Occupy movement finds its roots in Mexico

By David Bacon

    When Occupy Seattle called its tent camp “Planton Seattle,” camp organizers were laying a local claim to a set of tactics used for decades by social movements in Mexico, Central America and the Philippines. And when immigrant janitors marched down to the detention center in San Diego and called their effort Occupy ICE (the initials of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency responsible for mass deportations), people from countries with that planton tradition were connecting it to the Occupy movement here.

The banners at Occupy Seattle

    This shared culture and history offer new possibilities to the Occupy movement for survival and growth at a time when the Federal law enforcement establishment, in cooperation with local police departments and municipal governments, has uprooted many tent encampments.

    Different Occupy groups from Wall Street to San Francisco have begun to explore their relationship with immigrant social movements in the U.S., and to look more closely at the actions of the 1% beyond our borders that produces much of the pressure for migration.

    Reacting to the recent evictions, the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad recently sent a support letter to Occupy Wall Street and the other camps under attack. “We greet your movement,” it declared, “because your struggle against the suppression of human rights and against social and economic injustice has been a fundamental part of our struggle, that of the Mexican people who cross borders, and the millions of Mexican migrants who live in the United States.”

    Many of those migrants living in the U.S. know the tradition of the planton and how it’s used at home. And they know that the 1%, whose power is being challenged on Wall Street, also designed the policies that are the very reason why immigrants are living in the U.S. to begin with. Mike Garcia, president of United Service Workers West/SEIU, the union that organized Occupy ICE, described immigrant janitors as “displaced workers of the new global economic order, an order led by the West and the United States in particular.”

    Criminalizing the act of camping out in a public space is intended, at least in part, to keep a planton tradition from acquiring the same legitimacy in the U.S. that it has in other countries. That right to a planton was not freely conceded by the rulers of Mexico, El Salvador or the Philippines, however — no more than it has been conceded here. The 99% of those countries had to fight for it.

    Two of the biggest battles of modern Mexican political history were fought in the Tlatelolco Plaza, where hundreds of students were gunned down in 1968, and three years later in Mexico City streets where more were beaten and shot by the paramilitary Halcones. In both El Salvador and the Philippines, strikers have a tradition of living at the gates of the factory or enterprise where they work. But even today that right must be defended against the police, and (at least until the recent election of the Funes and Aquino governments) even the military.

    Plantons or encampments don’t stand alone. They are tactics used by unions, students, farmers, indigenous organizations and other social movements. Each planton is a visible piece of a movement or organization — a much larger base. When the plantons are useful to those movements, they defend them. That connection between planton and movement, between the encampment and its social base, is as important as holding the physical space on which the tents are erected.

    For the last two years that relationship has been very clear in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s huge central plaza. During that time, fired members of Mexico’s independent leftwing electrical workers union, the SME, have lived in a succession of plantons. They’ve often been elaborate, with kitchens, meeting rooms and communications centers, in addition to the tents where people slept and ate.

    At various time, the SME encampment was one of several in the huge square. A year ago the workers were joined by indigenous Triqui and Mixtec women from Oaxaca, who protested the violence used by their state’s previous governor against teachers’ strikes and rural organizations. The social movement in Oaxaca, which the women represented in Mexico City, grew strong enough to finally knock the old ruling party, the PRI, from the governorship it had held for almost 80 years.

    In the Zocalo plantons, people from different organizations mix it up. Last September’s Day of the Indignant brought together people from very diverse movements. Some see electoral politics as a vehicle for change, but many indigenous activists and SME members don’t. Even among those who do, there are deep disagreements over how to participate in the electoral process.

    But the people in the Zocalo have two things in common. Different plantons may not see every political question eye-to-eye, but each represents a social movement in the world outside the plaza. And the planton itself has value primarily because it forces public attention to focus on the crisis that has led each group to set up its encampment.

