Spirit in Action
Mexico Faces Globalization - Wendy Call, Author of No Word for Welcome
Wendy Call spent 3 years with organizers in southern Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, facing the threat of globalization in the form of a Megaproject to develop the area.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Aug 2012
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with Wendy Call, author of No Word for Welcome. The Mexican Village faces the global economy. For the three years that Wendy spent living in southern Mexico, in the isthmus of Twantepak, she accumulated stories and insights into the mechanism by which globalization remakes the life of the places it invades and the ways in which organizers help resist the unwanted parts of globalization. As a community organizer herself, Wendy knows the hopes and struggles of working on the front lines, so she brings extra depth of observation to the efforts of Mexicans in the fight. Wendy Call, author of No Word for Welcome, joins us from Washington State. Wendy, I'm so excited to have you here for Spirit in Action. Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. The texture, the personal insights, the historical insights, all of that in your book, No Word for Welcome. It's a rich tapestry that you're weaving here. How did you get started writing this book? What led you to it? I started out working as a grassroots organizer for a decade throughout the 1990s. And toward the end of that period of time, around 1996, 1997, I started to feel that I didn't have a lot of creative ideas left for how I could do the work of organizing, which is to really oversimplify something that's very complex. It's asking people to set aside their short-term needs and short-term goals and individual goals and think more on a long-term timescale and also to think more on a collective level. Think about what's good for my community, not just what is good for me. And that, of course, works against how we are acculturated to think in most of contemporary U.S. society. And so it wasn't easy work for me to be doing. I was working mostly in Seattle and Boston and then also in other communities around the U.S. on short-term projects. And so I decided I wanted to go and see how organizing functions in a place that was very different from what I had experienced in the U.S. and through a series of coincidences, really, I ended up attending a conference in a relatively little-known part of southern Mexico called the Isthmus of Tejantifek. And that is a little skinny part of Mexico that connects the Yucatan Peninsula to the rest of the country. So if you were driving from the U.S. to Central America, you would drive through the Isthmus on the Pan-American highway. At this time, there was a lot of rumors happening about a huge industrial development project that was planned for the Mexican Isthmus. It's a thin piece of land. There's only 120 miles between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. And therefore, it's been a transit corridor for a long time. And in 1996, the government of Mexico announced a new set of projects to industrialize this region, build a large superhighway, build a high-speed train, put in eucalyptus plantations, put in shrimp farms that operate on an industrial scale. All kinds of things were supposed to be happening. And so the people that actually live in this region, who are mostly farmers and fishermen and work from the land, got together with people from other parts of Mexico, university economists and people that worked in environmental organizations, and even some people from outside of Mexico. A thousand of them got together and sat down for three days in August 1997 to talk about what should we do about the big plans for globalization that are supposed to be happening right here. And I attended that conference, and I was really amazed to see how the local people organize themselves and how even the people who worked as small-scale farmers who might have only gone to school for three or four years who were speaking Spanish as a second language because they spoke a native language as their primary language really held their own in talking to university economists and people who worked for nonprofit organizations in Mexico City. And we're very, very clear that they were going to have some say over what happened for their region, and they were not going to defer to anyone. And I found this process so amazing in the sense of autonomy and clarity of purpose so amazing that I kept going back and visiting the region to learn more about the community organizing that was happening there. Were you also hoping that you would in some way leverage change in that area, or is this just you going as an observer? I suppose neither, in some ways I didn't see myself as an observer so much as someone who hoped to learn something from the process that I could incorporate into my own work. And I was very happy to do volunteer work and to help out where I could, but I really had the strong suspicion that I didn't have a lot to offer this region. I spoke Spanish, but not fluently, I didn't speak any of the local languages and I still don't. And I didn't have concrete things that I could offer. I think oftentimes people go to other countries, particularly to rule underdeveloped parts of other countries and have this idea that they're going to help out. But I didn't have any illusions that I had anything in particular to offer. I was going to learn and to be part of a movement and so in doing that I did a lot of observation. I collected a lot of information, I talked to a lot of people and did some collaboration on trying to put that information together into some picture of what was happening in the region. But I didn't go with some sense of what it was I would be doing when I got there. It was really at the core of curiosity. It makes me think about my time in the Peace Corps. I went as a math science teacher in a small village in West Africa. I think a lot of us went in the Peace Corps thinking, "Well, okay, I can go teach them and do something." But really what I felt like I came away with and speak to your own situation, I came away with friendships, connections and mutual understanding that developed. I felt like there's a place now where we belong to each other mutually. Absolutely, absolutely. I think that that's one of the things that if your heart and your mind are both open when you go to an unfamiliar community, what you learn essentially is how crucial the development of community is. Before anything else can happen, there has to be trust and shared experience and that might take a long time to develop. And in some of these areas, very rural and sometimes isolated communities, trust does not develop overnight. And by overnight, I mean 20 years. I mean, some of them, it's