Idealize This | Solidarity Tipsheet

Written for Hyphen on September 11, 2009, and cross-posted at Racialicious.

My last column, about the ethical differences between charity and solidarity, was a heavy-handed critique of NYT Magazine’s “Saving the World’s Women” issue. Good criticism, however, ought always be tempered by practical suggestions for improvement. So, for this week, I’ve distilled the opinions of other critics, suggestions of notable theorists, and my own rich reserve of activist foibles into 3 simple (albeit wordy) tips for doing solidarity work the right way.

Tip #1: Realize that, no matter how much you know, you actually don’t know shit.

When Americans set out to work transnationally, we have a tendency to assume that our education, or experience, or even underprivileged upbringing makes us both “insiders” into other people’s struggles as well as qualified to tell them how to address it. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that a poli sci major, a backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, and/or a stint as the president (and incidentally only member) of your local Amnesty International Chapter makes you qualified to be anything more than an asshole just shy of completing an undergraduate degree.

Third World activists, as well as scholars studying transnational activism, have long decried the Western tendency to speak for, over, and about people of the Third World under the seemingly benign mantle of “global sisterhood” or “global citizenship” or some other similar ideal that blurs the ethnocentrism of their efforts. The first UN Women’s Conference in 1975 is a well-known example of this conflict: many Third World participants took issue with the feminist manifesto drawn up by white American feminist Gloria Steinem, which had been touted as a common framework for action, but was crafted without input from Third World activists.

Eminent postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty similarly made waves a decade later, when her 1988 essay, “Under Western Eyes,” deconstructed the ethnocentric and ironically paternalistic analyses of Third World women that was (and is) prevalent in Western feminist scholarship. Delia Aguilar, another feminist theorist hailing from the Philippines, similarly argues that there is no such thing as “international sisterhood” and talks at length in many of her books about her problematic interactions with well-intentioned but misguided scholars and activists who wrongly presume that their experiences in the west qualify them to speak on women’s issues elsewhere.

If you really want to be effective (as opposed to annoying, useless, and embarrassed), get over yourself. Listen before speaking, and pause before acting. To paraphrase Aguilar, you have to illuminate these power relations in order to make unity possible.

Fair Trade and Hunger Strikes: My Day in Manila

Mabuhay! I’m in the Phils for a couple of weeks visiting my family for the holidays- and frantically trying to collect some interviews for a paper I’m writing on alternatives to current Philippine trade policy. Because I’m only gonna be here for a short time, I only had one day to spend in Manila for visiting relevant organizations. Fortunately I had a contact from Advocate for Philippine Fair Trade, Inc (APFTI), who freed up his whole day to take me around the city to meet with different groups.

The APFTI staff was wonderfully welcoming. Besides taking the morning to tell me about their programs and projects, they ordered in lunch for us, and spent the afternoon visiting fair trade businesses in Manila with me.
APFTI shares a space with another similar organization called Filipinas Fair Trade Ventures (FFTV). While APFTI provides small-scale producers and businesses with empowerment trainings, product development, market facilitation and coaching, FFTV works on constructing a network of fair trade businesses and organizations in the Philippines.

We met up with the Community Relations Officer from Rags to Riches, an org that is really similar to LOH in many ways – not only was it started with a grant from a social entrepreneurship competition, it’s managing committee consists completely of people under 25 and are less than a year old too! They have partnered with a group of nanays (mothers) from a slum in Quezon City who weave rugs from scrap cloth, and are working to form the women into a cooperative, develop more marketable products using the same recycled materials and weaving technique, and they market and sell the products so the nanays end up getting about a 100 % increase in income. Most of the nanays work from home, but the group we visited works together in an alleys between their houses. Upon some encouragement, I attempted to weave a rug but my work didn’t meet their strict quality control standards )

The two youngest nanays from Rags to Riches cut scrap cloth and weave a rug.

One of the nanays teaches Joy (from APFTI) how to weave.

