Houston Social Forum and more

How do we form new coalitions, especially brown/black coalitions? What do the Katrina evacuees have in common with immigrant workers? What is the relationship between the levees they didn’t build in Louisiana and the Border where they are sending the money to build a fence? What about the environmental damage left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, does the impact on the environment outweigh the needs and rights of the people to return? What is the true cost of the war in Iraq and what relationship does it have with the increasing cost of gas? What do people really mean when they say: It’s not about the issues, it’s about the struggle?

These questions and a dozen more have been crowding my head for the past few months. Being involved with the planning for the first United States Social Forum has forced me to be open to a variety of issues and opinions. Creating a space for civic dialogue is a lot harder than it looks.
Why, because one has to be very purposeful about balance and representation if the base desire is to have a forum where all the people who care to attend can be heard and no one voice dominates.

It also means you have to be fearless and instead of avoiding the issues that create conflict among activist, organizers, grassroots communities, and cultural workers you attack them head on. One thing I learned during my classes in conflict resolution at Antioch University was that chaos is useful if you can harness it to bring about clarity and eventually a unified vision.

Our elders say the most difficult journey begins with one step. In Houston I found people who were ready and prepared to take that first step. Folks, who were willing and able jumped into the chaos, suffered the hurt feelings and bruised egos and tried to use the social forum as a way to open the arena of public discourse. They washed the family laundry in public in the hope that folks would see beyond their current relationships and ineffective waya of relating to each other. The organizers of the Houston Social Forum began the journey believing, another world is possible.

I came to Houston to bear witness to how organizers in the USA who were new to the social forum experience would interpret that experience in practice. I came because I knew that many of the people who evacuated from the Gulf Coast landed in Houston. Another reason was that the HSF sprang up outside of the process set up by the National Planning Committee for the USSF. There is a desire within the process to focus on organizations and their constituents, but being an artist I appreciate the wild card. Houston was an effort put forth by individual activist and organizers with little organizational support.

The night before Heather and Jennifer, two of the organizers had come to a small gathering at the home of my nephew and I got a chance to sit down with them. I asked how they came to decide about a social forum in Houston, not seen as a bastion of progressive politics. My first question was about the involvement of artists, I was told there is a real disconnect between the arts community and organizers in Houston. Unfortunately I hear this from too many communities.

Having read about the social forum they hoped it could help ease the situation in Houston of disconnection between progressive communities. The idea was brought forward and the organizing began. Using the consensus process they set out to unite around the principal of “one no and many yeses” as espoused by the Zapatistas. Not to focus on the one thing that folks said no to, but on the many things they could all say yes to.

We assemble Saturday morning for the first HSF events on the campus of Texas Southern University, an African-American school. The demographics of the school are not reflected in the participants. The crowd numbers close to 100, and is overwhelmingly white and over 40.

So it’s Saturday morning, 9:30am and I head up to the room for my workshop around the United States Social Forum. With me is Ruben Solis, an organizer with Southwest Workers Union in Austin and the southeast regional representative for the USSF.

I love to talk to Ruben when he speaks about the integration of our struggles. He is so clear about the past and his vision of a course for the future. Ruben says the time is ripe for social action and he believes this could bring an estimated 40,000 to the USSF. He believes that if we work congruent to what is happening we can integrate that energy into the social forum process. Because what we are seeing today is a movement set in motion by the people, he believes the energy will push other social and political movements to become more active.

With Ruben are Robert and Lupe. I consider myself well read when it comes to what is happening in my country, yet I was blown away by the information Robert and Lupe shared with us about their campaign to get the military to clean up the Kelly Air Force Base and clean up the toxins on the surrounding land. The toxins buried under ground have created a stew, and when it gets hot the fumes travel into the homes and into the water supply. The surrounding community has experienced high levels of cancer, loss of hair, rotting nails, fragile misshapen bones, kidney failure, even blindness.

When no one else joins us, it becomes obvious, that those who have come to the forum are focused on issues that do not extend, at least in their minds, to the US Social Forum. So I went to other workshops, passing out U.S. Social Forum handouts and checking out the crowd. I stopped in at the Transforming Ourselves workshop, which was very popular. The description of the workshop reads: “How to develop attractive personality so as to be a better person, spouse, parent or employee? Discussion on practical means of transforming ourselves to achieve our goals. A workshop on spiritual development.”

The competition for the small crowd was fierce, not only was there 7-8 workshops running simultaneously, but a series of wonderful films were running at the same time.

Immigration is treated as a major issue with a plenary and several workshops, however only the plenary is well attended. About 50 people gathered in the auditorium for the plenary on immigration. The panel was moderated by Mike Espinosa, managing editor of La Nueva Raza newspaper, and featured activists with various points of view on immigration issues. Panel members include two elders and two youth. The elders spoke first followed by the two youth.

