Activist Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez once wrote in an essay that “there is no separating my life from history.” And it’s true: her life is like a thread weaving through the movements for self-determination and justice.  Born in 1925, she has lived more than nine lives: as a member of New York’s heady literati in the 1940s and 50s, a link between the Black Power and Chicano movements in the 1960s, a feminist critic of the sexism and homophobia within Third World solidarity groups here in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, and a respected public intellectual in the left throughout her entire career.

In March 2000, Betita authored an essay for Colorlines that asked “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” engaging a new generation of organizers of color, wanting to make the link between global capitalism abroad and austerity measures impacting communities of color, here at home.  Connections, wrote Betita, “absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle’s promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true.”  It was through this essay that I first came into contact with Betita and her ideas, as a young organizer of color both influenced by the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), yet also critical of a movement that was largely comprised of white, middle class males.  Her words helped me think about how inclusion figured in other struggles, such as the antiwar movement and, more recently, Occupy Wall Street.

It was with these questions in mind that I had the privilege to engage both Betita and her old friend Olga Talamante in dialogue this past Sunday.  The two have a friendship going back more than 35 years. They first met when Olga was released from prison in Argentina, where she was incarcerated for one year as a political prisoner, and was tortured the hands of the right-wing Peronist dictatorship.  Now, Olga heads the Chicana/Latina Foundation, which develops the leadership of young Latinas, and is active with local LGBT advocacy groups.

Olga and I visited Betita in an assisted living home in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury area, where she was recently moved, bearing ice cream and chocolate (she has a sweet tooth).  Betita suffered from a stroke three years ago.  Since then, her cognitive functions and memory have been slipping away, a tragedy for a life so rich with experiences.  Her friends have rallied to support her, starting a Betita Martinez Fan Club, to organize support and monetary contributions for her care.

But here are snippets of the conversation we got to have:

Colorlines.com: I want to preface this by saying that we at Colorlines approached you to honor as a part of Latino heritage month.  But, we also have complicated feelings about it and my colleagues and I thought that you would too. So, my first question to you is what do you think of Latino heritage month?

Olga Talamante: The media and corporations celebrate one month as Latino heritage month.  But, it’s much more complicated than that.

Betita Martinez: Frozen symbols.  Even Latina heritage is a frozen symbol already, frozen in its definition of what Latina means and what heritage means.  We have to be careful of encouraging it, the symbolization, this point cannot be emphasized enough.

CL: You have played an important role at the intersections of many important movements. [For example, you ran the New York office of SNCC in the 1960s as a Latina.] How did you develop this intersectional analysis?

BM: That has been a wonderful opportunity, to be at those intersections.  The intersections have always been there, people were waiting to see that the intersections were being made.  I was just lucky, I happened to come along during those moments.

OT: You articulated what many of us felt in those times.  You said it.

BM: That’s a big honor.  I am happy when people saw the connections before I even made them.  I didn’t want to be ahead, I wanted to be with the people in the moment.  But, you end up being ahead because you’re different.  That’s the irony of it.

CL: What made you different?  Why did you change your name from Liz Sutherland [an Anglicized version, using your mother’s maiden name] to Betita Martinez?

BM: My mother played a role in that, even indirectly, because her mother’s name is Phillips.  And, she was a very Phillips kind of person born from Tacoma Park, Maryland.  She married my father who worked at the Mexican embassy, while she worked at the Swedish embassy.  So, her mind was already working in multi-directions.  So, it helped me to have a multiple sense of reality and identity, right there.  It made a lot of difference to me: I couldn’t be a simple two-dimensions; I had to be multi-dimensional.

CL: What inspired you to link the Black Panthers with the UFW [who were organizing migrant farmworkers]?

BM: The connections between people and their cultures are very important.  When we make those links, we strengthen those capacities to be human, in the best sense.  [She started to cry with emotion.]  It’s always there, hiding in the rocks, we have to give it a chance to grow.  A big chance.

OT: That’s what the occupiers of Wall Street are doing right now. Lots of people, workers and students, the young and the old.  It’s an evolving movement, changing every day.  New ones are springing up in cities across the country.

BM: [Occupy] is a real place for people to talk, to blossom.  How beautiful, how exciting!

CL: Your essay Where’s the Color in Seattle is inspiring many organizers of color to ask similar questions about the #Occupy movement: Where are the people of color?

