S5 #1 | The Right to Stay Home w/ David Bacon

The End of Tourism

On this episode, my guest is David Bacon, a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (COLEF / UC Press, 2017) includes over 300 photographs and 12 oral histories of farm workers. Other books include The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People, which discuss alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. Communities Without Borders includes over 100 photographs and 50 narraatives about transnational migrant communities and The Children of NAFTA is an account of worker resistance on the US/Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA.

Show Notes:

David’s Early Years

Learning about Immigration through Unions

The Meaning of Being Undocumented

NAFTA and Mexican Migration

The Source of Corn / Maize

Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations / Frente Indigena de Organizacaions Binacionales

The Right to Stay Home

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) Campaign

The Face & History of Immigration in the USA

Immigration Reform and Amnesty

The Violence of Fortuna Silver Mines in Oaxaca

Solidarity, Change and Optimism

Homework:

The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration

In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte

Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants

Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration

The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border

David’s Twitter Account

David’s Official Website

Transcript:

Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism podcast, David. It's an honor to have you on the pod. To begin, I'd like to ask you where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you there.

David: Well, I live in Berkeley, here in California, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen having just what I've been up to today before talking with you.

Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your work. Perhaps I could ask you what drew you to the issues of labor and migration.

David: Sure. Well, I come from a kind of left wing union family, so I knew about unions and workers and strikes and things like that from probably since before I can remember. And so I was kind of an activist when I was in high school, got involved in the [00:01:00] student movement in the 1960s at the University of California, got involved in the free speech movement, got tossed out by the university, actually, and wound up going to work after that, really, because I got married, had a daughter, and I got married, had a daughter, and, I needed to get a job and, you know, worked for quite a while as a a printer in the same trade that my father was, had been in went back to night school to learn more of the, of the trade, how to do different parts of it, how to run presses and so forth and then got involved, this is, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s got involved in the movement to support farm workers, really, and I was one of those people, you know, if you're my age, you remember this, if you're younger, you probably don't, but we used to picket supermarkets to try to get them [00:02:00] to stop selling the grapes and the wine and the lettuce that was on strike, and we would stand out in front of Safeway and other supermarkets with our red flags with the black eagle on them, And ask customers, you know, not to go into the store, not to buy the products that farmworkers were on strike against.

And I got really interested in. I'm curious about the workers that we were supporting. You know, I grew up in Oakland and so I didn't know anything about farm workers, really. I didn't know anything about rural California, rural areas, didn't speak Spanish didn't know much about Chicano, Latinos.

Oakland's a pretty diverse city, but in the area of Oakland where I grew up in you know, in our high school, you know, the students were African American or they were white, and that was a big racial question in, in school when I was in high school. So I grew up not knowing any of these things.[00:03:00]

And Because I was involved in, you know, standing out in front of these stores and supporting workers, I, you know, began wondering, who are these workers that we're supporting? And eventually, I went to work for the union. I asked a lawyer friend of mine who was in their legal department if they needed any help, and of course he said yes.

I went down to, Oxnard and de Santamaria began working for the union, originally taking statements from workers who had been fired because of their union activity. I didn't know much Spanish, so I had to learn Spanish on the job. Fortunately, you know, the workers were very patient with me and would help me learn, help me correct my still bad pronunciation and bad grammar.

And, and I began to learn. And that process has been going on ever since, really. That was a, that was a formative time in my life. It taught me a lot of [00:04:00] things. It taught me about, you know, the culture of. farm workers who were mostly Mexican in those years, but there were still a good number of Filipino workers working in the fields.

That eventually led me to the woman I eventually married, my wife, who was the daughter of of immigrants from the Philippines from a farm worker family. So I learned about that culture and I began learning about immigration, which I hadn't really known anything about growing up. Why people come to the U.

S., what happens to people here. I, I saw my first immigration raid. When I was an organizer, I later became an organizer for the union as my Spanish got better. And I remember going to talk to a group of workers that I had met with the previous night, who were worked up in palm trees picking dates.

And I went down to the date grove, this was in the Coachella Valley, and there was this big green van, and there were the [00:05:00] workers who I'd been talking to the previous night being loaded into the van. I was just You know, really shocked. The van took off. I followed the van all the way down to the Imperial Valley, to El Centro, where the detention center was.

Stood outside the center trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to these people? And that was sort of an introduction to the meaning of being undocumented, what it meant to people, what could happen. And that made me an immigrant rights activist, which I've also been ever since, too.

But also, over time, I got interested in the reasons why people were coming to the U. S. to begin with. You know, what people were finding here when people got here was very, very difficult work, low pay, immigration raids, police harassment, at least, and sometimes worse than that, poverty. You know, Why leave Mexico if this is what you're going to find?[00:06:00]

And it also made me curious about the border. And so that also began something that has continued on in all those years since. I eventually went to the border, went to Mexico, began getting interested and involved in Mexican labor politics, supporting unions and workers in Mexico, you know, doing work on the border itself.