like, "Okay, after I know you the first 20 years, I may start to call you by your first name." Did you run into that at all in the situation you were in? Well, it's a fairly diverse region in terms of, you know, there are a number of different native nations there that have very different histories and very different local cultures. And so some of them are much more accustomed to and welcoming of outsiders and visitors than others are. This whole region has a long history of people coming from the outside as one of the women who I spent time within this region, a woman who was a traveling market vendor named Zuela would say, "Zuela, like to say, you know, we have always been invaded." The Spanish weren't even the beginning of it. Before that, the Aztecs came and before that, the Zapotecs came and moved here and stayed. You know, the Zapotecs are one of the native nations that's now lived there for well over 700 years. But from her perspective, as somebody who can trace her history back in this region with her community 5,000 years, you know, 750 years ago is not that long ago. So there is a real sense of cosmopolitanism in this region, even though it is very rural, and it's not easy to get to, because people have been traveling there for a long time. Some of the communities, like Zuela's community, which she's part of the Mihe people, their way of dealing with the outsiders was mostly to move their villages from the lowlands up into the mountains and try and maintain as much separation as they could from a lot of the outsiders who were coming. You know, in contrast to that, the Zapotec community, which now is the largest community in terms of numbers of people in the isthmus, they were much more interested in interacting with outsiders that came, integrating them into the community. So because it's such a diverse region, there are a lot of different responses to outsiders. In my own work, I tended to think that it was absolutely fine if someone didn't want to talk to me. I never went to a village, at least for the first time, unless I was going with someone who was from that village, or was going with someone who lived in a neighboring village, so I always went already as a guest. And, you know, explaining to people what I was doing, I was writing about how globalization was affecting this region, writing about how community organizing was happening in this region in the face of globalization. And usually I would find that some people wanted to talk to me, and some people didn't really want to talk to me. And although that didn't happen often, it did happen some. And I absolutely wanted the people who that I would end up writing about to understand that I was going to be sharing their stories. And that could be complicated when I was talking to people who, even if they could read, maybe didn't read very often, they didn't have books, they didn't have necessarily much access to books. And so the idea that I could write something down, and it would be published, and then later, other people would read it and know things about them with a little bit odd to some people. It was hard for some people to think about, "Oh, someone could read something about me, and even though I haven't met them, they will know things about me." And I had this actually happen in one case, one of the people I write about in my book, a preschool teacher named Aretha Ochoa. I published an article about her, and several months after it was published, a woman came to her village and said, "Oh, I read about you, and I'm really interested in what you're doing, and I want to hear more about what you're doing in your classroom." And Marisa was really taken aback because she thought, "I don't know this woman. How could this woman know something about me?" And it made me realize that she lives in a culture where there is reciprocity. If you share something with someone, that person's going to share something with you, because you're sitting right in front of each other. And she was now entering an environment in which a woman who was unknown came to her house knowing things about her, and she knew nothing about this person. She had just met this person. So it was a really different way of thinking for Marisa. It's kind of funny because it seems, Wendy, that a little bit unwittingly, you become an agent for some arm of globalization, this thing where knowledge goes out into the general populace. It appears on the internet, that kind of thing. Unwittingly, you've become an agent for exactly what you're trying to, I think, help them resist the incursions of globalization into their community. I think that might be true, although it wasn't really unwittingly. I was aware that this was going to happen, and so for that reason, a lot of people who I spent time with and who told me really fascinating stories, I never published anything about them or published those stories because I realized that either overtly or maybe covertly, that person wasn't comfortable with the story being shared to a wider community. Maybe they were comfortable sharing it with me because I had sat in their house and spent time with them, but that they didn't necessarily want that story to go out to a broader public that they couldn't control or even know in any way. And in terms of what I was doing there, I never really had the sense that I was helping anyone. The folks in the illness that they want to pick have maintained their cultural and social and political and spiritual autonomy for thousands of years, and they certainly didn't need someone like me who knew nothing going in about their region and their culture and their history helping them do that. I was hoping that I wouldn't hurt that process in any way, and I think what you're saying is true in the sense that when you publish something about a community, you may well hurt them. It may well have repercussions that you can't imagine. And so I think it's really important for writers to keep that ethical obligation, or maybe it's more of an ethical conundrum in mind, that we want to share these stories because we find them inspiring and we think that people can learn from them. But at the same time, by sharing the story, we might actually change the story. You know, people might pay more attention to and go to a village that doesn't necessarily want more visitors. On the other hand, I think that you did have some practical role to play in this. I realized, for instance, that at one point the locals were having no luck at all, finding where the super highway was going to slice through their lands, and they'd worked on that for years. But somehow you, as one of the nortes, you know, as one of these people coming from outside, you went and you were able to get that information. Yes. And I was surprised the first time that happened, that I was readily and without