Part 1 of 2
On The Bacon Trail
Exposing Historical Myopia
By
Rodolfo F. Acuña
Historical myopia
causes nearsightedness, distorting one’s view of current and past events. It
interferes in distinguishing details. Consequently, we don’t pay much attention
to how and why the present has come about.
In general
American culture discourages complex thinking. Almost everything is viewed
through the prism of faith. Learning is reduced to bullet points with minimal evidence required. The
historian acts like a prosecuting attorney obsessed with proving his
hypothesis.
Without access to
witnesses, knowledge is rarely tested by experience. The historians’
presentations are thus based largely on suppositions rather than facts. History
is formed by institutional memories constructed by the state.
This is why I find
the work of David Bacon so refreshing. Every time I look at his photographs or
read his blogs or his books, I realize how myopic we have become, and what is
wrong with the education of so-called scholars. For some time, I have admired Bacon’s
photographs especially those of farmworkers. However, I did not begin to look
behind the photographs until recently.
About five years
ago I got involved with the struggle to save the Tucson Unified School District’s
Mexican American Studies program as well the fight against Arizona’s
xenophobia. My fight against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)
alerted me to the privatization of Arizona and I could thus see the issues
clearly.
Bacon’s writings
like his photographs are art for change’s sake.
He is the author of books on labor, immigration, globalization and
privatization, and has published articles for TruthOut, The Nation, The
American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle, travelling
frequently to Mexico, the Philippines, Europe and Iraq. Bacon is a modern day
Jack London without xenophobic biases.
Bacon is a
scholar, not an academician. He does not wear degrees on his chest like battle
ribbons. His knowledge comes from life experiences; "Unions are schools. People learn about the realities of the
world and raise their expectations of what they want their world to be
like."
I found a 2012
article in The Nation “How US Policies
Fueled Mexico's Great Migration instructive. Bacon tells the story of Roberto
Ortega, a displaced Veracruzana butcher. NAFTA opened up Mexican markets to
massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods. Ortega, a
small-scale butcher, was wiped out as prices dropped. In 1999 he was forced to
migrate to Tar Heel, North Carolina, where he worked ironically for Smithfield
in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse.
Smithfield’s Tar
Heel packinghouse became Veracruz’s displaced the farmers’ number-one US
destination. “Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping
Smithfield’s bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US
meatpacking lines.” Meanwhile, businesses in the Vera Cruz went broke.
Under NAFTA
Smithfield had access to subsidized US corn, an advantage that drove many Mexicans out of business, as US corn
“was priced 19 percent below the cost of production.” Moreover, NAFTA allowed it to import pork in
Mexico. By 2010 pork imports grew more than twenty-five times, to 811,000 tons.
As a consequence
of imported pork, Mexico lost 4,000 pig farms, 120,000 jobs. Rural poverty rose
from 35 percent in 1992–94 to 55 percent in 1996–98. By 2010, 53 million Mexicans were living in
poverty—half the country’s population almost all in rural areas.
Bacon strings
verbal photos showing the effects of the expansion of the H2-A visa program
that “allows US agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and
other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts.” The
pull of landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz added to the pool of migrant workers
in the Carolinas.
In Mexico
Smithfield and other American operations were unburdened by the environmental
restrictions. Carolina Ramirez, who
heads the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, said that
“the company can do here what it can’t do at home.” In early 2009, the first
confirmed case of swine flu spread to Mexico City. By May, forty-five people
were confirmed with swine flu and schools closed.
Bacon shows how
NAFTA caused the Mexican Migration. He also shows how in the face of disaster
Mexican workers organized against the physical repression of Smithfield and
other companies as well as the complicity of the American media.
It is clear that
the Union is Bacon’s leader, and the key to resistance on both sides of the
border. “We are fighting
because we are being destroyed,”
says Roberto Ortega. “That is the reason for the daily fight, to try to change
this.”
Bacon’s book The Children of
NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border is a word picture that according to Bacon, is a world hidden from our
view. Again the dragons are NAFTA, poverty and repression. Bacon exposes the
exploitation in places such as the Mexicali Valley, and the deplorable housing
in Tijuana and other border cities. The heroes are the tireless union
organizers. The link between neoliberal polices and the suffering is clear.
The bottom-line
poverty forces Mexicans to move to the USA, with the chickens coming home to
roost.
A critique all of
Bacon’s writing and photo essays is beyond the scope of this blog. The strength
of David is his grasp of details and his ability to weave them into the fabric
of current history. It exposes the reasons for Enrique Peña Nieto’s
privatization and his crude repression of the Normalistas.
David lays it out
in US-Style School
Reform Goes South: “Just weeks
after taking office, Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, ordered the
arrest of the country’s most powerful union leader, Elba Esther Gordillo, a
longtime ally. The press said PRI was cracking down on corruption. But, Bacon
wanted to know the real reason for her arrest, notwithstanding the obvious fact
that she was corrupt.
Progressive Mexican educators saw it as an
attack on public education and the rights of teachers. They fought back, and
the state tried to silence the growing opposition to U.S. style PRI proposals
to standardized tests and remove the voice of the union in hiring. They were
not “Waiting for
Superman” and standing by while
Mexican education was privatized.
Significant to the teachers was that “Superman” was first screened on
the twenty-fourth-floor offices of the World Bank rather than in movie theaters.
Bacon wrote, “A network of large
corporations and banks extends throughout Latin America, financed and guided in
part from the United States, pushing the same formula: standardized tests,
linking teachers’ jobs and pay to test results, and bending the curriculum to
employers’ needs while eliminating social critique. In both countries, there
was grassroots opposition—from parents and teachers. In Seattle, teachers at
Garfield High refused to give the tests. In Michoacan, in central Mexico,
sixteen teachers went to jail because they also refused.”
PRI accused teacher-training schools
(“normal schools”) of leading opposition to charter schools. PREAL,
established by the
Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. and
the Corporation for
Development Research in Santiago, Chile, in 1995, set the neoliberal
agenda. PREAL’s mission was building a broad and active constituency “for
education reform”. Behind PREAL were powerful forces led by Ford and the World
Bank. Moreover, PREAL received grants from the US Agency for International
Development (USAID allegedly a CIA front).
Normal schools
throughout Mexico are battling neoliberal reforms. The election of PRI in 2012
galvanized this opposition. It was clear to PRI that the power of the
Normalistas had to be broken if it was to gain popular support. It was a war
for the control of Mexico’s historical memory.
Note: Part II will deal with the importance of Ayotzinapa,
its history – following the Bacon Trail.
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