In a Trumpian-era of "alternative facts" what does the truth mean? And what does the truth mean when we are complicit in obscuring it?

A few days ago, I heard the testimony of Mexican journalist Anabel Hernandez whose recent investigative book, La Verdadera Noche de Iguala, describes her findings around the disappearance of 43 normal school students on the 26th of September 2014. Speaking to an audience at the University of Texas at El Paso, Hernandez described how the students at la Escuela Normal Rural "Raul Isidro Burgos" in Ayotzinapa were disappeared in Iguala in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. They are among 26,000 people who have been disappeared in the country, including women, men, children, and babies. Hernandez believes in naming names and she says she has the names of every person on the list of 26,000 disappeared. Over 100,000 people have been killed in the past decade as part of Mexico's war on drugs.

Anabel Hernandez has uncovered evidence that the attack on the students that left the streets like "a river of blood" and their subsequent disappearance was the result of a collaboration among several levels of law enforcement with the military. The attack was an effort to disappear witnesses to the military removing two million dollars worth of heroin that had been hidden on the buses that the students occupied. The students had no knowledge of the heroin. They had "sequestered" the buses in order to get to a commemoration in Mexico City of the 1968 Massacre of Tlatelolco.

The 43 first year students whose faces stare at us from the poster above have been missing for over two and a half years. Their parents continue to insist that the search for them must continue.  On April 25, the parents arrived at the office of the Ministry of the Interior to request a meeting, continuing to demand that their sons be returned alive. After a hour of waiting for their request to be "processed," they began symbolically touching the wall that surrounds the Ministry building. They were met with tear gas grenades that injured five of the parents. Ayotzinapa students who were returning to Guerrero to inform the school of the attack on the parents were attacked by state police.

So what does all of this have to do with the truth and with us?

It has everything to do with us. Shocking images of the tragedies created by the opioid epidemic in the United States are increasingly reported in the media. The Center for Disease Control reports that 91 Americans die each day from opioid overdose. Increasingly heroin substitutes for prescription opioids. As a result of the increasing demand for heroin in the United States, Mexican drug cartels are turning to heroin as the profitable drug of choice. Heroin abuse has grown most dramatically in the Midwest and the Northeast. Whites between 18 and 45 years of age now have the highest death rate from heroin overdose.

Increasing addiction to heroin is a complicated issue and the racial/ socio-economic politics behind how our government is treating this epidemic are another story. But we have to start by confronting the truth that the deaths and disappearances in Mexico are not solely a consequence of Mexican governmental corruption nor cartel criminals.

The truth is that our government is complicit. The truth is that we are complicit as a society that consumes the drugs. The blood of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is surely on our hands as much as that of the Mexican government.

Anabel Hernandez says that no nation can move forward without knowing the truth that they have a right to know. We not only have the right to know the truth, we have an obligation to take responsibility for the truth. This is even clearer during these times of "alternative facts" and a President who lies, exaggerates, and misrepresents.

Only when we look truth in the fact can we begin to understand how our actions reverberate well beyond the borders of our nation.

One hundred and thirty five years ago the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect. The 1882 act excluded Chinese immigrants from entering the United States and in 1902 was extended to all immigrants from Asia. It was the first immigration law that excluded people based on nationality. Chinese workers had been recruited to work on the nation's railroads and they came with the hope of sending their wages home. They did the hardest labor building the expanding railway system and other workers claimed that they accepted such low wages that it brought down everyone's wages. The anti-Chinese movement began in California and soon spread nationally.

​Today, a number of organizations in San Francisco are remembering this anniversary with a call for inclusion. The AFT 2121, Chinese Progressive Association, Chinese for Affirmative Action and others declare "On the 135th anniversary of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, we stand together in solidarity to resist the Muslim travel ban and the anti-immigrant and refugee policies. Excluding immigrants on the basis of race and religion was wrong then and it's wrong now!"

 




​Chinese immigrants who were here before the passage of the Act, which was extended in 1894, could apply to remain in the United States.

Here restaurant owners Goon Bow, living in Brooklyn with his wife Mamie Goon, apply to leave the United States with the intention of returning.

The Chinese Exclusion Act had a direct impact on the U.S.-Mexico border and today there is a thriving Chinese Mexican community along the border from Texas to California, from Chihuahua to Sonora.  For Chinese workers who were already in the United States, they could remain if they could prove they were here before the passage of the law.

The roots of the Chinese community in El Paso grew lie in the completion of the Southern pacific Railroad in 1881. Many Chinese workers, initially hired to work in construction gangs for railroads, remained in El Paso following the completion of the railroad from the Pacific to El Paso. Over 1,200 Chinese men worked bringing the railroad to El Paso and census reports show that the Chinese community numbered around 1,000 in the 1880s. 

Chinese men turned to laundries and restaurants after their railroad work was completed and El Paso had many.

​Although the Chinese population diminished, numbering under 300 by the 1910s, cultural and social institutions grew, including the Chinese Benevolent Association and a number of tongs, organizations comprised of people from the same town or district in China.  Coming from the same village or region in China provided a sense of community and identity for Chinese immigrants so far from home. It is estimated that up to thirty percent of the men from one village could be working overseas at any given time

El Paso's oldest cemetery has a Chinese cemetery within it, the history of El Paso's Chinese community reflected in the tombstones.
 

 Although there had been Chinese migration to Mexico since the 17th century, the greatest numbers came in the decades following the US Exclusion Act. Chinese men married Mexican women and soon there were Mexican Chinese families in the Mexican north and in Mexico City. The men integrated themselves into the Mexican economy. 