any question handed a piece of information, who the people that actually lived in that region, that would have to live with the results of that industrial development project, if it were to happen, had been trying to get and could not. You know, one of the times that happened, it was regarding the highway that was proposed for this region. A lot of the people that lived in the region thought that the highway they had worked perfectly fine. It was a two lane road with speed bumps. Whenever you came to a village, you had to slow down your vehicle so that you wouldn't hurt any of the pedestrians who were crossing the road. And the idea was that that would be replaced by a four or six lane wide super highway, you know, very much like a U.S. interstate, and that it would also be a toll road, which would mean that no one who lived in the region, even if they could afford a car, which was rare, would be able to afford to drive on this road. And so people were worried about one, not being able to cross this highway, two, not being able to use the highway, and three, having the highway cut through their villages and separate, for example, your house from your farm land. And if the way you get to your farmland is walking, you know, half an hour every morning with your machete and your lunch and your water bottle, you're not going to be able to do that if there's a four or six lane highway in between. And so they couldn't get information about where the highway was supposed to happen, where was it being planned, when was it going to happen, would it be happening at all? And when I went and had an interview with the state government official from the agency that was planning this project, you know, without any question at all, he gave me the map that showed where the highway would go. And that led to, or I shouldn't say led to, that was part of a really large organizing campaign that ended up with the highway being built, but it was not a toll road, and it is not an interstate, in the sense of a US interstate, it's a more narrow, slow speed highway, and local people can still use it because it's free. You don't have to pay a toll to be part of it. So there were a number of cases like that where there was information that people really had a right to, and there is a right to information set of laws in Mexico just like there is in the US, but they're often ignored. The only way that they had access to the information was, ironically, if a foreigner went and announced for it. Wendy, I think that a lot of people could look from the outside and maybe with a bit of paternalism, look at it and say, "Hey, we're going to open up transportation. All of the wonders of our world will therefore be able to appear there. They'll get to have Walmarts, they'll be able to have Coke and Pepsi." Why isn't globalization something good for them? Is it just because they don't know what they're missing yet? You know, some people ask it that way, and I'm sure you have a different point of view. It's very clear in your book that you do have a different point of view, but you obviously know how it looks from the outside as well as from the inside. There's a lot that comes when you talk about globalization and accepting the impacts of globalization as a huge spider web of different kinds of things that you're accepting, or rejecting if you choose to reject it. But one of the things that I found fascinating about the illness that they want to pick was the way that people had been dealing with globalization for a long time. They talked about the Spanish coming and wanting to build a wagon path from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, the Aztecs coming, looking for a land bridge that would get them into Central America to expand their empire. There was a long history of globalization in this region, and what was fascinating was the way that the villages there would take some aspects of globalization, the things that they thought benefited them and not others. And at the same time, I could see the impacts of a global economy in a way that it was harder to see in the U.S. where we've been dealing with the onslaught for longer and maybe have even forgotten about how things were before. So just to give one example, most of the places that I went to were not easy to get to, so I would take a series of buses or in some cases pickup trucks that were being operated like a sort of collective taxi service into these villages. And when I was sitting at the bus stop at the edge of the market waiting for the pickup truck to come that was going to take me to this village, you know, two and a half hours away, I could predict how long it was going to take me to get there and how hard the trip was going to be based on -- I knew how far away it was, geographically looking at a map, but what I didn't know was the condition of the road and how hard it would be for that truck to get up the road. And the way that I could tell how long it was going to take me was were the children who were waiting at the bus stop with me who were from this village speaking in the local language, or were they speaking in Spanish? If they were speaking in the local language, it was going to be really hard to get there. And then the other part of the equation was looking at the adults who were around me and the adults who still had their teeth, whose teeth had not rotted yet when they were, you know, let's say 30 or 35 years old. If they still had their teeth, it was also going to be harder to get to this village because it meant that this road was too treacherous for the big Coca-Cola truck to get all the way up. And so once the big Coca-Cola truck could get to your village because you had a fairly decent road, it meant that by the time you were 30 or 35 years old, you probably weren't going to have any teeth left from having been drinking Coca-Cola. And your children were probably going to end up seeking Spanish and not speaking the local language to each other because of the access that global economy had to the village. So I found myself thinking a lot about isolation versus assimilation and what those things mean. And then also thinking a lot about how, you know, we tend to think of these places as out of the way or on the fringes of things, whereas, of course, every village and every, you know, human nucleus is the center of that local culture, whatever the local culture is. And so when a road is built so that a Coca-Cola truck can come in, that is something coming from the outside into this center and maybe affecting it. And I often found it interesting when I would talk to people about these villages in Mexico where I had spent time, there was this idea that these places were on the fringe of things, that these people, places were far, far away from the center when actually they were in some sense or in