Kiado Cruz speaks in Rhode Island by Brett Warnke

Cruz speaks on Cultivating Peace
By BRETT WARNKE
              

            The New England Witness for Peace group invited Kiado Cruz to speak about the nexus between agriculture and social justice in a lecture called "Cultivating Peace, One Garden at a Time."  Cruz, 30, who spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of South County (UUCSC), is a community organizer from a village in the lower Sierra Norte called Santa Cruz de Yagavilla whose people speak Zapatoec.  Poor education and run-down public facilities as well as crippling aftershocks from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have devastated the Oaxaca region in southwestern Mexico.  An estimated 1.5 million agricultural jobs have been lost since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.  And while Mexico quintupled its exports since the passing of
NAFTA, totaling $292 billion by 2006, the GDP dropped by 6 percent in 2009 as world demand for exports fell.  25 percent of the people who were born in Cruz's community have left. , desperately searching for food and jobs as cheap labor in the city of Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-hA-ca) or further north in the United States.  Oaxaca, birthplace of the famed 19th century reformer and Zapatoec President Benito Juarez, has been deeply affected by U.S. trade policy and its ethnically and linguistically diverse municipalities have rapidly declined because of migration.
       Cruz has been an organizer for RASA, The Autonomous Network for Food Sovereignty, a school that concentrates on indigenous forms of education such as mentoring, horizontal networking and apprenticeship, community service, and environmental stability.  He will travel 1200 miles at 16 confirmed events around New England including meetings with immigrant groups, community health projects, Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, a radio show in Virginia, and visit with national legislators.
       Cruz spoke about sustainable agriculture as well as community organizing.  In an interview he said, "We need to retake certain things.  My community should be producing its own food.  Growing local food is an opportunity for us to express to the world the political and economic necessity of alternatives to the present system.  It is necessary for us to think about where our food is coming from, not just in Oaxaca, but everywhere.  What has happened is that the market has opened up but small farms are competing with enormous ones.  This has forced people to leave their family and community farms.  In desperation and destitution, they leave their community.  With imported U.S. corn being so cheap, this has been hard on the Mexican people."
       Susan Letendre is traveling and collaborating with Cruz.  She is an environmental educator with the Rhode Island based Seven Story Market, an organization that works to tell indigenous peoples' stories, supports their enterprise, and provides a market for their arts.  She said, "[Cruz] brings a connection between environmental protection, our current food system, and the current trade policy.  His talk has the ability to close the loop for people."
       Cruz also spoke about the difficulties that many unprepared migrants face when entering cities:  "It is very different for those accustomed to a rural life.  The aggressiveness of cities is different for those accustomed to a rural life.  The aggressiveness of cities is different from what we have known our entire lives."  He also spoke about the nostalgia--what many local Cape Verdian immigrants call
"sodade"--that migrant laborer feel for their abandoned communities.
       "Migrants will live near one another in order to recreate a sense of community and share our experiences and pain."
       In a previous interview, Cruz spoke about the indigenous people's relationship with their local food, specifically corn, and its powerful symbolism.  Cruz said, "Corn is not just a thing, a useful
item.  It doesn't only have utilitarian purposes.  It is something that is much deeper and has spiritual meaning for us.  It is a part of us.  What makes this vision unique or different from the common
perception of corn is that it can be used to represent how we can see nature and our place in it.  Corn is not just a thing; it is something that is alive.  And, like everything else that is alive, when we die we go back to this nature that we all are a part of.  Corn is a way to express this idea that is very different from other ways of seeing."
He also said that planting corn today is a political action against the unfair neo-liberal trade policies that have shaken his region.

       "Each day it is more difficult for people to understand where their
food comes from," he said.
       Today, more than 20 percent o the corn consumed in Mexico is grown in America.  And the once rich variety of corn has vanished, replacing it with a single type.  Letendre said that in a trip to Oaxaca she met elderly farmers, still harvesting under a merciless sun who were reminiscing about the multitude of corn that has been lost.
       "They described the texture and the flavors," she said, "how it grew, the different sizes...but then they looked at me and realized that I had no memory of this crop; this corn was gone forever.  Then they looked at me and said, 'we’re old, to remember such things.'