OT: I’m excited some people of color are participating, but we should be the majority.  [Occupy] should be led by people of color. We’re the ones suffering from unemployment, from the recession, and from banks being bailed out.

BM: I hope that I’ve been an inspiration for young women and young women of color activists.  I don’t think about my work in the way that you talked about.  It’s an honor, it’s a legacy to maintain.

CL: What advice would you give to young women of color organizers today, on how to sustain themselves in the movement, as mothers?  [Betita wrote in her essay Neither Black nor White in a Black-White World that she “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”]

BM: We don’t think about this.  It’s an issue we have to think about.  Women do both, raise a family and participate in the struggle, we have to make them connect.

OT: It’s an issue when you were doing this work and continues today.  I work with young Latina college students.  This is a key issue because many of them work and go to school.  Many are activists; many are mothers.  They are doing all three things.  I don’t have one formula except to say that it has to be part of the discussion, otherwise it’s your problem, you have to balance everything, you have to be superwoman.  We have to make it not the individual’s problem, but the movement’s.  We have to setup time and resources that can help women be a part of the movement, because if being a mother or working prevents you from being part of the movement, then it’s not working.

BM: Amen.

To read more about Betita’s life and work, see Tony Platt’s essay The Heart Just Insists.

The concept of community is an ever-shifting one.

It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond just delivering goods or providing services, like the settlement houses that serviced the poor in the late 19th century. Community to Alinsky was based on physical proximity to your neighbors and the goal of community organizing was to build neighborhood, place-based, mega-organization that united various service providers, such as labor unions and churches.

But, the focus was short-sighted, trained on winning a metaphorical stop sign on your block, with campaigns guided by non-ideological and pragmatic goals, divorced of any critique of racism or sexism. This shaped the role of the organizer as an apolitical technocrat, an outside specialist, distinct from the community. Often, the leadership and staff of these bureaucratic organizations were white men, who were capable of working endless hours to get that stop sign installed.

Enter the 1960s and the global struggles of the Third World to shrug off its colonial masters. Radical movements within the U.S., who sought to eradicate poverty and institutional racism domestically, identified common interests with liberation movements abroad. This was the third world within. The same axes of oppression—racism, sexism, and capitalism—operated within communities of color at home. This new sense of community, what the Applied Research Center’s founder Gary Delgado terms as “communities of interest”, led to multiracial formations that tackled a wide variety of issues, beyond a single campaign, and prioritized indigenous leadership by community members so there isn’t a bureaucratic apparatus that mediates political activity between decision-makers and the community. Community leaders are not just members, but also teachers, analysts, as well as actors.

Most importantly, multiracial formations placed race as primary in their political framework for identifying their vision and strategy. Race is historically and socially constructed, but with ongoing material ramifications for people of color. Structural racism is the primary form of oppression in this country that intersects with sexism and capitalist exploitation. The history of racism is embedded in the racist institutions that create conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and labor exploitation for communities of color.

Now, post-Obama, a new generation is defining community and its relation to social change. Organizing Upgrade, a collaboration by young organizers involved in multiracial formations, launched today. They define communities of interest based not just on shared oppression, but also on a shared, liberatory vision of what could be. This seems apt, given that we have a Black president in the White House, a former community organizer himself, and for the first time, our desires for our communities are possible.

Join the community of possibilities at OrganizingUpgrade.com

via RaceWire

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.*

The Obama administration enacted the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) back in February, the largest boon to public spending and the safety net since the New Deal, and yet economic conditions are the worst it’s ever been for people of color and single moms. Unemployment is skyrocketing close to double digits, at 9.7% for August 2009. New Census data released recently showed an increase in poverty from 12.5% to 13.2% this past year, meaning an additional 2.6 million persons now live in poverty. Certain groups experience deepened poverty rates more than others, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
• Latinos and Asians had marked increases in their poverty rates, by 1.6 and 1.4 points, respectively.
• Over one third of all Black children and almost one third of all Latino children lived in poverty in 2008.
• Nearly a quarter of all families headed by single moms lived in poverty, or 3.6 million families, in 2008.

Tracking funds from the Recovery Act has proven to be difficult because there is no centralized, authoritative source of where the money is going to and what it’s being used for. Currently, information about ARRA funds are dispersed across the federal recovery.gov website, state stimulus czars, and watchdog groups. Recipients of monies are required to report on their activities and how many jobs they’ve created because of it by October 10. But, information will only slowly trickle out to the public. Even then, there is no requirement for recipients to race or gender their data, so we have no way of knowing how much of the recovery benefits those most impacted: people of color and single moms.