every sense their own center. And when things came from outside, that was the fringe impact on, you know, the center of this culture and community. It is an interesting perspective. To those of us who, you know, think globally, act locally, that kind of thought, did the people there think globally, act locally or were they, we don't care to think globally, that's not our problem, that's your problem, you have your mess out there. I think it was a mix of things, you know, certainly they were thinking about their local communities and how they were changing or not changing. And they also thought a lot about their role in the larger political system and in the larger economic system. One of the things I thought was really interesting is that often people who had very little formal education, maybe three or four years, they've been able to go to school and since then had been working, in essentially the primary economy, working as fisher folk, working as farmers, they were very cosmopolitan in the sense that they were interested in how their village fit into a global economy and had a much higher level of awareness of things happening in other parts of the world than I would say the majority of people that I had known in the US would. And I was amazed sometimes when I would travel to a village that was really out of the way, not a place that newspapers would ever reach, even a place that was sometimes hard to get a radio or television signal because of the mountains and the topography. You know, without exception, at some point during my visit, someone would ask me a fairly complicated question about some aspect of US foreign policy. I remember going to one village and someone asking me why the US government wouldn't leave VHS Island in Puerto Rico, which is a fairly specific topic for somebody who lives very, very far from Puerto Rico to be asking me about. And we ended up having an interesting conversation about the history of US colonialism in Puerto Rico. That's the kind of conversation that I have never had with, you know, the person sitting next to me on the bus in, you know, Seattle or Boston where I've lived here, but that happened really regularly there, those kinds of conversations. So I think there was a sense of thinking both globally and locally, and then even acting globally, a number of the people who I met when I lived there had come to the US for work in order to raise money and then go back and be able to stay in their villages. And since I finished working on the book and I now live in Seattle, there are a number of people who appear as small or even primary characters in my book who now live and work not far from where I live here in Seattle and they've chosen to insert themselves into the global economy moving to where there is employment for them because for various reasons they weren't able to earn a living in their village. And their plan is to earn a certain amount of money and then go back to their village and start a new business or invest in something new. And so in that way, the responses that people have to the pressures of globalization are really sophisticated and very cosmopolitan. It's hard when I think about when I left the United States and moved to the business, I had a grant from a foundation that was paying my rent and I had a telephone in my house. I could at any time call my family members and friends. I had an internet connection so I could communicate with people by email. You know, all of my needs for communication and for supporting myself who are met, whereas when the people that I know from the business who have come to the US, they've come with nothing, they've come not knowing anyone here necessarily, and they have figured out how to negotiate life in Seattle. And that's a sort of level of cosmopolitanism that I really can't imagine. You know, when I was living in the isthmus region, I was constantly having to ask people for help because I didn't know how to do things. When my toilet broke, I had no idea how to fix it. You know, the woman that lived next to me thought it was really strange that I had managed to live the first 30 years of my life without learning how to fix toilets because, of course, there, you do it yourself. I'm glad you've become an educated woman now. I'm not sure I'd be able to fix my toilet here in my house in Seattle, but... There's a question I have, which is maybe a little bit challenging or difficult. I'm aware of a lot of energy in the United States, at least from certain parts of the population, reacting against immigrants here. My reaction, and a number of people I know, reaction we have, is that those who look down upon the immigrants, the foreigners, that it's a xenophobic reaction, and it's like English has to be the official language, and that's what we have to teach in our schools and make that official language. I'm aware that the way you were talking about people, very favorably, of course, in book about wanting to preserve their own language, their own culture, their own people, and the mole from outside, from one point of view, that xenophobia. What do you think about that? I think that's a really good point, and I think there is maybe some xenophobia on the part of some of the people I met. I remember one time, one of my first visits to one of the villages that I talk about a lot in my book, it's called San Francisco Del Mad, it's a fishing village, and I was sitting on the little front stoop of the friend's house who I was staying with. It was early in the morning, about 6.30 in the morning, and an older woman walked by me down the main street, was actually one of the few paved streets in the town, and she was selling hot chocolate, which I had found really funny because it was 6.30 in the morning, and it was already almost 90 degrees outside, and she asked me if I wanted hot chocolate, and I said, "No, thank you." And then she said, "You're not from here, are you?" And I said, "No, I'm from the United States." And she said, "Well, to the devil with you." And she kept walking. And I thought it was funny, I laughed out loud when she said this, because honestly, most of the times the people from the US have shown up in her village, it has not voted well for that village. And when I shared this interaction with my friend who I was staying with, he was really appalled, and he said, "Well, we can't have that kind of xenophobia in our village, that is not going to help us move forward." And this is one of the people who was working very hard against industrial shrimp farms that at the time were slated to be built in his village and in the surrounding villages. And so he was certainly somebody very engaged with a movement to keep outside things that they found unhelpful out. And so I think it can be a really fine line between what is xenophobia and what is wanting to