After the Farm Workers Union, I worked for other unions for A number of years and they were generally reunions where the workers who were trying to join and we were trying to help were immigrants. So the government workers union, the women in the sweatshops sewing clothes or union for factory workers.

And so my job was basically to help workers organize and. Organizing a union in the United States is like well, you know, people throw around this word, you know, this phrase class war and class warfare pretty freely, but it is like a war. You know, when [00:07:00] workers get together and they decide they want to change conditions and they want to you know, get the company to, speak to them and to deal with them in an organized way.

They really do have to kind of go, go to war or be willing to, for the company to go to war with them. You know, really what people are asking for sometimes is pretty minimal, you know, wage raises or fair treatment at work or a voice at work. You know, you think, you know, what's wrong with that. But generally speaking when employers get faced with workers who want to do that they do everything possible to try and stop them.

Including firing people and harassing people, calling them to meetings, threatening people, scaring people. You know, there's a whole industry in this country that consists of union consultants who do nothing but, you know, advise big companies about how to stop workers when they, when they try to organize.

So that's what I did for about 20 years. Was help workers to get organized, form a union, get their bus to sit down and talk [00:08:00] to them, go out on strike, do all those kinds of things. And eventually I decided that I wanted to do something else. And I, I was already involved in, you know, starting to take photographs.

I would carry a camera and I would take pictures of what we were doing as workers. We would joke about it, kind of. I would tell workers, well, you know, we're going to take some pictures here and you can take them home to your family and show them, you know, that you're really doing what's right here and 20 years from now you'll show your grandkids that, you know, when the time came, you stood up and you did what was right and people would joke with each other about it.

And I discovered also that you could use them to get support for what we were doing. You know, we could get an article published in a newspaper somewhere. Some labor newspaper might run an article about us. You might get some money and some help or some food or something. But after a while, you know, I began [00:09:00] realizing that these photographs, they had a value beyond that.

And that was that they were documenting this social movement that was taking place among immigrants and, and Latino workers, especially here on the West Coast of people basically trying to. Organize themselves for social justice in a lot of different ways, organizing unions for sure, but also trying to get changes in U.

S. immigration laws, immigration policies those people who are citizens and able to vote, registering to vote, political change. You have to remember that if you go back to the 1960s or 1970s, Los Angeles was what we used to call the capital of the open shop. In other words, it was one of the most right wing cities in America.

You know, the mayor Sam Yorty was a right wing Republican. The police department had what they called the Red Squad, whose responsibility it was is to go out and to deal with [00:10:00] people that wanted to change anything or to organize and Unions or strikes or belong to left wing political parties or whatever.

And today, Los Angeles is one of the most progressive cities in the United States, and it has to do with what happened to those primarily Central American and Mexican and workers of color, women, who over time got organized and changed the politics of Los Angeles. And so, you know, I was really fascinated by it.

This process, I was involved in it as an organizer and then later as a somebody taking photographs of it and writing about it that and so that's, that's sort of the transition that I made for the last 30 some odd years. I've worked as a freelance writer and photographer, basically doing the same kind of thing.

I look at it as a way of organizing people, really, because the whole purpose of writing the articles and taking the [00:11:00] photographs is to change the way people think, and make it possible for people to understand the world better, and then to act on that understanding, which to me means trying to fight for a more just world, a more just society.

And so. That's what, that's the purpose of the photographs, that's the purpose of the writing, is to, is to change the world. I think it's a big tradition in, in this country, in the United States of photography and of journalism that is produced by people who are themselves part of the movements that they are writing about or documenting, and whose purpose it is to sort of help to move forward social movements for social change.

Chris: Amen. Some of the stories you were mentioning remind me of my mother who also worked for a labor union most of her life. And I was definitely still very much concerned with the state of affairs. I should [00:12:00] say that you know, I'm incredibly grateful as well to have a man of your stature and experience on the pod here to speak with us your work Has definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn't seen living here in southern Mexico, in, in Oaxaca.

And one of these, these books, which I'd like to touch on a little bit today, is entitled, The Right to Stay Home. how U. S. policy drives Mexican migration. And we're actually at the 10 year anniversary of the publication of this book. So I feel honored to be able to speak with you in this regard about it.

And, you know, it's, for me, someone who was a backpacker and a tourist, and then later a resident of this place, of Oaxaca, to come to understand much more deeply the complexities and nuances around migration, and especially in the context of Mexican migration to the United States. [00:13:00] What's left out of the conversation as someone who grew up in urban North America and Toronto, Canada very much on the left in my earlier years, in terms of organizing and, and and protesting, the, the, the dialogues and the conversations always seem to be around the the treatment of migrants once they arrived and, and not necessarily, as you said, why they left in the first place, the places that they left and the consequences to the places that they left.