Next we visited a group of women living in the same area who make beads from old newspapers and magazines. Thanks to APFTI, they are now connected to buyers from all over the world and fill orders for fair trade retailers like 10,000 villages. When we visited them, the 25 women were filling an order for 30,000 decorative bottles wrapped in their paper beads — meaning that each woman has to make 40 bottles per day to meet their deadline. They work out of their homes, as well, with their children nearby.

This woman is from Daet, the same town my mom is from. Here, she's gluing strings of beads she made to a glass bottle that will be shipped to a retailer in the Netherlands.

As we drove around the city, we passed by the House of Representatives where farmers and activist groups were protesting the end of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, which has redistributed farm lands from the government and land-holding elite to small farmers in an effort to alleviate poverty and ensure food security in the country. The protesters were hunger striking at the time I was there (many hadn’t eaten anything for as long as 18 days) because the program was ending before all tenable lands had been redistributed. In addition, a joint resolution that had been introduced into Congress with the intention of “extending” CARP actually privileges wealthy land owners by giving them the option of redistributing their land or not.

Protestors in front of the house of representatives

Two days after I left Manila, the House had passed the unjust Joint Resolution 19 despite the hunger strike and pressure from progressive lawmakers who promptly issued a statement saying:

We have decided not to be a party to the landlord-dominated House of Representatives’ pretension and deception of the Filipino peasantry and the people in extending the bogus Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). [...] This sham joint resolution further strengthens the landlords’ monopoly and control over vast tracts of agricultural lands in the country and will surely lead to the massive eviction of peasants and land-grabbing in the countryside.

It will also open the floodgates to the proliferation of various non-land distribution schemes like the Stock Distribution Option in Hacienda Luisita and the corporative scheme in the Cojuangco-controlled lands in Negros.

We call on the Filipino peasantry to intensify the struggle for genuine land reform in the countryside, in the parliament of the streets, and in Congress.

Junk the pro-landlord and bogus CARP!

Expose and oppose the anti-peasant Joint Resolution extending CARP for six months!

Struggle for genuine agrarian reform! Enact House Bill 3059!

Read more about this at Manila Indymedia.

I have a few more groups to try and visit when I’m back in Manila on Dec. 29 – hopefully some people will be there despite the holidays!

Summer Sound Bites Benefiting LOH and WBB’s Juarez Projects!

Community, Privilege, and other things we forget

We spent the past weekend in Juarez visiting with the women’s co-op with which Las Otras Hermanas (LOH) has partnered.

[For those of you who don't know, LOH is the fair trade non-profit we're starting in an effort to foster economic and community development. In Juarez, we're working with ALDEA, a small community organization  that has created a handicraft center for the women in the community.]

We planned to spend Saturday and Sunday with ALDEA, while we reserved Friday night for tweaking our business plan, but things went slightly off course when a huge division within the group nearly dissolved the organization.

Evidently, two of the four people comprising our managing committee had some serious concerns with the organization, mostly rooted in a lack of trust in other members, and communication difficulties.  It seems that one member of the organization was convinced that we had lost sight of our goal, and had interpreted our decision to spend the last few weeks solely on our business plan as a sign of our lack of commitment to ALDEA. Another member felt undervalued. One person thought another had too much personal ambition, another person thought someone lacked commitment, and everyone seemed very upset about the fact that, during meetings, I militantly refuse to deviate from the agenda.  Everyone felt disillusioned. So we ALL came out with our problems, and reservations and worries and spent six hours hashing out our differences in an effort to try and find a common ground (and convince one member not to leave the organization).

But while we walked away from that meeting feeling a little bit better, and having created some communication guidelines that should help us keep the peace, I nevertheless felt like something was still seriously wrong, something was still missing.

Why were we having all of these problems within LOH when we all worked together so well within Women Beyond Borders? LOH was born from WBB; they can’t be that different, I thought.

The next day we trudged into rainy Juarez, which we found terribly flooded – so much so, in fact, that Vero (our contact from Mexico Solidarity Network) wasn’t able to pick us up at the border as planned because she couldn’t leave her house. Consequently, we spent the morning wandering around the city, wading through streets, until the waters lowered enough to allow Vero to pick us up.