Maria Jimenez began; she is with CRECEN (Centro de Recursos para Centroamericanos). Maria questioned the way the recent immigrant rallies have given prominent positions to politicians and those who were not a part of the movement. She asked the question, is this a moment of opportunism or movement building? “Immigrants are refugees of globalization”, she insisted then went on to explain that when the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund insist that a country restructure agriculture and create polices that shut down small business, a dignified life is no longer possible so people have to leave—to cross international borders to seek a better life. Current policies around the world on immigration are similar and they exist to support globalization and to repress the displaced working poor. She made the point that Political refugees and those with wealth move across borders legally and safely. It is unsafe and life threatening for poor workers – for the international working poor and displaced.

Ruben Solis, Southwest Workers Union, offered a short history of Mexico and the first intrusions from colonizers to the current wave of demonstrations and the planned May 1 rallies around the nation. “What we have seen in the past few months was long in the making going back to the 1950’s when our leaders began the fight for the most exploited of workers—the undocumented worker.” He spoke about the role of NAFTA—dislocating indigenous people’s collective land holdings and creating new poor displaced class of workers. He admitted that the number of people who have participated in the immigration rallies have been surprising and welcome, surprising because it happened by the gut feeling of the people.

Lauren Gonzales (Jovenes Immigrantes Por Un Futuro Mejor-UH) is a student. She spoke about
the American DREAM Act (HR 5131) - a bill that would remove barriers to higher education and create a path to citizenship for immigrant youth. Currently children of undocumented workers can attend college and pay in-state resident fees. She cautioned us that children of undocumented workers often excel in their studies, but once they graduate they were are not allowed to enter the work force because they don’t have social security numbers. She ended by declaring that, “To educate youth and not allow them to enter the workforce is dangerous.” Her comments made me think of the violence and strikes that continue to plaque France.

The final speaker was Jose Rodriquez of the Anonymous Collective. Jose is a self described anarchist who says he was the kind who goes along because this is what everyone seems to be doing. “This war is a continuation of 513 years of war, the big guys against the little guys. When I observe this mobilization, I am just going alone because people are coming up to me and asking me if I was gonna walk out of school and work—a real grassroots effort that appears to be being taken over by big organizations, non-profits, and others who see it as big attention dollars for their organizations.” Jose questioned what others meant when they talked about the people. He spoke to a distrust of non-profits and organizations because very often to get something, recognition, anything they end up aligned with “strange bedfellows” obscuring the line between left and right rhetoric. He expressed doubt about calling what was going on in the streets around the recent immigration rallies a grassroots movement if ordinary people are not being trained to access power.

I left feeling that it seemed to be pitting elders and youth against each other—the youth movement against established organizations. Similar to the question youth often pose—“if you are working so hard, why has nothing changed?”

I was most moved and impressed by the plenary presented by the Common Ground Collective, a true grassroots effort that has come with slides documenting Hurricane Katrina and an exhibit of pencil drawings of evacuees along with their story. The images and words bear powerful testimony to the destructive force of nature and the destruction by neglect of man.

When no one else, not FEMA or the military, would venture into areas to help people in need, these young people did. They grew from a group of three trying to organize on their cell phone to a force of over 2,800 in less than six months. “We grew so fast because we were the only relief organization inside the disaster zone doing something other than handing out food.”

Their commitment to stand with people in need in solidarity, not as an act of charity, was the most important message I heard over the weekend. For me they answered the question of what happens when we resist the impulse to focus on the issues, and instead focus on the struggle ahead.

By using Open Spaces Technology, the organizers insured that anyone who had an opinion or point of view could put out a call to others to join them to discuss a particular issue or share their interest. Open Spaces allows participants to self select where they want to be and what they want to talk about.

Before I left for the airport and Atlanta, I attended the session “Building Bridges Between our Local Struggles and in our Communities.” The final comments I recorded came from Houston organizer Ernest McMillan who worked in the past with NAACP and SNCC, and is currently director of the 5th Ward Enrichment Project and Cuba Solidarity Committee.

It is time to get into the community instead of planning rallies—build institutions within the community to help youth become their own protagonist. You have to set ego aside and let them make their own mistakes. What encourages me, changing demographics in the community causes friction and tension, but it could be the catalyst for a new alliance. Students leading the black/brown alliance and taking it to other schools, youths. How can we build relationships that reflect in our work, learn from and support each other? This is a human rights struggle, but we are all different, we have to learn to work across and through those differences.


Bio:
Alice Lovelace is a published author, performance poet, playwright, essayist, arts infusion specialist, and community arts consultant with a Masters Degree in Conflict Resolution. Awards include 1996 Atlanta Mayor's Fellowship in the Arts and1997 Fund for Southern Communities’ "Torchbearer Award". Alice is coeditor of In Motion Magazine, an on-line publication devoted to issues of democracy. She is the lead national organizer for the United States Social Forum that will take place in Atlanta, GA June 27-July 1, 2007.


LINKS:

Visit the website for the Houston Social Forum at www.houstonsocialforum.org and log onto the blog page for reactions from other attendees.

United States Social Forum
www.usscoialforum.org

Coeditor of "Art Changes" @ In Motion Magazine
www.inmotionmagazine.com

A member of Alternate ROOTS, artists for social change
www.alternateroots.org