Debbie Nathan

This post has also been published as an article in the January 4, 2008 issue of El Paso’s Newspapertree.com. A version also appears in the Jan. 1-15 issue of CounterPunch. 

Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders that have happened there since the 1990s. Many who’ve heard have flown to the border to hold press conferences and make movies or put on plays and offer help. Especially women – including famous ones. Jane Fonda, J. Lo, Sally Fields, Minnie Driver, Eve Ensler – all know of the killings, or at least those involving long-haired adolescents who worked in maquiladoras and went to church and were good daughters before they ended up in places like Lomas del Poleo as anal-raped mummies and maybe a tattered bra.

Lomas del Poleo. Some Godforsaken desert spot on the Juarez fringe where at least a dozen bodies were found in the sand from 1996 to 2003. Most never identified, but one was Veronica Castro, a teen working at a big, foreign-owned assembly plant when she disappeared. The corpse of another girl, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, was found elsewhere near town, but at the time she was killed she lived in Lomas. Her mom, Paula Flores, is the first person who thought of blanketing Juarez utility poles with pink crosses to draw attention to the murders. As a result of such activism, the murders have come, internationally, to be known as feminicide. Embedded in that term is the idea that women are dying violently in Juarez precisely because they’re women. It’s a political concept, a theory, and thus awful but in its abstraction oddly comfortable.

The killing fields at Lomas del Poleo, on the other hand, are a hundred percent real, and straight-out scary to even think about. Don’t go there, the zeitgeist whispers: it’s isolated, desolated, gritty, scuzzy, a place only for cloak-and-dagger journalists, while the rest of us can just read about it and maybe march downtown with the stars, or sign Amnesty International petitions.

But now, something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, in the same area where Veronica et al were dumped. Yet few people in the US, or even El Paso, know or care about this new horror. And because they don’t, the murdered women of Juarez are being buried from consciousness.

How can they be resurrected? By digging into current events at Lomas del Poleo, where an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area’s females are blotted out.

A professor took me there years ago, when the feminicides was fresh news. She was studying the concept of border females as waste matter, in concert with the generalized phenomenon of illegal municipal dumping. Her theory included the fact that Juarez maquiladoras were organized and managed so the entire, mostly woman, workforce at the average plant would quit or be fired from their jobs – or “turn over,” the industry calls it — in less than a year. Massive turnover would quickly and efficiently dispense with labor once it was deemed worn out, or too expensive because of employers’ legal obligation after several months to give workers perks like health insurance and end-of-year bonuses. The professor felt that the maquiladora economy of female worker disposability was affecting the entire culture and that more and more in Juarez, all women were being defined as throwaways. That, she said, was fueling the brutal murders – and not just of scores of the long-haired, stranger-raped girls everyone talked about, but even of the many hundreds more victims who were being killed and dumped not by unknowns, but by their husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors.

This professor had ideas about why all those female bodies were ending up in the desert. She did not think it reflected some serial killer’s unique MO. Because municipal sanitation services are so lacking in Juarez, she said, everything unwanted – from household trash to human beings — gets thrown, sub rosa, in the outskirts. We poked with our eyes and some sticks in this parched, garbage-strewn place called Lomas del Poleo, where corpses had recently been discovered. We found only withered shoes, soiled Pampers, and bleached baby dolls. Not unexpected, the professor said. But what surprised me – I still remember after all this time – was the old man who ambled from behind a hill on a burro, herding goats and smilingly doffing his hat to wish us buenas tardes. “Where on earth did he come from?” I thought. Heretofore I’d assumed Lomas del Poleo was just some vacant, Boschian hell hole. Now I wondered if it was more inviting. Then I forgot the man, and Lomas. I moved away to the US interior.

But last month I was visiting El Paso for some winter fun in the sun. Another friend, a border community activist, took me to a meeting in a sparsely furnished green building across the river with no heat and everyone huddled in jackets and soberly talking in turn. Some were students from downtownish Juarez who had nice glasses and OK wardrobes. Others were “colonos” – the flea-market dressed residents of Lomas, many of who have lived there over 30 years. They’d walked a mile down from a mesa to reach the cold green building, because they are not allowed to hold public gatherings in their own neighborhood. Nor can they bring in friends or guests, for meetings or anything else resembling politics. To enter their own community for whatever reason, they must pass a guard house staffed by snickering male thugs with guns.

The thug checkpoint and all the rest of Lomas are enclosed by concrete posts, barbed wire and trained dogs. People cannot pass unless they live inside. Trucks supplying basics such as tortillas,

Photo by Detritus at Flikr.com

water and milk, are also disallowed. At the meeting in the green building, I talked with two women who appeared in their seventies. One was stringy and gnarled; the other squat, with white, lusterless hair like cheap twine. They both lurched slightly with old age or fatigue. They said there used to be many stores up in Lomas, but now hardly any remain. To get groceries each day, they must walk the mile downhill, then make their way back to the armed punks and wire and canines.

Sometimes when people leave the area to get food, or to work in maquiladoras, they return and find their houses razed to rubble by bulldozers. One of the women said this happened to her middle-aged son, and it made him so apoplectic and heartbroken that he died. She described such things and wouldn’t let me take her photo or use her name. She and her neighbor were terrified of reprisals. Their fear sickened me.

This is all going on a few miles from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Barnes & Noble, StarBucks, and the bikini waxing day spas of upper Mesa Street. What is happening in Lomas del Poleo is not unlike the logistics and doings of a concentration camp. Yet practically no one in the US – even those who’ve marched for and donated to and worried about the murdered women – seems to know. Or care.

The reason, perhaps, is that the barbed wire and dogs have nothing to do with how the feminicides are presented: as crazy, titillating speculations about serial killer conspiracies, rich-boy mafias, narco orgies, Satanic rituals and the black market vending of kidneys. Rather, the current disaster is connected to much greyer, more tedious speculation: the kind involving real estate. Plats, deeds and mortgages are not quite the stuff of Who-Done-Its. They turn even more arcane when combined with Mexican tenancy statutes. But these topics –

Photo by Antonio Zazueta Olmos, on flicker.com

land and law — are back story to the border’s little modern-day terrordrome. Because it’s closed to people like me, I haven’t actually set foot in it. But to understand the awful things I heard of and saw at that community meeting last month, I’ve explored the web, talked with people including Lomas residents and organizers, and watched documentaries on Youtube. This is what I’ve learned.

It goes back to 1945. That’s when the Mexican government seized thousands of acres of desert from a mining company just south of the border, not far from the West Side of El Paso and what is now the town Sunland Park, New Mexico. Shortly after this expropriation, corrupt, profiteering Mexican bureaucrats sold the property to private owners, though doing so was illegal. These owners sold to others. One eventual purchaser was a prominent Juarez businessman, Pedro Zaragoza, Sr.

Years later, in 1975, Mexico’s President Luis Echeverria declared part of this vast acreage to be federal land. Now things were really confused, because the boundaries of the national holdings were not surveyed: they were still mixed with areas that private buyers – including Zaragoza – considered his property. Even so, the problem seemed inconsequential. President Echeverria notified the private purchasers that if they wanted to argue he’d wrongly designated their holdings as federal land, they should file legal claims. No claims ensued. Apparently the buyers didn’t care one way or the other because the land was considered scrubby, remote, and of little worth.

