by David Bacon

As soon as  Anastasia Flores’ children were old enough, she brought them with her to work in the fields. “Ever since 1994 I’ve always worked by myself, until my children  could also work,” she recalls. “In Washington, I picked cucumbers, and in Santa Maria here I worked picking strawberries and tomatoes. In Washington, they allowed people to take their children to work with them, and to leave them at the end of the row with the older children taking care of the younger ones.”

She didn’t think bringing her children to work was unusual. It’s the way she had grown up herself. Today she’s is in her mid 50s, getting to the age when she will no longer be able to work. Just as she once depended on the labor of the kids for her family’s survival, she will still depend on them to survive as she gets old. Without their help, she will have nothing.

Anastasia was born in San Juan Piñas in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. The small town is in the heart of the Mixteca region, where people speak an indigenous language that was centuries old long before the Spaniards arrived.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, people began migrating from Oaxaca looking for work, as Mexico’s agricultural policies failed. Anastasia, like many, wound up working first in northern Mexico, in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California. “I picked tomatoes there for five years,” she remembers. “It was brutal. I would carry these huge buckets that were very heavy. We lived in a labor camp in Lazaro Cardenas [a town in the San Quintin Valley], called Campo Canelo. It was one room per family, in shacks made of aluminum.”

Before leaving San Juan Piñas she’d gotten married and  brought her first child, Teresa, with her to Baja. “I began to work there when I was 8 years old, picking tomatoes,” Teresa remembers.

Anastasia then decided to bring her family to California, because her husband had found work there in the fields. “I needed money and I couldn’t afford to raise my family in Baja California,” she remembers. “There were three kids and I couldn’t manage them. It was hard to bring the children across the border since they were so young, but compared to now, it was easier in the ‘90s. It only took us one day to cross.”

“My memories of that time are very sad because I had to work out of necessity,” Teresa says. “I started working in the United States at 14, here in Santa Maria and in Washington State. My mother couldn’t support my younger siblings alone, and I’m the eldest daughter. I couldn’t go to school because my mother had many young children to support.”

Anastasia’s son Javier, who was born in Santa Maria, shares those memories. “Whenever I got out of school, it was straight to the fields to get a little bit of money and help the family out,” he recalls. “That’s pretty much the only job I ever knew. In general we would work on the weekends and in the summers, during vacations.”

The Flores family was part of a big wave of migration from Oaxaca’s indigenous towns into California fields. According to Rick Mines, a demographer who created the Indigenous Farm Worker Study, by the 2000s there were 165,000 indigenous migrants in rural California, 120,000 of them working in the fields. “At that time there were few old people coming,” he says. “And because almost everyone came after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, they didn’t qualify for the immigration amnesty and are undocumented.”

Indigenous migration changed the demographics of the farm labor workforce in many ways, he explains. “A third of farm workers in the ‘70s and ‘80s shuttled back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. every year. Most were migrants, living in more than one place in the course of a year. That has all changed. The average stay in the U.S. now is 14 years.”

Because indigenous workers are undocumented, going back and forth across an increasingly-militarized border is practically impossible. Many are stuck in the U.S. If they go back to Mexico, it’s for good. As people grow older, some return because the cost of living there is lower. “But those who go back to Oaxaca depend on their family in the U.S. to send them money,” explains Irma Luna, a Mixtec community activist in Fresno. “They come from towns that are very poor, so they don’t have any income other than what their children can send them.”

Collecting Social Security benefits is not possible, because people with no legal immigration status (an estimated 11 million people in the U.S.) can’t even apply for a Social Security card. In order to work they have to give an employer a Social Security number they’ve invented or that belongs to someone else. Payments are deducted from their paychecks, but these workers never become eligible for the benefits the contributions are supposed to provide.

The Social Security Administration estimated in 2010 that 3.1 million undocumented people were contributing about $13 billion per year to the benefit fund. Undocumented recipients, mostly people who received Social Security numbers before the system was tightened, received only $1 billion per year in payments. Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, told VICE News in 2014 that that surplus of payments versus benefits had totaled more than $100 billion over the previous decade.

Recognizing this problem, the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, part of Oaxaca’s state government, has established a fund for starting income-generating projects in communities with returning migrants, including greenhouses, craft work andcarpentry. Nevertheless, most older migrants returning home still have no support other than money sent from the U.S.

Many older indigenous farm workers don’t intend to return to Mexico. “I’ve spent almost 20 years working in the fields,” Anastasia says. “A long time. I’m 56 now. I hope I will eventually stop working in the fields, but I don’t have land or a house in Mexico, so I plan on staying here. I’m used to living in Santa Maria. I have all of my kids here, so I want to stay where they are.”

DUE TO LACK OF SPACE WE WERE NOT ABLE TO PUBLISH THE COMPLETE ARTICLE. FOR THE COMPLETE STORY, VISIT:
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by David Bacon

LATEST BULLETIN:  On Sunday, June 19, Federal armed forces in Oaxaca fired on teachers and supporters in the Mixteca town of Nochixtlan, and at press time, it had killed at least a dozen people and wounded several dozens more.

