March 31, 2022
On the early morning of September 11, 2001, when the news of the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York was first hitting the public media, Gustavo Gutierrez and I were returning from the Macehualli Day Labor Center located in “La Esquadra -the Square” in northern Phoenix, Arizona.
This section of Phoenix, “the square”, got its name from being the area in Phoenix where the highest percentage of Mexicans reside per square census block, predominantly renters in lower end units such as trailers and such. Also, this community had historically been the hub of day labor recruitment activities by the regional construction and service industries across the valley.
The day labor issue in Phoenix in 2001 was very contentious as it is now in 2022. The nefarious anti-Mexican pogrom of state sanctioned racial profiling which was in ascendency under the regime of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio would consequently lead to the passage of AZ SB1070 in 2010. The passage of AZ SB1070 and its copycat bills across the country broadened the pogrom of the normalizing “immigration” enforcement powers into the realm of community policing, and this phenomena of the normalization of and political socialization of racial animus across the country provided the political platform for the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency.
But the stain of racial animus that motivated AZ 1070 and that continues today in Arizona did not begin with Arpaio.
On September 8, 2014, I was asked to provide testimony in a four-hour long deposition before the attorneys for the State of Arizona who were attempting to defend the AZ SB107 legislation in a community legal challenge that eventually went to the US Supreme Court. When I was asked about my opinion of the discriminatory policing practices that AZ SB1070 officialized, I responded by saying that AZ SB1070 was the continuation of the experiment in American Apartheid that was previously called the theory of “Manifest Destiny”, aka American Exceptionalism which is motivated by the pathology of “White” supremacy.
One of the many community responses to the pogrom of AZ SB 1070 was the Macehualli Day Labor Center, which was established by a broad community coalition to provide a safe and orderly public infrastructure for the recruitment and dignified treatment of the Day Labor community in Phoenix. The project was realized and was an operational success in spite of constant harassment by KKK elements and Minuteman types who directly antagonized the day laborers and the employers on a regular basis.
The Macehualli Day Labor Center was a successful model of public partnership that was established under the principle of Special Measures as referenced in the International Labor Organization Convention 169, regarding the rights of Indigenous Peoples as Migrant Workers with Families.
Yet even today in 2022, to attempt to converse intelligently with the leadership or rank and file of the US labor movement regarding of the rights of Indigenous Peoples as Migrant Workers with Families in the context of International Human Rights law and standards as is articulated in Convention 169 is to address a void. The silence is not just deafening it is dehumanizing, deadly and inevitably – complicit in genocide.
Driving home on the freeway from the Macehualli Day Labor Center on 9/11, the first early morning reports on 9/11 of the number of fatalities was being estimated as being up to 5,000 lives. Attempting to grasp the enormity of the tragedy, I turned to Gustavo and asked him if he recalled any such similar scale of human loss in such a brief time. He paused and thought for a bit and then answered: “the Mayas of Guatemala”.
I also had come to the same recollection myself, not coincidently because Gustavo and I had both attended a continental indigenous encounter in 1991 in Guatemala where we were personal witnesses to the participation of the delegation from the Consejo Nacional de las Viudas de Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) in the October 12, 1991, protest march in Quetzaltenango. The membership of the CONAVIGUA has a base membership of 50,000. They are the enduring survivors of the genocidal war against the Maya that still rages in the continent, and which began with first fleet of invaders under Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1492.
To make the connection between October the 12th, 1492, and April 23, 2010, when AZ SB1070 became a law in Arizona, you have to pass by 1845 and jump on the train of Manifest Destiny. For the adherents of “White Supremacy” this is not a problem, after all its their train. For Mexicans, both established and not established per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the problem is compounded by the quislings of the Latino white supremacy narrative vis-a-vis the identity of “Mexican” as a concept of International Personality in the treaty territories and not merely another generic ethnic minority group.
For the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples who NEVER agreed to give the government of Mexico the right to negotiate with Uncle Sam over their territorial or human rights, the problem is the void in cognition, and thus recognition of the nature of Human Nationality as Original Nations of Mother Earth. The problem is rooted in the patriarchal padre nostro of the pathology of the Doctrine of Discovery, aka American Manifest Destiny.
Here are the words of Gustavo Gutierrez during the Indigenous Peoples Forum on the Impact of the Doctrine of Discovery in Arizona held at the House of Representatives in the Arizona State Capitol on March 23, 2012.
YouTube:
Gustavo Gutierrez at the Arizona State Capitol
Impact of the Doctrine of Discovery in Arizona
March 23, 2012
¡No somos ilegales, No somos
criminales!
¡Somos trabajadores de Pueblos Originales!
Canto Macehualli
Movimiento Mundial Macehualli
Comités de Defensa del Barrio