But not all felt this way. In the early 1970s, fifty or sixty poor families came to a mesa they named Granjas Lomas del Poleo – Poleo Hills Farms — in search of country living. Most had earlier immigrated to Juarez from destitute rural areas farther south. They wanted to escape urban chaos and raise goats, pigs and chickens. Word got out about Lomas and one man appointed himself community leader. He helped new settlers pick out five-acre plots, where they built houses, grazed animals and tilled the land.

Eventually, Lomas boasted about a thousand inhabitants, a small church, a kindergarten, a grade school, and some ten stores. The community was still parched and desertified, and many homes were little more than hodge-podges of wood pallets, with rusted box springs for front yard fences. But the view was gorgeous: to the east a long range of mountains; on the west the Rio de Janeiran majesty of a peak topped with a giant statute of Christ. Residents knew there was an issue about exactly which land in the area was federal and which was already privately owned, but they weren’t much concerned. According to Mexican law since the Revolution, if land is unoccupied and undeveloped, poor people can gain title just by living on it a few years, as long as the owner does not dispute their tenancy. This is par for the course in Mexico. Indeed, according to those familiar with Lomas, many residents went to government agencies and courts and got papers recognizing them as owners of their tiny plots.

The affable man on the burro whom I ran into way back when was one of these Lomas people.

But in the late 1990s, big, private owners like Pedro Zaragoza’s widow and sons – one of them also named Pedro — realized Lomas was getting valuable. Real estate interests on both sides of the border were hatching grand plans for a new international port of entry and a NAFTA-esque, binational community. It would straddle the international line at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and include extensive manufacturing parks, as well as passage for cargo trucks and lots of brand new housing and stores.

As Juarez attorney Carlos Avitia has since explained to the Paso Del Sur community activist organization in El Paso, Mexican entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas decided their city’s growth would take place on outskirts that include Lomas del Poleo. “These are huge investors,” notes Avitia. “They plan to turn this into a suburb… All of a sudden they’re very interested in every last sand dune.”

Indeed, since the 1990s a highway has been built linking the Mexican state of Chihuahua west of Juarez to New Mexico’s Santa Teresa, where all that transborder development is set to take place. So far, very few people live in Santa Teresa, but its port of entry has been operating for years now. And in late 2007, part of yet another big road opened in northwest Juarez. Called the Camino Real, it has so far cost almost a million US dollars, and when it is done it will connect downtown Juarez to Santa Teresa. Right across from Santa Teresa will be a Mexican twin town called Jeronimo. The two will be be foreign trade zones with people living in them. The spanking new, binational development is currently almost uninhabited. But it’s projected to grow to 100,000 residents in the next decade or so.

The two main developers of Jeronimo and Santa Teresa are, respectively, Eloy Vallina – one of Mexico’s richest entrepreneurs — and Bill Sanders, a major international realtor (more here) who heads a controversial redevelopment plan for downtown El Paso. It aims to replace acres of historic but run-down buildings, mom-and-pop shlock shops

Bill Sanders lectures at Cornell U.

and poor residents with big box stores, mall-type businesses, and mixed-income housing that will not provide public rental subsidies for the many undocumented immigrants who currently live in the area.

Vallina is a member of Sanders’ development group for Santa Teresa. His son, Eloy Jr., sits on the board of private consortium which sprang the redevelopment plan on El Paso two years ago and has since provoked great controversy there. Vallina Sr.’s plans for the foreign trade zone Jeronimo are as strongly contested in Juarez as Sanders’ designs for El Paso are on the north side of the border.

Jeronimo opponents note that because the development is so dependent on massive infrastrucure – like the Camino Real highway — public taxes and resources are improperly being diverted from Juarez to one man’s private suburb. A major concern is the future of municipal water. The bolson that supplies Juarez is running out, and the only way to recharge it is from another aquifer, which sits beneath Jeronimo. But if that water is pumped by Vallina’s project, Juarez won’t get it and the city could go dry.

Also troubling is that anticipation about Jeronimo and Santa Teresa has led to fevered land speculation in Juarez, according to New Mexico State University’s Frontera News Service. Tiny lots not far from Lomas del Poleo have lately increased by 26 times their original price, with buyers offering as much as

International port of entry at Santa Teresa, NM

$39,000 for each parcel. The Juarez real estate explosion really took off when Bill Sanders bought 21,000 acres in Santa Teresa and announced his binational development project. This happened in 2003.

Perhaps not coincidentally, 2003 is the also year when formerly peaceful Lomas del Poleo – walking distance from the tidy, democratic United States of America - started to resemble an armed camp, a zone in the Palestinian territories, a World War II ghetto, a place of chilling violation of civil and human rights.

Two years ago, a soft-spoken, understated-looking guy named Bill Morton wrote a piece (here) for the online newsletter of Annunciation House, a church-based refuge for undocumented migrants in downtown El Paso.

Camino Real Highway (photo by DN)

Morton is a Catholic missionary and priest – thoroughly gringo – who at the time was pasturing a little church in Lomas. In his article, he describes hearing rumors there in 2003 that he at first didn’t think made sense.

Just a year earlier, the government had finally – after over three decades — supplied Lomas with electricity. Posts and wires had been installed, and each house had a meter. Now, residents were telling Morton they heard that all this infrastructure was slated to be removed. Morton pooh-poohed their worries. Why would the government take out what it had so carefully put in just months ago?

But the rumors were correct. Lomas residents and the Zaragoza family were already in court disputing who owned the land. One Zaragoza, Pedro Jr., recently told former Texas Observer reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Welsome (see here) that he considers Lomas inhabitants nothing but illegal squatters and land speculators. To up the ante and discourage occupancy of the area, the Zaragozas had gone to a judge and obtained a ruling to remove the utilities. Government trucks came in, accompanied by police. They pulled out all the posts and wires. Lomas was left without light, refrigerators, or fans.

The Zaragozas also obtained orders forbidding more building in Lomas so that new people wouldn’t there come to live, and current residents, unable to improve their homes, would feel pressured to leave. More ominously, existing housing was targeted for destruction. Soon after the electricity was removed, scores of menacing young men invaded the community. They were what Mexicans call guardias blancas, “white guards” -– privately contracted paramilitary goons. Their boss is a Catarino del Rio, who in the past has worked for the Zaragozas and is assumed to be on their payroll now. The thugs brought in heavy equipment, which residents assumed would be used to destroy their homes.

At first, people in Lomas dug ditches to block the tractors and demolition machinery. Complaints were also made to the Juarez police, who ordered the shock troops out. They left, but by spring 2004 were back, occupying a plot of land and building a camp with a watch tower, barbed wire, and a guard house. Ever since, Lomas residents have had to pass this checkpoint to enter their neighborhood – which is now completely fenced in by tall, concrete poles and wire. Many people complain that the guards have maced and kicked residents. They demolished a church and are said to have poisoned pet dogs. In the dark of electricity-less nights, they’ve prowled around and shone flashlights into houses. And people who leave to buy groceries or go to work come back to find their homes pulverized.

Some residents report that the guards carry AK-47s; others have seen rifles sticking out of their jackets. In Mexico it’s illegal for civilians to carry arms, never mind military-grade weapons. But when the Juarez police have been called they’ve done nothing. A resident got into a fight with Zaragoza’s thugs after a house was razed. He was fatally beaten. Not long afterward, a home caught fire. Two small children burned to death. Authorities and Pedro Zaragoza said the conflagration was due to a stove left lit when the mother went out, or to illegal electricity hookups connected to a line some distance from the house. Witnesses countered that the house had no power, and that goons had been seen walking around, possibly spilling gasoline, just before the home ignited.

