We celebrate today the liberation of Mexico from the Austrian Empire, a glorious victory of anticolonialism which continues to inspire a nation today. Where then are the Mexicans in American History?
How did Texas become a quasi white ethnostate whose wealth and power are created by the de facto slave labor of Mexican workers, workers who must remain illegal and hence exploitable and invisible in service to white elites resulting in our humanitarian crisis at the border. For if all the huddled masses yearning to be free were welcomed as fellow citizens and builders of the nation, not just the white ones, we would have to pay them a fair and equal wage and the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites would crumble into nothingness.
This is the real reason for the demonization of migrants by the Republican Party; they must have a vast pool of nearly free labor with almost no rules about what can be done to workers, and so wage a class war to enforce their capture of our society.
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
And these imposed conditions of struggle emerge from the history of slavery and the role of Texas as a Confederate bastion, as migrant labor replaces slave labor.
The historical legacy of slavery links racism against Black Americans and Mexican-Americans emanating from Texas, the heart of darkness.
Founded by theft from Mexico and the lawless banditry of slave owners who refused to emancipate their slaves, Texas remained a rogue state in fact long after joining the United States, a persistent delusion of its mad quasi-emperor Sam Houston and the displaced Confederates who recolonized and tried to use it as a base from which to seize Mexico after the Civil War.
Texas was not always a den of racism and violence; founded in 1579 as a colony of exiled Jews by Spain, the grandees who settled and ruled it dreamed of a new Sepharad wherein peoples of all races and faiths may live under the same law, arguably a nearer model of freedom and equality than ancient Greece and Rome for the new nations of Protestant Europe and a historical influence on American democracy.
This first ideal of Texas as an inclusive and egalitarian society ended in 1595 when Louis de Carvajal, the founder and Governor of the Kingdom of New Leon- current Mexico and Texas- was arrested as a practicing Jew and died in prison; his sister Francesca and her four children Isabel, Catalina, Leonor, and Luis were tortured and burned at the stake as Jews by the Inquisition in 1596, her last child Mariana joining them at the stake in 1601. Of de Carvajal’s legacy, only the city he founded, Monterrey, remains.
Whether this idea of Texas as a multiracial and multifaith refuge was realized before being infiltrated and seized by the tyrannies of the Spanish Empire and its Inquisition is beside the point; there is an alternate story and Golden Age to reclaim, the dream of Texas as a glorious Andalus.
Let us make a better future than we have the past, and redeem the hope of our ideals.
As I wrote in my post of March 16 2020, Walls of Hate, Tyranny, and Empire: America’s Global Borders; As we are inundated with the global awakening to fear of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes clear that this is a natural triggering stressor which parallels a manufactured one, that of borders and refugee crises, in its behaviors and effects in our social and political environment as leverage for nationalist and fascist tyrannies of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of our world into a vast prison.
Overwhelming and generalized fear is a necessary precondition of authoritarian regimes, and of violence and the use of social force generally, which together with submission to authority may be regarded as a First Cause of the disease of power in the sense that Thomas Aquinas argued causality and being, though in the absolute sense which he used all causes are recursive and enfold each other; ”If there is no First Cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.”
Authority and fear also alienate us from ourselves, dehumanize and commodify us as does capitalism as its outer form; for this is about the theft of our identity and power by those who would enslave us.
The first consequence of the emergence of authority and the disempowerment of its subjects is the modern pathology of disconnectedness; and this is the link which binds authority and tyranny together, and its weak point. Here is where resistance and revolution must act to shatter the knot of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systems which rob us of our humanity and our freedom.
We must build bridges not walls, togetherness not isolation, unity not division, and forge a borderless world and a free society of equals.
Todd Miller describes America’s empire of borders in a Jacobin interview; “Since coming into office, the Trump administration has launched unrelenting racist attacks on immigrants and refugees. He seems determined to build his wall by any means necessary and has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to conduct raids, arrest people, throw them in concentration camps, and deport them.”
