Preciado Rodriguez, Nancy A.

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4 4l l i l a s   p o r t a lIN 1953, JUAN RULFO, one of the most renowned Latin American writers of the twen-tieth century, published El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain), a collection of realistic short stories about rural life in the land of his child-hood in Jalisco, Mexico. Almost sixty years after Rulfo’s publication, this daughter of campesinos ejidatarios also has decided to write about the land of her childhood. For many, Rulfo’s burning plain is a geographical and imagined space that emerged from the literary discourse, but for me it has become the land of my consciousness. I am the daughter of campesinos in Mexico and farmworkers in the U.S., who were forced to migrate as the result of a system of more than 500 years of exploitation, humiliation, and elimination. I have twenty-four years of experience living development under a capitalistic, neoliberal, or “modern” context in Mexico and in the U.S. In other words, I am a member of los de abajo (those at the bottom). The oral stories of humiliation, exploitation, and death, too common for us, have constructed my pessimistic reality and utopian ideology. However, it was during the summer of 2011 and winter of 2012 in my return as “researcher” that my voice finally had the legitimacy conferred upon it by its manufacturers, that is, the intellectuals. In this article, you will learn that my “research” experience is our struggle for survival. I write from a particular position, and I will continue to write in this way as long as our conditions of oppression exist. My academic education may solve my personal problem of survival, but my personal problem will remain unsolved as long as it is not solved for los de abajo. The story you are about to read is the story of our new conquest, which takes place in the communities of the llano en llamas.The Story of Our New Colonization In his short story “Nos han dado la tierra” (“They Have Given Us the Land”), Rulfo relates the stories of campesinos and their land struggles after the agrarian reform. In my story, “Nos han quitado la tierra” (“They Have Taken Our Land”), I will provide a summary of my “research” experience, which describes the appropriation by coloniza-tion of the burning plain, a region whose primary colonizers are the invernaderos (greenhouse tomato producers) and the mining industry. This story began with trying to understand how the invernaderos have changed the livelihoods of campesinos in my community, Tonaya, and of the jornaleros (migrant workers). My conversations with the people of Tonaya revealed that a very small proportion of the popu-lation is employed by the invernaderos. The reason is simple: hard work for low wages. In addition, most of the population is subjugated by the caciques of the town, those who are buying and renting ter-ritory for the production of agave used for the tequila industry. As I continued to “research” communities with closer proximity to the invernaderos, I entered into the region known as the llano en llamas where the invernaderos are located. At their labor camps, I heard the stories of the migrant jornaleros, primarily indigenous, who for survival have engaged in contract labor and are the main workforce of the invernaderos. I sat down in houses with a single room shared by two or three families and listened to the stories of their jornalero children and their lack of alternatives to contract labor. I was given the best lesson in economics by a jornalera and her family who told me, “On a good day I earn an average of 100 pesos a day; a chicken costs 80 pesos and tortillas are 20 pesos a kilo. You tell me if you consider this a ‘decent wage’?” The company, however, continues to brag about paying their workers twice the minimum wage (mini-mum wage in Mexico is approximately $5 a day). The stories of the jornaleros made me realize that the current power structure at the llano en llamas is the same as during our initial colonization. Instead of chains, however, this new power structure uses modern methods such as the “corporate social responsibility” discourse, which is noth-ing more than the crumbs of a modern system that does not solve the problem of the oppressed, but placates them and consequently silences their outcry. This is the “vivir mejor” (live better) discourse of the Mexican state or its oligarchy. It is not “vivir bien” (live well) or “el buen vivir” (a life concept that roughly translates to collec-tive well-being). It is simply providing its labor force with enough resources to keep them alive. For the local communities, the invernadero has become a social agent that maintains general control of the social realities of the people in the communities. In addition to regulating the people’s lives via “employment opportunities,” they control natural resources ISTUDY/RESEARCH ABROADThe Land of My Consciousnessby  Nancy  A .  Prec iado  Rodr iguez4 5l l i l a s   p o r t a lsuch as water. The communities that are tired of the historical false promises made by the government guaranteeing access to water have, via the ejidatarios, started negotiations with the company Bioparques de Occidente S.A. de C.V. in an attempt to increase access to water for domestic use. Currently, they obtain water for domestic use only once a week, and their alternative access to water is a polluted river that they use to irrigate their plants and crops. In this sense the communi-ties of the llano en llamas and the migrant laborers are employing the concept of uno no muerde la mano del que te alimenta, aunque sea la misma mano que te golpea  (you do not bite the hand that feeds you, even if this is the same hand that hits you), or hegemony in Gramscian terms. “¡Diles que no me maten!” (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”) and “Es que somos muy pobres” (“It’s Because We Are Very Poor) are not simply the titles of works by Juan Rulfo, but the reality for us, the people of Tonaya,  and our struggle to protect our natu-ral resources. On July 21, 2011, I attended a community gathering and listened to the people of Tonaya demand the immediate clo-sure of the mine Minera Metalúrgica Tapalpa S.A. de C.V., because the pollution of the river has caused the death of cattle and the loss of crops. I also heard mine workers from Chiquilistlan discuss the poverty that forces them to protect an income of 900 pesos a week. It was the events following the plebi-scite, however, that revealed not only what Anibal Quijano calls a colonialism without a colonial administration, but also the real-ity reflected in Rulfo’s title “¡Diles que no me maten!” “Tell them not to kill me” is the silent outcry of the people in Tonaya, where the movement against the mine has ceased because of public intimation and death threats to community activists. Despite my privileged status as a foreign researcher, I have been denied access to information about the mine from federal, state, and local institutions. The reasons given are that the information is “nonexistent” or it has been classified as confidential to avoid generating “problems that might destabilize the established proce-dure.” The local government simply argues that the mine is not in our territory. They did, however, provide me with questionable lab tests indicating that the river is no longer contaminated, but I have yet to receive results from the lab tests that CONAGUA made dur-ing a toxic discharge from the mine into the river. The more telling response of the Mexi-can government toward the local movement, however, was to attack a community activ-ist, who was publicly silenced and assaulted when he refuted claims by local and state official that the river is clean. Soon thereafter the documentary Agua: El Verdadero Tesoro (Water: The True Treasure) about the mining conflict was mysteriously removed from the Internet. Despite the removal of the documen-tary and threats against community activists, the message of the campesinos to the Mexican government continues to be queremos vivir y queremos vivir bien (we want to live and we want to live well). ✹Nancy A. Preciado Rodriguez is in the master’s program in Latin American Studies.My father shows me the difference between our traditional maize (right) and the hybrid version.Type of housing provided by some invernaderos for workers.  

The Land of My Consciousness

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/2152/62693/3/14Portal_issue7_2012_PreciadoRodriguez.pdf

The Land of My Consciousness

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