Juarez’s city administration does nothing about these outrages except support the Zaragozas by encouraging Lomas’ shell-shocked residents to move. Many families have gone to another community downhill. Others have been relocated to a row of tiny, concrete structures that the city offers as alternative housing but which provide no land for the livestock raising and horticulture that residents practiced on

Photo by Rachel Falcone, Flickr.com

their own holdings. Juarez lawyer Avitia has noted that the Juarez politicians have a stake in supporting the eviction project. They are friends and associates of real estate entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas and Eloy Vallina. (Eileen Wellsome interviewed Juarez mayor Hector Murguia, who confirmed that he and Pedro Zaragoza are friends.) Eviction helps the magnates by freeing up land for development related to Jeronimo, Vallina’s golden goose just south of Santa Teresa.

Once poor but bustling, Lomas has lost three fourths of its population and almost all its stores since the goons came in. About 55 families soldier on, braving the constant threat of their houses being demolished, and the nerve-wracking sense that they and their community are being disposed of, and few care. Still they stay, insisting on their right to the land. They have lawyers and their suit against the Zaragozas. Attorney Avitia has worked extensively on the case. He says the law is on the Lomas residents’ side and eventually they will win.

But in an escalating battle of one-upsmanship, the better the legal proceedings go for Lomas del Poleo inhabitants, the worse they are pressured to leave. Lately, political groups and NGO’s from

Photo courtesy Bruce Berman

both sides of the border have been trying to help. Attempts to hold organizing events in the neighorhood several weeks ago were met with the paramilitaries and their weapons, dogs, pushing and shoving and threats.

At the meeting I attended in the green building downhill, I asked if someone would take me up to see things for myself. “We can’t,” I was told. “It’s too dangerous.”

Amid this state of seige, it also seems risky to discuss the one thing that has brought international human rights attention to Juarez: those murdered, thrown away women. The people I spoke with at the meeting were like everyone who’s held on in Lomas — militant, determined to make a stand. But they also appear so demoralized and desperate to save their homes that they are willing to renounce the dead girls dumped on their turf.

I asked both the old women I talked with about the female corpses found in Lomas starting in the late 1990s. “Oh, no!” one demurred. “Didn’t happen.” “Lies!” the other added sternly. “There were no bodies here. Ever.”

I recounted this conversation later with my friend the activist, who explained the old women’s reaction. So many things have been done by the pro-eviction forces to

Photo by Mark Paulda, Flikr.com

discredit Lomas, he said. Depicting it as crummy, slummy, and crime ridden. A dirty place that needs cleaning and vacuuming, even of its residents. What better way to bolster that claim than to talk of corpses in the sand? That’s one reason Lomas inhabitants deny the fact of the female dead.

My friend also pointed out that city and state government in Juarez and Chihuahua have for long been on a campaign to make people and social organizations feel guilty for speaking up about the murdered women and trying to connect their fate with other social problems. The old women, he said, “show how this campaign has permeated all walks of life.” Their silence is historically constructed, and understandable.

Understandable, but especially horrid, because to shut up about feminicide, Lomas residents must even mute their own blood. The white-haired lady I talked to: Early in our conversation, she said her son died after his home was demolished by Zaragoza’s thugs. Later, she grew more expansive. “It wasn’t just the house,” she confided. “It was also that his child – my 18-year-old granddaughter — disappeared four years ago. Went out one day with her boyfriend and was never seen again. The police found her ID card in the boyfriend’s pocket. But he works for the government. He was never charged or prosecuted. My son couldn’t do a thing. He lost his house and his daughter. Both losses killed him.”

We know what happened to the house. But how about the daughter? Like Veronica Castro, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez and so many others, was she tossed in the sand? Somewhere just a skip and a jump from Mesa Street, El Paso and Sunland Park, USA?

Please, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, J. Lo, Amnesty, and everyone who’s signed petitions, put on performances and marched for the dead girls of Juarez. Come back to the baggy-raggy border in your form-hugging clothes and fitting words. Come back and excavate the women by standing by their threatened neighbors – who also are being tossed and buried like garbage. Come back and dig up Lomas.

***

(For more resources about the repurcussions of Juarez and El Paso-area real estate development, including a feature-length video documentary, see here, here and here.)

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Two thousand eight marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Billie Holiday’s great album, Lady in Satin. Add two years and you’re back to 1956, the year she sang “My Yiddishe Mame” at a rehearsal. Until recently, Holiday’s Yiddishkeit session was available only on Verve’s The Complete Billie Holiday: 1945-1959. But a Venezuelan guy recently put it on Youtube (you’ll have to sit through endless Barbara Streisand photos to listen, but it’s worth it). Here’s the link, un a gutn nayem (goyishn) yor dir (Happy New Year and we’re not talking Rosh Hashana)!

You can also visit this (click here) ex-pat Israeli hipster memoir attesting that “My Yiddishe Mame” was part of Holiday’s repertoire.

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CounterPunch just reprinted a fascinating piece by Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi about Mexico’s Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer (Street Brigade in Support of Women). It’s part of the Mexican Sex Work Network collective, which works with prostitutes and transvestites. “This has meant transcending the ‘victim’ role and becoming people who want to be recognized as workers by their peers,” says Zibechi, “not seen as beings who have ‘fallen’ into the world’s oldest profession.” The Zapatista’s Subcomandante Marcos has met with the organization and praised their activities.

Zibechi describes how the group runs its own hotels and health clinics for sexoservidores, the Spanish word for sex workers. It finances these efforts through condom sales, and Zibechi wrote a sidebar detailing how the network runs that business. Counterpunch didn’t run the sidebar, so I’m copying it, below, from its original venue, the Center for International Policy – a great think tank in New Mexico that does radical analysis of the political economy of Latin America and how it’s affected by globalization and neoliberalism.

Here’s Zibechi’s condom sidebar, with some pictures from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America that I’ve collected from the web:

A Question of Charm

The sale of condoms is the main source of financing for the diverse projects of the Mexican Sex Work Network. Choosing the type of condom alongside design and name becomes a form of claiming ownership of the instrument of work and protection, and was left up to the ideas of prostitutes and transvestites.

“When we began the AIDS-protection program,” remembers Elvira, “we realized that price was one of the main problems. For older ladies, to spend 25 pesos on a condom was to invest almost everything they had charged the client.” Firstly they looked for donations from the State, which through CENSIDA, the organization dedicated to the fight against AIDS, donated them 60,000 condoms a month. “But when we began to report cases of corruption they reduced that to 3,600 condoms.”

They began to visit various distributors and factories and found that, in exact opposite to what market laws should indicate, buying in bulk raised the prices. They got in contact with a manufacturer who agreed to sell to them at the same price as to pharmacies and other distributors. “We nearly fell over in shock. He sold us condoms at 75 cents (about US$.07) each but in the pharmacies they’re 12 pesos ($1), that is 15 times the price of the cost,” Elvira says.

The Network began to distribute condoms at the price of one peso each, and with that profit they managed to subsidize almost all the projects, but particularly the clinics that consumed the bulk of their resources. “Before putting them on sale we spoke to the compañeras, we did workshops to see what they wanted, because some condoms smelled very bad or irritated because they contained harmful substances. They themselves suggested the name “El Encanto” (The Charm) to the three-month long debate process in which hundreds of sex workers chose between 20 brands.” The brand had to be attractive for both the client and for themselves. Currently, they sell three million a year.

