El Big Easy Amigo Blogger: April 2011

José Torres-Tama is an award-wining multidisciplinary artist, and he received a prestigious MAP Fund Grant for his "Taco Truck Theater / Teatro Sin Fronteras" ensemble performance on wheels, which challenges the anti-immigrant hysteria. "This Taco Truck Kills Fascists" is the project’s documentary that won Best Louisiana Feature at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival. "Aliens, Immigrants, & Other Evildoers” is “a sci-fi Latino noir” solo that exposes the rise in hate crimes against Latin American immigrants in a country that dehumanizes them while exploiting their labor. Northwestern University Press will publish the full “Aliens” script in the anthology titled “Encuentro: Latinx Performances for the New American Theater” due in May 2019. Vanderbilt, Duke, Cornell and others have presented his solos, and international presenters include Roehampton University in London, Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, and Centre for Performance Research in Wales. From 2006 to 2011, he contributed commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA, and exposed the human rights violations Latin American immigrant workers faced in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Top blog photo from “ALIENS” by Craig Morse, and bottom image by Ben Thompson.) www.torrestama.com

Friday, April 8, 2011

Fear Mongering of Immigrants Is Alive and Well in Louisiana

Go to LATINO USA'S site at
http://www.latinousa.org/932-2/
to hear the full program and an edited version of this commentary
that began airing across the country on Friday, February 11, 2011.

In the weeks following the Arizona shooting of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, we heard from both parties about a need for civility in framing political discourse and differences. The hate mongering rhetoric employed by most Republican Tea Party candidates in the 2010 elections was loaded with vitriol, and we kept hearing a cry to “take the country back”. Coming from mostly white conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, I find this phrase disturbing, especially with a multiracial president in the White House whose detractors only see a black man in the highest office.

Rarely is Obama referred to as the multiracial executive chief that he is, and the media plays along with this racially limited depiction of a hybrid president. Unfortunately, this divisive omission echoes one of the biggest fears still lingering in this country, which is the fear of the races mixing. Obama is the scariest representation of this great white fear nestled in the crevices of the old patriarchy, and its so-called Grand Old Party is bearing witness to the overall complexion of the general population change across the country.

We Latinos are becoming a greater factor, and the permanent suntan of most of our people is changing the color spectrum dramatically. Brown is the new black, and it frightens the old guard to the core of their wavering stranglehold on power. As such, its insidiously strategic politicians stoke the fires of xenophobia within its similarly scared base of supporters to take us back to the good ole’ days when their power and abuses of it went unquestioned.

How far back do these folks want to go? Perhaps, they long for the nostalgic 1950s when lynchings of African Americans was a ubiquitous sport in the South, keeping colored folk in a constant state of terror. Latinos and Asians were similarly marginalized, and Texas Rangers had lynching parties of their own with brown Mexican bodies as the strange fruits rotting in the brutal Southwest sun. Across the great land of the free, people of color were not afforded the freedoms exercised by their white counterparts, and we lacked a political voice to challenge the blatant institutionalized racism of those dark times.

In his 2010 re-election campaign, Louisiana’s Republican Senator David Vitter succeeded in taking us back a few decades. His “illegal aliens” attack ad had brown men crossing a ripped up border fence and receiving hefty welfare checks at the expense of white taxpayers. This was pure fabrication because undocumented workers are not eligible to receive such benefits. Just as disturbing was the endorsement Vitter received from the Times-Picayune. The local newspaper recommended voting for a candidate who first painted himself as “Mr. Family Values”, and was caught with his hypocritical pants down in 2007, linked to the notorious DC Madame’s prostitution ring.

That outing prompted a New Orleans Madame who proclaimed Mr. Vitter was a constant client of the Canal Street brothel she ran in 2002. When his opponents brought up the prostitution infidelities, the Senator’s response was that “his God” and the good people of Louisiana had forgiven him. In New Orleans, Latino organizations such as PUENTES and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce had no forgiveness for Vitter’s offensive ad, which criminalized all Latinos with Hispanic looking actors arriving in droves to cheat the state. With the support of prominent leaders from the African American and Vietnamese communities, they organized to have the thirty-second race baiting promo off the air.

It equaled Sharon Angle’s commercial, which pushed fear of “illegals” into the hearts of white Nevada voters, but that state’s Latino electorate flexed its massive muscle, defeating the Tea Party candidate’s gubernatorial ambitions. In Louisiana, Vitter’s hate and fear campaign yielded victorious results. Even in the blue city of New Orleans, the Republican garnered strong support, but I would not be surprised if he is found to have hired undocumented workers to reconstruct his home after the storm, exploiting their labor while criminalizing them simultaneously.

