Month: June 2020

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Book Reviews Current Events Prisons in the U.S. We Became Mexican American, a book

Join Our “Mixer” for Incarcerated Latinos on FaceBook June 28, 2020

Hello everyone,

I am inviting you to join me and my fellow LDO Volunteers who support Latino prisoners in the Monroe Correctional Center (MCC) in Monroe WA. We are doing a “Mixer” on Facebook, June 28th at 3 p.m., via Zoom. Please join us.

The Mixer will offer some informational and cultural activities. I will give a brief overview of our organization (LDO) at the start and two or three formerly incarcerated Latino community members will speak of their experiences. We’re hoping for some music too. So sorry we can’t offer you something to eat and drink!

If you are interested in the general topic of U.S. prisons and/or Latinx issues (culture, history, the Latino experience in the U.S., etc.) you may find our LDO Mixer hour interesting if not beneficial (if you’re interested in the subject of prisons, see my book review of American Prison, in this same blog). The purpose of our Facebook event is to help our communities understand prison realities, attract local volunteers to help with our prison work at the MCC, compile a list of followers and invite donor contributions.

The Monroe Correctional Complex, Monroe WA

LDO refers to the Latino Development Organization of Washington Serving Latinos in the Monroe Correctional Complex. This is the name of our nonprofit organization (501c3), and I am the president. LDO includes a Board of Directors, a small corps of community volunteers, and detainee leaders representing about 40 inmates in the MCC who affiliate with LDO. We appreciate both our community volunteers and the guys inside because without their help LDO would not exist. The photo at the top of this article, taken in 2019, shows some of our LDO detainees and some of our volunteers standing in front of artwork created by MCC prisoners.

The word “development” in the title of our organization was chosen by the LDO affiliated detainees a couple of years ago in one of our meetings. They chose it because they insisted and continue to insist on developing and improving themselves to achieve the fullest rehabilitation possible.

Before the pandemic struck, our LDO organization was building, at their request, a curriculum of educational and self-improvement activities, including guest presentations, short-term classes on psychology, history, art and culture (I gave some) and so on. They had already organized themselves into mentoring groups in art, Spanish, math, etc., as testimony of their own inclination toward self-improvement. Does that impress you? Our LDO guys impress me quite a lot. In any case, we’re preparing to resume our work as soon as possible.

Hope to see you on June 28th at 3 p.m.!

Visit and like us at our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/latinodevelopmentorganization/

And our web page is here: https://www.latinodevelopmentorganization.org/

 

Categories
Book Reviews Caribbean Latin America

Christophe, the King of Haiti / The Kingdom of this World, a book review

Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1969). (See English below) El reino del que trata este libro de 142 páginas es el del “rey” de Haiti, Henri Christophe, que llegó a su fin en 1820 en la isla de Española.

Nacido en Suiza, pero criado en Cuba, el autor probablemente se dio cuenta en su juventud de la historia pesarosa del país vecino. Así es que nos asegura en la introducción, que en 1943 tuvo “la suerte” de hacer una visita a Haití donde encontró “las ruinas, tan poéticas de Sans Souci, la mole imponente” que legó Christophe a sus desharrapados compatriotas, refiriéndose al edificio colosal y masivo que sus vasallos tuvieron que erigir y que trae turistas hasta hoy en día.

Sans Souci

Considerado como uno de los más destacados escritores de América Latina del siglo XX, Carpintier hace un lado su estilo magistral rebuscado, el que resalta en la introducción de este libro, y, menos mal, no escribe el texto propio de la novela de una manera rebuscada, pues se ajusta al nivel de un esclavo negro llamado Ti Noël cuya suerte nos revela el mundo del rey Christophe.  A través de su precaria existencia el lector descubre, sin tener que aguantar términos pedantescos, de la manera en que Christophe ejerció su despotismo sobre sus súbditos desheredados, opresión que debió desaparecer después de las insignes luchas por la igualdad libradas por el célebre Toussaint L’Overture cuyo nombre curiosamente no aparece en este libro.

Carpintier deja ver su anhelo por descubrir “lo maravilloso” en la historia de los pueblos latinoamericanos para contraponer a géneros similares europeos. Así es que ve en la historia de Haití figuras protagónicas como la de Christophe (y Mackandal, líder revolucionario vudista) que tienen la capacidad de asombrar a través del tiempo por sus hazanas extraordinarias.  [January 2020]

The Kingdom of this World, is available in English. The kingdom that this 142-page book is about is that of the “king” of Haiti, Henri Christophe, who came to an end in 1820 on the island of Española.

Born in Switzerland, but raised in Cuba, the author probably discovered the sorrowful history of the country next door when he was a young man. He assures us in the introduction, that he was “lucky” to pay a visit to Haiti in 1943 where he found “the poetic ruins of Sans Souci, the imposing mass” that Christophe bequeathed to his ragged subjects, referring to the massive colossal edifice that they had to erect, a structure that attracts tourists to this day.

Considered as one of the most outstanding writers in Latin America in the 20th century, Carpintier sets aside his elaborate writing style, evident in the Introduction, and, thank goodness, writes the body of the novel less pedantically, adjusting it more realistically to his main character, a black slave named Ti Noël. His pitiful life draws the curtain for the reader on the world of King Christophe. Chronicling his precarious existence, we learn the way in which Christophe applied his despotism over his unprivileged subjects, an oppression that should have disappeared thanks to Toussaint L’Overture’s well-known fight for equality, but curiously this hero’s name is absent.

Carpintier exposes his desire to discover “the marvelous” in the history of Latin American peoples in contrast with similar European genres. So, he features protagonists like Christophe (and Mackandal, a voodoo revolutionary) in the history of Haiti as characters whose extraordinary feats enjoy the capacity to amaze over time.

Categories
We Became Mexican American, a book

Prisons in America, a book review (an undercover report on a private prison).

Bauer, Shane. American Prison. A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (New York: Penguin 2018), 351 pp.  What I learned from this book is that prisons in America, especially in the South, have been centers of unmerciful torture, and that private prisons today, especially those run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), do a worse incarceration job than they claim.

Bauer gives the reader a double perspective on prisons in America in this volume. One is a survey of the rise of prisons in the U.S. alongside the argument that penitentiaries, as we know them today, arose as a unique vision of our young democracy. Before this time, someone who committed a crime would receive capital punishment in the form of hanging or the cutting of a hand or nose, and such. Afterward, it meant going to prison and, ideally, getting the opportunity to become a new person, rehabilitating.

The author advances his review of prisons in America by focusing on the South in the 1870’s, specifically, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It may have been a response to Reconstruction policies (an argument he does not make but I surmise it) but in any case, these states practiced convict leasing. This means that the respective governors rented the convicts under their responsibility, Blacks mostly, to plantations, railroad companies, mining companies, and so on. The prisoners would work 12 hours a day with minimal food and negligible medical services and the state governments would get paid by the lessees about 25% of the prevailing wages. The state budgets would thus benefit and so would the lessees because they were getting labor at the cheapest price, while the prisoners would be worked to death, practically. The author claims a death loss rate of 16% to 25%, greater than the death rates associated with Stalin’s gulags in the 1920’s. This was worse than slavery because the prisoners no longer represented an investment to be protected, so they could be abused to death or near death and no one would ask any questions. The author further asserts with withering detail that today’s private prison system arose from the convict leasing experience.

The other perspective, serving as the book’s main contribution, is a personal and comprehensive report on the author’s undercover experience investigating a prison, a private prison in the south.

The author became a prison guard at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana in 2014 and secretly videotaped and recorded the training he received and the work he had to perform as a CO (corrections officer). “Winn” was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), one of the largest private companies that manages many prisons and detention centers. Today it is known as CoreCivic.

The main argument in Bauer’s book is that because the CCA was a for-profit enterprise, the welfare needs of the prisoners were chronically disregarded to save money on facilities, food, medical services, and so on. “Winn” did not run better because it was administered with the efficiency of a business. In fact, CCA lost its contract months after Bauer ended his undercover study because it was mismanaging the prison to squeeze out every penny possible. For example, a Louisiana Department of Corrections report accused CCA of charging prisoners for the toilet paper and the toothpaste they used.

Another lesson for me is the impact that guarding prisoners had on Bauer, a good-hearted, liberal-minded reporter. His prison work began to darken his view of the prisoners he sought to understand at the start. Toward the end of his undercover work he found himself looking for opportunities to punish them and otherwise belittle their situation. It was a downhill slope for him and he recognized it.

I admire Bauer’s overall efforts including his careful rendering of the sources that helped him understand private prisons in America today. His bibliography is valuable and exceptional at the same time. These two approaches to prisons in America, and a clear and casual writing style, like a novel, made me read with great interest.

Categories
History of Mexico u.s.-mexico border

WHICH PRESIDENT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? TAKE A LOOK AT THESE WORDS.

“The president decapitates everything he doesn’t understand, condemns that architects charge for their knowledge when “anyone” can build a house, reproaches the many years engineers study because, according to him, wise people know how to make better roads, he affirms that the economy is not a complex thing, and that doctors should not charge for their specialized knowledge. The president hates technology, dislikes science and detests verifiable knowledge; he prefers the lyrical, the improvised, the visceral.”

“El presidente decapita todo lo que no entiende, condena que los arquitectos cobren por su conocimiento cuando “cualquiera” puede construir una casa, reprocha los anos de estudio de los ingenieros porque, según el, el pueblo sabio sabe hacer mejores caminos, considera que la economía no es algo complejo y que los médicos no deberían de cobrar lo que cobran por sus especialidades. El presidente aborrece la técnica y aborrece la ciencia y aborrece el conocimiento comprobable, lo suyo es mas bien lo lirico, lo improvisado, lo visceral.”

ANSWER: These are the words and thoughts attributed to President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO) by Luis Cardenas, an opinion writer in El Universal, June 11, 2020, a Mexico City newspaper. I’ve been saying there are a lot of parallels between President Donald Trump and AMLO. Here’s someone else saying the same thing.

Categories
Book Reviews Central America Latin America World Affairs

“Mamita Yunai” is about the United Fruit Company

Fallas, Carlos Luis. Mamita Yunai (San José, C.R.: Editorial Costa Rica, 1941, 2019), pp. 267. [See Spanish below] The author was a unionized banana plantation worker in Costa Rica in the 1930s who learned to read and write despite conditions to the contrary. Mamita became his best known work. It is an excellent piece of literature, on its own, yet it also accomplishes what the author most wanted: to unveil the unquestionably villainous working conditions that made it possible for Americans to consume their bananas in those years. Have these conditions changed today?

Mamita Yunai is the ironic nickname that Spanish speaking workers used to refer to the company that employed them and which dominated the banana industry: The United Fruit Company. Yunai was the closest they could come to saying “united,” and they regarded the American firm as a wicked mother, which she apparently was. Apt title.

This is Fallas’ fictionalized memoir of the years he worked in the banana fields of Costa Rica, on the Caribbean coast, first as a liniero or line man and later as a labor union representative. In the novel he calls himself Sibajitas and describes himself as a member of a squad of laborers opening the dense jungle to install the narrow-gage rail lines that would help extract the elongated perishable fruit. Sweating from insufferable humidity and heat, swamps, snakes and swarming mosquitos, the author convinced me of the improbability of human survival especially with little or no medical services. He writes that countless men died as a result, most of them left to rot in the muddy morass, as in the case of a close friend. Local government officials are described as enablers of this situation because they were in the company pay.

The north coast of Central America is the home of many African-origin folks who appear here as United Fruit workers, alongside their Hispanic-origin co-workers. They speak pidgin English and Spanish and reside in Costa Rica or are passing through from Honduras headed to Panama looking for canal jobs there. Aboriginals from Talamanca also appear in the story because the banana fields intruded into their long-guarded territory. They’re regarded as proud enemies of Spanish conquerors but their condition, in the 1930’s, had been reduced to wretched survival.

By the way, the Prologue’s author scorns Fallas’ many critiques for suppressing this book because of his membership in the local Communist Party, crushed long ago.  The book has been translated into English.

El autor fue un trabajador sindicalizado en las plantaciones bananeras de Costa Rica en la década de los 1930’s y aprendió a leer y escribir a pesar de tener todas las condiciones a su contra. Mamita Yunai es su obra mayor y la más conocida. La considero un trabajo literario excelente y pienso también que el autor logró lo que más quería: dejar ver las condiciones de trabajo incuestionablemente desgraciadas, que hicieron posible que los estadounidenses pudieran disfrutar de sus bananas en esos años. Han cambiado las condiciones en estos días?