And so I guess to begin, I'm wondering if you could offer our listeners a little bit of background into How that book came to be written and what was the inspiration and driving factors for it?

David: The book came to be written to begin with because I began going to Mexico and trying to understand how [00:14:00] the system of migration works in the context of the world that we live in, you know, people call it globalization or globalism, or you could call it imperialism.

So I was trying to understand that from the roots of first having been involved with people as migrants once they had arrived here in the U. S. I was trying to understand Well, two things. One was why people were coming, and also what happens to people in the course of coming. In other words, the journey that people make.

Especially the border. The border is the big And the border has very important functions in this because it's really the crossing of the border that determines what the social status of a migrant is, whether you have papers or not, whether you're documented or not, which is a huge, [00:15:00] huge, huge distinction.

So as a result of that, and as a result of kind of listening to people listening to the movement in Mexico talk, about it, investigating, going to places like Oaxaca. I first wrote a book that tried to look at this as a system, a social system. It's really part of the way capitalism functions on a international or global basis in our era because what it does is it produces Displacement, the changes that are, you take a country like Mexico, and this is what the first book, the first book was called Illegal People.

And what it looked at was the imposition on Mexico, for instance, it starts with NAFTA, the free trade agreement. In fact, the first book I ever wrote was about the border and was called The Children of NAFTA, the [00:16:00] North American Free Trade Agreement. But this book Illegal People, what it really tried to do is it tried to look at the ways in which People were displaced in communities like Oaxaca.

And of course, for Oaxaca, Oaxaca is a corn growing state. It's a rural state. Most people in Oaxaca still live in villages and small communities. Oaxaca's a big city, and there's some other cities there, but, but most people in Oaxaca are still what you call rural people. And so NAFTA, among the many changes that it imposed on Mexico, one of the most important was that it allowed U. S. corn corporations, Archer Daniels Midland Continental Grain Company other really large corporations to dump corn in Mexico at a price that we were subsidizing through the U. S. Farm Bill, our tax money. In other words, we're, our tax money was being [00:17:00] given to these corporations to lower their cost of production.

And that allowed them to go to Mexico and to sell corn at a price that was so low that people who were growing corn in a place like Oaxaca could no longer sell it for a price that would cover the cost of growing it. That had an enormous impact on people in Oaxaca because what it did was it forced people to basically to leave in order to survive.

It's not that people were not leaving Oaxaca already before the agreement passed. There were other reasons that were causing the displacement of people in rural communities in Oaxaca. A lot of it had to do with this relationship with the U. S. even then, but certainly NAFTA was like pouring gasoline on all of that.

And so three million people was the estimate that in a period of 10 years were displaced as corn farmers in Oaxaca. That's a huge percentage of the population of Oaxaca. [00:18:00] And so people were forced to go elsewhere looking for work. People went, you know, to Mexico City. You know, Mexico City, the metro system, the subway system in Mexico City was built primarily by workers who came from somewhere else.

A lot of them from Oaxaca. Who wound up being the low cost labor that the Mexican government used to build a subway system. They went to the border, they became workers in the maquiladoras, in the factories that were producing everything from car parts to TV screens for the U. S. market. And then people began crossing the border and coming to the U.

S. as either farm workers in rural areas of California or as low paid workers in urban areas like Los Angeles. So one of the big ironies, I think, of it was that here you had farm work, farmers who were being forced off their land. And remember that these are corn farmers, so [00:19:00] the Domestication of corn happened first in Oaxaca, and the first earliest years of domesticated corn, thousands of years old, have been discovered in archaeological digs in Oaxaca and caves near Oaxaca City to begin with.

So here we have people to whom the world really owes corn as a domesticated crop, who are winding up as being wage workers on the farms of corporate U. S. agribusiness corporations in California, Oregon, Washington, eventually all over the United States. That was the migration of Oaxacan people. And so you could sort of see In this, as sort of a prism, what the forces were, what the social forces at work are, in other words, that in the interests of the profits of these big corporations, these trade agreements get negotiated between [00:20:00] governments, okay, our government, the U.

S. government negotiates with the Mexican government, but that's like David negotiating with Goliath, or the other way around, rather, you know, The agreements are really imposed. It's not to say that the Mexican government of those years was opposed to it. It was a neoliberal government too, but the power in this negotiation is held by the U.

S. government. And so that trade agreement in the interest of making Mexico a profitable place for, you know, Archer Daniels Middleton to do business gets imposed on Mexico. And then as a result of that, people get displaced and they wind up becoming a low wage workforce for other corporations here in here in the U.

S. In fact, sometimes they Wind up working for the same corporation Smithfield foods, which is a big producing corporation [00:21:00] went to Mexico. It got control of huge areas of a valley called the Peralta Valley, not that far from Mexico city. And they began. Establishing these huge pork or pig raising facilities.

