El Big Easy Amigo Blogger: The Bearer of Difficult Truths: Because I Dare to Remember Against a Culture of Amnesia

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

Thursday, June 7, 2012

The Bearer of Difficult Truths: Because I Dare to Remember Against a Culture of Amnesia

My memory will retain what is worthwhile. My memory knows more about me than I do; it doesn’t lose what deserves to be saved. ---Eduardo Galeano

I believe in remembering a people’s truth.

I believe that writers and artists can be instrumental in creating work that serves as the conscience of our times. I believe in chronicling the personal experience to counter the “official accounts” that inevitably cultivate historical lies to silence and control, and render some people invisible, los invisibles, by disappearing them through the controlled mainstream media tentacles of misinformation.

In the Latin American tradition, I believe the poet, writer, and artist has a social responsibility, a mythic duty, to document and articulate the people’s struggle, la lucha de la gente, when they are denied effective means to have their voices heard in their fight against oppression and their many oppressors.

Since the storm, I have been reminding the citizenry of New Orleans and informing folks nationally and internationally that the post-Hurricane Katrina Big Easy, the romantic birthplace of Jazz, was rebuilt by thousands of hard working Latino immigrant workers, and most were cheated of their promised pay by ruthless local and national contractors.

They were brutalized by local police officers; languished in New Orleans Police Dept. jails without due legal process; subjected to the most abhorrent working and living conditions imaginable; some became indentured servants within hotels in the French Quarter; others were conveniently deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents after they finished many a construction job.

In June of 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its research data that up to 80% of Latino laborers who aided the reconstruction of New Orleans were victims of wage theft, and the “undocumented” status of many was exploited in a city that has a long legacy of labor exploitation.

Immigrant men and women gave of their sweat, blood, and some of their lives to rebuild an ungrateful city that abused their labor—as easily and effectively as it exploited enslaved Africans when “cotton was king.”

It should come as no surprise.

My brown people, my Mestizo brothers and sisters, who are descendants of a mythic and painful oppression exacted from one century to another by the cross and sword of Spanish Colonizers, other European plunderers, and the unfettered capitalism the U.S exports, became, and still are, the new people of color to exploit to no end in this post-hurricane reconstruction epoch.

Brown became the new black in the dirty South, a soil soaked with the blood of the systematic oppression of the “colored others.” Today, in New Orleans and in many parts of the South, many African Americans still struggle to gain a very elusive state of equality in the same terrain they raised with their arduous labor from one generation to another, and I write this introduction in the wake of a series by the Times-Picayune New Orleans daily which exposes the state of Louisiana as the biggest incarcerating machine of people in the United States, with rates of imprisonment that overshadow China. It is astounding, and most behind bars are disproportionately African American.

The jailed people of color now include many incarcerated immigrants as well because making more prisons has become a huge industry in the world’s prison capital, and immigrants have been easily snared as new occupants for the big business of jails and their jailers.

Fear of incarceration has been a big factor in keeping the immigrant labor force under control for a perfect storm of labor abuse. Since most immigrants could not speak English and were fearful of reprisals by their bosses if they complained about being cheated and their inhumane housing conditions, they were the ideal workforce to brutalize in this Deep South port city that has built its wealth on slave labor—just like its fatherland.

The vicious cycle continues: Welcome to the new “Slave Labor Fiesta” of Twenty-first century USA.

*****

This is an excerpt of the introduction for the creative non-fiction book I have been working on titled Hard Living in the Big Easy: Latino Immigrants and the Post-Katrina Reconstruction of New Orleans. The sardonic title is from a seminal piece that was recorded as a radio commentary for National Public Radio’s Latino USA, a weekly news journal. The renowned Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa introduced the commentary, and the piece aired nationally for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2006.

It was one of the first radio commentaries that explored the labor abuse many immigrant workers were experiencing as they toiled in the rebuilding efforts. This book is dedicated to the thousands of Latino immigrants who gave of their blood, sweat, and some of their lives to rebuild the flooded pueblo of New Orleans after the epic devastation caused by the failure of the federal levee system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a storm that was a Pandora of water and winds that revealed a country mired in lies and the incompetence of the Bush regime. "Dubya" and his criminal cronies abandoned the people and city of New Orleans at its most desperate hour, and this should not be forgotten.

“The city that care forgot” has never officially cared to thank the immigrants in any way, but I remember what they have contributed. They, the invisible, los invisibles, are a big part of the reason why the pace of the recovery has been so strong after such unimaginable wreckage the Big Easy was post-Katrina.

I remember them. I have not forgotten. I honor their memory.

It is the dirtiest little secret of the reconstruction of New Orleans.

It remains the untold and most neglected story of the Big Easy recovery, but as an immigrant myself, it is my duty to speak the unspoken and chronicle the many challenges my immigrant brothers and sisters have faced in rebuilding this historic port city. Many fight to remain, but many are courageous enough to stand up and fight for their human rights! ADELANTE!

Make art that matters!

José Torres-Tama

ArteFuturo Productions

1329 Saint Roch Avenue

New Orleans, LA 70117

www.torrestama.com

504.232.2968

1 comment:

rkeefe57June 7, 2012 at 8:14 AM
"In June of 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its research data that up to 80% of Latino laborers who aided the reconstruction of New Orleans were victims of wage theft...

For what it's worth, if you actually read the SPLC's "report," something no one in the media bothered to do, you find that the SPLC claims that 80% of the people THEY INTERVIEWED reported wage theft in New Orleans.

The group of people they interviewed consisted of several people who had already complained to the SPLC about wage theft, their friends and family members, a method known as "snowball sampling."

The Methodology section of the "report" admits:

“Because the targeted population is difficult to identify and contact, we used the snowball sampling method, in which study subjects refer researchers to additional subjects. Because study subjects were not chosen randomly, estimates from the survey may be biased.”

There's a huge difference between asking hundreds or thousands of people if they were ever robbed and asking a handful of people who came to you because they already were robbed.

http://wp.me/pCLYZ-18

These are the simple facts behind the SPLC's fundraising propaganda. What you choose to do with the data is up to you.
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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.