“ But, contrary to widespread liberal illusions, Trump did not start this war on migrants, but only intensified it.
In fact, as Todd Miller demonstrates in his new book, Empire of Borders, politicians in both major parties have collaborated over the last few decades to construct a massive border regime that polices migrants not only in the United States but throughout the world. In this interview with Jacobin contributor Ashley Smith, Miller discusses the origins and features of this new imperial strategy — and the international resistance against it.
AS
One of the points you make throughout your book is that this border regime did not begin with Trump but has been a feature of the United States from its founding. How has the US state internationalized its border regime over the last few decades, and how does it operate today?
TM
The US state established its borders through colonization, dispossession, genocide, slavery, and exploitation. This is especially true of its border with Mexico in the nineteenth century.
That violent process of conquest is too often legitimized by mainstream historians when they use innocuous-sounding phrases like “westward expansion,” dress up imperial bullying like the Gadsden Purchase as “agreements,” and craft self-congratulatory accounts of the Mexican-American War.
But there is no way to make the white supremacy of “manifest destiny” palatable. The United States seized land, planted its flag, and killed anyone that resisted, especially indigenous peoples, all in the name of God and European civilization.
It expanded its border regime through its imperial seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War. By the early twentieth century, the United States had established its territorial border, set up semicolonies, and policed seemingly independent states in its hemisphere with “gunboat diplomacy.”
Even knowing this history, it took me a while to understand that the US border extended well beyond its mainland. I think the first time I grasped this was while covering the migration out of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010. I quickly realized that this was not a migration story but a border story.
Shortly after the earthquake, as hundreds of thousands of people were still in the rubble of their homes, a US jumbo jet flew overhead blasting out an announcement from the Haitian ambassador. He warned in Creole, “If you think you will reach the United States and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right in the water and send you back home where you came from.”
Soon after, sixteen Coast Guard cutters came right up to the Haitian shore to stop the flight of any refugees. Then Washington contracted the private prison company GEO Group for “guard services” (presumably in a tent city in Guantánamo Bay) to in effect jail the victims.
At once I saw that the US border was: 1) geographically removed from where I normally had thought it was; 2) elastic and able to extend at will very far from the US mainland; and 3) not passive, but aggressive. In a nutshell, the border was much bigger — much, much bigger — than I ever thought it was.
For example, in 2012, when I was on an investigative trip to Puerto Rico, I learned that the tiny Mona Island — a mere thirty miles from the Dominican shore — was also literally part of the US border.
So when a sinking boat carrying Haitians to another destination crashed onto the shores of that small island, they were absorbed by the US border: detained, arrested, incarcerated, and eventually deported by the US Department of Homeland Security back to Haiti.
This is just one instance. Another is the Dominican Border Patrol, which the United States trained and equipped after its creation in 2007. And a third is Guatemala’s new Chorti border patrol, which the US Embassy, one commander told me, helped create to police its Honduran borderlands.
This wasn’t limited just to the Western Hemisphere. On other trips I found out that US funds created a Kenyan border patrol and a massive surveillance system on the Jordanian-Syrian border. And this is just scratching the surface.
To understand this, I think it’s important to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report’s paradigm-changing statement: “The American Homeland is the planet.” Since 2003, CBP has created twenty-three embassy attaches from Nairobi to Tokyo to Berlin to Brasilia and is at work in nearly one hundred countries through various border programs — creating, essentially, an empire of borders.
While the United States has always had such international border operations, it dramatically expanded them after 9/11. When I asked one CBP official at its Washington headquarters to describe with one word how much they’ve grown since then, he answered: “exponentially.”
AS
So that’s how the United States controls the global flow of people. How do its policies cause migration to begin with?
