Valentine’s Day sometimes brings chocolates and sometimes flowers. But Valentine’s Day in Oakland, California, brought angry women out to the Mi Pueblo supermarket in the heart of the barrio. There they tried to speak to the chain’s owner, Juvenal Chavez, not about love, but about the sexual harassment of women who work there.
Mi Pueblo worker Laura Robledo’s story, in her own words:
Hello, my name is Laura Robledo. I am a single mother of three children. Last October I started working for Mi Pueblo Foods at the McLaughlin Avenue Store, in San Jose. Recently I was suspended and later-on fired for alleged misbehavior.
During the first few weeks of employment, a co-worker began to sexually harass me on a constant basis.
The company allegedly conducted an investigation on this matter finding no apparent cause for disciplinary action against the alleged harasser. It seems that the individual that harassed me still works at Mi Pueblo. This makes me feel humiliated.
I believe management fired me because I decided not to remain silent. There could be more women that have been sexually harassed but are too afraid to speak up.
Last December I attempted to hand deliver a letter to Juvenal Chavez, the owner of Mi Pueblo Foods. But I was stopped by several male security guards at the entrance of Mi Pueblo headquarters in San Jose. In this letter I challenge Mr. Chavez to talk to me in person so I can tell him what it really means for female employees to work at Mi Pueblo Foods.
On Valentine’s Day, 2013, supported by members of local group Dignity & Resistance; workers organizing in Walmart retail stores; and union members and staff of UFCW, Laura again tried to deliver her letter, and again security guards blocked the way. Undeterred, workers and community members will continue finding ways to fight not only sexual harassment in Mi Pueblo Foods, but also discrimination against African-Americans, e-verify attacks on undocumented workers, and attacks on workers who wish to form a union at Mi Pueblo.
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If I could instantly acquire two new digital skills, they would be:
Knowing How To Code
Knowing How To Make Good Videos.
As it stands, I know zero about the former, and above is my latest attempt at generating media from an action around the Mi Pueblo Grocery fight, an ongoing campaign that I’ve been working on for some months here in Oakland.
Learning, slowly learning.
The action was nice, if a little gender-simplistic. (Queers and gender-nonconforming folks, if they can get work at all, also face hella sexual harassment on the job; it’s not just women.)
Still, the fierce women trabajadoras in the video inspire me.
Moving, patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently.
Yesterday: amazing political art by Young Gifted and Black, Isis Rising, and all kinds of other phenomenal hip-hop and soul-flavored performances at the Life Is Living festival yesterday in West Oakland (including an extended Nina Simone tribute that, during Jennifer Johns‘s take on Sinnerman, evoked a cathartic tear or two from the wildly dancing audience). On my way out of the park I watched this rhyme unfold in my head.
It started with the tradeoff of wages and prices, then meandered to attacks on reproductive care (thanks for that presentation, Becca!), the false liberation of muslim women thru u.s. imperialist war, and nuclear energy and fukushima (shouts to Umi for alerting me to the feminist working-class issues there).
So here you go — an extremely extremely rough experiment, something that will probably never amount to anything polished. Still, it represents my gratitude for all that I’m learning, every day, from comrades, artists, thinkers, ancestors, and people in struggle.
How many of you have seen Newsies? Easily the best Disney film ever made. Probably the best Disney film even conceivable. (How — how? — did this get greenlighted?) Based on the true events of the 1899 Newsboys’ Strike, it introduces the newsies as a “ragged army” of poor, plucky orphans and runaways who survive by slanging newspapers in the streets of New York. When journalism capitalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst collude to expand profits by charging more money to the “distribution apparatus” (a.k.a. these teenage laborers), the newsies, outraged, take inspiration from locally organized trolley workers and decide to go on strike.
They also dance and sing, fabulously.