In fact, that's where the swine flu started was because of the concentration of animals in these farms. Again, displacing people out of those communities. And people from the state of Veracruz, where the Perote Valley is located, many of them wound up getting recruited and then going to work in North Carolina at the huge Smithfield Foods Pork Slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

So that sort of tells you a lot about how this system works. It produces displacement. In other words, it produces people who have no alternative but to migrate in order to survive. And those people go through all the things that people have to go through in order to get to the United [00:22:00] States because there are no real visas for this kind of migration.

And them wind up being The workforce that is needed by the system here, Smithfield Foods or other corporations like them in order for them to make high profits here. And in the process of doing this, I was developing a a relationship with a very unique organization in Mexico, in Oaxaca, a part of which exists in Oaxaca, called the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales, which is the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations.

And this is an organization that was actually started by Oaxaca migrants in the U. S., in Los Angeles, and then expanded both into the Central Valley here in California and then expanded back into Mexico in Baja, California, where there are also big corporate farms where primarily Oaxaca, people from Oaxaca are the workforce, and eventually chapters in Oaxaca itself.[00:23:00]

And so I would got to be friends with many people in this organization, and I would go and take photographs at their bi national meetings, they would have meetings in Mexico where people could come together and and talk about their situation. And, you know, I began, obviously, listening to what people were talking about.

And, People developed this, I think, very kind of path breaking, unique analysis of migration in which they talked about a dual set of rights that migrants need and migrant communities need in this kind of world. And so, What they said was, on the one hand people need rights as migrants where they go.

In other words, people, when they come to the United States, need legal status. People need decent wages, the ability to organize, you know, an end to the kind of discrimination that people are subject to. But, [00:24:00] people also need a second set of rights as well, which is called the right to stay home. And that is the title of the book, The Right to Stay Home.

And what that means is that, People need political change and economic and social change in their communities of origin, which makes migration voluntary. So these are communities that are so involved in the process of migration that it would not make any sense to say that migration is bad, because In many cases, these are communities that live on the remittances that are being sent by migrants, by members of people's own families who are living and working in the United States.

So the discourse in these meetings was sort of on the order of saying that people have the right to migrate, people have the right to travel, people have the right to leave, but they also have the right to stay home. They have the right to a decent future. A young [00:25:00] person who is growing up in Santiago, Cusco, Oaxaca in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, for instance, has a right to a future in Oaxaca so that you can make a choice.

Do you want to stay and have a decent life for yourself in Oaxaca, or do you want to leave and hopefully have a decent life for you and wherever you go, whether Baja California or California or Washington State? So in order to have a Right to stay home. What has to happen? What do people need? It's kind of a no brainer. People need well high farm prices to begin with. They need the ability to raise corn, tomatoes, Whatever crop it is that they need and sell it at a price that is capable of sustaining those families and communities. People need education.

They need healthcare, but people also need political change because the Frente Indígena is a political organization. And so it was fighting [00:26:00] against the domination of Oaxaca by the old PRI, the party of the institutionalized revolution, which had been running Mexico for 70 years, trying to find a government that would begin to push for those kinds of social rights.

And that was you know, a very important kind of eye opening for me was to hear people talking about the right to stay home, so much so that I said, you know, we need a book about this. So we're not just describing the system itself, how it works, but we are talking about what are people's responses to it?

What do people think should happen here? And this was one of the most important developments of it. And it was not just. The people in Oaxaca, the more I did work on trying to investigate it and document it, there's part of the book, and also this was being done in people's [00:27:00] voices, the main voice in the right to stay home belongs to Rufino Dominguez, who was one of the founders of the Frente Indígena, who was my teacher in this, and so at one point they did knock the PRI out of power in Oaxaca and elected a governor, Gabino Cuei, who turned out to be not as good as people had hoped that he would be, but he was not the PRI.

And he appointed Rufino, the head of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. So here was Rufino who had, was a left wing radical who spent his whole life opposing the government in Oaxaca, who then joined it for a while until he could no longer stomach what was going on there and had to leave.

But. Pushing for that kind of political change in Oaxaca. There's another part of the book that talks about the miners in Cananea near the border with the United States. And their Effort to try to. win justice from this huge corporation that [00:28:00] was basically intent on destroying their union. And when they were forced out on strike, those miners also had to cross the border to Arizona to become workers in Arizona to survive.

Again, you know, you see how the system is working here, but they also were talking about what kind of political change has to happen in Mexico for the right to stay home. to become reality. And that movement in Mexico grew strong enough so that, you know, after The Right to Stay Home was published, some years after, since it was, as you said, 10 years ago that Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned.

He went all around the country speaking in every little tiny village that Mexico has, practically, in the course of four years. And one of the main things he talked about was the right to alternatives to forced migration. And I was there in Mexico City in the Zócalo when he took office. He finally won it.

