Annotations for Communities: Elderly

An international labor union has begun a series of meetings nationwide to involve its Latino retirees in national healthcare reform. From Miami, Emilio San Pedro reports.

About 40% of the retired members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU, are Latinas. That's why the union decided to create a series of nationwide meetings on Latino healthcare called Acceso or Access. At the first such meeting held in Hialeah, a primarily Hispanic industrial city northwest of Miami, about 100 retired Latinas expressed their healthcare concerns to a panel made up of national and local union representatives as well as representatives from the local congressional offices of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz Ballard.

The kickoff will be for our retirees, our Hispanic retirees across the country, to highlight the fact that for them the key issue, for our Spanish-speaking retirees, it's the access issue because they have the additional difficulty at times of not having linguistic access to this care, and particularly for women.

The retirees say they're concerned with how a new healthcare system would impact their ability to seek medical care from Hispanic doctors. For Latino USA, I'm Emilio San Pedro in Miami.

Latino USA commentator, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, is based in California. In Brownsville, Texas, a group of Chicanos and elders from Indigenous populations in the US and Mexico gathered recently for what they called the 17th Encuentro of the National Chicano Human Rights Council. The group is part of a movement which began in the 60s to help Mexican Americans reconnect with their Indigenous roots. Today, the movement is taking a new turn involving Chicanos in a spiritual reawakening foretold in ancient Indian myths, which caused them to action on human rights and the environment. From Brownsville, Lillie Rodulfo and Lucy Edwards prepared this report.

[natural sound] This weekend, council members have brought their families to camp on the grounds of the Casa de Colores. The multicultural center sits on 360 acres of prime farmland along the U.S.-Mexican border order.

[conch chell sounds] With the sound of a conch shell, a Mexican shaman, Andre Segura, calls a group to worship in a sacred dance of the Indigenous that the Aztecs have practiced for thousands of years. They also are called to reunite with the Indians of Mexico in their common struggle for equal rights. Elders like Segura say when Chicanos answer the call of the Danza, they are joining in a revival of the Indigenous spirit that is happening throughout the Americas. [Ceremony natural sounds] "This reawakening of the spiritual traditions," the elders say, "was foretold by Indian leaders centuries ago. Danzas and other Indigenous ceremonies carry a strong message of preserving the earth and all its people."

Andre Segura's Danza Conchera contains the essence of Aztec or Toltec thought in the entire worldview.

Chicano author Carlos Flores explains what happens when a Chicano worships in the sacred tradicion of the Danza.

When the Mexican-American decides to call himself a Chicano, basically what he's doing is declaring publicly that he's an Indian. In effect, what we're seeing here then is Mexican-Americans through their connection with an Indian shaman, I guess you could say, practicing the sacred.

Susana Renteria of the Austin-based PODER, People Organized in Defense of Earth and its Resources, offered passionate testimony at the conference. Her group has worked hard to focus attention on environmental racism in the Mexican-American communities in Austin.

They take toxic chemicals and inject it into Mother Earth. They inject it. It's like when you put heroin in your veins, and you're contaminating your whole blood system. That's what they're doing to Mother Earth. The water is the blood in her veins, and they're injecting these chemicals into, and they wonder why we have so much illnesses, why we have so much despair.

[meeting natural sounds] The council heard hours of testimony like this on a wide range of issues, bringing into focus everyday realities for Chicanos, such as the disproportionate number of Mexican American prisoners sentenced to die and the alarmingly high incidents of babies born in the Rio Grande Valley with incomplete or missing brains. Opata Elder Gustavo Gutierrez of Arizona, one of the founders of the council, offers this prophetic warning.

The moment that we start losing our relationship between Mother Earth and ourselves, then is when we get into all this trouble, and I think that what has happened to the people that are in power, they have the multinational corporation. They have lost their feeling about what is their relationship between the Earth, and the only thing they can think about is how to make money, and once that is the main focus, how to make money, then I feel that we're really in a lot of trouble.

[Danza natural sounds] The shaman, Andre Segura, says, "The Indigenous ceremonies that are part of every council meeting provide a spiritual foundation to unite Chicanos, as they speak out for the rights and the rights of all Indigenous."

Buscar dientro de su corazon, dientro de su-

Search your heart and soul as to how you feel about the Indigenous. The Chicano roots come from Mexico, and accepting this will unite the Chicano people.

[Singing, natual sounds] The Chicano Human Rights Council was formed in the 1980s to address the human rights violations in the southwest. The council teaches Chicanos how to document abuses that affect their community. The testimony they hear in Brownsville will be presented at international forums, such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. (Singing) For Latino USA, with Lucy Edwards, I'm Lily Rodulfo. (Singing)

A drama has been unfolding for more than two weeks now in the border town of Laredo, Texas. On July 29th, a group known as Pastors for Peace defied the US trade embargo against Cuba by taking dozens of vehicles carrying food, clothing, medicines, and other aid to Cuba across the US border. But one of those vehicles, a yellow school bus, was stopped by the customs service. Today that bus sits in a federal compound in Laredo. It's occupants refusing to leave the bus and now starting their third week of a hunger strike. From Laredo, Latino USA's Maria Martin reports.