hold on to what you have. And I think the way that I draw the line is, is that fear of something concrete or is that fear of something unknown? And I think that often anti-immigrant sentiment or people feeling threatened by other people coming to the United States is really more a fear of the unknown than a fear of something that is actually happening or something that might actually happen. And on the other side of that, of course, is that this woman telling me, "Well, to the devil with you, her life and her way of earning a living and her village's way of earning a living didn't reflect on me. I could go about my life and earn my living and feed myself and feed my family." And she could go ahead and do that with her village without what she was doing affect me. Whereas most of the people that I know from this part of Mexico who have since come to the U.S. for work, their inability to earn a living in their home village is directly related to the way that we live our lives in the U.S. either because of things we consume or because of our government economic policy, which obviously we don't choose, but it's an effect of U.S. power around the world. And so I think that there's a real difference in these different kinds of xenophobia where this woman can fear me, but I don't actually have -- there's no threat to me in my life because of the way she lives her life, whereas the folks that I know from this region of Mexico that have come to the U.S., their way of life has actually been directly threatened by the way that we live our lives here and the way that our government does business here. Quite a bit earlier in our talk, you mentioned about the people who were focusing on what was good long-term for the community as opposed to just the individual and just the short-term. For me, that's a question of spirituality. It's like a Native American. You talk about seven generations, who will this effect, that kind of thing. That's a question of spirituality. Did you find a spiritual nuggets, a spiritual light that you got from them, and could you compare that to what spiritual religious light you got, what identity you got by being raised in the U.S.A.? Well, it's different for a lot of different people who I worked with, and certainly one of the things that all of the people who I spent time with and who appear in my book, "Having Common," is what you refer to as a Native American conception of spirituality. The way that that manifested itself in this region, there were multiple aspects to it, but one was that people are not separate from the earth. I'm thinking of one time in particular, I was having a conversation with a fisherman about the possibility of a shrimp farm being built in his village, and this would be an industrial system in which they get rid of the coastal forest, replace it with cement tanks, fill them with shrimp, pump in lots of clean water to support that shrimp population, pump out a lot of waste, and in doing so, really damage the region's ecology, and eventually poison the local environment so much that the shrimp farm can't even function, because there's not enough clean water left to serve it. We were having a conversation about this possibility, and he said, it was very simple for him, he said, "Well, I'm not opposed to development or to things changing or to using different fishing techniques, but if it's going to hurt Mother Earth, absolutely not." And to him, that was non-negotiable, and there was a real sense, not in his exact words, but in, I think, the spirit that went along with what he said, that Mother Earth was a real living entity, and that he needed to serve that entity, that he was not separate from that entity in any way, and certainly his role as a human being on this planet was to serve Mother Earth, that was very clear in the way that he was speaking. Other people in the community, for example, Maritza Ochoa, the, who's a preschool teacher who teaches in a bilingual Spanish Ombayat preschool, and Ombayat is a language that is spoken only in her village, it has 10,000 speakers, and they all live in her town. She was a devout Catholic and practiced Catholicism and went to mass, and yet the Catholicism that was practiced in her village was not only very informed by liberation theology, it was also very informed by native spirituality, and there was a certain, incredible nature to her practice of Catholicism that really wasn't familiar to me. You know, I didn't grow up Catholic, but I had a lot of Catholic friends, and I ended mass quite a bit, and the Catholicism that was practiced in this village, Samatteo de Amada, was very, very different than what I had seen, you know, in Southern California, and her religious beliefs definitely did encompass this idea that her role in the world was to serve her community, and through serving the community, she was serving God, and that was not negotiable, that she was not going to make a decision that benefited her personally, but didn't benefit her community, because in a sense that would be sinful, you know, you just didn't do that. It was a word that we have, or I should say they have, in Spanish, that we don't have in English that I talk about a little bit in the book that Protego Nismo, and Protego Nismo means, you know, sort of literally taking on the role of the protagonist. This was something that was really considered a bad thing to do, and one of the things that people found strange about my project, and the fact that I was writing a book and going to put people in the book, was that to put yourself out there as an individual in that way was an act of Protego Nismo, and that meant that you weren't putting yourself subservient to your community, that you weren't acting as part of the community, you were acting on your own, and that was not something that people did. And I guess in some ways this is similar to, you know, my childhood experiences going to church and being part of, you know, a Protestant Bible school and that kind of thing, but it was really where people's sense of community came from, and I remember, you know, I moved around a lot as a child because my father was in the US Navy and we moved every few years, that every time we moved, one of the first steps in the process to adapting to a new place was to go and become part of the church congregation, find our role in the church congregation, and so it was really about finding community. I remember being a little bit at a loss, wondering how, when somebody moved and they weren't part of a church congregation, how did you find your community, if it wasn't through, you know, that aspect of finding, you know, a group of people that you were going to worship with. Now, obviously, it's different in southern Mexico, where people in these villages tend not to move. They might move away for a few years to go to