But the transvestites decided not to use the chosen condom because it wasn’t suited to their needs. “They said it’s very thin and they were right, because it was designed for vaginal use and it would break when they used it.” They found a stronger and more lubricated condom and started the same debate as the women had had. In the end they decided to print the rainbow of sexual diversity on it, and a pink triangle. “They chose the name Triángulo (Triangle) because that’s the symbol with which the Nazis stigmatized homosexuals, so in that way they adopted it as a tribute,” says Elvira.

They failed with the female condom. A few years ago they began to import it from England until a multinational company realized that the Mexican market was growing and withdrew the Network’s permission to distribute. In effect, the market is very monopolized. “While in the world there are 67 condom factories, there’s just one for female condoms. We have to wait for there to be more competition,” says Elvira, with irony.

Subcomandante Marcos is El Encanto’s most famous supporter. In Mexico there is a long history of “condom fairs.” In November 2005 the 50th National Condom Festival was celebrated in Mexico City’s central plaza and in various states local annual fairs are held to raise money for organizations linked to sex work. Recently the first “virtual condom store” made its debut on www.elencantodelcondon.com.

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Been off the blogmobile for a couple weeks due to travel, mostly to the US-Mexico border. I’ll be writing more on that soon. Meanwhile, here are some interesting links.

International bridge, El Paso, TX

First, wonderful work from Feroze Sidhwa, a 25-year-old student at the University of Texas medical school in San Antonio. The US papers this month are full of worry about possible trauma to our kids from learning of 16-year-old TV star Jamie Lynn Spears’ celebrity pregnancy. Sidhwa educates us about real pediatric horror: posttraumatic stress disorder in Palestinian children from violence and militarized apartheid, as well as malnutrition due to the same conditions. The piece, “Food Security and Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” was published in a recent print edition of CounterPunch, which very few people get to read. I asked for permission to store it here so Internet browsers can find it. Give a look (click here) and be grateful we have healers in training like Dr. Sidhwa.

And another Counterpunch item about an MD: the case of Catherine Wilkerson, an Ann Arbor doctor who was arrested and charged for trying to help a protester after police injured him, threatening his life. Wilkerson was tried earlier this month – and acquitted. The whole thing is zeitgeisty and ominous. Read about it here.

Finally, Richard Baron sent me an amazing photo essay from the book Hungry Planet, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio — of families around the world posed next to the groceries they consume in one week. Everyone from Italians surrounded by lots of homemade bread, to Americans with way too much Domino’s and Doritos, to middle-class Mexicans drowning in Coca Cola, to Sudanese refugees in Chad huddled one or two forlorn bags of grain. The picture posted here is of the Melander family, in Germany. For more, click this.

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Carrie Bradshaw and her girlfriends on SATC were big followers of the wedding announcements in the Sunday New York Times. Who can forget the episode devoted to Carrie’s sturm & drang when news of Mr. Big’s nuptials with someone else appeared in the paper of record?

I dip into Weddings occasionally, but it’s hard to stay with them each week because when you’ve seen one same-sex engagement picture, you’ve seen them all. Still, you never know if you’re missing something important. This is where Yiddishists like Miriam Leberstein come in. I met her years ago in a class at the Workmen’s Circle where we were reading the original of a novel by the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. Miriam comes from a staunch Bundist family. Her dad ate pork sausage on Yom Kippur, and Miriam was an early and ardent member of SDS back in her own treyf-meaty days. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but we crossed paths at a Yiddish poetry reading last night and had a chance to shmooze about the world. Good thing! People like her know what’s really important in the Style Section.

Like the item above.

“Did you see it? Did you? Go home and look!” she sputtered. “It’s starts out totally normal and boring, with the Chinese-looking bride graduating from some American university with a technology degree, and the wedding to the American at some trendy resort with a Baptist minister. But look further and it turns out the bride’s father was a head of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Mao must be turning in his grave!”

“I looked at the announcement,” Miriam continued, “and said, ‘This is it. The child of a commander of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army makes it into Weddings in the New York Times. What else is there to say about The New World Order?’”

Miriam and I had just sat through a reading performed by New Yorkers who write poetry in Yiddish. Some have been around quite awhile, like Beyle Shaechter Gottesman. She’s a poetesa, as they say in mame-loshn, from generations back, and hails from Chernowitz, in the Bukhovina in Eastern Europe. Her brother was the emeritus Yiddish instructor from

The Yiddish poet Beyle Schaechter Gottesman

Columbia University, Mordkhe Schaechter. I used to keep the books for a tiny Yiddishist organization on the Upper West Side, just so I could hang out with Mordkhe and his secretary and listen to their beautiful speech patterns.

Mordkhe spent many years in the 1940s and 1950s as a “Territorialist.” He and his group did not think it ethically correct or politically wise to create a Jewish state in Palestine. They explored other places, including Australia, Liberia, New Jersey, and the Norwood section of the Bronx. Nothing quite worked out, but the Territorialists’ were somewhat admired by Edward Said.

Miriam Leberstein and poet Myra Mniewski

The latter told me, not long before he died, that he once had a droll phone conversation with Mordkhe about common Semitic roots. It all had to do with the last name. “Schaechter told me the phrase S’a'id! is Yiddish for “He’s a Jew!” Said recalled with a big grin.

I remembered that anecdote when one performer at the reading, Albert Rosenblatt, did two poems by the recently deceased Grace Paley — but not in English. Rosenblatt and a colleague, Mindl Rinkevitsh, have been translating Paley’s work into Yiddish, which makes sense, since everyone comments about how Yiddish-inflected her English is. So I print two of their translations below, after the original poems.

You’ll read it, you’ll like it. And if you’re the daughter of an ex-head of the People’s Liberation Army now back in Manhattan from your honeymoon — Mazel tov!

REVENGE,
by Grace Paley

I cannot keep my mind on Jerusalem
It wanders off like an idiot with no attention span
To whatever city lies outside my window that day
Damascus
The libraries of Babylonia
Oh! The five exogamous boroughs of
Our beloved home New York

What will happen
When the Lord
Remembers vengeance
(which is his) and finds me

A WARNING

One day I forgot Jerusalem and my right arm is withered
My right arm, my moving arm, my rising and falling arm,
my loving arm
Is withered

And my left eye, the blinker and winker is plucked out
It hangs by six threads of endless remembering
Because I forgot Jerusalem
And wherever I go, I am known, I am recognized at once. I am
perceived by strangers.
Because on one day, only one day I forgot Jersusalem.

Jews everywhere, Jews, old deaths of the north and south
Kingdoms
Poor Jews in the ghetto walls built by the noble Slav,
Jew princes
In Amsterdam who live in diamond houses that shine like
Window panes

Listen to me. Wherever you go, keep the nation of that city
in mind
For I forgot her and now I am blind and crippled.

Even my lover a Christian with pale eyes and the barbarian’s
foreskin
has left me.

