Is Citizenship Being Diluted by Globalization? by Leslie Evans

http://danielverhoeven.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/is-citizenship-being-diluted-by-globalization-by-leslie-evans/

14/03/2009 • 8:20 pm

Is Citizenship Being Diluted by Globalization? by Leslie Evans

Published at UCLA

Author Leslie Evans

 

Sociologist Saskia Sassen proposes that international business at one end and poor immigrants at the other are shaping a new status of individual rights no longer tied to citizenship in a national state.

 

"I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship."

 

Is citizenship going the way of the nation-state in our new globalized world? Saskia Sassen thinks so. The University of Chicago sociologist told a UCLA audience why at a March 25 talk sponsored by the International Institute. She began by acknowledging that there have been no really dramatic changes in the laws defining the standing of citizens in recent years. But that can be misleading, she said, because the legalities of who is a citizen and who is an alien have always had rough edges that are being redefined without the need to draft new legislation. "Their very incompleteness contains the possibility of change, and they must be incomplete to retain flexibility." Professor Sassen's talk reported on the research for her forthcoming book Denationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age to be published this year by Princeton University Press.

 

Sassen's central point was that legal rights that used to be given only to citizens are more and more being claimed by large groups of people who rest their claims on international rather than national law or on relatively new legal concepts such as human rights vested in individuals rather than governments. These changes, which weaken governments but are good for individuals who change states or travel internationally, are a consequence of globalization, which moves more people longer distances more often than the societies in which nation-states were first forged and their legal systems constructed.

 

For Sassen, the clear definition of a citizen is being eroded at the high and low end: at the top of society by growing numbers of employees of companies with a global reach, staff members of United Nations-type organizations, and people with dual citizenship. At the bottom by growing de facto legal rights of undocumented immigrants.

 

Microelements that Add Up to Big Changes

 

Sassen pointed to a number of "microelements" that collectively are weakening the institution of citizenship in national states. These included:

 

Dual nationality. In the last decade, she said, many major countries have begun to authorize dual citizenship. The United States, which has historically been very reluctant to recognize such status has effectively acquiesced. "This is a diminution of exclusive allegiance," Sassen pointed out, "Even ten years ago many countries said no to this status."

 

Human rights of the body. Until recent years most legal rights were linked to ownership of property or membership in a political entity. As concern with and legislation protecting human rights has become more central, "the body becomes the site for rights" for people who are not citizens and do not own property.

 

Weakening of governmental sovereignty. Sassen suggested that recent advances in the legal prerogatives of individuals has been at the expense of the previous power of the state. Here she pointed to the constitutionalizing of the right to sue the government. This has been growing in the United States through an accumulation of case law. "Elsewhere it has been written into new constitutions, as in Argentina and Brazil." She said this was almost universal in constitutions written since the mid-1990s. Governments, even if democratically elected, are not permitted to speak for their citizens in all cases but citizens as individuals can preempt the government.

 

Growing legal rights of the undocumented. Rights that formerly used to be restricted to citizens are being won by noncitizens as well, Sassen said. In the U.S. "these include the right to be paid for work done, protection of human rights, and the right to own property. There is an informal social contract here, unauthorized but recognized. One part of the contract is that if the illegal alien demonstrates good conduct they can raise a claim to be legalized. Though this is not written into law, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States all display a tendency to grant citizenship to long-term illegal residents." These de facto rights amount, she said, to a category that she called "informal citizenship."

 

"The totality here," Saskia Sassen said, "is a growing distance between citizen and state."

 

How to Look at Immigrants

 

Saskia Sassen suggested that the deepening of globalization should make us look on immigration differently. Usually immigrants are regarded simply as individuals who have come to your country for personal reasons. Sassen proposed to see them as "one segment of a complex loop that may begin with corporate outsourcing or a military action." Their final move to a country they have long ties with is more a measure of global interdependencies in which elements of semicitizenship have been extended to people who do not even live in the country they eventually move to.

 

Despite a vocal nativist opposition to large-scale immigration, she said that falling birth rates in many developed countries increase pressure to look beyond their borders to maintain population levels. "In Europe," she said, "by 2100 there will be 75 million less people than today except for immigration. France, Italy, and Spain have already fallen below reproduction levels."

