The Rebel Star

In Tennessee's last blog she clearly described the repressive conditions in which our Mixtecan comrades must organize. Tennessee is quite astute, quick on her feet, and constantly analyzing our surrounding environmental circumstances and conditions. Considering that I am more lingusitically challenged and travel with little documentary experience, I am lucky to have my best friend not only at my side, but often guiding us through the cultural and political intracies of supporting CACTUS's imperative work.

Tennessee is the investigator, she uncovers unassuming rocks to find hidden keys that expose the local impacts of foreign capital and global media. Frequently, she fills the gaps of that which I cannot translate. Colloquial spanish in Mexico is quite different from that in Bolivia, Venezuela and Maine. When my mind and energy expire (usually around 8pm), I space out....letting my current environment mingle with past experiences, theories and lessons. Mexico truly is everything and nothing that I thought it would be, constantly challenging my perspectives and understandings of our global home.

As Tennessee wrote yesterday, we traveled to a small town outside of Huajuapan de León to celebrate CACTUS's Christmas party. I traveled on Tenny's lap in the back of Volkswagon bug. We somehow fit six people, including two tall and fully hipped gringas, into the car's small space. Our caravan passed through protected and undeveloped terrain. Mountain passes, skyscrapping cacti, and desert oasises filled our vistas. While I have been priviledged to bear witness to grandmother redwoods, delicate gulf coast wetlands, explosive Maine autumns, smooth white sand Brazilian beaches, firery Lake Michigan sunsets, and humbling Andean peaks.....nothing has sparked such environmental curiosity as seeing life emerge in unexpected places as it does in the Mixtecan deserts.

And this curiosity continued as we celebrated with CACTUS in an unassuming town park surrounding under the shading canopy of ginormous Sabina trees. Each of us toasted to the year's past experiences and the hopes and dreams for the coming seasons. Through the tears and cheers that Solstice afternoon, I believe that I began a process of truly learning what our comrades in Mixteca have had to confront not only in these last six months, but in the last 500 years.

This wonderful planet, third from the sun, is as ecologically diverse as it is culturally. And I think that it is the heterogeneity of life and language that keeps our globe perfectly spinning in orbit amongst the universe's spontaneity.

Last night, I sat in the back of a pickup truck pondering my aforementioned hyposthesis of life's meaning. The day's earlier panoramas were now shaded, the stars barely illuminating the surrounding terrain's contours. Spilling before me was an immense night sky, and I realized that I had not been privy to celestial constallations since I left my home in the United States. It was a sky not much different from my nights in rural Maine, and one that I have dearly missed in my nights of streetlights. It was then that I came to understand, that while humanity's struggles for peace and justice are as diverse as the earth around us, we all dream looking at the same stars. And perhaps it is this reason (not that pinche Marx) that those who dedicate themselves to erradicating oppression and marginalization often unite under the symbol of the star. For it is under one universal sky that our diverse desires for hope, dignity, soverignty and justice are born.