(from “Begin Again: Collected Poems, 1985)

(Translation of Revenge below)

NEKOME

Ikh kon nit haltn in eyn trakhtn fun Yerushalayim.
Mayn gedank lozt zikh in veg un blondzhet vi a nar, vos iz nisht
bkoyekh zikh tsu kontsentrirn,
–Tsu voser a shot es ligt, n yenem tog, in droysn fun mayn fenster:
Damesek
Di bibiliotekn fun Bovl
O! Di finf eksogamishe shtotgegentn fun
Undzer balibter heym Nyu York

Vos vet zayn
Ven der Eybershter
Vet zikh dermonen in nekome
(Vos kumt im)
Un mikh gefinin

Translation of A Warning, below:

A VORENUNG

by Grace Paley, trans. by Mindl Rinkevitsch and Albert Rosenblatt

In eynem a tog hob ikh fargesn in Yerusholayim
Un mayn rekhter orem iz mir fardart gevorn
Mayn rekhter orem, mayn baveglekhler orem,
Mayn orem vos heybt zih uf un lozt zikh arop,
Mayn balibter orem
Iz mi fardart govern.

Un mayn rekht oyg, der pintler un der vinker
Iz by mir oysgerisn
Es hengt af zeks fedemer fun eybiken gedenken
Vayl in eynem a tog hob ikh fargesn in Yerusholayim.

Vuhin ikh gey nor, derkent men mikh,
Dershpirn mikh glaykh fremde,
Vayl in eynem a tog, af eyn tog bloyz,
Hob ikh fargesn in Yerusholayim.

Yidn umetum, yidn, lang toyte fun di ale tsofendike un doremdike
kenigraykhn,
Oreme yidn hinter di geto-vetn goboyt funem adorldikn slav
Yidn-printsn in Amsterdam vos voynen in dimentine hayzer blishtshendike
Vi fentser-shoybn
Hert zikh tsu mir tsu.
Vuhin ir geyt nor hot dos folk fun yener shtot in zinen
Vayl kih hob in ir fargesn un itst bin ikh a blinde, a kalike.

Afile mayne gelibter, a krist, mit blase oygn un dem barbars forhoyt
Hot mikh farlozt.

(Thanks again to Albert Rosenblatt)

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( Almost all illustrations in this post, including the black-and-white nude, are computer generated and do not portray real people. Some virtual images are reproduced from work published by Dartmouth College Professor Hany Farid … see below for more about him.)

More of the latest sex-pol research and news: from studies of young people and sexuality, to Constitutional controversies about pornography record keeping, virtual vs. real child porn, and sex offender civil commitment law

According to a Nov. 11 Washington Post article, a new study from the University of Virginia finds that youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are less likely to end up delinquent than those who lose their virginity later. In part, say the researchers, this could be because sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble.

Virtual clothing mannequins from H&M

The Virginia study will appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

The study’s investigators acknowledge the dangers of having sex early. For example, young adolescents are less likely to use condoms than older people, which puts them at risks for STD’s and unwanted pregnancy. But, the researchers note, other nations mitigate these risks through sex education. Meanwhile, U.S. sex ed funded by the federal “abstinence only” budget must hew to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency, and allows no talk of birth control.

Speaking of America’s anti-sex-ed political culture, Advocates for Youth reports on its blog that the Democrats have been utterly craven lately. A recent report, from the Democrat-controlled Labor Health and Human Services Appropriations conference committee, includes the full $28 million increase requested by President Bush for abstinence-only-until-marriage-programs. “The Democrats have now granted the president and his anti-sex education zealots a whopping $141 million dollar budget for abstinence-only programs — something they could never achieve even under a conservative Republican Congress!” Advocates for Youth notes.

“Never mind the congressionally-mandated evaluation released in April showing abstinence-only programs have ‘no impact on adolescent behavior,’” Advocates continues. “Never mind the 2006 study by the Society of Adolescent Medicine which stated that these programs ‘threaten fundamental human rights to health, information and life.’ Never mind the 2004 report from Congressman Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) oversight committee demonstrating that 80% of abstinence-only programs contain ‘false or misleading information.’ Never mind the 13 governors who have refused abstinence-only dollars because they see no reason to use precious state dollars to match federal funds for programs that simply do not work.

“With one breathtakingly cynical move,” says Advocates, “the Democratic leadership has now stamped its brand on one of the biggest ideological boondoggles in congressional history.”

Meanwhile, the kids keep on trucking, doing who knows what? Do we really want to know? — God forbid, it might turn out to be boring! That’s the suggestion of yet another new study, of 18 to 24 year olds. It was reported on by Adult Video News (AVN) — the trade mag of the porn biz. According to AVN, which cannot possibly be happy about this, the research finds that young adults’ visits to internet porn sites over the past couple of years have been decreasing.

Visits to porn sites dropped from 16.9 percent of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9 percent as of the same time this year. That’s a 33 percent decline.

Why the drop? Members of the Gen Y demographic, one researcher says, are increasingly hanging out in social networking sites. They’re probably “too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin.”

Of course, some young adults (not to mention their elders) are taking pictures of their own skin and posting the results to amateur porn sites, or just stashing the product in their sock drawers. Until this month, anyone who took photos or videos such as these was supposed to go through an elaborate legal process, defined by a federal law popularly called 2257. That process involves inspecting the models’ and performers’ IDs to confirm they’re over 18, making copies of the IDs, and keeping them on file for government inspection. But due to a recent higher court ruling, 2257 has just been struck down in several states.

For years, 2257 has taken up a lot of the adult porn industry’s time and resources. In addition, the law theoretically applies to amateurs – even to husbands and wives out to spice up their conjugal fun. As technology and law writer Declan McCullagh, of CNET, explains: Under 2257, “An adult couple taking a single erotic photo of themselves with a digital camera in their own bedroom is required to (a) inspect their own government-issued photo identification; (b) ascertain that they’re at least 18 years old; (c) photocopy their own IDs; (d) photocopy the erotic image; (e) file this information in physical form; (g) display the date and a street address “prominently” in their files; (g) open these files to agents of the Justice Department without advance notice. If they don’t take each of those steps, both members of the couple, according to the law, are subject to a federal felony–up to five years in prison, as well as fines.

Whew!

But in November, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down 2257, ruling that its record-keeping requirements are overly broad and violate Americans’ free-speech rights.

The ruling covers several states, including Tennessee. This is where one of the defendants uncovered by Kurt Eichenwald’s work on the Justin Berry case was doing business when he was charged with helping Berry run a porn website that contained illegal images of a 14 year old. The defendant, Timothy Richards, was charged with and convicted for crimes including violations of 2257. In his defense, Richards claimed he didn’t know that the 14 year old was underage, because Justin Berry posted a fake 2257 disclaimer, asserting that the model was over 18 and he had records to prove it. The government didn’t buy Richards’ claim about being duped by Berry. Neither did a jury.

Now, Richards plans to return to court to argue that his 2257-based convictions should be overturned.

Interestingly, documents that emerged this summer in legal actions related to Richards’ case indicate that then New York Times reporter Eichenwald was using privileges as an administrator on the same illegal site that Richards was helping Berry operate – the one with the 14-year-old porn model (for details, see here, here, and here). According to his own statements, Eichenwald was involved in this child porn administrative role as a “private

Sex offender demographics map

citizen,” not a reporter doing research.

Because of the 2257 violation, he is theoretically also subject to being criminally charged — just as Tim Richards was. Earlier this year, a DOJ prosecutor and an FBI agent attended a court hearing related to Eichenwald’s involvement with the site, but would not say if he was being investigated. (Just after that hearing, Eichenwald retained a criminal defense attorney.)

