MEChA de Sonoma: May 2006: Archives

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May 3, 2006

May Day Our Way

By Davin Cardenas

I tell the compas at the party, "the most revolutionary thing we can do right now -- (pause to add dramatic tension) -- is to make tortas"; and neta, I wasn't playing. Sunday, April 30th, we threw down like 4,000 tortas, bad ass production line of flying bologna slabs, mayonnaise, cheese, lettuce and bolillos.
A couple families, students, and other community members came together at El Super Pollo (of whom I was already a fan of going in) to do exactly what we’ve been doing in these last couple months, and exactly what the system fears -- cooperating and uniting, while the logic of this sick economy promotes competition and division.

May Day 2006 looked like a strange, flag-waving, Mexica Fourth of July, with the unrelenting people of the sun marching against the orders of the patron (and sometimes with), against the orders of the church, against the orders of the establishment in general (included are those parts of the movement already bought out by corporate and political interests). A beautiful, beautiful sight to see; brown people flexing there economic muscles (even though I saw some paleteros that made out like bandits in that heat) actualizing what we had already known, but sometimes didn’t say, “they are nothing without us.” The North American way of life, that standard of living that is promoted by the mass media to the four corners of the world, can only come at the expense of others, and we are those others. I say "we" because our solidarity makes us all indios, it makes us all people that moderate to extreme American nationalists despise, and we come to find out that "equality" ain't such a bad or subversive idea after all, that maybe stepping on folks just isn't as cool as government makes it seem, and that people do realize their commonalities regardless of their “status.” We seem to get a lot more done a lot faster when we do it together, kinda’ like that torta production line.

We have come to find out that ordinary citizens from the other side of town who might not look like us, still sympathize with us, with our desire to raise healthy children, with our desire to be great, with our desire to not be repressed by anybody while working hella’ hard for hella’ little, and that these same sympathizers will actually walk and even break bread (or bolillo) with us. We come to find out that militarized raids on our job sites won’t deter us from la meta, and that we struggle for those who’ve been sent away and those who have died from the consequences of rich peoples political games and vices. We come to find out that our ideas about who we are change when we see ourselves loving ourselves, when we close our own businesses in solidarity, when we donate food, water, and time to the movement, when we begin to grasp our communal identity. We come to find out that things don't need to be the way they are in this world, that governments create poverty and immigration to their own benefit, and that if the people truly were the government, then nobody who looked, lived, and acted like these politicians would ever have the audacity to call themselves "representative" of the people. We come to find out that we are not like them, and that workers across borders have more in common with each other than they do with the people who "govern" them. We come to find out that "power" wasn't something given from above, but something that we already had but were just holding in for the right moment. We come to find out that finding out is key to our advancement; that conflict brings change and that challenge brings growth. We come to find out that we some damn fine people, that leadership is as individual as it is communal, that immigrants are diverse, and that tortas, just like justice, should be distributed to all.

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