“Mamita Yunai” es el apodo mordaz que los trabajadores de habla hispana usaban para referirse a la United Fruit Company, la empresa que los empleaba y que dominaba la industria bananera. “Yunai” era lo más cerca que podían llegar a decir “united,” y consideraban a la empresa norteamericana como una madre malvada, lo que aparentemente era. Título apto.

Esta es una memoria novelizada del propio Fallas cuando trabajó en los campos bananeros de Costa Rica, en la costa del Caribe, primero como “liniero” y luego como representante de un sindicato. En la novela se auto llama Sibajitas y nos dice que fue miembro de un pelotón de obreros que abría la espesa jungla para instalar las líneas ferroviarias que ayudarían a extraer la fruta amarilla y perecedera. Sudar a chorros a causa de la humedad y el calor insufrible, caminar en pantanos, aguantar serpientes y enjambres de mosquitos, el autor me convenció de la improbabilidad de la supervivencia humana, especialmente con poco o ningún servicio médico. Escribe que incontables hombres murieron como resultado, la mayoría de ellos pudriéndose en el fango, como en el caso de un amigo cercano. Describe a los oficiales de gobierno como achichinques por estar al pago de la empresa.

Gente de origen africano reside en la costa norte de Centro América y por eso aparecen aquí muchos de ellos como trabajadores de la United Fruit, al lado de sus compañeros hispanos. Hablan inglés pidgin y español y residen en Costa Rica o los describe el autor como emigrantes de Honduras dirigiéndose a Panamá en busca de trabajo. Los aborígenes de Talamanca también aparecen en esta historia porque los campos bananeros invadieron en su territorio, el que habían protegido durante la época colonial. Se les considera orgullosos enemigos de los conquistadores españoles, pero su condición en los 1930’s se había reducido a una resistencia miserable.

Por cierto, el autor del Prólogo rechaza a los críticos de Fallas porque suprimieron este libro debido a su membresía en el Partido Comunista, desbaratado ya hace mucho tiempo.

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Uncategorized World Affairs

THE ‘GIL’ SURNAME AND THE NAZI HOLOCAUST

Our Mexican-origin surname, Gil, appears in the Holocaust archives! Yikes!

I had the occasion recently to learn of the Arolsen Archives, in Germany, the largest repository of documents concerning the millions of Jews and other people who were killed by Hitler’s Nazi government  just for being who they were.  Remember the gas ovens? Most were burned to get rid of their bodies.

Apparently, all these documents (see the types of documents below), were scooped up by our soldiers at the end of World War II, after we bombed the Nazi’s into oblivion. Our GI’s gathered the papers and they were stored and placed into this archive and research organization.

Since I like archives, I went into the online collection, just to check it out, and decided to put in our surname, doubting I’d find anything, because it’s not a name normally associated with the Hitler era.

In just a few minutes of searching, up came the name, Antonio Accolti Gil. It seems he was an Italian with our surname (I don’t know whether the Gil is patronymic or matronymic). See a registration document about him below. He was picked up for whatever reason on February 5, 1944, and imprisoned at the Mauthhausen Camp, one of many built to hold these unfortunate people. He may have survived because the Germans were losing the war by 1944.

Prisoner’s Personal Card for Antonio Accolti Gil

I also searched with the word “Mexico,” and it produced about 50 results, to my surprise! These poor folks were Spaniards or Mexicans who had fought against the Nazis in Spain during its bloody and brutal civil war (about the time I was born) and the Germans picked them up and put them in the concentration camps, alongside the Jewish prisoners.

What does all this mean? 1) That the Holocaust (the genocidal elimination of millions of people by the German Nazis) was real, contrary to people who deny it today, unbelievably. The truth is hard to take, sometimes, and people can deny things all their lives. And, 2) it included many who were not Jews, like our Antonio Gil and the Mexicans and Spaniards mentioned.

Types of documents in the Arolsen Archive includes prisoner files of various sorts, documents about medical experiments on humans, testimonies from camp personnel and former prisoners, death registers, execution lists, deaths after liberation, Red Cross reports, and so on. Germans are expert record keepers, to this day.