Now, with the 2257 requirement overturned in Tennessee, anyone residing there who’s in Eichenwald’s shoes might breathe a little easier. On the other hand, Eichenwald lives in Texas, a state not currently subject to the circuit court ruling that overturned 2257. Time will tell whether 2257 is overturned nationwide.

And speaking of child porn laws – this is a little dated, in October October the New York Times interviewed Hany Farid. He’s a Dartmouth College professor who tries to do quantitative analysis to figure out whether photographs have been altered. Discussing his work (click here to see some), Farid remarked that he has “been an expert witness in several child pornography cases.”

Back in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that possession of computer-generated child porn is protected under the First Amendment because it doesn’t depict real children, but instead is built by morphing adult bodies to look younger, or it’s made completely from scratch.

Images of children in sexual poses are repugnant to most people, to put it mildly. But so are many other images we all are legally permitted to view. (Personally, I get especially sick when I see pictures of sexual assault from Abu Ghraib, or the photo of the naked little girl running from the napalm attack during the Viet Nam war.) Those items are protected speech – covered by the First Amendment. Child porn is not protected because traditionally, in order to create the material, sex crimes have been perpetrated against real minors. The images would otherwise not exist. Child porn was outlawed to discourage manufacture of a product that’s predicated on actual minors being made to perform sexually — when by legal definition they cannot consent to such acts. The reasoning may be arguable to First Amendment absolutists. Still, it’s serious reasoning.

But what happens now that we’ve got technology to make “virtual” images of people, even children, doing anything — even sex? In other words, what happens when kiddie porn contains no kids?

It’s possible to produce fake but real-looking images, Farid told the Times. And now defendants in child pornography cases – particularly when they involve material from the internet – are arguing that what they got caught with is virtual. Which would make it not illegal. The government has the burden of proving otherwise.

“So now in these cases,” Farid continued, ”defense lawyers will sometimes argue that the images aren’t real. So far, I have only testified on the side of the prosecution.”

What Farid and the Times omitted is that a judge in at least one child porn prosecution has rejected Farid’s work and deemed it unreliable. CNET’s McCullagh reported several months ago about Massachusetts resident Rudy Frabizio. He was indicted after his employer found sexually explicit images on his computer that appeared to involve minors.

When Fabrizio contested the government’s claim that all the images portrayed real children, the FBI contacted Professor Farid and asked him to run one of his analysis programs on the porn. But Frabizio’s lawyers discovered that Farid’s program had a 30 percent error rate. The program often classified a real photo as computer generated. It also classified a cartoon image as real.

The government opted not to use Farid as a witness and tried to replace him with an FBI agent who said he could tell which imagery depicts real children, versus which is fake, simply by looking.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner rejected that claim. “In a world of rapidly changing technology,” she ruled, “where the availability and use of Photoshop and other, similar programs is widespread, substantial evidence suggests it may be possible to digitally create or manipulate photographs in a manner the naked eye cannot detect. The government has not shown otherwise.”

What we have here is terra that’s mostly incognita, in which we need to think and rethink our child porn laws. How do we protect real children from sexual exploitation, while also protecting free speech as much as possible? To figure this out, lots of questions need to be answered. But first, they have to be asked. And that can be unpleasant.

For instance, all those people who want to see child porn: can they be sated by looking at virtual imagery that doesn’t exploit actual kids? Or must they have “reality” to feel happy? (This is dark variation on the same question television and Hollywood execs happily mull when it comes to mainstream media desires. Witness the public’s fascination with “reality TV” and with trying to tell the difference between “truth” and mere “acting.” In response, witness also the mainstream’s ever more sophisticated attempts to play tricks with our perceptions…often to our great delight.) (By the way, the graphic to the left does represent a real person, a suspected sex offender. Interpol puts scrambled images such as this on the Net, with an unscrambler code to facilitate identification and apprehension of the suspect.)

We don’t know much about people who harbor fantasies about sex with minors. What in the world goes on in their heads? We don’t know what percentage act their fantasies out criminally, versus how many just keep everything in their imagination. If it were to turn out that most do the latter, then — creepy as it sounds to the rest of us — it might do the world some good to give them fantasy images in which no real children are victimized.

But if any kind of image, even virtual, tends to provoke illegal sexual behavior against minors, we would want to seriously consider outlawing even fantasy material.

The problem is, we don’t know what’s what. There’s little research on the psyches or behavior of adults who are sexually attracted to minors (prison studies hardly count: incarcerated populations are notorious for telling researchers what they think they’re supposed to say, instead of what’s the truth).

Instead of high dudgeon and moralism, we need more and better research about people who are sexually attracted to those much younger than they, and what makes them tick. Until we know better, we won’t be able to help adults stay away from children And children will remain at unneeded risk for exploitation.

Professor Farid’s work has been funded by the federal government. No doubt he’s back at the drawing board.

Sex offender “buffer” map of Iowa City, computer generated

The rest of us should be, too. We should be pressuring the feds to fund scientifically sound, critical inquiry into human sexuality.

Don’t hold your breath. Let it out and let’s revisit the sex offender civil commitment controversy. The government was back in court in November in North Carolina, opposing a judge’s September ruling that sex offenders can’t be held in federal prison after they’ve served their sentences.

The ruling responded to a court order handed down on behalf of five convicts incarcerated at a federal sex offender prison. The feds said they were “sexually dangerous” and therefore needed to be civilly committed in mental hospitals – possibly for the rest of their lives. Civil commitment was approved under the federal “Adam Walsh” law, enacted last year.

But the judge said that to commit a person indefinitely, the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he or she is “sexually dangerous.” In an earlier order, the judge wrote that “there is serious question as to whether the federal government could ever prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual is both suffering from a mental illness or abnormality such as pedophilia and unlikely to refrain from sexually violent conduct in the future as a result of that illness.”

For now, the ruling affects only eastern North Carolina. But there’s a big prison there for sex offenders, Butner. It’s one of only a handful of such federal facilities in the nation.

Meanwhile, an inmate strike and protest is going on at a similar place in California. Sex offenders who’ve been civilly committed to a state hospital for sex offenders in Coalinga have been refusing food and engaging in other civil disobedience since the summer. According to a long article in the Los Angeles Times, they’re complaining of lack of psychotherapy services; many also feel it’s unconstitutional in the first place to be locked up after serving their prison time.

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I still get asked about David, whom I wrote about in New York Magazine a couple of years ago. He’s the undocumented Mexican who was living in a basement with over two dozen other immigrants. People wonder how he’s doing. David and one of his former roommates, Jose, keep in touch because they live near me, in Washington Heights. So here’s the latest.

They got kicked out of the basement several months ago when the apartment building was sold and the new owner decided to follow codes. David’s girlfriend is still in Colombia, stringing him along, and he’s the patient type. For female companionship, he and Jose still hang out at that dime-a-dance place in Inwood, which just expanded into a bigger building but has the same girls working. One of them hooked up with a 60-year-old customer and they got married. David quit his restaurant job and now works as a truck mechanic. Jose is in construction and apartment remodeling, which he says are booming here in NYC. If you want to know the state of the economy go ask the illegals. Invite them to dinner.

David and Jose came over on Thanksgiving. Over turkey and trimmings with some Bailey’s, they also provided updates on the military aspect of life these days for the undocumented in New York.