TM
Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies bear an enormous responsibility for creating the conditions that drive people from their countries. The United States has long been history’s top emitter of greenhouse gases (since 1900 it has emitted nearly seven hundred times more than Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador combined), driving up temperatures, causing desertification, raising sea levels, exacerbating preexisting situations (often of intense poverty, especially in rural areas), effectively making it a force behind displacement.
While borders have been hardened to deter, arrest, incarcerate, expel, and ultimately sort and classify the world’s most vulnerable people, destructive forces that cause migration can go where they please. One example of this is the “open border” policy in place for the US military.
With its forces deployed in over eight hundred bases around the world, Washington has conducted countless military interventions and coups, leading people to flee to other countries for safety. For example, in 1954 the United States intervened in Guatemala to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, resulting in a thirty-six-year armed conflict and brutal military repression.
Another example is Washington-driven neoliberal economics. It has forced indebted countries to privatize state-owned companies, slash their welfare states, and open up their economies to US multinationals. While that made money for local and international capitalists, it wrecked the lives of small farmers and workers, many of whom left their countries for the United States and other advanced capitalist countries to find work as criminalized cheap labor.
And if countries didn’t agree to neoliberalism, the United States often forced it upon them at gunpoint. If you look in Central America, Mexico, all around the world, this convergence of military and neoliberal policies has both done considerable damage and caused massive displacement of people.
As the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote so presciently and unselfconsciously in 1999, for the “hidden hand of the market” to work you need the “hidden fist” of the military to back it up and enforce it. And part of that hidden fist is the border regime that polices the migrants and refugees at its borders.
AS
This border regime, as you argue in your book, has generated a booming new industry in border security. What does this look like, and how does it intensify the attack on migrants in the United States and throughout the world?
TM
The US empire of borders has spawned a whole new dimension of carceral capitalism. It’s raking in enormous profits off the proliferation of walls, surveillance technology, checkpoints, and detention facilities.
When I was traveling in Israel and Palestine in 2017 with an international group, a man from South Africa told me that what we were seeing was worse than apartheid era in his country. He made the point that in South Africa, while it was bad from 1948 to the early 1990s, there weren’t all the checkpoints, walls, armed agents and soldiers, and technologies that we were seeing in the occupied territories.
During that trip we went to one of the biggest weapons and technology conferences in Israel. In the Tel Aviv convention center, Israeli companies pitched “proven” technologies, which they boasted had been tested on Palestinians under occupation, to governments from all over the world to police their own borders and oppressed populations.
At another homeland security expo in Tel Aviv I saw the demonstration of the Orbiter III, which they called the “suicide drone.” The weapons dealer said that it could conduct surveillance on a target, and then, if they so decided, dive-bomb it and utterly destroy it.
Even though Israel is the “homeland security/surveillance capital” of the world, as scholar Neve Gordon put it, the industry has metastasized throughout the world. I have been to similar border regime bazaars in San Antonio, in Paris, and in Mexico City.
This whole industry has boomed as states across the globe have built more than seventy border walls (up from fifteen in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall), spent billions on surveillance technologies, and hired hundreds of thousands of armed agents to guard the jagged frontier of the Global North and Global South. Corporations are profiting off border policing, adding crass capitalist interest to crude state repression.
AS
What are the domestic impacts of the border regime in the United States? How has it created a new caste division in the working class, deepened racial divisions, and built a state more prepared to repress its population?
TM
Border regimes, by their very nature, are systems of exclusion. They are enforced not only by guards but bureaucracies that oversee elaborate rules intended to make noncitizens work hard for their papers as if they were gaining membership to an exclusive club.
In this sense, the border is much more than the international boundary line. In the United States, the border zone, or jurisdiction, extends a hundred miles inland along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, 4,000-mile Canadian border, and both coasts. That’s a good swath of country where Homeland Security forces operates in what the American Civil Liberties Union has called a “constitution-free zone.”