I see a whole bunch of semis waiting in line to go to Mexico, and in the middle of all that mess, there's this little school bus and I feel sorry.

Retired Laredo social worker, Manuel Ramirez sits on a sidewalk near the border wearing binoculars. He's trying to get a better glimpse of the scene across the street, there off to the side of the Lincoln Juarez Bridge. in an enclosed lot where semi-trucks wait to be inspected by the custom service sits a yellow school bus with a sign which reads ‘End The Embargo Against Cuba’. Inside the bus, 12 people ages 22 to 86 wait out the blazing hot August days. They've refused to leave the vehicle and to take any solid food, since the bus was seized by the customs service on July 29th. Among them is Pastors for Peace leader, the Reverend Lucius Walker of Brooklyn.

We see a nation that is threatened, a nation that is not our enemy, with which we are not at war. We were asked by the churches in Cuba to take this mission on and having responded affirmatively to their request, we have come to see for ourselves the importance of what we are doing.

What the Reverend Walker and Pastors for Peace hope to accomplish by their hunger strike and their attempt to take aid materials to Cuba is to call into question this country's 32-year old prohibition against trade and travel to that island. Pamela Previt of the Customs Service says her agency tried to help the aid caravan get through the border smoothly, but that this bus clearly violated US Law.

Customs detained 29 boxes of prescription medication, four computers, and five electric typewriters, which are prohibited items according to the embargo. The group specifically claimed that it was the vehicle itself that was to be exported. And because of that customs seized the bus.

The Reverend Walker says he was actually surprised when the bus he was driving was seized. Even though the group stated they were making the trip to challenge the embargo against Cuba.

They simply were not able to stop it because this was a human wave and a vehicular wave of people who were determined that this is a law that can no longer be enforced.

The law Walker refers to is the Trading with the Enemy Act enforced by the Treasury Department. So far that government agency has not responded to a proposal from the Pastors for Peace to allow someone from the World Council of Churches to escort the yellow school bus to Havana. On the 10th day of the hunger strike, there was a rally, in Laredo to support the hunger strikers and an end to the embargo against Cuba. A microphone was passed across the fence and the strikers told the crowd they were prepared to stay indefinitely.

We are all determined to stay on the school bus until the school bus goes to Cuba.

Cuba is not perfect, the government's not perfect, but it's way better than what they have in Latin America. And I realize that…

That among the 12 people on hunger strike is 32 year old Camilo Garcia who left Cuba four years ago.

And I decided that I will do everything I can to help the revolution to survive, and I will stay in here as long as it take no matter what it take, even if it take my life. So what?

The 100 degree heat, the exhaust fumes and the liquid only fast are taking their toll on the health of the hunger strikers. Doctors brought in by the Customs Service and by Pastors for Peace are monitoring the group's health condition regularly. For Latino USA, I'm Maria Martin reporting.

Northern New Mexico is almost another country, a place of great natural beauty where los llanos y las montañas, the plains and the mountains, have for many years kept communities isolated but also close-knit and friendly. Producer Deborah Begel recently moved to Northern New Mexico. She sent this report about one local custom.

Really, I could be going down the road and if I see a car coming, I just wave at him. It just comes out automatic. It just wave.

Let's see, here comes Vanji from the clinic and she waves. Yeah, she wiggles her fingers. Hi, how are you guys?

Seated on a turquoise wooden bench on the front porch of the old Adobe Mercantile Building in Los Ojos, New Mexico. Joanna Terrazas waves at passing friends.

There goes Mapo, he smiles and waves at everybody,

A few paces down the street. Retired Marine Elipio Mercure is standing outside Pastores feed and general store.

We're so far apart, our communities, and sometimes you don't get to see each other for two or three or four days, so when you meet each other on the road, you wave at each other and say, hi, how you doing? And it's contagious.

Loyola Archuleta, the manager of the store, explains that most Chama Valley locals practice three waves, a kind of scale of friendliness.

One is for people that you don't really know too well. You just pick up one finger and for people that you really know a little more, you pick up your whole hand. But if you really know somebody that you really, really like, you really shake your hand back and forth [laughter]. Let's see, this is going to be {unintelligible]. Let’s see, hi. See he waves and then he shakes his finger at me, that what am I doing? [Laughter].

All the history of a family, a community, a friendship are revealed in a wave.

And this is her now. She's my, she's my comadre I baptized her daughter when we're ex sister-in-laws. So she'll wave and say hi, and that's as much as it goes.

John Nichols, author of the Milagro Bean Field War, describes his return to Taos after a long trip in his book, If Mountains Die. "When I raised my hand in greeting to a car driven by a stranger", he writes "and received a salutation in return, I knew I had a arrived to a place worth trying to call home". Pedro Archuleta of Tierra Amarillo, or TA as the locals call it, couldn't agree more.

The moment you see somebody just wave at you, as you come [unintelligible]. It's a different feeling because hey, I'm home. Finally home feel better.

My husband was telling me that one time he was coming down the grotto. And we have a tradition that when we pass the grotto, we cross ourselves. And instead of making the sign of the cross, he waved to the grotto.

For Latino USA. This is Deborah Begel.