Through the Prism of Nonviolence

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2013-2014

By John Heid 

Among the thousands of photos taken at a bus blockade in Tucson in early October one picture, taken by an Al Jazeera photographer, crystallizes the moment starkly and simply. The image leaves an indelible, if not iconic impression. 

Through the grimy, barred windows of a private prison bus, a young Latino can be faintly seen bowing with folded hands. His shackles drape, like a priest’s stole, from wrist to waist to unseen ankles. His barely visible face is solemn, his gaze dignified. Who is this man? What has he done? How did he come to this fate? Why is he chained? Why is he headed, or rather herded, to federal court and “Operation Streamline”? (For more information on Operation Streamline, visit www.EndStreamline.org, or see the Fall 2012 Nukewatch Quarterly.) 

Is he a member of one the 17 million US families separated by immigration policy and law? Is he one of the 70% of those crossing the border to return to his family? Could he be one of the two-thirds of those without “status” who have lived in the US over a decade? He’s wearing a Shell Oil Co. shirt. Was he snatched on his way to work, or while on the job? 

Is this man another casualty of immigration enforcement, or is he part of a vanguard of a social transformation movement? Or is he just a guy trying to make a living, support his family and live in peace? Does he bow supplication or solidarity? 

Once again the workhorse of motor vehicles, a bus, becomes the flash point of a human rights campaign, vaguely reminiscent of civil rights days and the accessibility rights movement. This time, the issue is not about equal access to public transportation. The issue is why people are on the bus in the first place — chained to the benches. The heart of the story is contained within the buses, not with the protesters locked-down underneath them. Thus, the action has appropriately taken on the moniker the Streamline 72, the number of men held in the two blocked vehicles. 

Media and public curiosity were immediately drawn to the canary yellow-shirted activists that for four hours immobilized two G4S private security buses en route from an immigration detention facility to the federal courthouse — and to those who simultaneously locked down the parking lot of the federal complex. Yet, as the aforementioned photo intimates, the back story belongs to the manacled passengers. 

Yes, one can celebrate that the wheels of injustice were halted for a proverbial minute. A momentary monkey wrench in the judicial gristmill called Operation Streamline. And yes, one can be amused by the “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” approach of the police trying to figure out how to sever the “dragon sleeves” that held the buses in place. And certainly we are grateful that the 72 bus riders were not branded with criminal charges that day. Still they were deported post haste through distant ports of entry. 

So, after a deep breath, we look to dismantling the apparatus that was interrupted for a day, which is to say shutting down “Streamline” and ultimately ending all deportations. As the popular chant declares: “Not one more deportation.” 

The action, consistent with the philosophy and practice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., created a tension “so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.” (“Letter From A Birmingham Jail”) While those on the bus are palpably in bondage, it is our “filthy rotten system” that binds all of us, heart, mind and soul. For many US citizens, the chains are invisible. The blockade served to raise local and national awareness, but the story remains woefully incomplete, even inaccurate, if we do not acknowledge that we too are bound by Streamline. 

That October morning we merely joined a human rights struggle and its contemporary vanguard — those bus riders in chains. They are the primal revolutionaries. They are the ones who envision a continent, and a world, where work is shared along with wealth, where borders are not walls but way stations. Theirs is a story of human passion and persistence which began years ago and miles away. It is humanity’s story. They are the ones who at risk of life and liberty struggle for a “new world in the shell of the old” for all of us. Those of us around and under the bus were an ad hoc affinity group for those inside. Those who engage in human rights work are supporting the vision of those who have been in this justice struggle across generations. It is a vision we share in and outside the bus. That October morning a peculiar, powerful solidarity was reaffirmed, and sealed in chains, as we all left the scene in cuffs. 

Above my desk the anonymous man in the Al Jazeera photo peers out at me, into me. His visage is seared into my psyche. I look back at the photo and ask, as Gandhi advised, if my next steps will be of any use to this person. “Will it restore him to a control over his life and destiny?” (the Gandhi “Talisman”) 

I notice the rider in chains is bowed, but unbowed. He knows where he’s going because he knows where he’s been. So, as I contemplate the trajectory and character of my next step, the query reads more like: Is the next step I take going to make any difference in my life, let alone his? Our fates are ultimately interwoven, aren’t they? After all, we’re all passengers on the same bus. Life. 

— John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa Community in Tucson, Arizona.

Through the Prism of Nonviolence

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2013

By John Heid 

“Beauty will save the world.” — Prince Myskin, in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot 

“He is not resting. He is watching. He is waiting, he’s expecting justice.” — Arizona Daily Star, Ernesto Portillo 

One night their faces appeared on the wall of an abandoned building on Congress Street, a few blocks from the federal courthouse. No apparition. No desert mirage. Simply portraits of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez and Brisenia Flores. The artists are anonymous, or rather, the images are the author’s. Their mere appearance bespeaks an innate authority.