Jose recounted being on the street in Queens last month and witnessing what he described as an immigration raid conducted on a main thoroughfare. He said police were involved. I found this hard to believe, since NYC has a policy prohibiting cops from checking immigration status. After David and Jose left and the dishes were washed, I got on the Net and did some checking.

First thing I found was a squib from the New York Post, describing an October 14 raid on a “phony-green-card ring” in Queens that netted some 40 suspects. The Post crowed that the raid “was kick-started by a story by Post reporter Douglas Montero,” who went undercover last year to show how easy it is to buy fake documents.

The Post article was short, sweet, and — of course — in English.

Over at the Spanish-language El Diario and other ethnic outlets, however, things were far lengthier and more distasteful.

Here’s my summary, translated:

It was less a raid than a dragnet: Police and FBI agents threw fencing around an entire block in Jackson Heights and started questioning people trapped inside. Yes, authorities were looking for sellers of fake drivers licenses and social security cards — items commonly purchased by immigrants so they can work. But the dragnet provoked rumors that other people besides forgery vendors were being busted, simply because they’d got caught up in the fencing and were undocumented. The operation took place on 84th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, a busy shopping area. It caused panic.

This was Sunday at noon. The 2010 World Cup Soccer playoffs were starting, and Roosevelt Avenue’s bars and restaurants were jammed with fans parked in front of teles. As rumors spread about the raid, frightened people streamed in, seeking refuge from the fencing and police.

The operation ended at 2 p.m., but for hours afterward Roosevelt Avenue was deserted. Even the 5 p.m. soccer match between Brazil and Colombia failed to re-enliven the street. Storekeepers complained that sales were down. “There’s a lot of fear,” said one business owner.

Jose was still frightened a month later, at my Thanksgiving table.

A few days after the dragnet, David said, he and Jose were in a cafe near the West Village. While they were waiting for their order, in walked two men in ICE uniforms (ICE is “Immigration & Customs Enforcement” — the new, official name for what Mexicans call “la migra”).

David and Jose were petrified. They sat stock still at their table, trying to be cool. Waiting, just waiting. Here’s what finally happened.

The ICE agents ordered some food. To go. It came. They went. David and Jose finished their meal.

Back at the Thanksgiving table, we changed the subject to Creedence Clearwater (Jose has been trying to understand the lyrics to “Cotton Fields”).

I later vowed to spend more time on IndyMedia’s “Voices that Must Be Heard” site (click here). “Voices” is a translated, continually updated digest of the best of the ethnic press in New York City. It regularly covers newspapers in dozens of languages. Reading Voices weekly, you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in our immigrant communities — and sometimes not just in New York.

Take that quick item I wrote a few months ago about male smugglers — coyotes — being nicer to female smugglees than they used to be (click here). Well, according to a recent Voices That Must Be Heard piece, translated from El Diario (click here), it’s not just that guy coyotes are becoming more sensitive. It’s also that the human trafficking profession is shifting gender: these days, lots of smugglers are women.

They talk in the Diario article about how they can take care of migrant moms and children better than male coyotes can, because the women smugglers turn their own abodes into safe houses, providing their customers tasty, home-cooked meals and comfy beds. Female smugglers also try to devise better ways for their clients to travel north than those yucky treks through the deadly but macho desert that no normal girl and her babies wants to bother with. (For a recent, very moving description of what such people leave behind when they make those terrible crossings, click here.)

It won’t be long before big, beefy Vicente Fernandez types will also choose women coyotes over their own sex. Real man may not eat quiche. But they still go for a nice bowl of pozole casero and clean sheets en route to Gringoland.

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Writer David France was on (click here) Boston public radio WBUR yesterday, talking about his story, in last month’s New York Magazine, about the fall of former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald. France’s interview is the first normal radio piece about the subject — “normal” referring to the quaint practice of a host asking critical questions of a critical guest, rather than staging a puff event, as NPR’s “All Things Considered” did with its media reporter David Folkenflik in late October, and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer repeated days later.

(On the Lehrer program, Eichenwald lavished ad hominems on me, as is his wont. The show must have felt embarrassed, because later they invited me to be on — but warned that I was not to talk about Eichenwald … not about the same issues that France would subsequently discuss in Boston. I argued about this restriction with a Lehrer producer, but ended up agreeing to appear (click here to listen) and thought we’d be talking about the problem of how, under the law, the media can’t research child pornography. Indeed, that’s how the show was advertised. But when I got on the air, Lehrer’s questions seemed to be trying to point me toward saying I approve of sex between teens and adults. It seemed weird, strained, and none too friendly. Still, I was happy for the chance to call for reason and intelligence when considering issues regarding children, young adults, and sex. Thanks, Brian!)

Back to the Boston interview. On the radio, France (shown at left) brings up new material that did not appear in New York Magazine. He provides more detail about Eichenwald’s involvement with a web site that turned out to have illegal material on it. He gives critical context to Eichenwald’s claims about epilepsy induced memory loss. He speaks at some length about men who were convicted based on Eichenwald’s misguided reporting — and he expresses sympathy for these men’s legal plight, as well as skepticism about the fairness of the long prison sentence one of them faces. Most of all, France focuses on the various tragedies and outrages that occur when emotion and moralism get in the way of competent reporting.

The interview ends with a suggestion that the story may not be over when it comes to Justin Berry.

This is a sharp, nuanced piece of media that surpasses France’s written work on the subject.

I’m waiting until after Thanksgiving to blog the latest sex-politics news, culled from research and journalism from here and there. More later; meanwhile, enjoy the holiday!

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I dropped by the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, held at NYC’s Museum of Natural History over the weekend. The fest began decades ago, to showcase moving-image offerings by anthropologists — materials that have been coming out since stuff like Man of Aran first appeared in the 1930s. Back then, the medium was 35 or 16mm. Later Super8. Then camcorders. Now there’s cheap, digital equipment — including cell phones. And currently, some of the most interesting “ethnographic” productions aren’t even made by anthropologists.

Instead, they might be by human rights, political and media-democracy activists.

“The Machine is Us/ing Us: Content from YouTube, WITNESS’ The Hub, and Karma Tube” was the title of a presentation I attended.

Margaret Mead in Samoa as a young woman

There, YouTube’s film manager, Sara Pollack, said YouTube is fueling political activism by posting practically any video that’s submitted, including those promoting all sorts of justice and social change projects. She clicked on an example (see it here): about Eric Volz, a young US guy running an environmental magazine in Nicaragua who says he was falsely charged and convicted of murdering an ex-girlfriend in that country. According to Pollack, the video made by Volz’s supporters, then posted on YouTube, has garnered attention for the case from the mass media.

Also up was Sameer Padania, of the brand new site The Hub. It’s part of Witness, a group that trains people worldwide how to use technology so they can go on the streets and videotape human rights abuses. Anyone who creates such a product, even if it’s just with a cellphone, can submit it to The Hub. The person who filmed Seinfeld comedian Mike Richards making racist comments at his show would not send that video to The Hub. The one who recorded Egyptian police torturing suspects in the jailhouse would. Great site!

Another speaker was Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of dotSUB — which allows polyglot volunteers to translate YouTube-style videos into a second language. And a third, fourth, etc. It’s a Wiki-esque version of the Tower of Babel razed.