Over 200 million people, approximately two-thirds of the US population, live in this zone, where the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints, do roving patrols, work with local and state police, and racially profile and target people for arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the last twenty-five years,
the number of agents has ballooned from 4,000 to 21,000, and annual budgets have gone up from $1.5 billion in 1994 to $23 billion in 2018. Detention centers now exceed 250 and can be found throughout the country.
This massive apparatus is only growing larger and becoming more invasive. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has been testing new small- and medium-sized drones with the ability to “fly unnoticed by human hearing and sight” along a “predetermined route observing and reporting unusual activity and identifying faces and vehicles involved in that activity comparing them to profile pictures and license plate data.”
All of this amounts to a gargantuan, and profitable, exclusion apparatus, effectively creating a modern caste system that extends throughout the country and indeed the globe.
AS
Amid the struggle to close down Trump’s concentration camps, activists are again debating what we should demand. Why should we call for an end to the border regime and open borders?
TM
I was just listening to a podcast featuring Vox founder Ezra Klein, who said that he would be open to an argument for open borders if it were shown that it would not destabilize the country. Of course, Klein isn’t the only one with that view, it’s a mainstream one in many ways.
However, what I think is the exact opposite. Hardened borders exist and are proliferating to police a world precisely because the global situation is already precarious and unstable. As I mentioned before, Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies (and to take it further, those of border-building Western regimes such as the European Union and Australia) have wrecked whole sections of the world.
When the United States responds to these people by militarizing the border, it only exacerbates the instability. It doesn’t solve the causes of migration but locks them in place; creates chaos at the border, especially for migrants; stimulates corporate investment in the border regime; compromises our civil rights and liberties; and encourages demagogues like Trump to whip up xenophobia and racism.
I think of the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar who, after removing a piece of the US-Mexico border wall near San Diego, said “I will not accept that this wall is in my face.” The whole purpose of Jarrar’s art is not only to dismantle a border apparatus, but also to transform into something more utilitarian.
For example, he pounded a sledgehammer into the concrete wall that separated west from east Jerusalem, took out chunks of cement, and turned them into sculptures of soccer balls and cleats to give back to the kids whose soccer fields the wall had taken away. I often think of Jarrar’s question: why do we accept that these borders are in our face?
It is akin to accepting a global caste system, a system of segregation long rejected by civil rights movements and internationally condemned by anti-apartheid movements. The one silver lining in the age of Trump is that his racist attacks on refugees and migrants has produced a new movement to challenge and dismantle the global border regime.’
In the words of Lenin which founded a political party and a Revolution; “What is to be done?”
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2023, International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”;
We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the archetype and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
A few days ago Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and identity politics.
The other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Gaza and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
Living Undocumented series trailer/Netflix
From Executive Producer Selena Gomez
Empire of Borders: How the US is Exporting its Border Around the World, by Todd Miller
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/todd-miller-empire-of-borders-immigration-trump
America as a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Jay’s Revised Modern Canon
Modern American Literature 2024 Edition
Hispanic-American History
Century of the Wind, Eduardo Galeano
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Latin Moon in Manhattan, Our Lives Are the Rivers: A Novel,
Cervantes Street, Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me, Jaime Manrique
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena ViramontesT
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Spanish
5 de mayo de 2024 Cinco de Mayo: sobre esta celebración de la liberación anticolonial, cuestionando la eliminación de los mexicanos de la historia estadounidense y amplificando la solidaridad histórica de los pueblos negros y mexicanos en la historia reescrita de Texas
Celebramos hoy la liberación de México del Imperio Austriaco, una gloriosa victoria del anticolonialismo que continúa inspirando a una nación hoy. ¿Dónde están entonces los mexicanos en la historia estadounidense?
¿Cómo se convirtió Texas en un etnoestado cuasi blanco cuya riqueza y poder son creados por el trabajo esclavo de facto de los trabajadores mexicanos, trabajadores que deben seguir siendo ilegales y, por lo tanto, explotables e invisibles al servicio de las élites blancas, lo que resultó en nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera? Porque si todas las masas apiñadas que anhelan ser libres fueran bienvenidas como conciudadanos y constructores de la nación, no sólo las blancas, tendríamos que pagarles un salario justo e igualitario y la riqueza, el poder y los privilegios de las elites hegemónicas se verían afectados. desmoronarse en la nada.