I don't want to go into all the things that had to [00:29:00] happen for Andrés Manuel López Obrador to win an election and become president of Mexico. But in his, in his inaugural speech as he was being sworn in, he talked about, we are going to make Mexico into a place where Mexicans can be happy living, where you don't have to go to the United States in order to survive, and I think you can talk about the, Things that the Mexican government has not been able to accomplish in the last four or five years.

But I think one thing is beyond question and that is that that has been the main direction of the policy of the government of Mexico in that period of time because that's what got him elected. was this idea that, as he said, we are going to reject the liberal, neoliberal hypocrisy of the last six administrations in Mexico, meaning no more trade agreements like NAFTA, no [00:30:00] more opening Mexico up to U.

S. corporations to come in and make money and as a result of which everybody's going to have to leave, that there had to be some kind of different direction in Mexico. So, in a way, I think that. Maybe that book, The Right to Stay Home, was like a little grain of sand that joined with other little grains of sand like it in helping to move forward that process of political change, because it happened on really on both sides of the border.

Gosh, millions and millions of Mexicans who are living in the United States. So the process of political discussion that goes on about the kind of government Mexicans should have happens not just in Mexico, it happens here too. You know, part of Mexico is here on this side of the border. So you know, the book, and the book actually was published in Spanish and in Mexico as well too.

So I think that it talked about things that were very important to people. [00:31:00] At the time, and that people are still debating about what has to happen in order for the right to stay home to be a reality. And I think it's something very important for people in this country to listen to and to think about as well, too, because in all the debates about migration that happen in here in the U.S

There's not a lot of attention that's paid to this whole idea of the two sets of rights, what has to happen. You know, certainly, you know, there are people like Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party that just, you know, never going to talk about anything like this. But even among Democrats, even in the Biden administration, you know, it's really too much about how to manage the border, you know, which basically boils down to how many people are we going to detain and deport.

Rather than thinking about what kind of [00:32:00] world do we want to live in. Therefore, what kind of places migration going to have in it?

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Chris: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's it's been fascinating reading and rereading this book in, in, in part to be able to give voice to not just migrants and not just migration issues in the places that people move to or migrate to, but also in the places that they, that they leave behind and the voices of the people that they leave behind.

And you know, I think for. Many North Americans, especially those who are first or second generation citizens of those countries of Anglo North America, of Canada and the United States, that these are, these are the stories these are the voices that that maybe they haven't heard of in their own families as well.

And so, you know, you started to mention a little bit about this. the kind of superficiality, perhaps, if I'm, if I can say it in that, in those terms, of the [00:33:00] political conversation around migration in the United States, in Canada, and perhaps even in Mexico. And so I'd like to ask you about the reception and perhaps the fallout Once the book was published, and I'm curious how the declaration to the right to stay home or the right to not migrate has altered at all the political or social social landscape in rural Mexico, you know, at least in terms of the people that you know in these places.

And also if there was any response, any, any ground shaking movements as a result of the book coming out among activists in the United States.

David: Well, I think that the book contributed to an important change. In the immigrant rights movement in the United States here, because, you know, having participated in that movement as an activist [00:34:00] for, gosh, 40 some odd years now, maybe more, Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 with the so called amnesty law.

Which not only gave amnesty to undocumented people, but also made it illegal for undocumented people to work in the United States after that and started the whole process of the border militarization. In fact, you know, the negative parts of that bill were so bad that many people like myself opposed the bill, even if it had amnesty in it, saying that it was not a this was not a good deal.

And I think that over time. You know, history has proven that we were right not that amnesty was unimportant and not worth fighting for, but that the price that we paid turned out to be much higher than people were willing to give it credit for, you know, at the time. But what was also really missing from that debate, for instance, in [00:35:00] those years, was any sense that we had to really deal with and think about the causes of migration and the roots of migration, the displacement.

It was really all about the status of people when they were here. You know, should it be legal or illegal for people to work? Should people get papers or should people not get papers? And that was a very limiting Conversation, because what really, what it really meant was that it could not acknowledge the fact that the migration from Mexico is not going to stop.

For instance, the, in that, in that bill, the, the qualifying date for amnesty was January 1st, 1982, meaning. That if you came before that date, you could apply for the amnesty and get legalization, and if you came after that date, you couldn't get it. For people migrating from [00:36:00] Oaxaca, for instance, almost everybody came after.

So all the Oaxacans who came to the United States, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people really hardly anybody. Qualified for amnesty because of that bill, which is one reason why legal status is such an enormous question for the Oaxacan community here in the U. S. So it, the, the discussion of that bill didn't acknowledge that and also by setting that date, it was, I think, very cynical because Mexico had what was called the Peso Shock in 1982, where the economic crisis in Mexico got so bad that Mexico had to devalue its currency.