Latino immigrants continue to do much of the reconstruction work in the Crescent City, but they are repeatedly cheated by contractors who exploit their tenuous status and don’t’ pay them. Criminals target them because they are known to carry cash. When they are murdered, their lives mean little to the local police, who corroborate with ICE to deport them. Under local Sheriff Gusman’s watch, dozens of immigrants have literally disappeared after they were picked up. In early February under freezing temperatures in front of his jail, the New Orleans Congress of Day Laborers held a twenty-four hour vigil to protest his brutal practices. They called out the names of Leornardo Ortiz, missing since 2008, Guadalupe Saldibar, missing since 2009, Jesus Contreras since 2010, and a dozen others for whom they held signs with silhouetted dark figures with the year they were disappeared next to their names.

I hope that New Orleanians wake up and smell the café con leche and have the decency to acknowledge the inhumanity that many immigrants have suffered here while rebuilding our city. Gusman, a Democrat, abuses his authority, and Vitter used fear as his re-election platform. Neither have been models of civility. When police officials and politicians engage in direct vilification of a people, they contribute directly to the general mistreatment of those targeted. In a depressed economy, undocumented immigrants are easy scapegoats.

How many believe that they are loosing their jobs to immigrants and are willing to pick up a weapon like the Arizona shooter to release their hatred, the kind of hatred inspired by Vitter’s poisonous campaign and the human rights violations exacted by the local sheriff?

Make art that matters,

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

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The Disappeared Immigrants, Photo Retablo

A member of the Congress of Day Laborer demonstrating on Canal Street in New Orleans for a public protest, and carrying a name placard of an immigrant who has disappeared in the NOPD jail system. This demonstration took place on International Workers' Day on May 1, 2011. Demonstrators carried dozens of name placards with silhoutted figures of immigrants who have gone missing in the notorious jails of the New Orleans Police Department. While the NOPD has been rightfully castigated for its mistreatment and murdering of African American civilians in the days after Katrina, the press has not engaged in investigating the many immigrants who have gone missing in the NOPD jails. Immigrants live in a parallel unverse and their suffering goes unnoticed.

When an Immigrant Dies in Chocolate City, Photo Retablo

Members of the Congress of Day Laborers/El Congreso de Jornaleros demonstrate in front of the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Poydras Street in New Orleans, across from City Hall, to demand answers for the mysterious death of Jose Nelson Reyes-Zelaya. He died in the custody of ICE agents within twenty-four hours of being picked up by the New Orleans Police Department and handed to them. ICE agents would not release any evidence and claimed that Reyes-Zelaya commited suicide. They would not even release any informaton to the Consulate of El Salvador in New Orleans. This demonstration took place in July 2010.

LUCHA LIBRE MAN UP CLOSE

LUCHA LIBRE MAN UP CLOSE is one of many New Orleans immigrant workers who demonstrated on International Workers Day on May 1st, 2012. The march was organized by the Congress of Day Laborers, and immigrant workers, their families, allies from the African American community, Unitarians and other church groups, and local Union organizers all met at Louis Armstrong Park on the edge of the French Quarter. From there, a good hundred plus demonstrators marched through downtown New Orleans and ended at City Hall, where many immigrants presented testimonials of worker's abuse, unjustified jailing, and cases of brutality at the hands of the local police.

ALTO AL ODIO! STOP THE HATE!

At no other time since my arrival in 1968 have I been witness to such blatant defamation of immigrants as I am seeing today, and the passing of Arizona’s SB 1070 by the Republican Governor Brewer in 2010 has spawned other copycat anti-immigrant laws in states like Georgia (May 2011), Alabama (June 2011), and South Carolina (June 2011). In these three Southern states, it’s been Republican Governors signing these odious laws to criminalize immigrants and anyone suspected of looking illegal, as in brown Latino men, women, and children. Basically, people who look like me because I, too, am a brown Mestizo Latino male, and based on the discretion of local police in any of these states, I could be detained and made to present my passport or green card to prove my status. This demonstrator's placard petitions us to stop this hatred and the persecution of immigrants in the so-called land of the free.

WE ARE ALL AMERICANS

The phrase of the “American Dream” itself has done much to place the United States as the sole proprietor of a name shared by all three continents of a sizable landmass, which is also referred to as the “New World.” For the geographically challenged, let me remind you that America is South, Central, and North America. Unfortunately, the U.S. citizenry and its politicians often suffer from a collective denial that the entire hemisphere is called the Americas, and as part of a measure to deconstruct the inherent biases of this pompous stance, many us us born in Latin America need to refrain as much as possible in referring to the United States as the absolute possessor of the moniker of “America.” The rest of us born in the “other Americas” also dream, and the phrase exemplifies a continuous act of condoned cultural appropriation. It posits the U.S. as the sole beneficiary of a geographical ideology akin to all that is good, noble, and warrants praise, while degrading the “other” Americas as lesser than, or even non-existent, as Eduardo Galeano states, “a Sub-America.” NO MAS! We are all Americans!

