Aguacates

So apparently more people read this thing than I thought! Seriously, I am flattered because I have had several people contact me this week and tell me that they enjoy reading my entries. I have always felt that being a writer has been part of my identity and this year I feel like it's come back more than ever. I remember when I was a little girl, my mom used to have to take my sister and me with her to the restaurant she worked at with her on the weekends sometimes. It was a small place, so it was OK. My mom was the best looking waitress, as well the hardest working. :) I used to sit in a corner at a table and write stories most of the day. I even made covers for them and chapters and then drew pictures on the cover. I'd really like to go back and read those so I can see how truly whacked out I was as a kid. I bet I would make more sense to myself now. I am pretty sure I wrote some really funny things, like stealing golf carts and driving to Canada or something. jajajajajajajajajajajajaja...........................

OK, that was a random tangent that has nothing to do with Immokalee!

Immokalee. I've been here for two weeks but it has felt like forever. Rahiel has left and I miss her a lot. Now I really feel like I am on my own for real in a spiritual sense. And that's hard because I have been asking myself a lot of hard questions.

One thing that has been really frustrating is my lack of Spanish in some cases. There is absolutely no way that I can express how I feel about a lot of things in Spanish the way I can in English. And this affects a lot of things, I am realizing. It really puts up a lot of barriers to building relationships with people in the community. I hate to constantly ask people to translate, too. All day I watch people come into the office and then I cannot fully communicate with them. I cannot support them or hear their stories fully. Sometimes its people who are coming in because they have not received wages for work, things like that.

So then this is where I have to ask God to continue to help me to forgive my Dad, who is the reason I don't speak Spanish fluently; because he was so freakin adamant about English being my first language so my mom stopped speaking it to my sister and me when we were very young. And then all I picked up most of my life were random phrases and words until I went to college and took 3 semesters of Spanish. That helped a lot but it's still not the same. I see no solution but to move to Latin America for a while and totally immerse myself into learning it fully. If Latinos can come to the US and learn English well and learn to express themselves deeply in another language, then so can I. So much of me is ready to pick up and leave this year but part of me is being an adult (sigh) and being practical about things like finances. So it might have to wait for a while.

I am not writing this to offend anyone but I just need to be honest, too. It is so hard that all the White people who have moved here to Immokalee to work with the community all speak Spanish better than me. It's difficult because none of them have to know Spanish. That is not their culture, that is not their roots. I should know it. The most important and influential person in my life is my mami, a pura ecuatoriana and I can't even fluently speak her native language that she wanted to teach me so badly.

I want so badly to reconcile these two worlds I live in. I keep thinking about how a few years ago God began to affirm me in my ethnic identity as a bi-racial person. I always heard Him tell me He was going to use me a bridge builder. I kind of can see how that may possibly come alive. I live in a world of White privilege because of how I look and because I am half White. But I am also a Latina and that is the culture I was raised in. And now somehow God is gonna use this for His glory as He uses me to love the Latino community. I can't fully explain it but I feel like I can see it.

So mostly I have been working on small things around the office, like making packets, copying articles, going to meetings, meeting and talking with people who come to visit. I know it does not seem so glamorous and exciting. But at the same time I feel motivated and inspired because I realize this is how you change a system. You educate, you network, you build relationships. You mobilize. We had a meeting this week to talk about the upcoming Subway campaign in the fall, so that they too can join in with ensuring farm workers get paid fair wages and have safe working conditions. It was amazing to sit there and listen the staff name off all these different groups and individuals they have guaranteed support from around the country. Basically this is what they do and this is what they did for the Taco Bell, McDonalds and BK campaigns. During the fall and spring they will go to the location of the company's headquarters and just work off whatever connections they already have there and then build new ones. They spend several months, the allies and the farm workers, in that specific city visiting churches, synagogues, universities, high schools, non-profits and community organizations explaining to them the situations of Immokalee. They then just build ally after ally and it leads up to a huge protest eventually at the company's HQ. Due to these strategies, the CIW, I believe is one of the most dynamic and effective grassroots movements in the US today. I feel so privileged to be a part of this. They are truly a group of people who persevere through the worst and it is amazing to hear their stories.

Their first campaign started back in 2001 against Yum! Brands,which is the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, A&W, Pizza Hut, and another fast food place, I forget. Not only did they do a protest and ally building in Louisville, KY for several months at the Yum! Brands HQ, they also did a Taco Bell Truth Tour. A large group of farm workers and their allies got on a bus and drove cross country to Irvine, CA to do a hunger strike at the Taco Bell HQ. Along the way they visited numerous universities, churches and community organizations to build relationships and to educate people about what was going on. They then sat outside the Taco Bell HQ and did a hunger strike. It was like a 100 of them, I think, I am not sure how many. But that is courage, that is determination, that is perseverance. And Taco Bell and Yum finally did agree to their demands to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes they picked. They worked on that first campaign for FOUR years.

And they are changing a system, slowly...............

I watched a couple of documentaries this week that made me sick to my stomach. One of them was The Corporation and the other was This is what Democracy Looks Like. (The latter is about the WTO protests that went down in 99 in Seattle). We live in such a sick world. We live in a world that is controlled by a bunch of big corporations who are money hungry, greedy and they don't care who they step on in the process of getting more profit. We live in a world where many people outside the US see this country as imperialistic. We live in a world where transnational corporations have more power than our governments do and they own everything. Soon they will come into our homes while we sleep and patent our genes without our permission and then they'll be on sale at a freakin Wal-Mart the next week.