We have been following the recovery and its promise to stimulate the economy while protecting the planet and its peoples through the creation of green jobs. Watch this page on October 13 for the release of our Green Equity Toolkit, ideas and resources for community and labor advocates on how to create equity in the emerging green economy. If we are to follow the directive of ARRA and the subsequent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance to help those most impacted by the recession, then we must make race and gender equity key in our planning and practices around green job creation. The toolkit will help us do that.

Our initial research into recovery allocations in Los Angeles County brings to light some concerns. Los Angeles County, like many in this country, is cleft by a racial wealth divide into two types of cities: poor and rich. Poor cities of the county–half of the residents of the City of Los Angeles are people of color and one in five live in poverty–are receiving a quarter of the recovery dollars per poor person, as compared to rich cities. We designate cities such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills as rich cities in the county, where more than 70% of the population are white and the poverty rate is well below the national average.

This is the worst economic downturn our country has experienced since the recession of the early 1980s and flirting dangerously to parallel the Great Depression of the 1930s. What will our generation remember when we look back at this time? Did we seize the opportunity of the Great Recession to bring about a green transformation to sustain all peoples, especially those most distressed? ARC provides the tools. We must act together to demand equity in the recovery, green or otherwise.

Photo taken by Jacob Ruff at the Mobilization for Climate Justice protest against Chevron in Richmond, California.

* A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Image by Urban Envy.

Born on May 19, 1921, Yuri grew up in a white middle class suburb of San Pedro, California. Her life was irreparably changed when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She and her family were forcibly removed from their homes and interned at detention camps setup for Japanese Americans during World War II. There, Yuri connected the treatment of Japanese Americans with the history of racism in this country, where people of color are dispossessed of land, labor, and so-often freedom.

Yuri and her husband moved to Harlem in the 1960s, drawn by the burgeoning political activism of the civil rights and Black nationalist movements. She became acquainted with Malcolm X and joined his Organization of Afro-American Unity, when he departed from the Nation of Islam. She famously cradled Malcolm in her arms, when he was assassinated on February 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom.

But, more than just a footnote to Malcolm, Yuri continues to fight for the liberation of people of color, both domestically and globally. I first met Yuri in 2004, during a trip to the Bay Area. A friend who was a long-time acquaintance of Yuri’s in Harlem suggested that I look her up. I found her, a small woman reliant on a walker with tennis balls stuck at the ends. What she lacked in stature, she made up with energy. She had just returned that afternoon from a visit to political prisoner Marilyn Buck in federal penitentiary in Dublin. Yet she was not tired, she was curious about the organizing I was involved with in NYC. She listened with wide-eyes at my descriptions of campaigns, asking questions, and every now and then pausing to remark “Oh Gee!”

For Yuri, as Diane Fujino cited in her book Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (University of Minnesota Press, 2005):

“The Movement is contagious and awesome because the people in it are the spirit of the Movement. And the Movement will continue because new concerned people will rejuvenate and revitalize this never-ending struggle. It just always makes you want to be part of it.”

Happy birthday, Yuri Kochiyama.

A dissertation should be written on the sociology of board games, if there hasn’t been one already.

Recently, I had to do some research on board games for a report.  I studied two games: LIFE from the 1990s and MONOPOLY, bubble economy version from 2006.  It was VERY interesting the social norms enforced in both.  LIFE assumed that your goal was to die rich and retire at Millionaire Estates, along the way you may encounter troubles like contracting Moo-shu flu, etc.

Monopoly, the mega edition, from two years ago was bigger, badder, and faster.  Why be limited to buying railroads, when you could get the whole depot?  Money starts at $1000 bills.  Instead of modest, square green plastic houses, you can upgrade to a shiny, silver skyscraper.

I also saw themed Monopoly, one based around M&M’s, another around dogs, and yet another around Disney characters.  I can’t possible imagine what that is supposed to socialize one to be.

The game that I would write?  Tent City!  You, a young person of color, screwed over by the public school system, unable to find a job.  Out of money.  Out of alternatives.  Desperate.  Roll the dice and see if you can land yourself land to pitch a tent.  Or, hack your way into a foreclosed property and tap into electric lines and water systems.  Extra points for players who start their own community of squatters or who refused to be moved.