 

Immigration also has many faces. The word "immigrant," Sassen told her audience, "brings to mind a picture of a poorly educated low-wage worker. Immigrants are also foreign professionals, IMF and World Bank staffers, international business men and women."

 

At the high end of society, groups of citizens whose ties to the state are in process of being weakened are "denationalized subjects, global activists, the global financial elites, and people with transnational identities."

 

Sassen described global activists as people who go to other countries to take part in political activities normally reserved for citizens of those countries. "This is a new element of globalization," she said, "tourists going to do citizens' work, cutting across borders."

 

Unbundling Citizenship

 

Citizenship, Saskia Sassen summarized, was really only formalized in the early nineteenth century as modern states developed the record-keeping ability to adequately track those who lived within their borders. Today, she argued, the sharp distinction between citizen and alien is breaking down due to the growth in the number of transnational citizens with a foot in more than one country and the steady extension of more and more legal rights to noncitizens, including outright illegal immigrants.

 

These tendencies are most apparent in the forty or so global cities like New York, London, Tokyo, or Los Angeles, which she called "strategic sites for new types of political practices." In these cities with their large noncitizen populations "you can join in politics while not a citizen." Lacking only the rights to vote or sue the government, the noncitizens lobby for their positions and take part in many kinds of political activity including street demonstrations. The new tendencies are least evident in rural towns or in suburbs dominated by a single ethnicity or class.

 

Saskia Sassen concluded by saying "I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship."

 

UCLA International Institute

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A Nation of Immigrants: Part One: Michael Yates

http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/?p=105

« Michael Steele is a Nitwit and Wolf Blitzer is a Jackass

A Nation of Immigrants: Part One

Mar 14th 2009mikeUncategorized

Every night on CNN, Lou Dobbs bashes immigrants.  No matter what the subject, he manages to turn it into a horror story about the evils of people he calls "illegal aliens."  They steal; they cheat; they use drugs; they murder innocent people; they transmit diseases; they have filthy habits; they take jobs from decent hardworking American; they cost the taxpayers billions of dollars each year; they get perks ordinary citizens can only dream of, such as free healthcare and college tuition.  Dobbs' attacks are mirrored day and night on radio talk shows, in newspaper editorials and guest columns, and in the halls of Congress and every state capitol.

 

What these hatemongers say resonates with many of my fellow citizens.  I have heard them say so.  But especially in these hard economic times, when scapegoating of one group or another might become virulent and lead to vicious and divisive actions and politics, it might be a good idea to get a handle on some facts.

 

The first thing we need to understand is that immigrants come to the United States not out of choice but because changed circumstances, brought about often enough by business-supported political actions taken here in the United States, have forced them to do so.

 

Consider the story of a typical immigrant, a composite of millions of others who could tell the same tale.  Let us call her Elena.  Elena worked in a garment factory in a free trade zone in El Salvador.  The factory is a subcontractor for a large clothing chain in the United States.  The free trade zone itself is the product of an agreement made between the government of El Salvador and the International Monetary Fund.  The government is right-wing, dominated by the rich rural families that have run the country for many decades.  It has been waging a war against left-wing insurgents, aided by money and military advisors from the United States, which, in support of U.S. coffee companies and other businesses with interests in El Salvador,  has been deeply embedded in Salvadoran affairs .  The government's budget is strained because of the war and because the rich are too powerful to be taxed and the poor have no money.  In the countryside adults must subsist on about 1,200 calories per day.  To pay its bills, the government goes to the IMF for a loan.  The IMF, itself dominated by the United States, grants the loan but imposes strict conditions on the Salvadoran budget.  One of these is that exports must be stimulated by offering foreign firms tax incentives.  So the government establishes a free trade zone, a space in the capital city of San Salvador where businesses can set up shop in publically-financed buildings and operate tax-free.  There is plenty of labor available, mostly women who have migrated to the city to escape the civil war in the countryside.

