Recent translation work

A friend of mine did some architecture work with the MST (Rural Landless Workers Movement) and asked me to translate their latest action manifesto. This group is known for being the shit - if they were an urban movement I would be working for them.

MANIFESTO REPUDIATING THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE MST PROMOTED BY THE PUBLIC MINISTRY OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL.

AGAINST THE REVOCATION OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS, IN DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY AND IN DEFENSE OF THE MST.

We, Brazilian citizens, members of social and political organizations, want to demonstrate to Brazilian society and the international community our indignation and most vehement repudiation of the measures taken by the Public Ministry and the Military Brigade of Rio Grande do Sul against the MST (Landless Workers Movement).

In September 2007 the Subcomandant General Cel. Paulo Roberto Mendes Rodrigues sent the Public Ministry a report elaborated by the Military Brigade that characterizes the MST and the Via Campesina as movements that have ceased to realize “typical acts for social demands” and have passed to orchestrating “acts typical of criminal organizations” and “paramilitaries.”

Such measures by the Military Brigade cross into the jurisdiction of the Federal and Civil Police, violating the 1988 Constitution. State deputies, governors, members of INCRA and supposed foreigners were secretly investigated.

On December 2, 2007, the Superior Council of the Public Ministry approved a report elaborated by prosecutor Gilberto Thums that designates “[…] a staff of Justice Department prosecutors to pursue public civil action with the aim dissolving the MST and declaring it illegal […]”. As such, the Public Ministry decided “[…] to intervene in the MST’s schools, with the intention of taking all measures necessary to reinstate legality, both in the pedagogical aspect and in the MST’s external structure of influence.”

On March 11, 2008, contradicting the inquiry of the Federal Police that investigated the MST in 2007, the Federal Public Ministry denounced 8 supposed members of the MST for “integrating groups whose objective was to move the State of Law, the present order in Brazil, that would practice crimes of political non-conformity,” crimes captured in the National Security Law of the now defunct dictatorship.

The denunciation refers to the encampments of the MST as a “parallel State” and points to the existence of support from FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia), among foreigners responsible for military training.

In addition to such measures is the intensifying process of police repression of the MST’s political actions. Peaceful marches, protests, and occupations are attacked with extreme violence on the part of the Military Brigade. The images reveal shocking brutality: bombs thrown in the middle of families with children, rubber bullets shot at face level and beatings.

It is against these measures if such authoritarian and dictatorial character that we come to publicly demonstrate our support of the MST.

Democracy cannot be an empty word. To dissolve the MST, make it illegal, prosecute and criminalize its actions and its political militants to “break its spine” signifies- in no uncertain terms- to annul the democratic rights of landless rural workers.

Such criminalization of poverty and social movements represents an attack on democratic liberties and cannot be tolerated in a country that intends to be free. Since re-democratization and the end of the military dictatorship this is the bluntest threat to civil and political rights, with intent to succeed, including against other popular organizations and our people’s fighters.

One of the report’s proposals goes to the extreme: it suggests canceling the voting registration of those landless encamped or settled in a region to avoid their political influence. Suffrage without the right to organize politically is a farce. To annul suffrage is patent dictatorship.

Not one citizen aware of Brazil’s recent history can be silent before so great, evident, and concrete a threat to democracy and Human Rights. This is a shameful offense to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1988 Constitution that reserve the right to association for lawful ends.

The MST is a social movement of popular character that fights for agrarian reform for social justice and popular sovereignty. The Brazilian elites need to learn that social questions should be resolved with POLITICS AND NOT WITH POLICE!

The only way to put an end to the MST is to put an end to the latifúndio (grand agricultural estate), to agro-business, and to millions of landless families by giving them opportunity for work and income in food production. This is the political proposal of agrarian reform guaranteed in the Federal Constitution, whose promise the MST claims thought its occupations and fights throughout Brazil for the last 25 years.

For this we call on all those that fight to stand at with us at the Public Act in Repudiation of the Criminalization of the MST Promoted by the Public Ministry of Rio Grande do Sul in the theater of the Catholic University of São Paulo (TUCA), Rua: Monte Alegre, 1024-Perdizez, at 7:00PM on July 16th, 2008.

DOWN WITH THE AUTHORITARIANISM OF THE MILITARY BRIGADE AND THE PUBLIC MINISTRY OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL!

ALL SUPPORT TO THE WORKERS/LANDLESS, TO THE MST AND TO THE VIA CAMPESINA!

FOR AGRARIAN REFORM! FOR DEMOCRACY! AND FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY!