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In a dazzling display of preternaturally sophisticated taste (or as part of a steady diet of musicals my mother supplied me at a young age), I became obsessed with this movie following its release in 1992, when I was six or seven years old. I remember sliding in the VHS (I think my parents had taped it from TV) and sitting on the carpet below the screen, transfixed by Jack Kelley (a young Christian Bale), Spot Collins (the dreamy dangerous one from Brooklyn), and the rest of the balletic, rough-and-tumble weyr. To this day, I can belt out any of its numbers and recite large swaths of dialogue.
But I am hardly alone in this devotion. Recent example: a few weeks ago at an outdoor beer garden, a friend of Ryan’s, visiting from Oregon, joined us in the opening bars of “Seize The Day” so tenderly and sparklingly that we drew astonished compliments from a nearby table. “What was that?” the woman marveled. “It was beautiful!”
Indeed, the enduring cultish popularity of Newsies has now inspired an adaptation for theater. Academy-Award-winning composer Alan Menken is teaming up with Harvey Fierstein to translate the turn-of-the-century David-and-Goliath tale from screen to stage. Unfortunately, however, it appears that the new version is doomed to be bled of much of its political nuance, in favor of (you guessed it) the romance angle. Fierstein explains:
“In a musical, there’s an old rule: You must follow the love story. It gives the audience somewhere to go and someplace to rest their hearts.”
This slated snoozeifying shift is tragic, not because its motivations are wrong, but because they are right. You do need a love story. Thing is, Newsies already has one. But rather than the typical hetero-sapfest, it is chiefly a love story of solidarity: of workers learning to trust, defend, celebrate and enjoy one another.
I’ll admit, at six years old I came at Newsies heart-first. The head came later. But it did come. And this film affords ample room to grow into, intellectually.
So, in honor of one of my favorite movies of all time, here goes a series of posts: on the real-life lessons we can draw from Newsies.
Lesson One: You’ll Have To Deal with the Scabs.
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See that song up at the top?
Hear that part (around 0:50) where Boots asks Jack (the leader):
—”What’s to stop someone else from sellin’ our papers?”
—”Well we’ll talk wit’ em.”
—”Some of ’em don’t hear so good.”
—”So we’ll soak ’em!”
“Soaking” is newsie speak for “rolling up on,” or “beating up.” David immediately chimes in with the typical liberal nonviolent objection: No, we can’t be violent! It’ll give us a bad name!
How this violence vs. nonviolence conflict resolves itself through the film testifies to the realism that elevates the movie beyond fun to fascinating. Spoiler: They do use violence. Why? Because they have to, in order to maintain a hard picket line. And this bears out in the history of labor unions in the United States.
[My father] was a union man. There was a dual union— one for whites and one for blacks. He said we should have one big union but a white and a black is better than none. He was making big money—eight dollars a day. I used to brag that “My father makes eight dollars a day.” But he taught me that “you got to belong to the union, even if it’s a black union. If I wasn’t in the union I wouldn’t make eight dollars a day.”
New Orleans is a trade union town. My father had seen the longshoremen organize and they made a lot of money. Unions were not new to this city. And I mean they had unions! When they came out on strike, there were no scabs. You know why there were no scabs? Because you carried your gun. The pickets had guns and they would blow your brains out.
Real talk. And even though Newsies‘ slightly sanitized brawls depict fists, slingshots, and rotten fruit (the opposing side, with hired Pinkerton types, is armed with much more deadly weapons — chains, bats, and brass knuckles — and backed by police), not to mention the conspicuous absence of racial tensions among the workers, nonetheless, the movie does show them defending their strike from scabs through use of force. Not only shows, but cheers it.
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Nowadays, though? Fighting scabs appears to be taboo: at least in mainstream media. Take the recent and relevant example of the ILWU strike up in Washington.
Longshore workers have shut down ports in the Pacific Northwest as they confront a scab grain terminal operation, block trains, dump grain shipments and stand up to a police attack on their picket lines.
Just two days ago, workers (including the local longshore president) and supporters (mostly women) blocked another train from entering the EGT grain terminal. Police responded with mass arrests and liberal application of pepper spray.
