Monday 14 July 2008
by David Bacon
Truthout | Perspective
The FIOB is a political organization of indigenous communities and migrants, with chapters in Mexico and the U.S. It advocates for the rights of migrants, and for the right not to migrate -- for economic development which would enable people to stay home. Indigenous Triqui women prepare meat and their traditional large tortillas.
Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico - For almost half a century, migration has been the main fact of social life in hundreds of indigenous towns spread through the hills of Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states. That's made the conditions and rights of migrants central concerns for communities like Santiago de Juxtlahuaca.
Today, the right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival. But this June, in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca's Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their looms, to talk about another right: the right to stay home.
In the town's community center, two hundred Mixtec, Zapotec and Triqui farmers, and a handful of their relatives working in the US, made impassioned speeches asserting this right at the triannual assembly of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB). Hot debates ended in numerous votes. The voices of mothers and fathers arguing over the future of their children echoed from the cinder block walls of the cavernous hall.
In Spanish, Mixteco and Triqui, people repeated one phrase over and over: the derecho de no migrar - the right to not migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just inequality and exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons people have to migrate to begin with. Indigenous communities are pointing to the need for social change.
About 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca live in the US, 300,000 in California alone, according to Rufino Dominguez, one of FIOB's founders. These men and women come from communities whose economies are totally dependent on migration. The ability to send a son or daughter across the border to the north, to work and send back money, makes the difference between eating chicken or eating salt and tortillas. Migration means not having to manhandle a wooden plow behind an ox, cutting furrows in dry soil for a corn crop that can't be sold for what it cost to plant it. It means dollars arrive in the mail when kids need shoes to go to school or when a grandparent needs a doctor.
