Only Solidarity Can Prevent Greater Disaster:

karlos says: I saw Mama D from New Orleans testifying to congress on C-Span yesterday. (A picture of her house can be seen by scrolling down.) She was just amazing. All the women giving testimony were...

I tried to find the video on c-span.org, but couldn't. Hopefully I'll be able to find it and post it soon.

Below is an article on the Gulf Coast Justice and Solidarity Tour by Arnoldo Garcia of the National Network on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Whirlwind Snapshots from the Gulf Coast Justice & Solidarity Tour
By Arnoldo García

See my photos from the Gulf Coast Solidarity tour (you will probably have to "join snapfish to enter the site!)

During five hectic days in early November, I was part of a national delegation of some 40 organizers and activists from across the country – representing immigrant rights, environmental justice, faith, labor, Indigenous African American and other people of color community organizations, accompanied by community leaders from Louisiana, Mississippi, and neighboring states – that participated in a solidarity and justice tour of the Hurricane Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region.

We went to meet with leaders and residents of devastated communities and began to dream together how to collectively overcome the severe challenges and obstacles the not-so natural disaster poses to achieving justice and healthy community in the Gulf region and country. And we were guided there by the profound belief that only through human and unconditional solidarity could a greater disaster be prevented.

Organized by the San Antonio-based Southwest Workers Union with Project South and Grassroots Global Justice, we converged on Jackson, Mississippi, on November 2, going immediately late that afternoon into the first of many meetings and discussions that were to take place over the next four days on the road, alongside flood-ruined homes, neighborhoods and offices, in churches, on porches, in driveways and parking lots. Early the next morning we hopped into three vans and drove to New Orleans beginning an intense and heart-felt journey filled both with sadness and hope at what we saw.

We learned first-hand about the impacts of the natural disaster and its devastating political consequences for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Indigenous people and other poor and working class communities in New Orleans, Gulf Port MS, Houma Indian lands and various parts in between.

We saw how the overwhelmingly African American and poor communities were left behind as Katrina hit the coast; then forsaken by U.S. government relief efforts, and are now being prevented from returning. We learned how Latinos were denied FEMA and Red Cross aid, as federal marshals, immigration police and other security forces were sicced on them because they were “illegal” Or how immigrant contract workers, recruited from as faraway as Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, were being abandoned, exploited and worked like slaves; exposed to hazardous and toxic conditions where they worked and lived. Katrina put the region upside down and exposed the dangerous intersections and roots of our social, economic and political afflictions.

Lifelong and recent Gulf Coast residents continue being denied access to their homes, a living wage income or job, others returning to find their belongings on the streets, evicted, while strangers are now living in their former dwellings priced out of reach. Others finding their homes in ruins, demolished or slated for demolition, still others prevented from entering their neighborhoods.

During the tour, New Orleans government laid-off over 3,000 city workers and announced the virtual privatization of the education system, firing principals and converting them into charter schools. On our last day back in Jackson, Mississippi, the front page of the state’s main newspaper carried breaking “news:” immigrants are sucking up state public services without paying for them, draining the state coffers and the cause of the fiscal crisis.

In spite of these cruel stratagems imposed on communities of color, we witnessed undaunted community-based recovery efforts in action:

· The Common Ground Collective, an all-volunteer health clinic providing food, medicine
and other vitals, organized by a former Black Panther and an elder visionary community leader and first President of the NAACP in the region. Recently raided by ICE, the immigration police, Common Ground Collective has withstood harassment by police, vigilantes, and the FCC – for installing a community radio broadcasting shout-outs so that families and neighbors could locate each other

· Community Labor United’s heroic drive to collect the stories and voices of the forcibly displaced African American community and organizing the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Accountability Campaign with the unprecedented goal of getting all the displaced to return to rebuild New Orleans with justice and health. PHRFAC/CLU is convening a national people’s assembly of the displaced December 8-10 in Jackson, culminating in a national day of action on International Human Rights day;

· Saving Our Selves, which began when a group of friends decided to take a van-load of supplies into the hurricane devastated region, believing this was just a stop-gap measure while the government-led relief kicked in with FEMA and Red Cross. Initially paying for it out of their own pockets and credit cards, SOS has now delivered over 300 tons of supplies and FEMA and Red Cross come to them for help.

· The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA) bold work with immigrant workers and communities, the displaced among the displaced, calling out the Red Cross and FEMA for expelling Latinos – or those perceived to be immigrants; defending and helping stranded contracted workers ripped off by greedy and unscrupulous contractors, government officials and others wishing to blame the incredible lack of response on the threat of a "Mexicanization" of the hurricane-devastated region. MIRA is symbolized by Victoria Cintra, a gutsy MIRA organizer that, even after her home had been destroyed by the hurricane, is leading the charge across the region battling for the rights of the foreign-born while driving around, organizing, documenting abuses, demanding justice, all the while living in a rented RV.

· And the United Houma Indian Nation on their southwest Louisiana coastal lands, telling us the 9,000-year history of the region and their continuing struggle for self-determination and survival after the latest natural and political storm. We visited their makeshift relief center housed in the Robichaux family’s former store and actively witnessed their work to restore an elder member’s home, as we helped hammer some nails and clean up the detritus left in the wake of Hurricane Rita.

· There are still other extraordinary stories of community-based relief and solidarity: the Vietnamese community's national support efforts bringing in volunteers and supplies from afar; veteran and soon-to-be veteran activists making the trek to volunteer with these and other community organizations working to clean-up and rebuild their homes and neighborhoods and the yet to be told stories of survival, displacement and return.

This was the most impressive part of our visit to the Gulf Coast region: the boundless generosity and solidarity bestowed upon us by the host community organizations. Their courage and determination to take on the disaster’s impact on their communities shined through the debris and wreckage, their vision of all displaced communities being able to return and reclaim their neighborhoods and homes, to mourn lives lost and together make a new history based on dignity with hope, justice and health.

What began as critical volunteer and emergency efforts to help relatives, neighbors, friends and fellow organizers and activists are now becoming a new movement with community-based institutions and projects that will go beyond the initial community-lead disaster relief and assistance we witnessed. In fact, a new national and global challenge has emerged for all of us to consider after Katrina:

How do we organize for and achieve deep justice and community in the natural world where our country – whose capitalist-driven social and economic development hurricane puts up in its wake so many racial, gender, immigration, class and other inequities and barriers to full humanity -- makes her natural forces even it more dangerous to humanity because reconstruction and recovery with full dignity, justice and health is our goal?

Arnoldo García represented the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on the Gulf Coast Justice & Solidarity Tour. All photos in this snapshot are by Arnoldo García.

_________________________________________
Arnoldo Garcia
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Red Nacional Pro Derechos Inmigrantes y Refugiados
310 8th Street Suite 303
Oakland, CA 94607
Tel (510) 465-1984 ext. 305
Fax (510) 465-1885
www.nnirr.org