Very strange Mead images found on the web

Here’s how it works: Say someone translated one of those tortured Egyptians’ words from Arabic to English for the Hub video. Using dotSUB, someone can then translate the English to Swahili, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or any other tongue. One person can translate a fragment of the video, then fall asleep or have to go to his or her day job. A second volunteer can pick up where the first left off. Maybe V2 doesn’t finish, either, but V3 takes over. And so on till the whole thing is done. Very cool.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I still don’t know how to embed YouTube items into my blog. So you’ll have to follow the links yourself, but I hope you go to this one. It was recommended to me by Naomi Dagen Bloom, whom I met because she was sitting behind me at the Mead festival. She’s has been using her blog to spread the word about a bill that just passed through the House of Representatives and is headed now for the Senate.

It’s HR 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and Prevention Act of 2007. It’s an amendment to the 2002 Homeland Security Act. From a First Amendment point of view it’s very scary, particularly because it’s aimed not at foreigners, but at US “natives.” True to name, it would establish a commission to study and come up with ways to prevent “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism.”

“Violent radicalization” in the bill is defined as the “process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.”

“Homegrown terrorism” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence…to intimidate or coerce” — among other entities — “the United States government….in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

Hmm. If you replaced “United States government” with “British government,” wouldn’t the American revolution and its activists have fit HR1955’s definitions of extremists and homegrown violent radicals? The mainstream media has published almost nothing about HR1955 but the web is roiling with protest denouncing it as the “Thought Crime Bill” — including on YouTube (click here for examples).

To learn more and take action, see various entries this month on the excellent blog, “As Time Goes By.”

Margaret Mead would be proud of how her festival is promoting all this online ferment. Granted, she knew nothing about the internet, and most pictures of her make her look very unhip and old. (Though I think the one I mounted at the top of this post is exceptional.) I look pretty old, too, and so does Naomi. OK, well, let’s just say old enough that we know how to spell.

Which is why, when I went on YouTube to view all those anti-HR 1955 videos, I felt like a weirdo invading MySpace. I mean, I’ve never seen so many apparently smart, educated people dubbing their videos with “accept” when they meant “except”, “intimadate” for “intimidate,” and so on like sounds of chalk on the retina blackboard. All the lefty and righty civil libertarians seem to be about 20 years old: that’s the only way to explain their semi-literacy. No doubt they’re intelligent, but they’ve done 2 much TV watching & txt mssging, and damn, I wish they’d get edited so people like me won’t feel ancient and like we’re not members of their new “The Machine is Us” club.

But hey, kids. Now that you’ve made it to this site, the crone is going to give you a lesson about sex politics, which is what I blog a lot about. So — like, did you ever hear of Margaret Mead? She wrote a book back in the 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa. It was a real breakthrough in modern anthropology and in the US as a whole, because it said certain things about Samoan adolescents. To wit, that they and their parents were open and relaxed about sex, which allowed them to engage in much sexual exploration. This led Mead to propose that attitudes about sex are formed culturally rather than naturally, and if it weren’t for cultural repression, people would masturbate, have homosexual relations, and engage in unwed sex and other erotic acts without feeling anxious and guilty. The book caused quite a stir when it first appeared. It was as innovative then as the net is now.

And oh yeah, Mead was a lesbian. Plus, a feminist.

The “Machine” owes her a big thanks. That’s why I’m featuring her today, as a tribal rite on my little cyber cog.

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To get to Carrollton, the suburb just north of Dallas where my sister lives, you have to drive through mean little Farmers Branch. Which is yet another burb, lately in the news because the town has been trying to keep landlords from renting apartments to “illegal aliens.” I passed through Irving, Texas too – where police are stopping people for the tiniest infractions, demanding papers, and turning those without immigration documents over to federal authorities so they will be deported.

Metro Dallas is small compared to Houston. It takes extra shlep time, but if you’re phobic about 65 MPH, as I am, you can drive from one end to the other without ever getting on a freeway. You see a lot that way – big, bleached, plainsified sky, noble old prairie architecture, and the city’s core, which still has lots of WASPs and WASP churches and white-people emporia.

Out on the perimeter, though, mostly what you see is Mexicans. Christmas-painted restaurants with words like Zacatecas and Tenampa. Endless little night clubs and bakeries and furniture stores with neon-winking Spanish. And people everywhere, going about their business, eating, driving, shopping with wife and kids and grandma.

Harry Hines Boulevard is Mexican. Irving, Mesquite, Market Center. A half million people converged on the May 2006 immigrant civil rights march in Dallas. Mostly Mexicans.

I picked up the local version of Mike Lacey’s New Times (The Dallas Observer) and went by the Mexican consulate to snap a picture of someone reading Gustavo Arrellano’s “Ask a Mexican” column so I could send it to Arrellano and get a free copy of his book (alas, I have since learned he already has a picture of the Dallas consulate). If you dial the phone number of that overworked agency, you often get a message, in Spanish, that you should leave your name and number if you’ve been a victim of the dragnets, and someone will get back to you.

On Sunday morning I went botanica hopping in Oak Cliff, a section of Dallas that appears to date from the 1920s to 1940s. Botanicas sell candles, herbs and powders, as well as statuettes and prayer cards depicting the saints. Botanica magic is based on European folk practice, syncretized with African and indigenous healing and spell casting in pre-Columbian and slaveholding Latin America. According to my mom, my grandmother was into the Old World version — as well as Old-to-New-World immigration. She bribed and sneaked her way out of one of the early-20th-century progroms in Kishinev, where dozens of Jews were murdered. She escaped by masquerading as a peasant (complete with over-the-top crucifix jewelry) and hiding, for a price, under hay in the wagon of a farmer (Bessarabia’s version of today’s coyote). Her own mother gave birth to 20 children and lost 11. To save the other nine from sickness, she wore a garlic chain around her neck. I am here because of such ignorance and hope. Botanicas, even in Dallas. They’re a national treasure.

I asked a few store managers which saint a customer should pray to, to ward off an immigration dragnet.

“All of them!” advised one woman.

“Saint Jude. For impossible causes,” said another.

Being Jewish and not personally worried about deportation this time around, I skipped the frankly Catholic items and chose others.

One, a packet of “Pancho Villa powder,” responds to undocumented immigrants’ lack of access to decent health care here in the U.S. Back in Mexico, there’s a Pancho Villa miracle sect, in which ailing people gather to worship the fabled revolutionary, hoping they will get well. I went to a prayer and healing ceremony once in Cd. Juarez. The main event was the playing, on a thrift-store machine, of an old 33 rpm record of “steed music” — songs dedicated to Villa’s favorite horses.

There are still middle-class white people in Oak Cliff, but – as in the rest of Dallas — most send their children to private schools. Over and over I’ve been told the public system is terrible. But it’s all the immigrants have. That and “No Child Left Behind.”

If “No Child” doesn’t work, there’s always this blessed botanica item you can wash your kids with. Jabon del Estudiante, Soap of the Student. It promises “marvelous changes,” presumably in academic achievement.

Great! But will the changes make a difference in the long run? For years now, immigrant groups have been trying to get the national “Dream Act” passed in Congress. It would allow undocumented young people to gain citizenship by enlisting in the military. Or they could use their marvelous academic skills to attend college. Even though the bargain offers up human life (and even better, brain power) for our homeland, Congress keeps nixing the bill.

I forgot to query the botanica owners about which product we should use to get the Dream Act passed.

So here’s the contest:

Ask the above question at a botanica in Dallas or anywhere else. First person with an answer and a mailing address gets my Pancho Villa powder or jabon del estudiante.

Get to your nearest Latino neighborhood and enter now!

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