And what that meant was that thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico lost their jobs and had to come to the United States. And by setting that date, January 1st of that year, what you were really saying is, none of those people are going to qualify for amnesty. So they were [00:37:00] already here. But also it didn't acknowledge that, you know, in the, that, that bill set up a a commission to study the causes of migration, supposedly.

And that commission came back and recommended the negotiation of a trade agreement between the U. S. and Mexico. And it said, well, in the short run, maybe this would result in the displacement of a lot of people, but in the long run, it would lead to the economic development of Mexico, and then people would have jobs and they wouldn't have to come here.

Well, that was another very, very cynical kind of thing, because the negotiations of NAFTA started not long after the report of that commission, and in fact, NAFTA did lead to the displacement of millions of people in Mexico. There were four and a half million migrants from Mexico living in the U. S.

when NAFTA went into effect and by 2010 it was [00:38:00] 12 and a half million people. So an enormous increase in people and the rise in Mexican living standards. Never happened. Well, that's not true. When López Obrador finally came into office he began taking measures to raise wages and raise the living standards in Mexico, which previous administrations had resisted bitterly because they wanted to attract investment.

And things have started to improve economically for workers and farmers in Mexico a little bit. But up until then, so being unable to face the roots of migration and its connections to corporate America and the way our government was on the one hand producing migration or doing things to produce migration on the other hand making The status of migrants, illegal criminalizing it here.

It was a really, a very difficult debate for people in [00:39:00] the immigrant rights movement. As a result, a lot of organizations said, well, MSD, we need MSD. Let's just forget about a lot of other stuff. Let's just get down to seat on what we paid a really bad price for it. Today I think there is a lot more discussion in the immigrant rights movement about what happens in Mexico and Central America in particular that causes people to come to the United States.

I think still there's not enough of a willingness to deal with the economic part of it. the poverty. So these days, the way it gets dealt with is mostly by talking about the violence in Honduras. For instance, San Pedro Sula, which is called the murder capital of the world. You know, I wrote a whole article about how did San Pedro Sula become such a violent place to begin with?

And what did it have to do with U. [00:40:00] S. companies going and growing bananas in Honduras? But in any case it gets put down, I think too much to violence, to the exclusion of the causes of the violence. What is the, what is the root cause of violence in Central American countries? The Civil War in El Salvador was fought about who was fighting on what side, what kind of changes were people proposing.

The more you unpeel it, the more you look at it, the more you see that this is really, again, about the economic and political relationship between the U. S. and China. Those countries. And so I think that books like Illegal People, like The Right to Stay Home, played a role in trying to get us to look more at this as a whole system, what produces migration, and then criminalizes migrants here.

I think that it's a very [00:41:00] limited accomplishment. Because we still have an extremely unjust immigration system. You know, we all hated Trump and the detention centers and, and his racist orders. But the reality is, is that we have more people crossing the border this last year than any other previous time in our history.

And we have thousands and thousands of people living in detention. In the United States in detention centers and in detention centers on the Mexican side of the border. And this is under a democratic administration. So, I think that we have to be real about how limited our impact has been up to now.

But, having said that, I think it is still a big advance for us to be able to talk. in this country, in the United States, about the roots of migration, and also be able to reach out to organizations and people and communities in Mexico and talk about, well, [00:42:00] okay, what is our, what should our relationship be?

Well, how do we work together? How are we going to be able to try and change this system together? I think those efforts are kind of only starting, really. I don't think there's nearly enough of it, but I think that's the future. That's where the change is going to come from.

Chris: And I can't stress enough, you know, how devoid of complexity and nuance most any political conversation has these days, and that most people don't go looking for it, in part because You know, most people haven't been taught.

So, you mentioned a little bit earlier, as you wrote in, in your book, The Right to Stay Home, about the consequences of mining companies, as an example, in, in Mexico. Foreign owned mining corporations. And Here in Oaxaca, it's very well known that these corporations undertake geological testing without the [00:43:00] consent of communities, that they lie to the communities about concessions when trying to push their way into the territory, and then sponsor community violence by dividing the people against each other through bribery, corruption.

Intimidation, threats, and sometimes assassination. And so, I'm curious, first, if you could offer a little bit more of what you've seen in this regard, and secondly, why do you think that in this example that, you know, Canadians, in the context of the one particular mine here in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, is a Canadian owned mine, why they have no idea that this is happening on foreign soil in their names?

You

David: know, I wrote a long article about San Jose del Progreso in the Vice Centrales in, in Oaxaca, and Fortuna Mine there, which is a Canadian, Canadian company. And I think this is [00:44:00] another way of seeing what this kind of, just to use shorthand, this free trade arrangement between the US, Canada and Mexico, what it really means for people on the ground.

Mexico in previous administrations changed this mining law so that it became possible. And the purpose of to make it possible for foreign corporation to get a mining concession anywhere in Mexico and develop a mine without having to get the consent of the people who live in the community around it.