 

Elena gets a job in the garment factory.  She is so desperate for work, with young children to support and no husband (he was killed in the fighting), that she ignores the long hours and horrendous working conditions.  Wages are pitifully low but they keep her family fed.  A year passes and Elena makes friends among her coworkers, all of whom have their own tales of woe.  As the women become habituated to industrial labor and as they talk among themselves, they begin to think about things: about how hard it will be to work at such a rapid pace as they get older; about how the bosses abuse them physically and sometimes sexually; about how the clothes they make sell for a lot of money in the United States, enriching the owners on the backs of their starvation wages.  One of the women is from a village once controlled by the rebels and has attended a peoples' school, where she learned something of her country's sordidly violent and oppressive history and of the global forces that have made it impossible for her and her family to ever improve their lot in life.  She tells them that only when the ordinary people have gotten together and fought for a better life did things ever change.  The archbishop of the city ash been saying the same things and demanded that the government do something to alleviate the misery of the masses.  As this woman speaks, Elena and the others feel something stirring inside themselves.  If they banded together, perhaps they could win better pay, hours, and conditions.  Maybe they could get the employer to provide daycare facilities so that they could bring their children with them each day.

 

The women contact a union organizer and they begin to try to get their coworkers to join.  The organizer knows activists in the United States who will support and publicize what the women are doing.  All goes well for awhile, but soon the boss begins a systematic campaign of torment of union supporters.  The woman from the rebel village receives phone calls threatening death to her and her young daughters.  When the workers and supporters put up a picket line to protest their treatment, police and paramilitary thugs descend on them with clubs and tear gas.  A week later, Elena is fired.  She begins to work out of the union headquarters to keep the union going, but she notices strangers following her home, and her phone starts ringing in the middle of the night.  When she picks up the receiver, she hears screams that sound like someone being tortured.  The day after the archbishop is murdered, she decides that she must leave the country with her kids.  Through a friend, she contacts a man who, for a fee, transports refugees into Mexico or the United States.  Elena uses her entire savings and begins a long, difficult, and dangerous journey to El Norte, ending up in northern Virginia, with a letter to show to a priest.  Through him, she finds a place to live until she geta a job.. She meets many other refugees, some for El Salvador, and they take comfort from one another.  And they begin again to build a community.  She gets work at a hotel as a room attendant, using an identification card she gets from a friend.  Her kids start school, and they help her with her English.

 

Why would anyone consider Elena to be an evil person.  How is she responsible for her fate?  What would you have done if you were her?  Aren't the actions of the United States, its government and  its corporations, root causes of what has happened to her?

 

The second fact we need to grasp is that, more so than perhaps any other country, employers in the United States have relied upon, and indeed actively encouraged, periodic waves of immigration to provide them with easily exploited pools of cheap labor. For the past three decades, millions of immigrants, primarily from Mexico, Latin America, and East Asia, have come to this country seeking work, in what Kim Moody, in his book U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition calls our third historical influx of immigrants. While some of the new arrivals are highly educated, with technical skills that give them access to special visas, most are poor men (men typically come first and their families follow) displaced by both political upheavals aided and abetted by U.S. foreign policy and the deregulated international trade and capital flows that have made it impossible for them to make a living as peasant farmers. In 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 15.7 percent of the U.S. labor force—about twenty-four million people—to be foreign-born. Not all of these workers have proper immigration documents, although we do not know precisely how many. There are probably, at least, twelve million undocumented persons in the United States today, but not all of these are in the labor force.  The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that undocumented workers make up about 5 percent of the labor force, so if this is true, there are about 7.6 million undocumented workers here or a little less than one-third of all foreign-born workers. The number of immigrant laborers, both with and without documents, has risen dramatically (though unevenly), especially since the early 1990s. In 1970, foreign-born workers comprised only 5.2 percent of the labor force; in 1990, the figure was 8.8 percent.

By far, the largest group of recent arrivals has come from Mexico. In 2005, a little under one-third of all immigrant workers were from Mexico. Given that most of these have limited formal education and given the near impossibility of poorly educated and unskilled persons entering the United States legally, there is no doubt that a significant proportion of Mexican workers are here without documents.  Other countries that have sent significant numbers of immigrants are the Philippines, India, China, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador.