OK, that might be an exaggeration but if a TNC feels they have the right to go into any country they want and patent a rare plant THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO THEM and then make it into some expensive drug that only rich people can afford, how is that fair? How is that fair? How is that fair???????????

I am writing about this because I see the affects of globalization and neoliberalism in Immokalee. I see how it has forced people to leave their mother countries and their families.

I meet men who are lonely and who are looking for a woman to love them. I realize that they are not many single women in Immokalee. But there are a lot of single men who were forced to leave their wives and children to find work because their countries are getting screwed over by TNC's and US foreign policy and by their own governments. It is such a freakin devastating situation and many times this week I have had to wrestle with things like this within and I feel hopeless. Now I also see gentrification going on here, too, and I am like damn, they can't get a break in life??? Now some rich people are going to try and shove them out of their community because they think traditional agriculture won't even exist in the future. Are they really going to try and import everything cheaply from Latin America?

I HATE free trade. With a passion.

Last night I thought a lot about power. Then today I got a surprise phone call (I actually got two and they both made me very happy). But the first one was with a good and old friend from Tampa, Heather Plazak. We were talking about some different things and I shared with her something that I got myself into a couple of days ago. I am not going to explain the whole situation here because it's too complicated but basically something happened that was my fault and it really caught me off guard. Then she told me with a lot of love that I was relying too much on my power, on my own strength, on myself. I was not trusting God completely. It was definitely true because I heard God tell me the same thing, more or less, yesterday.

We NEED the power of God.

And I know various kinds of people read this and you all do not follow the same spiritual beliefs that I do. But I need to express here that in some ways I have forgotten how powerful God is. That is so wrong. And this is all somehow related. This one personal thing that happened to me helped me to see how dangerous it is to rely on our own strength and our own wisdom.

I think about "power to the people" and all this kind of hype that goes on in activist worlds. If the power were really in the people, wouldn't things be a lot better by now? I believe that God can empower us, He wants to empower us, to move, to act, to do something. He doesn't want us to be complacent. But God is the ultimate one with the power. And once we fully grasp that, that we serve a God of the impossible, then maybe we will begin to move mountains.

Why are we not crying out to God more for change? Why don't we pray together for things to be more just? Why don't we pray in Jesus name for maquiladoras to shut down, for the WTO to demolish and that more fair institutions would be implemented instead? Why don't we pray that the people of God would move, especially the people of God with privilege and degrees and that we would use those resources to change systems, to move mountains, to create something to His glory?? Why don't we pray together against greed, that CEO's of these TNC's would be changed in spirit? Why don't we stop being complacent and do more?

Why is the majority of the activist and grassroots world devoid of Jesus and prayer?

I have been questioning myself a lot lately. I wonder if I really am who I say am. I wonder if I am really about what I say I am about. I feel like this summer is a test.

I went running tonight (early evening and the sun was not beating down on me, so I did not feel like I was going to die, it was great!). I was able to actually go about 4 miles, yay! Anyhow, I thought a lot about this I ran. It's easy to be a certain kind of person when everyone is watching. I don't want to stop running when there are cars on the road and people might be watching. Then people might not think I am able to run, that I am not capable. I want them to have a certain image of me, I don't want them to think I can't handle it, so I force myself to keep going even though there is a huge cramp in my right oblique and also in my right shoulder.

But then I got to a more isolated road. I could have walked it if I wanted to. No one was watching. I could have gotten away with it. And then I could have kept running when I got back to a busier road again, when people would see me.

If I really want to be good at running, if I say I want to get better at this, I want to be healthier and stronger, then I am going to run whether anyone is watching or not. It's something I choose to be committed to.

If I say I am going to follow Jesus, then I am going to do it whether other Christians are watching or not. I have no other Christians here to watch me. It's not like college, where Melyssa and Jeremy always challenged us to go deeper, to do more. This is where the real test comes. Am I committed or not?

If I say I am committed to seeking justice, then I am going to do it, whether others are watching or not.

I want to be who I say I am. And I need to be OK with the fact that I am going to fall from time to time.

But I can't stop running this race. God is all I have, He is all we have. We can't change things without Him.

Because if it was possible to change things without Him.........
then someone explain to me why all these movements that exist in the world, all these ideologies have not been able to fix things yet.

We need Jesus and we need each other.

One last thing...sorry, I know this was really long. I need to ask for some prayer for my family. One of aunts, my Tia Odalys, may be passing away soon. She is the wife of my Tio (uncle) Javier, one of my mom's younger brothers. She is diabetic and has not been doing well for the past couple of years. Recently she went blind and had two massive heart attacks. I am not close to her so it has not really hit me yet. I am concerned, though, for my three cousins and my uncle she is going to leave behind. My cousins are only 15, 20, and 22. All still so young.............and they just have so many other crazy things going on along with this. I only usually see them about once a year. We were all super close when we were kids but you know how things get when you get older. So just pray that God does something beautiful in my family even in the midst of a hard time. Maybe this will all bring us closer together. I think it already is. My mom and my Tio Javier have had a lot of conflict over the past few years. The other night I was talking to her on the phone and she was on her way to take them out to eat and get them out from the hospital and I just had this surge of hope and I got a little teary eyed. God is hope and He does the impossible. So I just pray things get better and that we are all brought closer together to each other and to Him as a result of all this.