steps off the National Mall, I thought of the chapter of this nation’s history which is currently unfolding – one that happens out of sight of the Capitol, but that I am about to find myself in the middle of, when I spend my fall semester in Tucson, AZ studying the US/Mexico Border.

There is a missing piece of the American story that we don’t hear much of in the elementary school narrative that inspired me.  It’s the story of unthinkably brutal oppression: oppression that destroyed Native populations and culture, oppression that keeps racial divides uncrossable chasms, and the oppression of Latin@ immigrants, who come to this country seeking a better life outside their home countries’ economies, decimated by US economic policy.

People are dying in the desert, seeking a route north to a livable life.  People are starving in former agricultural communities in Central America, their corn worthless because of the flood of corn from American imports.  Children are separated from parents, detained after applying for food stamps.

And until I sought it out and did my reading, I didn’t know.  People crossing the border were just undocumented immigrants with undocumented stories, silent to me.

The girl in the upper-middle class classroom full of white kids has the privilege to not know that her government is not as awesome as they might have you believe, but Latin@ children in Arizona certainly don’t, and that is a problem – for everyone.  When injustices are silenced, they continue, and they grow, and they affect us all.  Fighting oppression is not about me going to Arizona to lift people up from the burdens placed upon them.  To fight oppression is to uncover it, to see where it lives and how it works, so we can challenge it in all of our lives.  We have obligations to each other to stand in solidarity.  If we don’t think the oppression of others affects us, we’re wrong.  Only together can we resist and seek solutions.

Break the silence, stop the violence.

The View from Wiseheart

On By madderkaIn Original CommentariesLeave a comment

Written June 24, 2012

“What would you bring along on a trek like this?  What is bringing you along?” – Adrienne Rich

I write this from Gail and Charoula’s front porch, beside the rainbow flag that flies from the post, and the woodpeckers that swoop between the suet feeder and a giant maple.  Charoula’s yellow car sits in front of me, license plate reading “HERBALS,” the tailgate adorned with bumper stickers with slogans from simply “Love,” to “May the Forest Be With You,” and “Stop the Republican war on women.”  Bumper stickers are everywhere in and around this house – “Defend America, Defeat Bush” stickers in the bathroom, “Earth Native” and “Live in Peace and Love” on the front door, and now, “I’ll be Post-Feminist in the Post-Kyriarchy” and “These Hands Don’t Hurt” on Charoula’s computer, courtesy of CARES and the VC Feminist Alliance.  Where there are no bumper stickers, there is art – goddesses radiating power and love, rainbows and other lesbian symbols, created by them and their friends, accumulated over 50 years.  When I arrived here, Gail was painting the stars of an American flag lavender.  “It’s the only way I’ll fly it in the parade,” she said.

Beyond the house are incredibly beautiful fields and thickets of bushes and trees and forest.  Their horse, New Moon, roams near the vegetable garden.  Asparagus, gone to seed, towers above the grasses – I had no idea asparagus grew to be tall and wispy.  The backyard is thick with herbs and wildflowers Charoula grows to make salves and oils and tinctures.  More sculptures hide beneath trees and in patches of flowers.

I’ve spent a week here, and my days here have been filled with long talks about feminist and lesbian life over the past 55 years.  I’ve also been moving mulch from the drive to the backyard in the hours before the temperature rises too high to bear.  My pants are now tucked securely into my socks, protecting me from the chiggers – tiny mites that happily nibbled my legs and torso when I didn’t worry enough about them yesterday.  Along with the chigger bites, another state checked off my list, fascinating stories, and two new Vassar friends, I bring home with me a new perspective on my life as a feminist lesbian.

Gail and Charoula came to this farm in 1990, after Gail had inherited the land and bought an additional 30 acres their house sits upon.  They moved to this house to start a farm and be landykes.  They’re up against a lot here, in rural Pickaway County, Ohio, which is the center of the state’s industrial agriculture.  When I drive the 3 miles to Gail and Charoula’s house from the old building I’m staying at in the town, I pass fields upon fields of perfect corn before I come to their land growing wild with diverse, organic species, buffered by a thick layer of trees and shrubs.  It would be easy for them to grow discouraged with the state of the land.  Gail grew up here, and she talks reverently about how the soil is so rich and the fruits and vegetables it produced were so wonderful.  She’s seen the family farms disappear, machines replace manual labor, Monsanto corn and soy replace cattle and tomatoes, and a quarry open right to the edge of their land, less than 400 feet from the log cabin Gail restored with a Time-Out grant from Vassar.  Despite this, here they have stood, firmly planted, asserting their right to the land, and the land’s right to be wild.  They’ve challenged those who spray pesticides too close to their land, despite the sign posted, “Please Do Not Spray – Organic Farm.” They’ve created wetlands. They’ve encouraged birds and cats and raccoons and other wild animals to find homes here.  This land has a strong energy; it is vital and whole.