Bill Wagner / The Daily News. Law enforcement personnel wrestle ILWU Local 21 longshoreman Kelly Muller to the ground as they arrest protesters and try to clear the tracks so a Burlington Northern-Santa Fe grain train can pull into the EGT grain terminal at the Port of Longview on Wednesday morning.
For mounting these defenses, these workers are pilloried as “thugs” and “goons.” A CNN reporters openly laughed at them. Other reporters deny that the ILWU is fighting true scabs at all, claiming that this all boils down to pig-headed union-vs.-union beef. (David Macaray debunks that argument handily.)
Courts, meanwhile, find the ILWU in contempt: which happens in Newsies, too. In fact, one of the film’s greatest political strengths, in my mind, is how it shows the institutional and corporate-backed violence not only matching but outstripping the workers’ use of physical force. Put in this context of severe power imbalance and active repression, the viewer naturally sympathizes with the newsies’ self defense, even if it is technically “criminal.”
But we’ll save the legality subject for the next post in the series.
For now, I am curious, especially from the Buddhist/spiritual folks who live in commitment to nonviolence: how do you propose dealing with scabs? When workers organize to halt production and the company predictably pushes back, what levels of strategic property destruction and physical force, if any, do you find legitimate? Have you ever been in such a situation? (For the record: I haven’t.)
Share your thoughts, and take care. See you next week with more Disney labor lessons!
Ok, Jamie Foxx sometimes seems like an arrogant, misogynist asshole (have you ever listened to his XM radio station???), but this had me crackin’ up this morning.
And speaking of musical improv . . . last night Ryan and I went with a friend and our neighbor Ineva to Monday Night Karaoke at a little neighborhood bar down the street from our apartment. None of us sang, but Good Lord some of those folks were talented, and talent or not, everyone was havin themselves a good time. Mostly middle-aged Black folks. Mostly Motown/R&B/soul, with Erykah and Jill Scott and the Temptations and Marvin all making appearances. If you know me and my outdated musical tastes, you’ll appreciate the extent of my enthrallment.
Folks, I’m going through it a little bit this week. Just a lot of complex stuff coming up. Haven’t found the right words for sharing it here, yet. But in the meantime, this video of my friend and fellow Goddardite — vocalist, composer, interfaith priestess, and cultural worker Imani Uzuri — made me smile today in a full, full way. Not only does Imani bless the world with mad artistic skills (including, but not limited to, the most moving voice I’ve ever heard in person in my whole entire life: no lie), she also illuminates the people around her with her spiritual reflections, historical insights, unbeatable hilarity, and genuine compassion.
Here, she reminds us of the importance of exploring and loving our always-complex selves. It reminds me of an essay I read yesterday in the current issue of make/shift: a piece by Alexis Pauline Gumbs called “M/Othering Ourselves: A Black Feminist Genealogy, Or, The Queer Thing.” The essay in turn takes its inspiration from a line from Audre Lorde: “We can learn to mother ourselves.” Gumbs asks:
What would it mean for us to take the word mother less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us right now?
I hear this question (and its associated family of questions) echoed in Imani’s 120-second share. (And enacted, unwittingly, in the sweet out-takes in the final few seconds.)
Imani’s work itself is powerful enough; being in her presence during Goddard residencies, and seeing the mind, soul, and radical self-mothering behind the music, has been an extraordinary gift to me. She’s real and grounded, as well as spiritually developed and crazy talented. Quite the combo. Check her out, and join me in celebrating the friends who inspire us, even unknowingly, while we’re slogging along.
Via cnekez, keeper of the beautiful blogspace to live (def):.
Interviewer: Isn’t love a union between two people? Or does Eartha fall in love with herself?
Eartha Kitt: [Smiles] I think, if you want to think about it in terms of analyzing … Yes. I fall in love with myself … and I want someone to share it with me. I want someone to share me with me.