Some Chinese immigrants were smuggled into the United States; others crossed as Mexican citizens. Many remained on the Mexican side even though anti-Chinese violence grew during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and threatened Chinese Mexican communities in the 1920s and 1930s. During the period of intense anti-Chinese sentiment, Mexican women who had married Chinese men lost their citizenship and were sometimes deported to China with their husbands and children.

Despite violence on both sides of the border, the Chinese American and Chinese Mexican communities survived and thrived.

Today, the Chinese American and Chinese Mexican community in El Paso is fighting to preserve what may be the last standing Chinese laundry in the city. The City Council and the building's owner, Billy Abraham, plan to demolish it as part of an effort to put an arena to benefit the wealthiest developers in town. The possible demolition has made news across the state, including in Houston's Chinese language newspaper.

It gives me great hope to see communities organize to remember a dark episode in US history and to demand inclusion rather than exclusion. And it gives me great hope for border communities to fight against the erasure of their history.

4. Despite people's intense suffering and even fear, they will not and cannot remain silent in the face of injustice. The poor and the marginalized communities will always find a way to express their rage and their dreams.

5. And the one I think is most important:  In the face of great, overwhelming power, we may feel helpless and hopeless. I have certainly had days when I felt I couldn't do anything to make the world better.  We may feel angry, bitter, judgmental and sarcastic. The question that brings me back to myself is "Why am I doing this?" If it is for any of these reasons listed above, I know I will not not be able to sustain fighting for justice. Only love can sustain radical action. Not mushy love. Not romantic love. Not nostalgic love. Rather, love that understands we are all connected, love that requires commitment, and love that acknowledges that even if we risk pain, we still have faith. I know that we have to maintain faith. We have to maintain hope. Without them, how can we believe in change?

​What lessons would you share? Please let us know.
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Mr. Silvestre Galvan has carried this banner of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in farm worker  marches since 1965. 

Anabel Hernandez courtesy of Journalists without Borders

Anabel Hernandez and the widespread killing of Mexican journalists has shown me another reason to care about what happens to journalists in Mexico. Investigative reporters like Hernandez and the late Miroslava Breach risk their lives to reveal the corruption and power of drugs consumed in the United States. Without the US as a consumer of drugs like heroin, the cartels, the corrupt government officials and law enforcement officers would not have the money nor the motivation to kill these journalists.

We are part of the problem. We are complicit. I read someone say once, "Each high an American experience is covered with the blood of the innocent." We are just getting a taste of what it is like to have our press constantly threatened and bullied by our government. We have to care about freedom of the press for ourselves and for our global neighbors.

Today on World Press Freedom Day, I am honoring the journalists who have risked so much to uncover what Anabel Hernandez says is the truth that every victim and every society has the right to and which Miroslava Breach died for.

Miroslava Breach courtesy of the BBC

In the 1990s, I taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. One day after I had lectured about the Great Depression in Texas and mentioned the labor organizing of Emma Tenayuca, one student came up to me and said she was related to her. She went on to tell me that the family did not speak about her publicly because they were embarrassed by her activities so many decades earlier. It hurt my heart but I understood their hesitancy. She was a controversial woman in her time.

​Emma Tenayuca was a fierce defender of Mexican workers, especially women, and she spoke without hesitation about the terrible working conditions forced upon workers.

Often women, especially the young and the old, have been excluded from our histories. Tenayuca is an example of the strong work of young women. At 16, she became involved in organizing cigar workers. By 21, she was an organizer with the National Workers' Alliance, which eventually brought together the Socialists and the Communists to work on behalf of workers who were suffering greatly during the economic crisis of the Great Depression.

She is most well-known for her work with the pecan shellers. If you have ever peeled pecans you know the fine powder that comes from the shell and that can irritate your skin. Imagine hundreds of women sitting in a room peeling pecans. The pecan dust filled the air. Their hands were reddened by the dust. In the 1930s it became cheaper for employers to hire Mexican American women at extremely low wages than to maintain pecan shelling machines. Pecan shellers were paid pennies and were offered all the pecans they could eat. When Tenayuca  began organizing the workers for better pay and improved working conditions, 12,000 women walked off the job. After two months, employers gave in and raised their pay. This 1938 strike is often used as one of the examples of Mexican American women's power.

While the success of the strike was a positive for Tenayuca, it also brought her more attention. When she prepared to give a speech at the city auditorium, a mob entered the building, ready to attack her. She was led out of the building to safety. That night, members of the mob joined the Ku Klux Klan in burning the mayor in effigy for defending her. Emma had joined the Communist Party in 1938 (and married Homer Brooks, the Chair of the Communist Party in Texas). Her affiliation with the CP lessened her effectiveness as a labor organizer and also resulted in her being blacklisted. She was unable to find work.

During the Great Depression, the Communist Party gained the largest following it has ever had in the United States. Americans had been taught that if you work hard enough, you will make it. The Depression taught them that this was not true. Despite their hard work, many Americans were suffering from unemployment, homelessness, and hunger.

In 1941, Emma and Homer divorced. In 1946, she left the Communist Party. She moved to the Bay area where she eventually became a school teacher.  She returned to San Antonio in the 1960s and died in 1999. She has become a role model for many Mexican American women since because of her important labor organizing work and her fearlessness.

In 2008, her niece Sharyll Tenayuca co-authored That's Not Fair! No Es Justo!: Emma Tenayuca's STruggle for Justice/La lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la justicia.  I was happy to see this pride in her family about their brilliant relative.

 “I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice,” she said. It is a lesson to us all.