Marian's Blog

Que pasa in Oaxaca?

"Habia una vez una vaca ..." She was a student in Laredo when my daughter memorized and publicly recited Maria Elena Walsh's poem about a very astute cow from "la quebrada de Humahuaca." Read it below. I've always thought Humahuaca (oo ma WA ka) actually might have been Oaxaca.

Americans seem conditioned to talk about Mexico without ever really knowing or talking about most of Mexico herself. The current state of the state of Chiapas (also in Mexico) is just one of many stories of things, small, large, and in-between, going on in the Americas that are too rarely or infrequently reported - let alone discussed - in the U.S. press. This is why I swooped in on Marc Lacey's little article in the New York Times and reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. Now we knew Marc in Nairobi, and earlier this year I blogged about his coverage of U.N. abuses of women and children in the Congo. So I'm guessing this Mexico story signals a major switch in Marc's beat. This particular article is about some of Oaxaca's citizens versus the local arm of Mexico's powerful political party, the well-established PRI (Partido revolucionario institucional), and how some say the PRI allegedly operates (via state governor Joel Ruiz) in this particular southern Mexican state.

On Racism & Fascism: Stan Goff's article at Alternet.org

Finished reading retired soldier Stan Goff's article which asks if the U.S. is becoming fascist. It's quite detailed. He even writes about the U.S. military recruiting, inadvertently or otherwise, straight-up white supremacist racists. Goff concludes: "They are not Arabs who are painting Aryan Nations graffiti on the shattered walls of Baghdad." Can you imagine?? Along with everything else Iraqi people have been forced to go through and to subject themselves to, to endure. Goff's last line made me recall a local train ride from Sisak to Zagreb, in Croatia. One afternoon I noticed something written on the gray stone wall at one station where the train always stops along the way. Unusually, what I saw not only was written in large, bold letters, but in perfect English. It caught me by surprise. It was the "N" word. In the middle of Croatia.

Right after, I wrote an official report to the international human rights mission in which I worked. No one ever responded. Two weeks later I again rode the train. Someone had painted over the N word. This was a relief and I'm glad someone did. And yet even that doesn't alter the fact the word had been there, and that I and many others witnessed it. That someone had thought about this, then gone and very deliberately taken paint and written this foreign word - the "N" word - in huge letters on a gray stone public wall facing every passing train. And they'd written it in perfect English.

Someday I shall remember which station it was, in which community. I wondered then and still it comes back. Who wrote it, and why? I was the only Black person for miles around. I never saw another Black person in that area, nor on the Sisak-Zaghreb train. Why that particular spot? Had someone written it for me to see? Was it written because of me? I'll never really know.