Real Parque

[note: I am in the process of adding video to this post. My internet connection is making it hard to upload now, so check back later]

Aight, I need to get down to my day-to-day business. This will be the first of a few posts talking about the communities I have been working in lately.

Real Parque is one of a handful of favelas spanning Rio Pinheiros that together form the front line of class conflict over non-peripheral urban space in São Paulo. (Centro, where I live, is the second front line. But there the fight is over occupations of abandoned buildings rather than self-built favela communities). Along with Paraisópolis, Jardim Colombo, and Jardim Panorama, Real Parque sits on the west side of the river next to the rich neighborhoods of Morumbi and the an upscale residential area that shares the name Real Parque.

COMPOSITION

There are, very roughly, around 4,000 residents in Real Parque – 3,000 in favela structures and 1,000 in conjuntos habitacionais (public housing blocks) built to hold residents who were removed to make space for a building supply store - a sort of Home Depot. This is one example of a process called verticalização – stacking favelados into housing blocks to get at the valuable land they occupy. Here are the closest things to before-and-after pictures I could make with google. If you look closely you can see that the favela has grown, though I unfortunately don't know the time lapse on these photos:

CULTURAL LIFE

I got to know Real Parque through Paula, an activist and resident who I met at a housing rights meeting. She caught my attention for complaining about NGO complicitness in the December 2007 evictions on the northwest edge of the community, which I will get into later. She works with a group of residents called Favela Atitude that brings plays and cultural events to Real Parque and Jardim Panorama.

Through her I also received an invite to attend the Pankararú festival this June. The Pankararú are indigenous Brazilians originally from a reservation in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. But as paulistano construction companies started recruiting from the poverty striken area and non-indigenous peasant families grew to occupy the majority of their land, the Pankararú migrated to the favelas of São Paulo starting in the 1940s. Real Parque boasts two Pankararú community centers and one of the most active groups of migrants in the city. Here are highlights of the festival a friend and I recorded:

PHOTO CREDITS: Kristine Stiphany

Until recently, it was prohibited to display these private, religious dances to anyone not in the tribe, and children could not participate. But the Pankararú made them public and began including their children in order to claim more social recognition and rights.

I also have some stuff from two members of Favela Atitude doing a little freestyle rap/sapateado after the show:

EVICTIONS

On December 11, 2007 police were called to enforce an eviction order for land occupied by 80-140 families. A judge granted the order on behalf of the Empresa Metropolitana de Águas e Energia (Metropolitan Water and Energy Company), a mixed public-private company claiming to own the land underneath their homes. It was to be the first phase in regaining a larger portion of the land claimed by EMAE.

Residents were given 4 hours notice that their homes were to be bulldozed. Some scrambled to remove their belongings from their houses, others resisted and were forced out. In what has become one of the principle forms of protest by favelados, groups of residents began to block road traffic on the Marginal – a main artery that connects the high-end business and residential districts in the southwest to roads running toward the city center. To clear the roadway, the Tropa de Choque (Shock Troop) attacked residents – including mothers with children – with teargas and rubber bullets. You can see clips of the eviction in this movie by Favela Atitude, including how the Pankararú pitched in with the protests.

While EMAE was seeking the removal order in court, locals were finding it hard to organize fellow residents as eviction rumors spread, in part because NGOs operating in the community were not backing the call to resist. The president of the largest outside NGO, Projeto Casulo, was dismissed after publicly supporting a call to fight removals. A look at Casulo’s finances hints at who might have been behind the dismissal: its sponsors include BIM and JPMorgan (investment banks), Bradesco (largest private bank in Brazil), the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Unilever (consumer brands multi-national – think Dove soap, Axe body spray), and the Institute of Business Citizenship (a philanthropic consortium made up of Brazilian banks, advertisers, real estate developers, and construction firms whose mission is to support projects promoting “community development” and “business sensibility”). The remaining NGOs that did not have such deep pockets, some run by residents, were silenced with offers of office space in a new community center promised as part of the hazy plans for the bulldozed land.

As NGOs split the community, affluent residents from the non-favela side of Real Parque supported EMAE in court. Their neighborhood association hired a lawyer to draft a friend-of-the-court brief stating that removals were in the best interest of development in Real Parque. Unfortunately there is no clear neighborhood association on the favela side, and attempts to form one in the face of the EMAE threat are only superficially successful so far. Paula informed me that whenever they try to call meetings they are met with residents saying “I remember what happened last time we organized – the teargas and the rubber bullets. I’m not coming.”