a school or to work and earn money, but you were always coming back and grounded in, you know, your village in the place that you were born. I'm interested in some of your comments about the Catholic church. You've got Maritza, who's Catholic, who is getting valuable strength from that. There's the bishop that you traveled with back into the backwoods there, how he's living out liberation theology, even though the church removed him as a bishop, because, you know, liberation theology wasn't a favor anymore. Do you have some sense whether the Catholic church ends up being more positive or negative influence, and I have some vested interest in this. I grew up Catholic, even though I've been a Quaker ever since I've been an adult. I got some valuable things out of my Catholic upbringing, and I think there's some things that don't work for me from it. How did you think, particularly in Mexico, it worked, net positive negative? This is a really complex, multilayered question. You know, I did not grow up Catholic. My mother grew up in the Missouri Senate of a Lutheran church, which I think some of the things I think are negative about that church and negative about the Catholic church, they share in common, but she was really a refugee from that church in a way that I've had some friends that think of themselves as refugees from formal Catholicism as practiced in the United States. But I did find in Mexico, there was a huge diversity among the villages I visited of what the role of Catholicism was in the village, and some villages, almost everyone, identified themselves as Catholic, although there was certainly a lot of indigenous spirituality within their particular brand of Catholicism and part of the reason that the Catholic church, of course, was able to become so powerful in Mexico with by incorporating rather than rejecting a lot of different aspects of the spirituality that it encountered when it arrived. In other villages I went to, many more people were part of Pentecostal or Evangelical Protestant faith. The fanciest and nicest building in the town where I lived, which was a market town of about 30,000 people, was the Mormon church, and there were lots of Mormon missionaries around, and people would actually occasionally ask me if I were a missionary because I was white, although the Mormon church had been successful enough in this region of Mexico that the elders who did the mission work there were actually all local Mexicans that were not foreigners coming and doing that anymore, it had a local faith. And then there were other people I knew who their spirituality was completely based in their local community without any influence from the Catholic church or from the Pentecostal church, it was all whatever the local indigenous spirituality was. And so I saw the whole range, but the thing that I found among all the people who I spent a lot of time with, and these are not an arbitrary collection of people from these villages, these are people who had chosen to put a huge amount of energy into some kind of community work. So that's something of a self-selected community. But they all, I think, what they drew from the Catholic church if they were part of that or their own spirituality, if they were part of a different faith background, was a sense of obligation and service and a sense of being part of a larger collective. As to whether the overall impact was overall positive or overall negative, I think that's a really hard question to answer. I will say that one thing that was true in this part of Mexico that's also true in some parts of Chiapas and in other parts of Latin America is that the tension between the Catholic church and the Pentecostal and Evangelical churches was quite high and was often a real stumbling block when it came to doing community projects. And the organizations that seemed to get around that the best were the ones that said here, we are doing community organizing and we don't talk about church affiliation and we don't talk about political party affiliation. Those are separate from what we're doing here. And it was very hard for an organization to maintain that, but it was interesting to me that those two things seemed to go together that you needed to take religious affiliation and political party affiliation out of the equation before really effective organizing could happen. With your added perspective of what you saw in the Christmas of Twantepak, how do you think about our community living connection here in the United States? My own perspective, which I'll give you just, I'm not trying to set you up or anything, is that we've lost so much community, whether it's spiritual or secular community. From my point of view, what's important is the community that binds us as a whole makes us think beyond ourselves of the bigger thing that we're part of. That's spiritual for me, and some people might just think of that as secular humanism, and I don't want to debate words, but that's what I'm concerned about. And I think we've lost too much of that in the United States, and that makes us ineffective when we want to stand up to other forces in the world, economic or governmental or whatever. You're going down there to the isthmus of Mexico there and finding how people are drawing their strength and how they're able to witness and work together. Did you come back with a change in your own personal sense of community? I think I came back with a sense of just what we're up against here in the United States. I originally went to this part of Mexico as a frustrated grassroots organizer who felt that I wasn't doing a good job at my work, and I realized in my time living there and talking with people there, that part of the reason I was so frustrated was because of precisely this lack that you just described, that we do tend to think of ourselves as individuals with individual goals and seeking individual improvements, and that's really foreign to the way that folks in the isthmus tend to think and tend to construct their identities. I think that is changing some people there did complain about, well the problem here is that people are becoming too individualistic, and that was the term that people used and people would complain about that. But still, we are far behind where they are, and I think you're right that we have lost a lot of that aspect of our lives, and we often think of things that are collective or communal as being negative almost. At the same time, I am hopeful that there have been a lot of recent initiatives in the US to bring some of that back. I mean, some of it I think is having a deeper understanding of that aspect for native cultures and native ways of organizing community. And then also, you know, some very intentional things that we're doing in the US, very practical things like community-supported agriculture