On Sunday night, June 12, as Ruben Núñez, head of Oaxaca’s teachers union, was leaving a meeting in Mexico City, his car was overtaken and stopped by several large king-cab pickup trucks. Heavily armed men in civilian clothes exited and pulled him, another teacher, and a taxi driver from their cab, and then drove them at high speed to the airport. Núñez was immediately flown over a thousand miles north to Hermosillo, Sonora, and dumped into a high-security federal lockup.

Just hours earlier, unidentified armed agents did the same thing in Oaxaca itself, taking prisoner Francisco Villalobos, the union’s second-highest officer, and flying him to the Hermosillo prison as well. Villalobos was charged with having stolen textbooks a year ago. Núñez’s charges are still unknown.

Both joined Aciel Sibaja, who’s been sitting in the same penitentiary since April 14. Sibaja’s crime? Accepting dues given voluntarily by teachers across Oaxaca. Sección 22, the state teachers union, has had to collect dues in cash since last July, when state authorities froze not only the union’s bank accounts but even the personal ones of its officers. Sibaja was responsible for keeping track of the money teachers paid voluntarily, which the government called “funds from illicit sources.”

The three are not the only leaders of Oaxaca’s union in jail. Four others have been imprisoned since last October. “The leaders of Sección 22 are hostages of the federal government,” says Luis Hernández Navarro, a former teacher and now opinion editor for the Mexico City daily La Jornada. “Their detention is simultaneously a warning of what can happen to other teachers who continue to reject the [federal government’s] ‘education reform,’ and a payback to force the movement to demobilize.”

The arrests are just one effort the Mexican government has made in recent months to stop protests. On May 19, Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño Mayer announced that he was firing 3,000 teachers from Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán for not having worked for three days.

All three states are strongholds of the independent teachers movement within the National Union of Education Workers-the National Coordination of Education Workers (the CNTE, or “Coordinadora”). CNTE teachers have been striking schools since earlier this spring to stop implementation of the government’s education reform program. While strikes in Mexico are hotly contested, there is no precedent for firing teachers in such massive numbers just for striking.

The night of the firings, federal police attacked and removed the encampment that teachers had organized outside Mexico City’s education secretariat. On June 11, the police in Oaxaca City moved to dismantle a similar encampment in front of the state’s education office. When 500 heavily armed police advanced shooting tear gas, confrontations spilled into the surrounding streets, reminiscent of the way a similar strike in 2006 was attacked, and then mushroomed into an insurrection that lasted for months.

One controversial provision of the federal government’s education reform requires teachers to take tests to evaluate their qualifications. Those not making good marks are subject to firing. This year, when the government tried to begin testing, teachers struck in protest.

In March, when Nuño tried to give awards to “distinguished and excellent teachers,” one of them, Lucero Navarette, a primary-school teacher in Chihuahua, told him, “The results can depend on many factors and the personal circumstances each one of us live through…many don’t get the result they deserve, because the job they actually do at school is very different from what comes out in the test.” Journalist Hernández Navarro says educators have a tradition of egalitarianism and mutual support, and believe that “there are no first- or second- or third-class teachers. Only teachers.”

On March 22 Nuño also announced a measure that would spell the end to Mexico’s national system of teacher training schools, called the “normals.” Instead of having to graduate from a normal, he said, anyone with a college degree in any subject could be hired to teach. Since the Mexican Revolution and before, the normals have been the vehicle for children from poor families in the countryside, and from the families of teachers themselves, to become trained educators. Returning to rural and working-class communities, teachers then often play an important role in developing movements for social justice.
The normal schools themselves have historically been hotbeds of social protest and movements challenging the government.

Guerrero’s normal school in Ayotzinapa was the target two years ago of an attack that led to the disappearance and possible murder of 43 students, which has since galvanized Mexico. Recently a commission of international experts criticized the Mexican government for refusing to cooperate in efforts to identify the fate of the students, and pointed to the possible involvement of officials at very high levels in their disappearance.

Firing teachers and disbanding the normals is a not-so-hidden goal of the federal education reform. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has called for abolishing the normal schools, and urged President Enrique Peña Nieto to fire teachers who get bad test results and exclude them from teaching. Similar measures have been advocated by a Washington think tank, the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas, a project of the Inter-American Dialogue with funding from USAID.

Both organizations work in cooperation with the corporate Mexican education reform lobby, Mexicanos Primero, headed Claudio González Guajardo, a member of one of the country’s wealthiest families. González instructed Peña Nieto that “Mexicans elected you, not the [teachers] union,” and told him to “end the power of the union over hiring, promotion, pay, and benefits for teachers.”

Oaxaca has become a target because Sección 22 proposed its own alternative education reform over six years ago, which concentrated on respecting indigenous culture and forging alliances between teachers, students, parents, and their communities (for more on the alternative reform proposals and the corporate sector’s attacks on teachers, see “US-Style School Reform Goes South”). After the insurrection of 2006, the union became the backbone of the left’s effort to defeat the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and in 2010 Oaxacans for the first time elected a non-PRI governor, Gabino Cué. Owing his election to the teachers, Cué agreed to begin implementing their reform instead of the federal one.

DUE TO LACK OF SPACE WE WERE NOT ABLE TO PUBLISH THE COMPLETE ARTICLE. TO READ THE COMPLETE STORY PLEASE VISIT: http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-are-mexican-teachers-being-jailed.html