 

Part of this essay is taken from the second edition of my book, Why Unions Matter, just published by Monthly Review Press.  You can order a copy at http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/whyunionsmatter.php

 

 

About Michael Yates ~

Michael Yates is a writer, editor, and educator.  Among his books are Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: an Economist=s Travelogue (Monthly Review Press, 2007), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2002), Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, 1998), Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs (Monthly Review Press, 1994), and Power on the Job (South End Press, 1994). He has also published more than 150 articles and reviews in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers.  His works have been translated into seventeen languages. He is currently Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press.   He taught economics and labor relations at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown from 1969 until his retirement in 2001.  He won the Chancellor=s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984.  He taught courses for workers from 1980 until 2008, at a number of colleges, including Penn State, the University of Indiana, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Yates also worked in the Research Office of the United Farm Workers Union and served as a labor arbitrator with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mediation.  Yates grew up in Ford City, Pennsylvania.  He is married to Karen Korenoski of Dunlo, Pennsylvania.  They have four adult children.

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At the Border Between Politics and Thrills: NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/movies/15denn.html

 

March 15, 2009

Film

At the Border Between Politics and Thrills

By DENNIS LIM

THE current crop of American films dealing with immigration is as varied as the immigrant experience itself: an ensemble melodrama about illegal aliens in Los Angeles (the recent "Crossing Over"), a quiet story of a Dominican baseball player in the minor leagues in Iowa (next month's "Sugar"). But there are a pair that could be considered movies without borders. Both are Spanish-language features shot in Mexico by first-time American directors, and both are ambitious hybrids: socially conscious films in the form of brash genre entertainments.

Cary Fukunaga's "Sin Nombre," which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and opens on Friday, combines elements of a chase movie, a gangster flick and a tragic western with the specific plight of Central American immigrants making their way across the Mexican countryside toward the United States border. Alex Rivera's "Sleep Dealer" (April 17), which was shown at Sundance last year, is a science fiction parable set in a near-future Mexico, where concepts of migration and labor mobility are reinvented by cutting-edge technology.

Mr. Fukunaga's film was indirectly inspired by the nation's deadliest human trafficking case, which left 19 immigrants dead after they were abandoned in a sealed trailer in South Texas in 2003. He was a graduate film student at New York University at the time. Driven to visualize the horror of the incident — to "imagine what it was like in that trailer," he said — he made a 13-minute film, "Victoria Para Chino," which won a prize at Sundance and a Student Academy Award.

In researching his short Mr. Fukunaga, a California native of Japanese and Swedish descent, acquired a more expansive picture of migrant flows to the United States. "The way I'd viewed immigration was strictly from the U.S.-Mexican border, and I'd never considered what it could be like from farther away," he said. He learned of Central Americans who made the perilous trip north across multiple borders, riding freight trains through Mexico, and realized that this arduous journey could be a compelling backbone for a feature film.

He traveled repeatedly to Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. His first trip was to Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, which shares a border with Guatemala. With the help of a friend's father, a journalist in Mexico, he contacted border police officers and social workers, who in turn put him in touch with gang members, both in prison and on the streets, who had a hand in immigrant smuggling. He visited the train yards where immigrants would gather, waiting to hop the freights at night, and the shelters that housed those who were injured on the journey.

And from almost everyone he talked to, he said, he heard "horrific stories" of exploitation, corruption and brutality. "There's a lot of violence without consequence," he said. "People can just do things, and no one will ever hear about it."

Not content with his interviews Mr. Fukunaga decided to ride the trains himself, partly to help allay his queasiness about potential exploitation. "I was making a film about people's misery," he said. "I didn't want to talk about things I didn't know firsthand."

Disregarding the warnings of the friends who had accompanied him, he boarded a northbound train packed with immigrants in the Mexican town of Tapachula. A few hours into the journey gunshots rang out in the next car, along with shouts of "bandilla" (bandit). The next morning he discovered that a young Guatemalan had been shot for refusing to turn over his money.

He rode all the way to the Oaxacan border, and on return visits to Mexico made two more trips, each time picking up where he had left off. When he told his traveling companions he was preparing to make a movie, he said, "they thought I was crazy." But a camaraderie would develop nonetheless: "There was a real sense of protecting each other."