programs. I remember the first time I joined a community-supported agriculture program that was around early 1990s, maybe 1993, and it was a relatively new idea at that time that a bunch of households would get together and pay a farmer at the beginning of the season, then the farmer would go out and buy what year she needed, plant the crop, and we would all divide up the harvest. And if things went badly, we all would suffer for that, not just the farmer. That's a really tiny example of community and a really limited one. But now, you know, there are communities-supported agriculture programs all over. It's a very widespread thing. Twenty years ago, it was really not well-known at all. So I think that there are things like that that we're slowly moving back to where we were a long time ago, and if we can get there, maybe we can head off the worst aspects of this beast of globalization that we seem to have unleashed in our economy. For those of you who've tuned in recently, you're listening to Spirit In Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. My website is northernspiritradio.org and come to my site to hear all of the broadcasts of the last six years. You'll find links to my guests, like Wendy Call, who's with us here today. She's author of a book, No Word for Welcome. And you can also come to my site and leave comments, and they're so helpful to me. They're helpful to other visitors as well to know what you liked about the various programs I have on and what you didn't care for. Wendy, as I said, is the author of a book, No Word for Welcome. The Mexican village faces the global economy. She's talking about the isthmus of Twantepak. It's a miniature study that sees globalism both from the outside and sees it historically. So to some degree, you've got a bird's eye view of what's going on, but you also are getting from within this book a very close up, a worm's eye view of what was going on there. As I was reading the book, Wendy, the lens I was looking at was so different that I wasn't quite sure. If you were just seeing this in the outside trying to report what you're seeing, learn about the area, or sometimes you were acting as their neighbor and brother, just walking alongside them. I sense different portions of you involved in what you're reporting. Are you trying to give us some information so that we can address globalization? Are we trying to just become one of the family there in the neighbors? Did you go through different identities as you went through the process of writing? No Word for Welcome? I absolutely did. It's a really interesting question, and the first time someone has asked me about that, and I think it probably comes out of a very attentive and careful read of the book. But there were, if you were to read through different drafts of the book, and there were many of them, there were different aspects of involvement that would have been clear. I had one earlier draft that was much more of a memoir. It had more about my own experiences, my own challenges, good things and bad things that happened to me while I was there. And I didn't do that so much because that was interesting to me. It was more what I thought would be of interest to the widest number of readers here, you know, it was sort of more in the genre of travel writing. It was only one person from this part of Mexico who I met when I lived there who can read English because she had lived in Los Angeles for a long time and actually lives in Los Angeles right now. And I sent her the first couple chapters of this earlier year draft of the book, and she wrote back to me and talked to me about what she liked and what she thought that I had gotten wrong. And then she said, "But there's one thing that I really don't understand. This is the book about the isness that they wanted back, and why is so much of it about you?" And I realized that I didn't have a good answer for her, and so then I went back through, and the next draft of the book took out a lot of those personal experiences. And certainly, you know, if you were to look at a log of what I did, you know, every day of the total of three years that I spent there, I spent a lot more time volunteering for local organizations and attending the meetings of local organizations and helping with gathering information about what was actually happening with all of these industrial development projects that were proposed. A lot more of that happened than appears in the book, and part of that is because I wanted readers to be able to have their own experience of the region to actually have some sense that they were getting to know people who lived there without me as the narrator, the author, mediating that experience. A lot of the process of completing No Word for Welcome was really a process of weeding out and deciding of all of the different experiences and of all of the different stories, which ones actually merit inclusion and which ones have a wide enough interest that I should actually, you know, put them in the book. One of the things, Wendy, that, you know, was weighing with me through the book was, is there going to be an answer to dealing with globalization here? I think I've settled on a question that's short of that, and that is having had this experience and from the worms I view of watching the world being inundated or threatened perhaps by globalization, do you feel more or less hopeful for these valuable pockets of humanity and for something alternative to globalization to happen? Do you feel more or less optimistic at this point? I'm not saying this at all to dodge the question, but I would say that I feel more and less optimistic. For me, the experience of living in a place that was by our standards, by U.S. standards, poor and, you know, what people like to call underdeveloped, although I don't think it is underdeveloped. It's a very sophisticated set of communities with very long history, but in terms of infrastructure, what we would consider very poor and underdeveloped. And also, you know, when you have access to relatively few monetary resources, you know, you live very close to the edge and a relatively small change in your environment can have absolutely disastrous implications. If it rains too much and your corn rots and you have nothing else to eat, what are you going to do? And so in living there, I had a really strong emotional sense of just the razor's edge on which we live on this planet because we have abused the planet in so many different ways. I remember seeing in a Mexican newspaper, and I cut out this picture and put it on my desk in my house there in the isthmus. And it was a picture of a man in Nicaragua whose neighborhood had flooded, his whole town had flooded, and he was wading through water that was more than waste deep, holding two chickens. That was the only thing he was