Solidarities
Back in 2012 I completed a research study, Mexican Solidarity with the Salvadoran Revolution: Solidarity as a Mutually Empowering Process. That year I learned from two mujeres who, after having experienced the indiscriminate, violent, and homogenizing politics of ICE, who raided restaurant kitchens with the sole purpose of arresting and deporting as many brown bodies as possible, apathetic to national origins and cultural nuances, realized that very little separated them from their Salvadoran compañerxs. That their struggle against an intervening US government was their own.
I've learned, practiced and meditated a lot on what solidarity might mean and look like in organizing and existing, loving and resisting. This interview, from La Onda Latina, a treasure trove of oral histories of political and creative organizing from the 70-80s, has revived those lessons in me.
From undocumented mexican womxn organizers with the Salvadoran Revolution to chicanxs with greater and multiple mexican communities, we find, as Cherie Moraga wrote in Loving in the War Years, avenues through which we learn the most "about silence and oppression as it continues to be the most tactile reminder that we are not free human beings." The proximity and intimacy of coming together, perhaps by chance or ugly circumstance, we become willing to adapt the wholeness of your collective existence, and move forward to combat the wholeness of your oppression.
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/program?sernum=000534549&term=