Cassie, Andrea, Vero, Me, and Charis at a restaurant in Pronaf, where Vero picked us up after the rain.

Flooded streets. This was *after* the water had gone down!

On the way to the handicraft center, Vero gave us another tour of the industrial parks, intermittently cursing the flooded streets which nearly stalled our van. Along the sides of the roads, rows of stalled cars were abandoned or being pushed through the water, while some young people took to boogey-boarding in between them. You see, these floods are one consequence of the city’s lack of infrastructure, Vero said.

At the handicraft center, we were delighted to find that a bright mural now covered one side of the building. It had been painted by some neighborhood kids, we learned, who were starting a community art project: they’re painting walls in the neighborhood in an effort to preserve and express their culture, and themselves – using the color and design scheme of the mural we painted last March!

As we sat outside of the handicraft center, someone suggested starting the meeting by going around in a circle and listing one thing each of us likes about ALDEA and one thing each of us likes about LOH. Though a lot of wonderful things were said, I only remember two – because upon hearing them, I immediately realized what we (LOH) had forgotten.

Antonio, one of the founding members of ALDEA, an incredible person.

Vero, Laura and her children sitting outside of the handicraft center before the meeting.

Antonio said, “I like ALDEA because, as myself, I can do nothing. But as a community, we can do everything.” Then Vera added, “This organization is about families, and because it’s about families, we’ve become a family.”

And I realized that LOH’s problem wasn’t about a failure to prioritize ALDEA or solely about poor communication, but about our failure to create and foster a sense of community within LOH.

That night at the motel, I told our group what I thought: that the pressure to not fail, to be professional, to fit in with the excessively corporate tone of Edson and Skysong - combined with the added stress of our petty squabbles and personality differences had a created standard at LOH that dictated the complete division of the personal from the professional. When conflicts arose, for example, our mantra became “Just let it go; You don’t have to be friends to work together.”

Shameful.

Maybe if we were a different kind of organization – one that only cared about the bottom line – we could succeed with that line of thinking. But how could be honestly claim to advocate for ALDEA, commit to their vision, and prioritize their needs, if we don’t espouse the same values that they do?

It wasn’t always that way. In Women Beyond Borders, one-third of our mission is about fostering sisterhood and supporting each other just as much as we strive to support women elsewhere. We appointed a Wellness Chair to maintain the general well-being of members by recognizing milestones, remembering birthdays, and planning social events to alleviate stress and reduce activist burnout. We co-wrote Principles of Unity, for crying out loud! But, somehow, those commitments and values had not carried over into LOH.

So I told the girls that I don’t believe LOH can succeed unless we change that tone and change our strategy and that, instead of committing to LOH or solely committing to ALDEA, we *have* to commit to each other. We should be a family, like Women Beyond Borders is a family, and like ALDEA is a family. And you don’t walk away from your family.

LOH may fail for many reasons – maybe our business plan won’t work, or maybe we won’t be able to market the products successfully enough – but if it fails, it can’t fail because we couldn’t get along or because we didn’t try.

Edson gave us $20,000 of “learning money.” The program knows we may fail, and probably expects many of us to – it’s the learning that’s important, they think. While the members of the cooperative were unanimously deciding to give up forty percent of their already meager earnings to help develop their community, we were getting $20,000 of learning money. That’s privilege. We didn’t earn that, and we don’t deserve that. But we got that. The women of the co-op earn the money they make, and they deserve a lot more than they get.

The four of us often play around about how oppressed we are, but we are excessively privileged. Not only because of the money, but because we (even for a second) felt entitled to entertain the idea of quitting, simply because we didn’t get along. Because at the end of the day, we leave Juarez’s flooded streets for a dry motel 6 in El Paso. Because at the end of the weekend, we come back to Phoenix, go back to our on-campus jobs, open our macbooks, and write blog entries about privilege. We are so privileged.

So we decided to change things. To start caring more about and committing to each other, committing to building a community within LOH that ALDEA wouldn’t be ashamed to partner with.