In October 2012, US Customs and Border Patrol (CBC) agents shot 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez in the back seven times through the border fence. Jose, from Nogales, Sonora, was carrying a pizza home for dinner. No charges have been lodged against the agents involved. Jose is one of 19 individuals killed by CBC agents in the past two years. Now, day and night, Jose’s plaintive, piercing eyes watch the passers-by on Congress St. His eyes expect justice. They demand it.

Early on a Sunday morning in May 2009, a self-avowed white supremacist and accomplices broke into 9-year-old Brisenia Flores’ home near the US-Mexico border. They shot Brisenia and her father while allegedly seeking drugs. None were found. The portrait of her young smile presses a simple query: “Why?”

Tucson editorialist Ernesto Portillo writes, “Brisenia and Jose Antonio Rodriguez were victims of violence connected to our country’s failed drug and immigration policies. Their deaths are deemed collateral damage, and public indifference smothers outrage.” (Arizona Daily Star July 14, 2013)

The suffocating silence of apathy is shaken by these images in the shadow of the federal courthouse. Their appearance puts paint to poet Langston Hughes’ dictim, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Art becomes a public indictment. The victims and their survivors will not rest until justice is served.

* * *

I embroider letters, I stitch stories. I stitch you and I stitch me to you, dead countryman. — From The Eye of the Needle, by Beatriz Iturribarria 

More than 90,000 people have been killed in Mexico alone in the US-Mexico drug war. Another 20,000 are missing. In 2011, a handful of individuals in Mexico City formed the “Fuentes Rojas Group” (Red Fountains). They sought to raise visibility of this war by creating a memorial for every single victim. The name of each victim is hand-embroidered on starch white handkerchiefs in blood red thread. The Fuentes Rojas Group’s premier project is called “Bordando por la Paz” (Embroidering for Peace). These handkerchiefs are displayed in art-based public events. According to a Fuentes Rojas statement, the symbolic actions “promote peace, human dignity, justice and solidarity. Their goal is to empower the ability of citizens to act collectively by means of shared responsibility and meetings between people.”

In a public demonstration decrying the drug war violence, the first 3,000 kerchiefs were displayed last year adjacent to the Zocalo, or Plaza de la Constitución, in the heart of historic Mexico City. The exhibit is slated to travel to Paris and beyond. Many names are yet to be added and the list grows daily.

The embroidering is done privately and in small groups, communally. I’m reminded of Gandhi’s “constructive program” and the spinning wheels. The Indian cloth had both a symbolic and pragmatic impact. The embroidery has symbolic and political power.

* * *

“The creator asked all of the animals to watch and stay awake for seven nights. On the seventh day, only the owl and the panther were still awake and because they did not succumb to sleep, they were given the power to see in the dark.” — Cherokee creation story (adapted) 

“Escaping machine guns, bullets, hunger, running from place to place. Seeing people get killed and sleeping with my shoes on. That was my childhood.” — Wendy, from Guatemala 

Wendy’s self portrait of a blindfolded girl is one of the paintings currently being exhibited at the Tucson Art Museum’s unusual installation “The Museum as Sanctuary: Giving Voice to Tucson’s Refugees.” Wendy is a member of the Owl and Panther Project of the Hopi Foundation. For three years, youth and elders, many of them survivors of refugee camps and torture, have been putting their stories to canvas and parchment. Paint has been like an ointment; water colors a soothing balm. Now their works are on public display alongside the classics.

Nada, another one of the artists, wrote, “My painting expresses my dark feelings about what has happened to me.” Another, Patty, wrote, “My self-portrait was painted with my eyes closed because I want to be. I want to dream, just breathe…” And now she can, in primary colors, in public view.

The Cherokee creation story, after which Owl and Panther takes its name, is mirrored in the lives of people who have found sight through the darkness. They have an acuity that penetrates the violence of their experiences, and moves them from victim to survivor — to artist. Their works reveal a restored humanity in brilliant colors and in black and white sketches. <owlandpanther@hopifoundation.org>

Art is its own language. Its grammar circumvents the intellect and gets to the heart of a matter. History is rife with examples: From cellist, Vedran Smailovic playing Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” amidst exploding bombs during the siege of Sarajevo, to the poetry of Neruda in exile; from the scratch board images created by Nukewatch co-director Bonnie Urfer in myriad US prisons and jails (using contraband materials), to the watercolors that Liz McAlister of Jonah House in Baltimore sent daily to her children from Alderson Federal prison camp during an 18-month sentence.

Art and justice go together hand-in-hand. The cauldron of our imaginations — when expressed on canvas or a handkerchief or watercolor paper, on abandoned building walls and urban bridges, in iambic pentameter or a musical score — nurtures and restores the human spirit. It challenges the regimes of domination.