SOMOS HUMANOS / WE ARE HUMAN

A Congress of Day Laborers' demonstrator carries one of the more poignant signs contesting the inhumanity implied in the demonizing and stigmatic label of "illegal aliens." The definition of “alien” means foreigner, nonnative, and immigrant according to the dictionary. It also means a hypothetical or fictional being from another world, as in nonhuman, as in a non-sentient being that should not be treated with the accords of decency and humanity. They are inhuman and have no rights, even if they bleed the same red blood that the “legal” oppressors bleed. The term “illegal aliens” is being used strategically to exact a precondition that dehumanizes undocumented immigrants (men, women, and children), people whose labor the United States has always exploited to its benefit, and immigrants have become associated with other terms that scare the populace such as “terrorists,” “criminals,” and “disease carriers.” Aided by conservative media advocates and bombastic personalities like the former Lou Dobbs of CNN and the powerful buffoon Rush Limbaugh, some Republican right-wingers have made outrageous claims that immigrants crossing the border are bringing diseases and infecting U.S. citizens. Let’s dare to see this scarlet letter “a” of the “alien” for what it really is. Let’s dare to call it the calculated classification of the dehumanized that benefits the de-humanizers.

Stop Wage Theft

Latino immigrant workers are still doing much of the reconstruction work in New Orleans, but many are still victims of wage theft by ruthless local and national contractors. Instead of the promised wages, contractors often call Immigration Agents to have the workers deported after many a construction job has been completed. This practice has been going on for the nearly seven years since Hurricane Katrina's pounding and the consequent federal levee breaches flooded the historic port city. Thousands of immigrants have worked hard to rebuild the Big Easy and thousands have been cheated. The Southern Poverty Law Center's 2009 study revealed that 80% of the immigrants who aided the reconstruction have been victims of wage theft. The undocumented status of many workers has been used against them. Welcome to the big "21st Century Slave Labor Fiesta" in these United States. New Orleans was built on the slave labor of African Americans when "cotton was king," and it continues to exploit the labor of a new people of color. Brown is the new black to abuse--not only here but across the so-called "land of the free." While their labor is exploited, immigrants are criminalized by right-wing political zealots, and the Democratic President deports them in record numbers. It's an insidious cycle of labor exploitation that is reaching epic proportions. Don't think for a minute that this is all by accident. This country's corporations are addicted to labor exploitation, and since the domestic reconstruction cannot be outsourced, the most vulnerable workers are the best to abuse.

Respuestas/Answers for the Death of José Nelson Reyes-Zelaya

On July 29, 2010, members of the Congress of Day Laborers held a vigil for the mysterious death of José Nelson Reyes-Zelaya, a 28 year old immigrant from El Salvador. He died in the custody of ICE after twenty-four hours of being picked up by them. Their press release on his death noted that Reyes-Zelaya committed suicide and died of apparent asphyxiation. ICE refused to give out any more information. The CDL presented a Freedom of Information petition to ICE agents, but to this day, they have not heard anything more. There was hardly any news coverage in the local media about this tragedy, and it exemplifies how little immigrant lives matter in New Orleans, a city that has been rebuilt by thousands of Latino immigrants after the storm. The CDL protested on the same day that Arizona's infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070 when into effect. All photos and captions by José Torres-Tama.

UNDOCUMENTED & UNAFRAID

These photographs document El Congreso de Jornaleros/The Congress of Day Laborers May 1, 2011 demonstration through the streets of New Orleans. Organized by the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, the gathering began at Louis Armstrong Park on North Rampart Street. It continued on Canal Street, up Poydras, and ended at City Hall. The theme for the march was THE RIGHT TO REMAIN! Demonstrators proclaimed that Latino immigrant workers and their families have aided the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, and are now experiencing persecution by the NOPD and rampant ICE deportations since most of the city has been rebuilt. All photos by José Torres-Tama. www.torrestama.com

José Torres-Tama as the ALIEN character with Cross of Dollars/Los Dolorosos Dolares.

Congress of Day Laborers on July 29 in New Orleans

Day Laborers with Wooden Cross

The dirtiest little secret of the reconstruction of the Big Easy is that it has been rebuilt by hard working Latino immigrants who have risked their lives in a city where many have been victims of random police brutality. There is no Arizona law here like SB1070, but immigrants are criminalized, arrested, and jailed daily in the Crescent City, with NOPD's finest even robbing some of them because they can. As devastating as the BP oil spill disaster has been to our Gulf and wetlands, this human tragedy has been unfolding for the past five years. It is time to give the Latino immigrants who have labored to restore a devastated city their rightful gratitude and stop the condoned official violence against them.