holding. He had the clothing he was wearing and these two chickens. And I thought that, you know, the sum total of his savings account, so to speak, is these two chickens. It could be a few meals or maybe they could lay eggs, but that was it. And that was a really visual image for me of what I felt people really in most of the world are living, that were really on that kind of a razor's edge. So in that sense, living there, you could say made me less hopeful, but on the other hand, seeing that in spite of that, people were very, very proactive in protecting their communities and very confident that they were going to get through this. I remember having a number of conversations with Maritzo Choa, who's a preschool teacher, and she's teaching her children in Spanish and in her local language on the apps. There are 10,000 speakers of her language, and she is absolutely adamant that her children are going to continue to speak this language and teach it to their children. Now, if you talk to linguists, they will tell you that any language that has fewer than a quarter of a million speakers is on its way out in danger of extinction. Well, she doesn't have a quarter of a million people speaking her language. She has 10,000, but she's still adamant that she's going to do whatever she can to make sure that these 10,000 people pass it on to their children and grandchildren. And so seeing that level of commitment really made me more hopeful. One of the things that people told me when I first visited this region is, "Oh, the illness if they want to beg." That's the place where people go their own way, and they are very autonomous, and they don't take no for an answer, and they don't care what anyone else thinks. When you're living on such an economic and ecological precipice, which in a sense we all are in this world, having that quality that you might even call stubbornness is a really helpful thing. And so I came out of this experience more aware of what we faced and how difficult it is, but also aware of the spirit that people have to keep going even in the face of that. So I wanted to turn back a little bit of your question on to you as a reader of the book. You said that as you were reading, you were wondering, "Am I really going to get an answer about what do we do about globalization?" And of course, as I was writing the book to those years, that was the question that hounded me. Am I actually going to have anything to offer at the end of this book? I don't want to ask someone to have read, you know, 300 odd pages and then think, "I have nothing to offer." So at the end of the book, what did you think? Did you feel like you came away with some sense of what we do about this? Well, I think I want to bow a little bit to your wisdom. What you just said was that you were both more and less optimistic. That is my experience. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, as I mentioned. I saw some of the preciousness and the wealth which is the community before the outside world takes over and starts forever changing how the people live. I saw a little bit of it last year when I was in Cuba, which in some ways is kind of isolated from the world because of the embargo of the United States and so on. What I see is there's great strength in local community and I see some of the riches that come from global living, you know, medicine. We've got penicillin and people who don't have to die or suffer needlessly. I recognize the strengths of both and I think that one of the things that your book does that helps me feel better about the world is if people sit down and read no word for welcome, they'll come away understanding some of the balance that we do not get from our media and from our ways of living. We think the more we have, the better. And I think if they read your book, they realize that sometimes when you have less, what you have is infinitely more precious. So that's the wealth that I came away from the book. I don't think globalization is defeated. My sense is that the best tool we have to make globalization not threatening, not strike us at the core is what I would call deep spirituality. I practice mine as a Quaker and I think we're used to walking that edge. I think a lot of people who have religion in the world only learn one side of the story. An improved in depth of spirituality is the greatest hope from the world in my point of view and those words as I would define them not necessarily seeing anyone else would. What do you think of that one? It's a big responding of a lot of questions within that question. I could go on for a very long time. But one of the things that is coming to mind for me in what you said in the earlier part of your answer about where this leads us. What do we do about globalization and what does this leave us in terms of thinking about what we've had as priorities in our culture and what we've decided is valuable. What we've taken on is sort of a slogan for the folks in the instance that they want to back who organized the campaign to keep industrial shrimp farms out of their ancestral fishing grounds. At least until today have been successful in doing that. Of course, that struggle will continue indefinitely. As part of this campaign, one of the main organizers of the campaign is a man named Leonel Gomez. He's an elementary school teacher who is from a fishing village, lived in a fishing village. Now, he had t-shirts made that were part of this campaign and on the back there was a saying in Spanish, but I later learned was from the Cree people of the United States and had somehow been translated into Spanish and made it to the Mexican isthmus. And the saying was, this is a shortened version of the original, when the last tree has died when the last fish has been caught, then we will understand that we can't eat money. That phrase really haunted me for a long time because I thought, oh, we just have to make sure that we don't wait until the very end before we figure that out. And I do maintain hope that we are figuring that out. And with any luck, it's not too late. I do have the sense that your book helps us figure it out sooner. And for that, I'm very thankful. And I'm also thankful, Wendy, that you're able to join me here today for spirit and action. Thank you so much. It's been really a gift to be here. And I really appreciate the rich discussion about the book. Today's spirit and action guest was Wendy Call, website WendyCall.com. And you can, of course, simply Google her book, No Word for Welcome, or even better, follow the links from my northernspiritradio.org. We'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)
Wendy Call spent 3 years with organizers in southern Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, facing the threat of globalization in the form of a Megaproject to develop the area.