This year’s Kris and Lynn Cheatum Community Peace Award went to two recipients, including the Cross Border Network for Justice and Solidarity. This acceptance speech for the network was written by Judy Ancel, who was unable to be present, and was read by Corliss Jacobs.
Thank you for the Cheatum Award. Lynn and Kris Cheatum were extraordinarily kind people who practiced peace in all they did. It’s a real honor to be recognized by their legacy. Thank you so much.
The Cross Border Network was founded in the late 1990s. And it was founded as a result of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. As a labor educator, Judy Ancel noticed that many workers felt great hostility towards Mexico, blaming Mexicans for stealing our jobs. She had worked very hard alongside union members and environmentalists to oppose NAFTA in 1993. We lost that fight, and NAFTA unleashed multiple migrations: the migration of jobs and corporations to take advantage of the $5 a day labor across the border and the migration of millions of Mexican campesinos bankrupted by corn imports from the US, to the cities, to the northern border towns, and to the US.
The fact was that neither the Mexican people nor the Chinese were stealing our jobs. Other poor countries weren’t stealing our jobs. Our corporations were taking jobs to these poor countries in order to take advantage of the differential in wages between the US and those countries, for instance, in Mexico at that time, manufacturing workers in what was called the maquiladoras, the factories, mostly along the border, were paying $5 a day.
And you compare that to a US minimum wage at the time, which was in 1993 when NAFTA passed $4.25 per hour, while of course many unionized American factory workers were making much more. And you could see what the attraction would be. And so, we felt that in order to get people to begin to understand that, we needed to have some people-to-people exchanges. And so The Cross Border Network was formed in 1998.
At a union women’s summer school I met Martha Ojeda, Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. CJM was a nonprofit based in San Antonio, Texas, with a board of Mexicans, Americans, and Canadians. Ojeda was a charismatic organizer who had led a strike of Sony maquila workers in Nuevo Laredo Tamaulipas which had been brutally repressed, forcing her to flee Mexico for a while. She had the relationships to do worker-to-worker meetings, and so we began to partner with them and the founders of the cross border network were actually some KKFI folks, mainly Katie Phelan, who had done volunteering at KKFI since it went on the air, and Molly Madden, who was a volunteer on the Heartland Labor Forum. and various other folks who got involved.
We started in 1998, and we began to take delegations down to the border, mainly in the state of Tamaulipas, which is right across from Laredo, Texas, on the west and across from Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros Tamaulipas on the east. We started to meet workers through CJM and learned about the conditions in the maquilas – the toxic chemicals, the massive repetitive strain injuries, the corrupt company unions, the pregnancy tests on hiring, and of course the wages of hunger.
We started before 2001 when you could still bring working-class people in from Mexico with visas, with tourist visas. And so we brought them here, we brought them here to see what life here was like and gave them a realistic picture of the US. And those kinds of exchanges were just incredibly rich. So that’s how we started, and we learned very, very quickly as we met workers in factories, like, I mean, a large number of factories were actually servicing the auto industry and they were making the simpler parts like wire harnesses.
There are a lot of wire harness factories. Sony in Nuevo Laredo had a computer disc factory. Emerson Electric was making radios. Zenith was actually making TVs in Reynosa, and we began to meet these workers who are working in these places. Not only do they work under sweatshop conditions and make very, very low wages, but we began to discover that they had family in the United States and would often send teenaged boys to work in Texas because they needed somehow to supplement the low wages that were being paid by General Motors, Sony and Emerson Ford and Zenith. The other thing we learned was that many of these workers were migrants themselves, people who were from southern Mexico and rural parts of Mexico who had been dispossessed as a result of NAFTA because of the farm imports – the imports of food.
And so one of the things we did on these delegations we took down there is that we went to the grocery store so that people could see that a huge part of the groceries people were buying at that time were actually imported from the United States and way more expensive than the subsidized market basket of food people got before NAFTA wiped out both farm subsidies in the countryside and food subsidies in the cities. In fact, we learned that the US required Mexico to end collectively owned farm land and subsidies while they got to keep our agricultural subsidies here in the U.S. This was one of the greatest drivers of migration as literally millions of campesinos were forced off the land with nowhere to go but north – north to the maquilas, and then across the border, to subsidize the low wages of the maqilas.
And so what you saw was US economic imperialism, destroying the livelihoods of millions of some of the poorest people in Mexico and turning them into factory workers and migrants. And that was a profound lesson for people to understand in order to figure out what the U.S. economy and those people who are running the U.S. economy were really doing.
And so that has become the mission of the Cross Border Network. Ever since we worked in Mexico, you know, until about 2005, when it became way too dangerous to work there because of narcotrafficking, which was also a fruit of NAFTA. I mean, I don’t know if people remember this, but the brother of the President who signed NAFTA, the Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, named Raul, was arrested and convicted of massive narcotics trafficking. He pioneered the drug routes up from Mexico through I-35 up into the United States.
The surge of migration really is coincidental with what we call neoliberal economic reforms, which actually started before NAFTA in the 1980s in Mexico, and have now spread to much of Latin America and in part caused the recent migration of people from Central America and now from Venezuela and Colombia. In the 1980s, the US sided with dictators against insurgencies, and the 2009 coup in Honduras and the genocide in Guatemala are very, very tightly tied to US policies, which have impoverished people, given rise to corruption and massive violence, and created the migrants who were now trying to kick out.
So, that’s been the mission of the Cross Border Network—to connect the dots between US policy and migration. Of course there are other factors dislocating people, like climate change, but that too is connected to our way of life and our love affair with fossil fuels. The myth that people leave poor countries voluntarily to pursue the American Dream and to make a better life for their children is a half-truth at best.
To quote African poet Warsan Shire, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” People don’t uproot themselves without strong reason—leave family, leave everything familiar, leave the language they know, to come to a place as foreboding and unwelcoming as the United States.
And so, that’s a lesson that we really try to teach people. As a result, we became very involved in the immigrant rights struggle here in the United States, which is something that we’re doing. As we also continue to try to build international solidarity, we’ve led people-to-people delegations since 2009, we’ve been working primarily in Honduras.
It’s hard to measure successes. US foreign policy is a bipartisan catastrophe. Organizations that work in this field can’t expect that change will be anything but slow. We feel good about educating people.
Many young opponents of US imperialism in Honduras were disappeared and killed in the 1980s as Honduras was the staging ground for the contra war. Berta Cáceres was an indigenous leader in Honduras, who opposed US policy. She opposed the exploitation of the resources of her people, the Lenca people, and specifically a dam that was being built.
She was an opponent of the dictatorship of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was a drug king who was convicted last year in New York City for narco-trafficking. She was an opponent of a dam and the dam was financed by one of the biggest banks in Central America, Banco Fichosa. And she was assassinated March 2, 2016.
As for us: We have a fund, which we established during COVID, called the Bienvenido fund. Bienvenido means welcome in Spanish. And the Bienvenido fund goes to help very poor immigrants who are destitute or have very, very little money to pay the very high US Citizenship and Immigration fees. We also are beginning to help with bail money as the Trump administration ramps up his threat to deport at least 12 million people.