At least for now, the eviction process is frozen. In January 2008 the São Paulo Public Defender’s office found EMAE was guilty of “bad faith litigation” in their pursuit to remove Real Parque residents. Turns out after having their request for removal denied by one judge, they changed some of the names and dates in their paperwork and illegally submitted the same claim to a court across the city. It was this court that granted the eviction order. The Public Defender sent the issue back to its court of origin where it is currently tied up.

REAL PARQUE AND MY PROJECT

So far I have mostly hang out – attended a few cultural events and interviewed Paula to get the back-story on evictions. I am making Real Parque a case study in how collaboration between government, business, and civil society explains the persistence of violent eviction (more common under dictatorship) even in conditions of democratic politics. Future plans are to do more visits and interviews, attend meetings once they start up again with the municipal government, and maybe give a few English lessons to residents. I'll keep posting...

The truth will set you free

Just wanted to share this excerpt from the final chapter of The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. As a quick summary, the book argues that society is built on explicit and implicit violence, and that commitment to Christian non-violence on the part of each individual is the only path to achieving social justice. The first step is recognizing this truth, the second is to proclaim it and live it in your own life, and finally to have faith that the truth will convert others and the violent order will fall. The socially just order that will replace it is the coming of the Kingdom of God that the Bible promises, and in Tolstoy's analysis, all this is what is meant by the passage in Luke 17:20-21:

The kingdom of God cometh not with outward show; neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, Lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Reading this has been one of several things in my post-undergrad experience that has reminded me to value of the internal world of the individual - their heart/mind/soul - in the struggle to end oppression, and not just external social-political-economic arrangements. I don't consider myself Christian, but there is much to learn from the more radical Christian traditions. Enjoy!

It is precisely those people who profess most anxiety for the amelioration of human life, and are regarded as the leaders of public opinion, who assert that there is no need to [strengthen the consciousness of Christian truth on the part of each individual man], and that there are more effective means for the amelioration of men’s condition. They affirm that the amelioration of human life is effected not by the efforts of individual men, to recognize and propagate the truth, but by the gradual modification of the general condition of life, and that therefore the efforts of individuals should be directed to the gradual modification of external conditions for the better. For every advocacy of a truth inconsistent with the existing order by the individual is, they maintain, not only useless but injurious, since it provokes coercive measures on the part of authorities, restricting these individuals from continuing any action useful in society. According to this doctrine all modifications in human life are brought about by precisely the same laws as in the life of the animals.

So that, according to this doctrine, all the founders of religions, such as Moses and the prophets, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Budda, Christ, and others, preached their doctrines and their followers accepted them, not because they loved truth, but because the political, social, and above all economic conditions of the peoples among whom these religions arose were favorable for their origination and development.

And therefore the chief efforts of the man who wishes to serve society and improve the condition of humanity ought, according to this doctrine, to be directed not to the elucidation and propagation of truth, but to the improvement of the external political, social, and above all economic conditions. And the modification of these conditions is partly effected by serving the government and introducing liberal and progressive principles into it, partly in promoting the development of industry and the propagation of socialistic ideas, and most of all by the diffusion of science. According to this theory it is of no consequence whether you profess the truth revealed to you, and therefore realize it in your life, or at least refrain from committing actions opposed to the truth, such as serving the government and strengthening its authority when you regard it as injurious, profiting from the capitalistic system when you regard it as wrong, showing veneration for various ceremonies which you believe to be founded on error, serving as a soldier, taking oaths, and lying, and lowering yourself generally. It is useless to refrain from all that; what is of use is not altering the existing forms life, but submitting to them against your own convictions, introducing liberalism into the existing institutions, promoting commerce, the propaganda of socialism, and the triumphs of what is called science, and the diffusion of education. According to this theory one can remain a landowner, merchant, manufacturer, judge, official in government pay, officer or soldier, and still be not only a humane man, but even a socialist and revolutionary.

Hypocrisy, which had formerly only a religious basis in the doctrine of original sin, the redemption, and the Church, has in our day gained a new scientific basis and has consequently caught in it nets all those who had reached too high a stage of development to be able to find support in religious hypocrisy. So that while in former days a man who professed the religion of the Church could take part in all the crimes of the state, and profit by them, and still regard himself free from the taint of sin, so long as he fulfilled the external observances of the creed, nowadays all who do not believe in the Christianity of the Church, find similar well-founded irrefutable reasons in science for regarding themselves as blameless and even highly moral in spite of their participation in the misdeeds of government and the advantages they gain from them.