Mr. Fukunaga takes pride that "Sin Nombre," which won the directing and cinematography prizes at Sundance, is rooted in thoroughly researched particulars, many of which will be evident only to Spanish-speaking viewers. He was careful to get regional accents right and to use the specific argot of the gang members, whom he grilled about their familial dynamics, a line of questioning that he said annoyed some of them: "The guys were like, 'Enough of this "Who buys the toilet paper?" I want to tell you how we chop up bodies.' "

To the extent that "Sin Nombre" has a message, Mr. Fukunaga said, he hopes it is an "anti-isolationist" one. "Americans think we're so far away from the world," he said. "But this is a North American story. It's not so exotic. And it obviously has an impact here every day. Look right there" — he pointed to the open kitchen of the Manhattan restaurant where the interview was being conducted, staffed mainly by Latino workers — "that's where it's happening."

With "Sleep Dealer" Mr. Rivera also wanted to reflect the daily realities of a shrinking world, but he chose to do so by way of what he called "third world cyberpunk." While he has long been a sci-fi fan, he saw what he called "a black hole, a vacuum" in the genre's typical locations and perspectives.

"Science fiction in the past has always looked at Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo," he said in a recent telephone interview. "We've never seen São Paulo, or Jakarta, or Mexico City. We've never seen the future of the rest of the world, which happens to be where the majority of humanity lives."

"Sleep Dealer," which won the screenwriting award at Sundance last year (the script is by Mr. Rivera and David Riker) as well as the festival's Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film dealing with science or technology, envisions a future in which would-be immigrants remain south of the border and use network-connected robots to beam in their services.

"Their labor comes without their body," Mr. Rivera said. "The idea struck me as a reflection on outsourcing, a reflection on the position that immigrants have in this country today, where they're made invisible from the political system."

Mr. Rivera, who studied political theory at Hampshire College, has been active in immigrant rights groups over the years. His father came to the United States from Peru, and many members of his extended family are immigrants.

"Sleep Dealer" is his first feature, but he has been making experimental shorts and documentaries since the 1990s. His previous film, a 2003 documentary for PBS called "The Sixth Section," was about a community of migrants in upstate New York rebuilding their village in Puebla, Mexico, from afar — a real-life microcosm of the world of "Sleep Dealer," in which people are, as Mr. Rivera put it, "connected by technology but divided by borders."

"Sleep Dealer" taps into the cultural and economic fears that have come with a globalized planet. "If you look at 'Blade Runner' or 'I, Robot,' the drama comes from the idea that the robots will wake up and want to kill the people," Mr. Rivera said. "In my film people use machines to exploit each other. The robot doesn't want to kill you. The robot wants to take your job."

Like Mr. Fukunaga, Mr. Rivera was looking less to advance a political message than to foster a general open-mindedness. For all its newfangled trappings "Sleep Dealer" reasserts a narrative as old as this country.

"I believe the American story is that this is a nation of immigrants," Mr. Rivera said. "That's more powerful than the story that people who come here are threats."

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COMMENTARY:Navarrette: What America is becoming + Comment

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/03/12/0312navarrette_edit.html

COMMENTARY:Navarrette: What America is becoming
Ruben Navarrette Jr., THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

Email: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com
Thursday, March 12, 2009

Laura Gomez has a funny, and yet terribly perceptive, term to describe the sort of racial holding pattern in which America's largest minority finds itself.

"Latinos have been in this limbo between white and nonwhite — or what I call 'off-white' — for more than 165 years," Gomez told me. Off-white works for me.

Gomez, a professor of law and American studies at the University of New Mexico, might be onto something here. Latinos are neither black nor white, and yet there are black Latinos and white Latinos. There is no Latino race, yet what many Latinos were subjected to in the 20th century — including being barred from hotels, restaurants, and public swimming pools — and continue to be subjected to today in subtler forms would have to be called racism. Still, in America's great racial debate, Latinos have been consigned to the sidelines.

There is a lot that Gomez, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford, could teach Attorney General Eric Holder. The attorney general isn't a sociologist, but he played one during Black History Month. Spelling out how far we still have to go to achieve racial nirvana, Holder called the United States "a nation of cowards" who are reluctant to talk about race.

President Barack Obama recently critiqued the nation's top law enforcement officer for his choice of words.