Basically saying that, you know the Mexican government was entitled to sell off these concessions regardless of what the people there thought about it. And so the purpose of this was to, again, attract foreign investment into Mexico. This is part of the neoliberal policy that says [00:45:00] that the economic development policy of Mexico should be to sell pieces of Mexico to foreign investors, to foreign corporations.

And supposedly this money is going to make life better. For people in Mexico well, first of all, it's a very corrupt system, so the selling of mining concessions involves, you know, millions and millions of dollars that wind up in the pockets of those people who grant the concessions. So it was a source of enormous corruption in the Mexican government in granting those concessions and in passing that change in the law to begin with.

And then in fighting for changes in the legal system, the free trade set up, those mining corporations could then, basically, it gave them not only a kind of impunity against communities that protested about it, but in which they could even sue the Mexican government. If the Mexican government tried to stand in the way and say, well, you [00:46:00] can't develop the mine, then the mine could sue the Mexican government and say, well, you deprived us of potential profits and you owe us millions of dollars.

And there were decisions like the metal cloud decision that allowed for this kind of thing to happen. So what this meant is on the ground, you have mining mining concessions sold and mines being developed all over Mexico. In the face of local opposition, and the mine in San Jose de Progreso is a really good example of that, where you have a Canadian company that comes in and says, okay, we are going to, in fact, they weren't the originators of the mine, they basically bought a mine that had been played out by previous owner.

And so we are going to dump a lot of money into this and we are going to make it a producing mine and the impact on the community. We don't really care. And so the impact is really enormous. You know these are open pit mines. They're a scar on the land. They [00:47:00] contaminate the water, the aquifer, so that these farming communities can no longer support themselves in the same way.

In order to develop the mine, what they do is they divide the communities. And so, as you said, in San Jose de Progreso, they bought off the town's, the town's government who basically gave the company permission to do whatever it wanted to in spite of local opposition. Then when local opposition got organized to, to oppose it, the company cooperated with the with the local leaders that it had bought off to basically go after those leaders in a very violent way.

So, Bernardo Vazquez. who had was from this community. He had actually gone to the United States and become a farm worker in Petaluma, in California. And then seeing what was happening in his community, went back to San Jose de [00:48:00] Progreso and to and began leading the opposition. And he was then ambushed and assassinated.

Other people in his, around him were also killed, and then the violence went both ways. People on the other side got killed. And so this whole community became a warring camp, camps against each other. You know, I remember when I visited there, there are two taxi companies in this community. There's a taxi company that's associated with the People who are pro mine and the taxi company is associated with people who are against it.

And you better not get into the wrong taxi because you could, some terrible things could happen to you. I took pictures of these threats that were spray painted on the walls of, some of the irrigation canals there, Bernardo Vasquez, your time has come, you know that was before he was assassinated.

A lot of the people who work in the mine come from somewhere else, some of them from Canada[00:49:00] but it takes a few of the jobs in hand somehow. to certain people in the community there as a way of buying them off and giving them a stake in the continuation of the mine. And so what happens is that you have a community that's a continuing, a continuous war with itself.

And this happens all over Mexico. In fact, it's not just Mexico, this is happening in El Salvador, it's happening in Guatemala, and actually mostly by Canadian companies. So you ask, do people in Canada know about this? I think there are some journalists like Dawn Bailey who have Canadian journalists who have tried to write about it, and tried to make people in Canada aware of it.

I don't think that most people in Canada have the faintest idea of what those corporations are doing, and that's because I think the corporate media in Canada has very little interest in showing that, partly because, you know, they have the same basic set of economic interests that the mining corporations themselves do.

[00:50:00] Probably share, same shareholders, who knows? In any case That's something that could happen and that should happen if people in Canada became more aware of what these companies were doing and then began taking action in Canada to try to restrict them. I think it would have a big impact on the ability of these communities in Oaxaca to survive.

I think that San Jose the Progresso is going to be a war with itself and this continuing political violence is going to happen. Until the company, basically until the company leaves, really. I don't see any other solution, I don't see how the mine can continue operating there under any ownership and not have this war taking place there.

So, but I think that the way to get that company to leave is for people in Canada to take some action in cooperation and in solidarity with the people in that [00:51:00] community. So, maybe by Organizing delegations from Vancouver or Toronto down to San Jose del Progreso would be a way of helping that to develop.

That's possibly something that might happen, but basically you need that relationship in order, I think, in order to stop this from happening.

Chris: Hmm. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, of course it just ends up contributing to migration, right, and exile, displacement within those communities. And and so I'm curious, what do you think the right to stay home or the right to not migrate can offer us as modern people, as citizens or migrants in the context of the current crises and perhaps the crises to come?