Seems to me that Eartha Kitt (a singer, dancer, and actress) is talking about falling in love with the whole world. Even with the interviewer — asking those leading, loaded questions.
She cuts right through his seeming innocence (or cluelessness?), mocking the true misogynistic subtext: that a woman is incomplete without a man (hello, heterosexism), and that in order to make love ‘work’, women have to ‘compromise.’ (And in this sexist, racist society, we know what that means, y’all.)
To me, this scene is a profound display of pitch-perfect compassion. As Khandro Rinpoche says, “Compassion is not about kindness. Compassion is about awareness.” She is on some next-level shit here. And she is sharing it.
What does it mean to fall in love with oneself (“for the right reason; for the right purpose”)?
Sometimes I really have fun subverting the “reality drama” genre, you know? Because the drama of reality isn’t always about sex, vices, arguments, competition, smack-talking, appraising, or unraveling. (In other words: getting what we want, and disparaging what we hate.) The drama of reality can also refer to explorations of the utterly mundane. Making ordinariness an occasion for attention. In this case, that might mean cooing like an idiot over a cat, and giving a sloppy, unnecessary video tour of the house you grew up in.
Arguably, the boring stuff does not qualify as “drama.” (After all, what’s the purpose of the word if it just encompasses everything?) But my point is that drama is not an objective category. It depends less on the particular content and more on the mind we bring to it.
We think of drama as being juicy, compelling, and maybe a little dirty. That’s what we expect, and in a way, that’s what we want. At the heart of drama is conflict. Non-drama is non-conflictual.
But fortunately for us everyday drama queens, there is a fundamental, inescapable basis for conflict underlying every single experience of our lives.
Hey friends! Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth so suddenly! I went into another Vipassana meditation retreat (my third so far under S. N. Goenka), and by the time I realized I’d forgotten to update the blog about it, it was too late: no phone, internet, reading, writing, or speaking for ten long days. Thanks to everyone who’s visited and written to me in the meantime — a number of delightful messages and comments when I arrived home to San Francisco. Mmmm.
For the first day or two since returning from the retreat, I’d been experiencing something of a blockage. A mild panic or depression that left me feeling that all the activities and avenues I had been struggling to juggle up until the meditation course — work at the Faithful Fools; grad school and blogging; political study; and day-to-day dharma practice — were far too hazy, murky, massive, or complicated for me to ever significantly impact or contribute to any of them. It’s been a long time since I felt such strong pessimism and self-doubt, and the timing — directly after a Vipassana retreat, which usually leaves me feeling giddy and abundant — added to the confusion.
Fortunately, I had just spent almost two weeks focusing at a deep level on the reality of change. So I did the best that I could do: watched and waited. Tried not to spin out or magnify things unnecessarily. Felt and explored the negativity, stayed curious about it, rather than trying to push it away.
And wouldn’t you know — it worked! Today my feet started coming back under me, thanks to some conversations with Ryan as well as three key pieces of media: one video, one book, and one radio segment.
I’ll share the book and the radio spot in the next few days. The video, below, is an independent documentary made for this year’s East Bay Meditation Center annual fundraiser. Seeing it today for the first time since early February, when it debuted at the event with Alice Walker and Jack Kornfield, reminded me just how much this organization inspires me, and how fortunate I am to be able to take part in it. (Even participating in the documentary making was great! Met some wonderful fellow members, and the filmmaker was tremendous, too.)
No more introduction necessary, really. Enjoy! And if you feel so moved, join in.
Jay Smooth gets it right on. Now this is real metta (lovingkindness). As Sharon Salzberg says,
The practice of lovingkindness is, at a certain level, the fruition of all we work toward in our meditation. It relies on our ability to open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, not cutting off the painful parts, and not trying to pretend things are other than they are.
Unrelenting pressure to be positive is not real love or kindness, even if it’s coming from good intentions. It’s only when we let go of expectations for joy or peace that real, honest listening and caring can occur.
Kloncke 