As a part of Vassar’s contemporary community of queer feminists, I often feel like we are pioneers up against the forces of patriarchy, and that struggle can feel frustrating and hopeless.  Especially from my perspective, as a Women’s Studies and Geography double major, the problems facing the world can feel incredibly overwhelming.  I constantly study the oppression of women, structural violence, the decimation of the environment, and power being held in the hands of the few; it’s really easy to throw my hands up from time to time and say, forget it – the world is doomed, and no one is safe.  Here, on this 150-acre piece of land in Southern Central Ohio, there is uncertainty in what the future will bring, but these women, Vassar lesbians fifty years ahead of us, radiate so much hope and confidence in the Earth and in the power of communities of women to keep this land strong and safe for those who come to it.  That hope and confidence makes me believe in the future.  Perhaps that, as Adrienne said, “is bringing me along.”

Thanks, Charoula and Gail – see you again, soon.

A Wolf Girl Goes Back to the Land

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“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” –Australian Aboriginal Group

This piece was originally posted on June 17, 2012 on Feminist Hive Mind, a community blog which belongs to me and some of my Vassar feminist community.  This (Laying Foundations) is my personal blog.  Posts here may appear on Hive Mind as well.

Tomorrow, I will drive to Ohio to spend time with Gail Dunlap and Charoula Dontopoulos, two women who went to Vassar in the late 1950’s.  As two of the original Vassar Wolf Girls, they would creep from their dorms in the middle of the night wearing wolf skins to howl at the moon together in secret lesbian sisterhood.  They needed to skirt the wrath of the Warden, who did dismiss some of these women from the conservative Vassar of the 50’s, labeling them “unfit from campus life.”  My own grandmother, asleep on the other side of campus, was oblivious to their existence until I told her a few months ago after hearing Gail speak on a panel about the lesbian experience at Vassar.

The existence of lesbians and queer women on Vassar’s campus today is far from invisible, but we’ve only come so far because of the women who came before us.  I’m on my way to Ohio to learn and work with these women on their lesbian land where they live alongside the Earth, and rehabilitate land that has been deeply harmed by human impact.

Ask any of the other Hive Minders and they will say, of course Maddie is going to lesbian land.  I earned my label of “ecofeminist” within a month of arriving at Vassar, quickly seeing the connections between environmentalism and feminism in my Global Geography class.  The ways in which the devastation of the environment and the oppression of women intertwine are extremely apparent to me.  The patriarchal instincts to dominate women and dominate nature are rooted in the same masculine* need to assert power.

By working to rehabilitate the land, we can learn how to unravel systems of patriarchy in our own lives.  There are parallels: we must live alongside the land as we must live alongside each other, compromise with the land as we must compromise with each other, and understand how our survival is as entwined with the wellbeing of the land as it is with the wellbeing of other humans.

There are also direct connections between environmentalism and other movements to deconstruct systems of oppression: poor communities which lack political power and capital have more exposure to environmental hazards like urban industry and hydrofracking, and less access to open space and affordable, nutritious food.  Environmental hazards also tend to have an especially large impact on women, particularly in the developing world, where women are often responsible for growing subsistence crops and fetching water.  If pollution compromises their food or water source, they must find different ones, which depletes their time and money, vital bargaining chips for essential self-advocacy.

In the rapid industrialization of the planet, industries and technologies, which are responsible for harming the environment, have simultaneously erased a lot of old knowledge about agriculture and land management.  Family farms are dwindling, and Native peoples which knew their land much better and for thousands of years longer have largely died out or been uprooted from their homelands.  Existing memory of how to live alongside the land is limited.  Thus, it is as important as ever to forge connections between the generations, share experiences, and continue to keep and pass along the knowledge that exists.  I head to Ohio to spend time with Gail and Charoula, to learn what they have to teach me, and to share and build on our common experiences as lesbians – Wolf Girls – invested in the land and the Earth that is our home.  We carry that shared knowledge forth with us to whomever we meet.

* I recognize that the terms “masculine and “feminine” do not inherently correspond to any particular gender.  Systems of patriarchal oppression are deeply rooted in society, which only recently began to address the problematic nature of a gender binary. It is relevant to discuss the traits and characteristics associated with the tropes of “masculinity” and “femininity” in order to dismantle them both and explore how the characteristics they describe can be embodied by anyone.