"I think it's fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language," Obama told a reporter. "I think the point that he was making is that we're oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there's some sort of racial flare-up or conflict."

As an Obama supporter, Gomez didn't have a problem with the main thrust of Holder's comments. What bothered her was that his narrative was so incomplete as to be irrelevant.

"Holder's speech is very much in black-and-white terms," she said. "Almost everywhere he mentions specifics, he's talking about blacks and whites."

Like when Holder said: "The study of black history is important to everyone — black or white," or when he rattled off a list of African American civil rights figures as "people to whom all of us, black and white, owe such a debt of gratitude."

It wasn't exactly the inclusive and multiracial tone that Obama struck in his poetic speech on race in Philadelphia during the presidential campaign.

Gomez understands the context of Holder's remarks.

"Granted, this (was) Black History Month," she said, "and there's an important reason to talk in those terms ... but I think it does raise a question: Where are Latinos in this?"

For Gomez, it's a familiar story.

"We're presumed invisible from the racial past of the United States," she said.

Gomez mined that past in her book, "Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race," which traces the origins of Mexican-Americans as a racial group in this country.

Today, stuck somewhere in between whites and nonwhites, Latinos are often ignored — in entertainment, politics, media, business, etc. Television networks will do a series on race or ethnicity in America, and still sketch out the storyboard in black and white. When Latinos are noticed, they're usually a footnote, an afterthought, or an accessory — as when a well-meaning politician is talking about race relations, equal opportunity or civil rights, and mentions "blacks and whites ... and browns."

Another concern for Gomez is that, even when other Americans do see Latinos, a lot of people aren't always sure what they're seeing. Consider the immigration debate.

"There's this almost hyper-visibility of Latinos," she said. "But it's a narrow and often wrong kind of hyper-visibility because it is the 'illegal alien.' Every Latino is presumed to be an immigrant and secondly to be an undocumented Mexican."

Ah yes. There is nothing like people whose ancestors have been here for six generations being told to "go back to Mexico" by those whose ancestors are relative newcomers.

Granted, it's not easy to turn a blind eye to an ethnic group that, according to Census estimates, could represent one in four Americans by the year 2030. But some people — like our attorney general — manage to pull it off.

And in doing so, they describe America as it used to be, not what it is, let alone what it is becoming.

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Comment: It is hard to hide a 500-pound brown gorilla in the room of racial politics inside the United States. Latinos/as are the huge racial group that is usually invisible and kept invisible by the corporate controlled media still control-freaked by many people with a subconscious racist mentality. Americans can see the major impact that Black African-Americans have had on the whole country, especially since President Obama's election into the Presidency. Some racists may think, "Oh oh... here comes the Mexicans now!"

Historians should note that as a rule Mexicans and Mexican-Americans (Chicanos, Latinos etc.) have not conducted major 'race riots', but there have been bloody attempts at all out revolution! Amerikans tend to have a black-white mind-set that is not inclusive of Latinos and let us not forget the original indigenous peoples of these lands who did suffer from true genocide!!!!!

Surely Latinos need to get politically organized towards the creation of a strong Latino Liberation Movement that is connected up in working alliances with others groups who seek democracy, justice and liberation from oppression. Mexicans are smart and do not even want the racial stigma that black-skinned African-Americans have been subjected to over the centuries. We need to be all inclusive, multi-racial and comprehend the multi-dimensional objective facts of connected reality.

Latinos are a complex multi-faceted people who are not a singular group of people but are a colorful collage of different kinds of people with diverse specific historical-cultural  backgrounds. We cannot be put into one bag for easy analysis.

The term 'La Raza Cosmica' comes close to a general label but there will always be a vaqueness in any label for those who we can loosely label as Latinos. How many pure blood Native Americans are there? We should know that many Mexicans are actually Mestizos of indigenous origins.

The fact remains that we are human beings with basic human survival needs that need to be met in terms of food, clothing, shelter, medical care and basic education (including widespread literacy programs). We struggle daily to meet our basic survival needs in these troubled economic times.

We should unite together on the basis of our basic humaneness as human beings and not let racial-ethnic labels keep us divided from the masses of the people in Latin America, Africa and Asia!
 

Education for Liberation! Join Up!
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