More thoughts on the utility of academics

Studying the creation and maintenance of depressed urban communities in Brazil got me thinking about how little I know about the same subject in the U.S. With the exception of a history book of Harlem, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and one article on government red-lining, I don't know much about the American ghetto. (Side note: the word in Portuguese is "gueto." I read a whole article scratching my head, wondering what the hell the author meant by "gwee-toe?" "gweh-tu?" until I finally got my head in one language to realize that the Portuguese spelling approximates the English pronunciation).

I went looking for any radical academic thought that arose out of this element of our "American experience" and found the article "Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation” (David Harvey, 1973). A great excerpt got me thinking again about the constant battle between the relative utilities of academics and activism, and the plausibility of forging a middle-way:

A revolutionary approach to theory… does not entail yet another empirical investigation of the social conditions in the ghettos. In fact, mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. This kind of empiricism is irrelevant. There is already enough information in congressional reports, newspapers, books, articles and so on to provide us with all the evidence we need….

This immediate task is nothing more nor less than a self-conscious and aware construction of a new paradigm for social geographic thought through a deep and profound critique of our existing analytical constructs. This is what we are best equipped to do. We are academics, after all, working with the tools of the academic trade. As such, our task is to mobilize our powers of thought to formulate concepts and categories, theories and arguments, which we can apply to the task of bringing about a humanizing social change. These concepts and categories cannot be formulated in abstraction. They must be forged realistically with respect to the events and actions as they unfold around us. Empirical evidence, the already assembled dossiers, and the experiences gained in the community can and must be used here. But all of those experiences and all of that information means little unless we synthesize it into powerful patterns of thought.

Chalk one up in the academic column, but add a dis for hyper-empiricist research. I like this guy. And while he is raising the flag for radical geographic thought, it could just as easily be any social science.

A global phenomenon, and what the hell can we expect democracy to do about it?

This great story in the NYTimes about Gurgaon, India reveals the same phenomena that arise in many "third-world" cities as they become outposts of the global economy. It's similar to São Paulo: severe income inequality made plain through the proximity of slums to luxury high-rises, elites buying exclusive access to public goods of education/health/law and order, and a low state capacity to provide even basic necessities for those not living in these private enclaves.

The story includes quotes from residents of the complex pictured that will surely make your blood boil a bit. There's also an accompanying slide-show to get a better sense of what lives are like on either side of this urban universe. Really, do read the article.

PHOTO: Ruth Fremson, NYTimes

The author only briefly touches on the role democracy plays in this system, noting that:

India has long lived with such inequities, and though a Maoist rebellion is building in the countryside, the nation has for the most part skirted social upheaval through a critical safety valve: giving the poor their chance to vent at the ballot box. Indeed, four years ago, voters threw out the incumbent government, with its “India Shining” slogan, because it was perceived to have neglected the poor.

In democracy, leadership change is always possible and rarely prohibitively difficult. And it is true that the party in power does tweak how a state relates to underclasses (most often this shows in levels of social spending). But if India is anything like Brazil, I would venture to guess that voting and other democratic institutions have not fundamentally altered the nature of urban inequality, nor the basic relationship between the poor and the state. When I feel pessimistic, I doubt whether they ever will.

The field of comparative politics gives certain reasons for why democracies in practice are limited in this respect: clientelism and cronyism, corruption, manipulation of the press, fractured party systems and other institutional weaknesses, etc. If we can break these patterns and strengthen institutions, democracy will "function better." (As an aside, what constitutes "better functioning" is ultimately a normative question, making comparativists pretty useless for defining it in any compelling way. But for me, better functioning means creating conditions of social justice.)

The technocratic cartwheels of comparative politics aside, they are basically using what I call the "more cowbell" argument. (Recall the classic SNL skit with Christopher Walken exclaiming "I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!") If something isn't working - in this case democracy - we just need more of it.

But what if all the noise from the cowbell is covering up an inherently bad tune? Political theorists in the line of Marx will tell you that capitalism is to blame, to which democracy is inherently secondary - nothing more than a distraction from the economic gluttony and exploitation at work, a way to pacify the oppressed by giving them a superficial outlet for their anger. As an OSU professor has noted, democracy is unlike any other political system in that it internalizes descent. And in my thinking, it is in fact anti-revolutionary - to the degree that it keeps all sides playing under the established rules of the game and feeding the underdogs small victories as needed - just enough to keep them in for the next round.