Ésta es la verdadera razón de la demonización de los inmigrantes por parte del Partido Republicano; deben tener una vasta reserva de mano de obra casi libre y casi sin reglas sobre lo que se les puede hacer a los trabajadores, y así librar una guerra de clases para imponer su captura de nuestra sociedad.
¿Para qué tenemos una frontera? Hemos trazado una línea en la arena para explotar la disparidad y crear mano de obra migrante ilegal; un recurso invisible de aquellos sin existencia legal a quienes podemos hacer cualquier cosa sin represalias, y cuya mano de obra barata alimenta vastas industrias de agricultura, hotelería, cuidado y manufactura.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo.
Y estas condiciones de lucha impuestas surgen de la historia de la esclavitud y del papel de Texas como bastión confederado, a medida que la mano de obra migrante reemplaza al trabajo esclavo.
El legado histórico de la esclavitud vincula el racismo contra los afroamericanos y los mexicano-estadounidenses que emana de Texas, el corazón de las tinieblas.
Fundado por el robo a México y el bandidaje ilegal de los dueños de esclavos que se negaron a emancipar a sus esclavos, Texas siguió siendo un estado rebelde mucho después de unirse a los Estados Unidos, una ilusión persistente de su loco cuasi-emperador Sam Houston y los confederados desplazados que recolonizaron y trató de utilizarlo como base desde la cual apoderarse de México después de la Guerra Civil.
Texas no siempre fue una guarida de racismo y violencia; Fundada en 1579 como una colonia de judíos exiliados por España, los grandes que la establecieron y gobernaron soñaron con una nueva Sefarad en la que pueblos de todas las razas y religiones pudieran vivir bajo la misma ley, posiblemente un modelo de libertad e igualdad más cercano que la antigua Grecia y Roma para las nuevas naciones de la Europa protestante y una influencia histórica en la democracia estadounidense.
Este primer ideal de Texas como sociedad inclusiva e igualitaria terminó en 1595 cuando Luis de Carvajal, fundador y Gobernador del Reino de Nuevo León -actuales México y Texas- fue arrestado como judío practicante y murió en prisión; su hermana Francesca y sus cuatro hijos Isabel, Catalina, Leonor y Luis fueron torturados y quemados en la hoguera como judíos por la Inquisición en 1596; su última hija, Mariana, se unió a ellos en la hoguera en 1601. Del legado de De Carvajal, sólo la ciudad fundó, Monterrey, permanece.
No viene al caso si esta idea de Texas como un refugio multirracial y multirreligioso se hizo realidad antes de ser infiltrada y tomada por las tiranías del Imperio español y su Inquisición; hay una historia alternativa y una Edad de Oro que recuperar, el sueño de Texas como un Andalus glorioso.
Hagamos un futuro mejor que el pasado y redimamos la esperanza de nuestros ideales.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 16 de marzo de 2020, Muros de odio, tiranía e imperio: las fronteras globales de Estados Unidos; A medida que nos vemos inundados por el despertar global al miedo a la pandemia de coronavirus, queda claro que se trata de un factor estresante desencadenante natural que es paralelo a uno fabricado, el de las fronteras y las crisis de refugiados, en sus comportamientos y efectos en nuestro entorno social y político. palanca para las tiranías nacionalistas y fascistas de fuerza y control en la subversión de la democracia y la transformación de nuestro mundo en una gran prisión.