You know, you mentioned that Immigration the numbers, the number of people coming into the United States over the last year has just been unprecedented. The number of migrants [00:52:00] flowing through Oaxaca, for example, in Southern Mexico right now is unprecedented and it really seems, you know, like.

not just my opinion, but in terms of statistics and predictions and all of these things, that it's only going to get more unprecedented. So I'm curious what you might, what you might think that this, this declaration, the right to stay home or the right to not migrate, might offer us going forward.

David: Well, I think it offers us something to fight for.

That it gives us a vision of what a future could and should look like in the communities where displacement is taking place. In San Jose de Progreso, for instance, the right to stay home means a community that's not at war with itself, which means that the mining operation has to end. But, Ending the mining operation doesn't necessarily mean that people are [00:53:00] going to have an educational system or a health care system that's capable of meeting their needs.

So you need political change in Oaxaca, San Jose de Progreso, and Mexico in general, that is able to deliver those things. For people. I think we could take that same thing and and look at people coming from Venezuela. There are a lot of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing Mexico coming to the U.

S. border. On the one hand, the U. S. government is sort of a little bit more friendly. to Venezuelan migrants, although it's still doing whatever it can at the border to try to keep people out. Because, you know, this gets used in the media in the U. S. as a way of saying, well, this is the proof that the socialist government in Venezuela is incompetent and corrupt and ought to be removed, which has been U.

S. policy for a long time. But in reality, the economic problems in [00:54:00] Venezuela would certainly be a lot less if Venezuela wasn't subject to the U. S. sanctions regime, which is basically sought to strangle the Venezuelan economy. And so the people who are leaving Venezuela, whether they're middle class people who are, you know, fed up with the problems of Caracas or whether they're poor people who have you know, have to migrate in order to survive those are due to U.

S. policy again. So really, the right to stay home means in the United States that people in the United States, progressive people especially, have to seriously take a look at what the impact of U. S. policies are on the people that are being subjected to them, and to begin with, cause no harm.

That would be a good starting place to stop those policies that are actively producing migration. You know, the people who drowned in the Mediterranean, those 600 people who [00:55:00] drowned in that horrible boating accident, who were they? A lot of them were Afghans. A lot of them were Iraqis. Why were they leaving?

What were they doing on that boat? They were the product of that U. S. war. Now, I was a very active, you know, opponent of, of the war. I went to Iraq twice to try to make connections with trade unionists and other people in Iraq who were trying to fight for kind of a progressive nationalist solution to the economic problems of Iraq in the wake of the occupation to end the occupation.

But you know, that's kind of what we need. We need to take responsibility for the impact of what this government has done. When we take a look at what the, what is going to happen to the people of Palestine and Gaza, [00:56:00] Under the bombardment, you know, if people were able to leave Gaza, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of people going wherever they could.

And the Middle East simply in order to get out from under the Israeli bombs. And those bombs are coming from where? They're coming from the United States, that military aid package. You know, you cannot have a military policy and a military aid package the way the U. S. passes them without its having enormous impacts on migration, on the displacement of people, and at the same time it also Produces impacts here in the U.

S. that we also need to take a look at and see what the relationship are. You know, people migrate in the U. S. as well, too. We have factories to close when Detroit stopped being an [00:57:00] auto manufacturing center and the Factories in Detroit closed, the car factories, thousands and thousands and thousands of auto workers became migrants in the U.

S., going from city to city to city, looking for. So the price of the economic crisis that exists for us isn't felt just by people in Mexico or Palestine or Iraq. It's felt here in the United States and in Canada too. These problems They require a political solution, you know, they require us to organize ourselves in a way that is strong enough to force political change on our government here, so that it takes responsibility for the past devastation.

And the past displacement and also stops doing the things that are going to keep on causing it in the future. And then I think we can think about kind of repairing the world. I think we have to repair the world, too, after this. But the first thing we have [00:58:00] to do is we have to stop hurting it. We have to stop the damage, and that means having enough political courage and enough political power to make our government do that.

That's a tall order. That's a tall order. I don't think it's something from today to tomorrow. But it's a long process. You know, I'm a, I grew up during the anti Vietnam War movement and the civil rights movement, and I saw this country at a time when it was possible and when we did it. So I'm the optimist.

I believe that it's within our power to do this. But looking at where we are right now, I think we have a long way to go. And so, you know, if what I do contributes is granito de arena to it, you know, a lo mejor.

Chris: Thank you so much, David. Yeah, it's definitely really, really important to hear words such as yours in a time of deep nihilism.

[00:59:00] And, and also the absence and I think the disregard of, of Elder Voices in our midst and in our movements. So, I deeply appreciate your willingness to speak with me and, and to our listeners today. And just finally, before we depart, how might our listeners find out more about your work?

How might they purchase your books?

David: I have a blog and a lot of what I write and the pictures that I take are up there and I put them up there pretty regularly. And so the way to find it is to Google my name, David Bacon, and the blog is called The Reality Check. And so if you Google that together, you'll find it and that's how you can connect.

Chris: Thank you so much, David.

David: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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