Last November 28, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, visited University City. Thousands listened to her, many dialogued with her and talked about the reason for her candidacy. Photo: Carlos Mamahua

DISPOSSESSION, GRIEVANCES, PROPOSALS

By Adolfo Gilly

Last November 28, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, visited our University City to dialogue and explain her candidacy and her program to a crowd of students and professors that, having as a protective backdrop the big mural of Juan O’Gorman, the one in which Copernicus and Ptolemy cross and meet, listened attentively and with applause to the words and proposals of Marichuy.

Martín Esparza, of the Mexican Electricians Union; Mario Luna, representative and leader of the Yaqui peoples of Sonora; Araceli Orozco, mother of Lesvy; two UNAM students, Amiel Moreno and Elena González; and Bettina Cruz, an indigenous organizer from Juchitán (Oaxaca) accompanied her on the platform. Botellita de Jerez and Café Tacvba added music and festivities.

A banner hung at the foot of the O’Gorman mural summed up the flower of utopia: “We come to talk about impossible things, because too much has been said about the possible.” It brought to mind the words of Marc Bloch, historian, soldier and combatant of the French resistance, shot by the Nazis: “By dint of utopias, reality finally appears.”

I found on the esplanade compañeras and compañeros of so many times and tendencies of the left and among the used books for sale there, appeared one of the greats of Latin America, the Peruvian Manuel Scorza, with his novel Redoble por Rancas, which tells us about the Peruvian times of dispossession, anger and avenger myths.

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What did the candidate of the Indigenous Government Council say and propose? Here I reproduce, better than any chronicle, her very own words in some of the paragraphs of her message:

“Now more than ever, we need education to be critical, scientific and in accord with the reality of this multicultural nation in which the native cultures have always been denied. The foregoing is in order to stop that there is training to instruct operators about dispossession, about excessive production, about the justifiers of the social, political and environmental to which this capitalist system has subjected us, that education stops being the seedbed for the alienation of the peoples in our communities and in the cities; in other words, that it stops being part of sea the gears that make the capitalist system function.”

“We need education to be free and popular because rights must not be begged for or converted into merchandise, but rather vindicated and exercised without fear for the construction of new forms and horizons.” […]

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“And we tell you that we are and we will be, because the pain and rage that the original peoples have is also because of seeing our dead, disappeared, incarcerated for defending what is life for us. We have pain and rage over impunity in the face of thousands of femicides, because of the systematic violence that women of the countryside and the cities experience day after day and that makes us say “enough, the time for women has come.” And have no doubt! We want it all.”

“Because our struggle our commitment is very great and we must not stop constructing, with dignity, the Mexico in which women never again falter on the path and in the work to heal our homeland.” […]

“We say that because we come seeking something much bigger and more important, we come seeking the collective conscience of below, which we have seen born and flourish in organized students and who have taught us a lot with their dignity and determination.”

“Proof of that is in the historic struggles waged by students in 1968, 1986 and 1999, which remind us that it’s also your time and that you are not only the future, but also the present, and not just of Mexico but also of the world. Today we say that along with that apprenticeship in the historical memory of university students and rebel youth, it’s time to promote and construct from the collective thought and action of the original peoples and from the dignity and strength of the struggle of the women that rebel and organize the new world that is reclaiming history.” […]

“To you, the conscious youth, the creators and multipliers of arts and sciences, we recognize you as a great light in the midst of so much death and darkness, we need you to continue dreaming, fighting and making larger all the time that which the powerful fear so much, which is called democracy, liberty and justice.”

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“To all our brothers and sisters of this great city, now deeply torn, trapped I networks of violence and organized crime, torn to pieces every moment by the ambitions of big real estate capitals, to whose decisions all the public powers and all the parties of the politics of above are subjected, we want to tell you that it’s time to rebuild this city and this country from below and to the left, renewing the solidarity of everyone, which on previous occasions has distinguished you, during the earthquakes in 1985, in the recent earthquakes, on occasions when the effort and unity are demanded of the thousands and thousands that with your daily work make the city’s life possible.”

“The cities are par excellence the space in which capitalism is reproduced nonstop; the space and time of cities are organized to satisfy the reproduction of the capitalist system. Exploitation, dispossession and disrespect are permanent times in the existence of the cities.”

“What it’s about is that those below of this city, together with the native indigenous peoples and residents that inhabit it that are cornered, gradually but steadily losing their old territories, or living and working in subhuman conditions, organize joyous rebellion and anticapitalist resistance, seeking to hit the al monster in its heart at the same time that a new really just, free and democratic city is constructed.”

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María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, in University City, spoke her words about land, work and life, against dispossession, money and death. It’s up to us to listen to them, consider them and decide.

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada

Monday, December 4, 2017

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/12/04/opinion/010a1pol

Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee