Where I’m At: Coffee & Notes on Latin America by neil
Neil Balan
The recent completion of the 2006 World Social Forum – held simultaneously in Caracas, Venezuela and Bamako, Mali, with another session planned to follow in Karachi, Pakistan this March – added extra emphasis to recent early morning activities. I spent some time over coffee reading another thought-provoking, motorized essay from the February issue of The Walrus. With “Bolivar’s Ghost”, by Pedro Sánchez and Gord Westmascott, I encountered a descriptive and concise piece functioning as a where-we’re-at-now summary mapping the recent confluence of political and social shifts in Latin America.
While reading and sipping, I realized three things:
1.) That I had, without much thought or self-awareness, engaged willfully with the text, taking for granted the coupling of coffee-as-morning-comfort and the essay.
2.) Further on this trajectory, that my coffee connected directly to this assembly of global and local issues as per the program of the World Social Forum; the coffee itself was a vehicle, a thing fully immanent and emergent and incorporated (Fair Trade? Starbucks?), which is to say that I was no longer a bystander at my kitchen table.
3.) That I was planning – the very evening I was reading – to catch Black Coffee), a two-part documentary on TVO interrogating the historical inequities and exploitative inequalities of the global coffee trade. Apparently, coffee is the second most valuable legally traded commodity in the world, behind oil.
I was traveling in two participatory directions: political praxis at a remove (i.e., arming myself with knowledges and discourses pertinent to things ongoing in South America, Black Coffee viewing); and consumption of a desired product with a very dirty and past and present (i.e., coffee as a commodity that travels in productive and industrial vectors refined through centuries of colonial, imperialist, and neocolonial exertions of repressive force as political and economic power).
Pause affluent sipping.
Thinking back to the article, Sánchez and Westmascott do well in tempering the enthusiasm expressed by many in relation to the social turn in Latin America. They point with certainty to potential possibilities for new state policies and reforms that will counter decades of state-enforced and forcefully-backed strategies of marginalization, criminalization, and exploitation of impoverished and indigenous peoples in the south. They also suggest that the efforts to develop Mercosur, a continental trade alternative to counter the FTAA (Free Trade of the Americas Agreement), show promise. Yet, they also warn onlookers and interlocutors against easy attempts to fashion some sort of tangible solidarity among these countries, arguing that we ought to be weary of the violent history of relations between and among South American states, which exist firmly in their own tenuous hegemonic circuit. Their suggestion is that things have a capacity to proceed in a democratic direction but that we’d do well –especially as onlookers at a distance – to support the trajectory with a kind of cautious optimism.
Toward the end of their essay, the authors attempt a diagrammatic rendering of the oppositional situation as it currently stands: urban elites – both well-intentioned and indifferent –benefiting from years of repressive governance and neoliberal policies; and politically empowered groups of an entirely different peasant and working class strata, attempting to penetrate the center of the institutionalized political apparatus, literally encircling urban areas in growing numbers. There’s a momentum gaining energy by the day. Whether it will remain in confluence or will diverge and devolve in unpredictable ways is the question the authors leave us with. The situation is a state of emergency: literally, something has emerged with a weight and a resonance but it is also something that, time-pending, could become an emergency in the negative sense vis-a-vis the accidental and the catastrophic, i.e., renewed repression, external political and military pressure…
I found myself connecting this to some discussions we’ve had here in relation to the idea of momentum, particularly in relation to the uprising dans les banlieues in French cities in late November 2005 (see: On Paris Burning). Barrios, favelas, shanty towns, and the concentric rings of urban ghettos: these emerged as a result of massive post-industrial capitalist reforms aimed at driving people from rural communities and/or peripheral territories. This points to a similar wave of migratory flows, a pattern of development and orientation that once again posits the city — even as wired global hub now existing more “vertically” its anachronistic “horizontal” arrangement—still as a formidable structure of defense-in-depth, a fortress keeping people out. Despite our (Western gaze? Northern gaze? Fractured & discontinuous gazes?) idealizations about the integration of the cosmopolitan place of the global polis, the idea of the city still remains a very physical and opaque place in many contexts.
In Sánchez’ and Westmascott’s recounting of the 2003 “gas wars” in Bolivia, they describe the efficacy of El Alto, an edge-ghetto and deregulated “twin-city” of La Paz, as both a community and a staging area. It served as the place from which Evo Morales – now, the first Aymaran (indigenous) president in Bolivia’s history – and the massive coalition of affiliated groups, organizations, and supporters (Hardt and Negri’s the wealth of the poverty of the multitude?) collectively uttered their tactical aim directed at La Paz: “Not one drop of gas.” The popular mobilization of people taking to the streets in protest and occupation shut down La Paz and prevented the import of gas into the city, shutting it down.
On these problems, and in connection to the sorts of events we’ve witnessed in France, Paul Virilio offers a salient remark:
“The desert is spreading, they say. Yet, it is not the desert that is spreading over the planet, but the urban wasteland – the place where, without ever mixing, the multitude of ethnic microcosms survive – in the shanty towns, the half way hostels, the sink estates…Recently, when some young North Africans were asked why the did not want to stay in the Maghreb [the expanse of territory west of the Nile and north of the Sahara desert – North Africa] and preferred to emigrate [to France or, generally, Europe], they replied, with the simplicity that comes with stating the obvious: “Because there’s nothing here to take!” They could just as well have said, “Because it already looks like a desert here!” The ‘deportees’ in the ‘camps’ of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, ‘savages’ or even ‘new barbarians’. In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously unknown level of deprivation and human misery. They are waste-products of a military -industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals the knowledge and skill accumulated over generations and millenia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to exactions of kapos of a new kind.”
(Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, 62)
While Virilio tends toward overdeterminations of the hagiographic type (the “technophobic monk” as critic), there’s some resonance to his remarks. The outskirts are a fall-out zone, a kind of wreckage and ruin that is re-built by communities making due (noun) but also making do (verb) with what they have in and around themselves. They serve very clearly as relays for the “deprivation and misery”, the measure of startling discrepancies of scales of resource allocation.
Though the suburban ideal in North America is still thriving (relatively), the formation of edge-cities and ethnoburbs suggests both the intersection of different territories and the articulation of overlapping places existing within the same nominal spaces within those territories. This is to say that perhaps it’s less a matter of mixing and more a matter of aggregation, especially in Canada and, specifically, in Toronto where the population is radically heterogeneous and less homogeneous; or rather, difference is easily detectable via appearances. The polarizing distinctions one can make in El Alto/La Paz or even in Paris’s outlying districts are more difficult in Toronto but all the more important when you consider the kinds of fragmentations that could or can occur.
As for connections between these territories and zones and places? Well, global popular culture weaves through them all, a transnational circuit with an autonomy all its own, mediated and remediated in different ways and at different rate. Matthew McKinon’s current CBC online feature, Hang the DJ, offers a take on how the practice of hip-hop interacts with these kinds of prominent political and social problems. He devotes one installment to hip-hop in la banlieu and also devotes a section of his discussion to hip-hop in relation to “the culture of retribution” and the increased incidence of lethal gun violence in Toronto. I have no doubt that there are currents of hip-hop running through El Alto, indigenous-inflected hip-hop as a vehicle for political expression. I expect that the hip-hop will soon augment the coffee exports and the grassroots political praxis driving potential social transformation; I can hear, with an air of global celebrity (M.I.A.?), the messianic coming of a Bolivian MC from the tough streets of El Alto…
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