Artists take Gandhi’s constructive program to another level they call a “re-construction program.” Without beauty, to invert Dostoevsky’s insight, the world cannot be saved. After dismissing Prince Myskin’s insight for years, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel lecture noted that it is not a careless phrase but a prophecy. Art transforms the status quo and revolutionizes it — creatively. Despite all, it is beauty that will save the world.

— John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa Community in Tucson, Arizona.

Through the Prism of Nonviolence

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2013

By John Heid 

The sun was low in the mid-February sky, its warmth tempered by a cool breeze which sent dust swirling across the unhurried late afternoon streets, just another Sunday in South Tucson.

Raul was biking to Southside Presbyterian Church to make preparations for an immigration reform workshop. One block from the church he noticed three Tucson Police Department squad cars and a man in handcuffs, not an unfamiliar sight in this Latino/Latina neighborhood. Off to the side was a car full of children peering out from the windows and a woman in tears.

Raul stopped, parked his bike and approached the woman. “How can I support you?” he asked. She described how the police had pulled over her family on suspicion of child abduction and subsequently charged her husband with a child car seat violation and driving with a suspended license. After the officers determined that he, Rene Meza Huerta, did not have a valid license they alerted US Border Patrol (BP) for an immigration status determination. The police were awaiting its arrival.

Raul, a seasoned organizer and a green card holder, began texting friends to come and record the unfolding of yet another family separation in South Tucson. He recalls hearing children crying out for their dad behind him as he began to document the scene, writing down squad car license plate numbers and officers’ badge identification. A police sergeant approached. Raul asked him why the Border Patrol had been notified. The officer replied that Arizona law SB1070 requires that “any person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status determined before the person is released” if there is “reasonable suspicion of an unlawful presence.” Recognizing the racist chain reaction in motion, Raul queried further as to the basis for reasonable suspicion. The tone of the conversation shifted abruptly. The sergeant became irate and ordered to Raul to move on or risk arrest. Moments later the police put up yellow crime scene tape.

Raul texted more friends, and in those critical initial moments he went to a deeper place within himself. “How can I just document and stand by? I’m tired and fed up just recording these family break-ups.” As a member of Corazón de Tucson, a grassroots migrant justice organization, he’s seen many. “This time, there’s no way I’m going to let this happen without putting my body in the way.” He locked his bike at a safe distance, gave his backpack to the children’s mother, texted media and waited to see if BP would show up. They did. As agents put Rene in the BP “dogcatcher” truck, Raul crawled underneath. Recounting the events for me, Raul sarcastically ridicules the common misconception that Rosa Parks “was tired so she just sat down” on a Montgomery city bus that day in December 1955. He tells me, “I was tired so I just laid down!”

Neither the threats of felony charges, pepper spray, taser guns or even the pleas of friends who arrived on the scene saying “you can do more outside jail” could make him budge. “I need to make visible what happens daily in Tucson and around the country. Right now this is all invisible. If you release this father to his family I will come out,” he said to the police. “It’s your call.” He texted on. From underneath the engine of the truck he began sending photos as police moved in with pepper spray. “I never really feared for my life, but I knew it was going to be rough in more ways than one.” Raul knew that his actions could result in considerable physical discomfort and the loss of legal residence status.

The only moves he made of his own volition that afternoon were soul deep. After a heavy dousing of pepper spray Raul was forcibly extricated from beneath the vehicle, taken into BP custody and detained.

Nearly three months after that calm-turned-chaotic Sunday afternoon, Raul reflected with me from his office at the Southside Worker Center where he is employed as an advocate and organizer. While multiple federal charges against him are pending, Raul reminds me that Rene was deported two days after the incident despite activists’ concerted efforts to reunite the family. It happens every day all across the United States. One and a half million people have been deported in the last six years alone. “A system that criminalizes migration can never be authentically reformed,” Raul notes. “Humane immigration reform is not possible when you have 33,000 people held daily in over 250 detention facilities throughout the country.”

“So, why did you do it, Raul? Really?” I asked one last time. He responds, trying to close our interview, by saying, “We are all Rene.” I pushed him for more. “How so?” “Well, besides being a statement of solidarity, it’s a call-out for an end to injustice. All injustice. All dehumanization. We are reclaiming a humanity not currently recognized. Declaring ‘we are all Rene,’ although at varying levels, we condemn the political system that creates the conditions where the state tears apart families and communities.” He mentions the Mayan belief that, “You are my other me,” and adds the Zapatista mantra: “Detras de nosotros, estamos ustedes — Behind us, we are you.”

He is no Rosa Parks. No, he’s Raul Alcaraz Ochoa. And yet at the end of the day we are all Rene, all one, at varying levels, no exceptions.

Now, what will I do the next time I’m on the way to an organizing meeting and witness this injustice in front of me? What will you do?

— John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa Community in Tucson, Arizona.