El miedo abrumador y generalizado es una precondición necesaria de los regímenes autoritarios, y de la violencia y el uso de la fuerza social en general, que junto con la sumisión a la autoridad puede considerarse como una primera causa de la enfermedad del poder en el sentido en que Tomás de Aquino argumentó la causalidad y siendo, aunque en el sentido absoluto en que él usó, todas las causas son recursivas y se envuelven unas a otras; “Si no existe la Causa Primera, entonces el universo es como una gran cadena con muchos eslabones; cada eslabón está sostenido por el eslabón que está encima de él, pero toda la cadena no está sostenida por nada”.
La autoridad y el miedo también nos alienan de nosotros mismos, nos deshumanizan y mercantilizan, al igual que el capitalismo como su forma exterior; porque se trata del robo de nuestra identidad y poder por parte de aquellos que nos esclavizarían.
La primera consecuencia de El surgimiento de la autoridad y la pérdida de poder de sus súbditos es la patología moderna de la desconexión; y éste es el vínculo que une la autoridad y la tiranía, y su punto débil. Aquí es donde la resistencia y la revolución deben actuar para romper el nudo de sistemas interdependientes y que se refuerzan mutuamente y que nos roban nuestra humanidad y nuestra libertad.
Debemos construir puentes, no muros, unión y no aislamiento, unidad y no división, y forjar un mundo sin fronteras y una sociedad libre de iguales.
En palabras de Lenin que fundó un partido político y una Revolución; “¿Lo que se debe hacer?”
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de diciembre de 2023, Día Internacional del Migrante: “No hay crisis migratoria; Hay una crisis de solidaridad”;
Celebramos hoy la voluntad humana de llegar a ser, de explorar, de descubrir nuevos mundos y de crear nuevas posibilidades de llegar a ser humanos, en la figura icónica del migrante como epítome y fuerza impulsora de la civilización.
A menudo, el migrante también representa el arquetipo y la alegoría del Extraño, con todas las ambigüedades, peligros y oportunidades para la reimaginación y transformación del ser humano, el significado y el valor implícitos en los temas de este psicodrama universal primario.
Hace unos días, Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, citó el libro que mantuvo en su mesita de noche durante años en lugar de una Biblia, Mein Kampf, ante multitudes que lo vitoreaban durante un mitin electoral en referencia a los migrantes; “Están envenenando nuestra sangre”.
No importa dónde se empiece con las ideas de la alteridad como una amenaza a la identidad, el origen de todo fascismo, siempre se termina a las puertas de Auschwitz.
Demos al fascismo la única respuesta que merece; ¡Nunca más!
La ola de fascismo que recorre el mundo estos últimos años se origina en un miedo primario a la alteridad como pérdida del yo; esto es utilizado como arma al servicio del poder por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, se convierte en divisiones y jerarquías de pertenencia a élites y alteridad excluyente, racismo, patriarcado, nacionalismo, y todo esto se cohesiona en identidades autorizadas y políticas de identidad.
El otro es siempre nuestro propio reflejo y no podemos escapar el uno del otro. Por eso el fascismo y la tiranía son inherentemente inestables y siempre colapsan en la depravación y la ruina; cuando proyectamos lo que no nos gusta de nosotros mismos sobre los demás, como objetos de los que abusar, como si exorcizaramos nuestros demonios, nos deshumanizamos a nosotros mismos y a ellos. Y esa negación fracasa como estrategia de transformación y adaptación al cambio, engrandeciendo instituciones y sistemas osificados hasta convertirlos en amenazas en lugar de soluciones, y todo el edificio se derrumba debido a las fallas mecánicas de sus contradicciones, como está sucediendo ahora en Estados Unidos y en toda la civilización humana.
Por eso la aceptación de nuestra propia oscuridad y monstruosidad es crucial para la lucha por la liberación; ¿De qué otra manera podemos lograr cambios en los sistemas de opresión si no podemos enfrentarlos en nosotros mismos? Especialmente debemos mantenernos cerca e interrogar sentimientos como el disgusto, la repulsión, la ira y otros atavismos del instinto que arrastramos detrás de nosotros como una cola invisible de reptil con el reconocimiento de que nada de lo que sentimos es bueno o malo, sino sólo cómo los usamos en nuestras acciones.
