Leaving Tomorrow!

Hi Friends & Family!


All of your curiosity and interest in this trip has compelled me to start a travel blog. Here it is!
It has two general purposes. First, to put all of the information, pictures, and thoughts about this trip in the same place for family and friends to check out (when they're bored and/or procrastinating, duh). Second, it's kind of an experiment to see how clearly and openly I'm able to write in such a relatively public forum.





Highlander: 6/1/10-6/5/10

I will be traveling to the Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, for a workshop on popular education and community organizing. The general jist is workshopping in the morning, garden/shed work in the afternoon, fun in the evening. Fingers crossed for musicians : )

The Highlander Center was founded in 1932 as a leadership school for the Southern labor and civil rights movement. They're currently focused on economic justice more generally, with a focus on youth and immigration issues. The workshop I'll be attending is on movement-building strategy. I aim to take good notes and bring them along to Sarah Lawrence in the fall and work through it with the social justice community on campus. I'm hoping this will provide a concrete point of integration for the material I'll be learning in Chiapas as well, so that I can come home and feel like I have tools to think about Zapatista theory in terms of concrete organizing. We'll see???

info:
http://www.highlandercenter.org/
http://viewfromthehill.org/?p=1493
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center
Interesting article on Myles Horton, one of the Founders: http://www.southernhistory.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10263


Chiapas: 6/6/10-6/17/20

I will then be hauling ass to repack my stuff, shower and sleep in one night and turn it around to go to Chiapas, Mexico. I will be studying Spanish, the Zapatista Movement, and Latin American social & economic history with the Mexico Solidarity Network in Oventic and San Cristobal de las Casas.

I'm a little overwhelmed with absorbing information at the moment, but the short version is that the Zapatista movement is an indigenous movement that launched an armed uprising against the Mexican government the day that NAFTA was passed on January 1st, 1994. They declared their communities autonomous from the Mexican government, within which "they keep alive their own life-support systems based on self-reliance and mutual help, informal networks for direct exchange of goods, services and information, and an administration of justice which calls for compensation rather than punishment" (From Esteva, "Basta! Mexican Indians Say 'Enough'!). Since then, their decentralized (leaderless) movement has become a huge part of Mexican civil society.

Another interesting point from the Esteva article on Zapatista organizing:

"It comprises networks of groups--coalitions of discontent-- which share certain characteristics: they are deliberately open and allow for the participation of different ideologies and classes; they distrust leaders and centralized political direction; they consciously avoid any temptation to lead or control the social forces they activate. The opt instead for flexible organizational structures, which they use for concerted action, rather than for channeling demands; they explicitly detach themselves from abstract ideologies, preferring to concentrate on specific campaigns (for example, against a dam, a road, a nuclear plant, or the violations of human rights); and they exhaust all democratic means and legal procedures available before resorting to direct action or revolt." (Esteva, 304).

More info, including the syllabus ("Zapatismo and the Other Campaign):

http://www.mexicosolidarity.org/studyabroad/summer


http://www.zcommunications.org/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona-by-subcomandante-marcos

Note the time of this post and you might notice I've been procrastinating. I've been wondering why, besides that I just finished a fast-paced semester. I think I've been avoiding the fact of how electrifying it might be to realize that the stuff I study in class is real in the world. Obvious logically, but emotionally it's actually quite a bit of heavy-lifting. Even starting with the fact that that has been the flow of my life so far (to explore first through study, then through experience).

Who knows! Thanks for reading this far. Talk soon.


Love,

Harley

P.S. "Small Change" is the name of a Dispatch song I've been playing over and over recently. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPa_UKVY4Rc