Still, I'm not convinced this is inherently so. I don't really have any answers here. There was a time when I believed wholeheartedly in democracy's ability to facilitate fundamental changes, perhaps radical. I am much more pessimistic now, but where has that gotten me? I still can't untangle the knotted roots of urban injustice enough to say with conviction what they are, how they work, or most importantly, where to start pulling them up.

Lula in Der Spiegel

Lula comments on the motives for the slum upgrading in Sunday's Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: A drug war is raging in your major cities. Armed gangs control most of the slums in Rio de Janeiro. Has the government lost control over the favelas?

Lula: Police power alone isn't enough to solve the problem. The government itself must make its presence felt and provide opportunities, and then the violence will subside. This is why we are cleaning up the biggest slums throughout the country. We are providing them with drinking water, energy and sewage systems, schools, hospitals and libraries. With economic growth running at between 4 and 6 percent over a number of years, all this becomes possible. We have allocated $270 billion (€175 billion) to spend on improving slums as well as modernizing our infrastructure such as ports, highways, railroads and airports -- all without any new borrowing.

Writing, teaching, and community media

I’m gonna throw this out, trusting you to chew on it awhile and give me your thoughts. I am pondering making a significant part of my life writing for a popular audience, teaching writing, and starting newspapers in marginal communities.

This idea came to me the other day and I can’t get it out of my head. I think this is because:

(1) Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed has affirmed for me the importance of mental liberation as a necessary element of social change, not just changes in material relations. I come from a generation of young, western, bleeding-heart types being sent into the world with development studies degrees and dreams of staffing world-saving NGOs. But I have already concluded that both government poverty programs and their “purer” NGO counterparts suffer from a deep fear of trusting poor people with resources or ever allowing their citizens/clients true autonomy- thereby negating their own reason for existence. The only way that the underclasses of the world will get this control is by demanding it on their own terms. A pre-requisite of this demand is a critical understanding of reality and why it exists as it does. A pre-requisite of this understanding is freeing the mind from the myths that locate the sources of oppressive situations in oppressed people themselves, writing counter narratives… basically people who aren’t encouraged to think thinking for themselves and forming their own ideas of “what is” and “what should be done.” Community written and controlled newspapers could provide a space for this to happen, as could writing classes.

(2) Developing an ever more complex, critical, and reflective understanding of the world (both its larger elements, and the parts that intimately affect my life) has been THE thing making my life worth living. To use Freire’s language, this is the project of becoming progressively more human. Having my understanding of a situation completely blow up in my face, letting the smoke clear to see it in an entirely new way, and discovering that I am capable of changing that reality now that I understand it – that’s where it is AT! If my life project isn’t helping other people have this experience then it’s a waste.

(3) I might be better suited writing for popular, rather than academic consumption. I like writing, people tell me I am goodish at it, and I want to write things that change the way people understand social realities. And not just 10 people with advanced degrees – a politically significant number of people capable of changing social realities as a result. I also struggle to raise the patience/time necessary to write a scientifically sound article on, say, “the enabling factors of neighborhood leadership in earning community legitimacy.” People listen to folks who live in their community, for chrissakes. I don’t need to do three months of data collection to tell you that.

(4) The sub-human ideas that people outside of a given underclass have about said class are really disgusting. These ideas are propagated through terrible representations in media and affect both how an underclass understands itself, and how others think underclasses deserve to be treated. This reality smacks you in the face in Brazil – I spend an afternoon in a favela and then come home to read all google news-hits where the word “favela” was used. It’s two different worlds. What if media was a humanizing force instead of de-humanizing? What if people were telling their own stories, and others were actually listening?


(5) I got a little miffed with my boyfriend when he wouldn’t apply for the new position as Homelessness Advocate for the city of Columbus. I wanted him to propose starting a newspaper written and sold by homeless citizens as the goal of his position (Cincinnati does this: see StreetVibes). Then I thought – why the hell am I not doing this? Well, because I had a ticket to São Paulo of course, but that was probably the only thing holding me back. And you know what, similar empowerment initiatives through visual and print media are being done in Brazil - see for example Viva Favela, Observatório das Favelas, Alfabetização Visual where my girl Gabriela O’Leary works, and the many examples of small community radio in peripheral neighborhoods all over the city.

If I run with this idea, it doesn’t mean I can’t go to grad school. It does mean I won’t be a prolific academic, probably not even a professor, and I will end up work primarily in English speaking countries because I don’t think my language abilities will ever be strong enough to teach writing in anything but English.

What else important might I be giving up taking a path like this? Are there other plusses? Think about it for a bit and give me your comments.