Al final, lo único que importa es qué hacemos con nuestro miedo y cómo usamos nuestro poder.
Contra este Anillo Wagneriano de miedo, poder y fuerza debemos lanzar un contrafuego de solidaridad y amor, porque sólo esto puede hacernos libres. Debemos hablar directamente de ese miedo a la alteridad como pérdida de identidad y de poder si queremos cambiar el rumbo de la historia hacia una sociedad libre de iguales y no tiranías fascistas de sangre, fe y suelo, hacia la democracia y una sociedad diversa e inclusiva. Humanidad unida y no estados carcelarios de fuerza y control, hacia el amor y no el odio.
Somos más fuertes juntos que solos, como demostró Benjamín Franklin con su haz de flechas en referencia a Eclesiastés 4:12 y el Gran Pacificador iroqués llamó en algunos contextos Deganawidah. Una sociedad diversa e inclusiva nos hace más poderosos aunque de diferentes maneras, más ricos, más resilientes y adaptables, ofrece alegrías desconocidas y abre nuevas perspectivas y posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos.
El cambio no tiene por qué significar miedo y pérdida; porque también ofrece nuevas maravillas ilimitadas. Debemos ser agentes de cambio y portadores del Caos, si queremos convertirnos en un punto de apoyo y cambiar el equilibrio de poder en el mundo.
La idea de los derechos humanos ha sido abandonada por sus antiguas naciones garantes, y pueblos enteros en Gaza y Ucrania han sido borrados en guerras de limpieza étnica como muestras de atrocidades y crímenes contra la humanidad, y debido a este y muchos otros fallos de los sistemas, la civilización está colapsando; cosas efímeras e ilusorias como la riqueza y el poder no tienen sentido a la sombra de nuestra degradación y el terror de nuestra nada frente a la muerte.
El comentario de un lector en mi publicación del 8 de diciembre, La caída de Estados Unidos como garante de la democracia y los derechos humanos, contenía la frase “más esperanzados en el bien de la mayoría de las personas”.
Aquí sigue mi respuesta; Yo también creí alguna vez en cosas como la bondad humana, pero después de cuarenta años de guerras, revoluciones, resistencia y lucha de liberación en todo el mundo, no puedo. En lo que confío y espero, si no en lo que creo, es en la solidaridad de acción en la lucha contra los sistemas de opresión y las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites. Así es mi fe; la igualdad de las necesidades humanas y la necesidad de nuestra unidad en las tomas de poder para crear un Libertad sociedad de iguales.
Según lo escrito por Jean Genet, quien me hizo prestar el juramento de la Resistencia y me encaminó en el camino de mi vida durante el asedio de Beirut en 1982; “Si nos comportamos como los del otro lado, entonces somos el otro lado. En lugar de cambiar el mundo, lo único que lograremos será un reflejo del que queremos destruir”.
¿Cómo acogeremos al extranjero?
Estados Unidos como un faro de esperanza para el mundo, según lo escrito por Emma Lazarus;
“No como el gigante descarado de la fama griega,
Con miembros conquistadores a horcajadas de tierra en tierra;
Aquí, en nuestras puertas del atardecer bañadas por el mar, se alzarán
Una mujer poderosa con una antorcha, cuya llama
Es el relámpago aprisionado, y su nombre
Madre de los Exiliados. De su mano-faro
Resplandece la bienvenida mundial; sus ojos dulces mandan
El puerto con puente aéreo que enmarcan las ciudades gemelas.
“¡Conserven, tierras antiguas, su pompa histórica!” ella llora
Con labios silenciosos. “Dame tus cansados, tus pobres,
Tus masas apiñadas anhelan respirar libres,
Los miserables desechos de tu repleta costa.
Envíame a estos, los desamparados, tempestuosos,
¡Levanto mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada!”
Torch of Liberty 
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