    Clearly someone in Seattle knows this tradition of plantons in the Zocalo, perhaps even as a participant. When the painter made the Seattle banner, she or he also included, right next to the word “planton”, the anarchists’ “A” with the circle around it. This symbol was a reminder of another aspect of cross-border fertilization. Many anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists — members of the Industrial Workers of the World – fought in the Mexican Revolution. Because of that revolutionary upheaval, even today, almost a century later, ordinary Mexicans expect certain rights, including the right to set up a tent in the Zocalo. U.S. workers crossed the border to fight alongside Mexicans in that insurrection long ago, for a government that would acknowledge that right. The planton, therefore, is a common heritage, with a history that makes it as legitimate on Wall Street as it is in Mexico City.

    Not long after the OWS camp was set up in Zuccotti Park, the planton/occupy movement crossed the U.S./Mexico border. In Tijuana, home to a million people, mostly displaced migrants from Mexico’s south, activists came together and set up an occupation on the grassy median of the Paseo de los Heroes. Their tents were pitched in the middle of the Zona del Rio, where the city’s 1% meet in fancy hotels and work in government offices. Then, on October 18 police reacted even earlier than they did in most U.S. cities, arresting two dozen activists at the urging of local businessmen. Occupy Tijuana condemned the detentions, declaring, “We are not assassins, delinquents, tramps or crooks.”

    In New York a group, Occupy Wall Street – Español was formed at the first Asemblea en Español. They, in turn, translated the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Participants formed a subgroup, Occupy Wall Street Latinoamericano to spread the movement to Spanish-speaking communities, recognizing that the city is home to so many Mexicans from the state of Puebla that its nickname is PueblaYork, as well as much older established communities of Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and other Spanish-speaking people. The group will soon publish the first issue of its own newspaper, with articles talking about immigration, globalization, and the specific attacks by the 1% on Latinos.

    Bringing the immigrant and Occupy movements together means more than setting up an encampment. The San Diego demonstration didn’t set up an overnight camp, but it brought thousands of workers and supporters down to the ICE detention center to protest the firings of immigrant janitors.

    The Occupy ICE protest was intended to draw public attention to the Federal government’s immigration enforcement strategy that requires employers to fire undocumented workers. In Southern California, the multinational corporations who clean office buildings are terminating 2000 union members. Earlier waves of firings have targeted unionized building cleaners in Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco, sewing machine operators in Los Angeles, food service workers on university campuses, and thousands of others.

    Garcia says ICE and the employers are in collusion. After firing union janitors with high seniority and benefits, using immigration status as a pretext, the companies can then hire new workers at lower wages with fewer benefits. “To hide their greed the commercial real estate industry has used the tools of government to confuse and divide the 99%,” he charges. “They first said we were unskilled workers who should be happy to be working. They then weakened worker protections to make organizing virtually impossible. Over the last decade the industry has used immigration as a wedge to intimidate and, if need be, replace our workers. ICE is doing what the 1% corporate real estate industry wants: using immigration laws to recycle well paid janitors in the hopes of taking back gains in pay and benefits our union has won.” [Ironically the week USWW organized Occupy ICE its parent union, SEIU, endorsed the reelection of President Obama, who is responsible for the ICE policy of firing workers.]

    The vision of Occupy — the 99% vs. the 1% — has enormous support among immigrants and unions. In place of the tired rhetoric of politicians, shedding crocodile tears for the “middle class” while demonizing the poor, Occupy gives workers a vision of their commonality in the 99%. This powerful message blows away illusions that higher-paid workers have more in common with stockbrokers than with immigrants laboring at minimum wage, or unemployed young people on the streets of African American ghettos or Latino barrios.

    The Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad shares the same vision of class-based commonality. “We are outraged,” it says, “that U.S. citizens, when they demand justice and expose the inequalities that exist in their society, are treated like criminals. With the same outrage, we condemn the criminalization of migrant Mexicans by the U.S. government, the raids by immigration authorities [and] the militarization of the border. No human being should be treated as a criminal because they struggle to find better conditions in which to live.”

Editors’ Note: this is an edited version of the orginal article published in Truthout. You can view the complete article at: http://www.truth-out.org/unions-and-immigrants-join-occupy-movements/1323183717