Ríos Montt Trial to Begin

Maya villagers gathered in a courtroom in Guatemala City in January (2012) for the evidentiary hearing in Mr. Ríos Montt’s case. Photograph © Victor J. Blue for The New York Times.

Last month I noticed this OpEd at The New York Times, noting the prospects that former Guatemalan dictator (read U.S. surrogate, alum of the School of the Americas, etc.) General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Over the course of three decades an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed by various military regimes; a vastly disproportionate number of the victims were indigenous peoples. The crimes have been documented by multiple inquiries [1]. Now The Times reports the trial is set to commence this week. What is that saying about the 'arch of the moral universe?' The ex-dictator actually seems to be caught in the vagaries of practical political bargaining between the current Guatemalan government and the Obama administration. But that is close enough. It is lesson enough that the powerful cannot arrange for protection in perpetuity.

The Pope and the Dictator

Some of the most affecting images I have seen emerge from the work of photographers and artists who are coming to terms with the legacy of authoritarian terror in various Latin American countries.
I've posted about this work here and here numerous times. With the election of the new pope - Francis I or the Cardinal formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio - today, we confront another deeply troubling aspect of official Catholicism - it's complicity with that authoritarian politics across the continent, but specifically in Argentina.

This undated picture popped up on my FB news feed. It is - according to the Portuguese source, Indignados Lisboa, "Foto do novo Papa Francisco I ao lado do ditador argentino Videla." Jorge Rafael Videla was head of the Military Junta that terrorized Argentina from 1976 though 1981. I mentioned him here most recently last summer when he and some of his minions were convicted for some of their more horrendous offenses (like stealing babies from people whom they had tortured, then murdered and selling them).

In this picture Videla is accompanied by, you guessed it, Jorge Mario Bergoglio!* The image is symbolic of the interactions between the Church hierarchy and the murderous junta during Argentina's 'dirty war.'  There is no real news in this - here is a report from this afternoon and here, for instance, is a report from several years ago, both in The Guardian. What is shameful is that the church hierarchy apparently deems it all irrelevant.
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* It reminds me of the embarrassing photo of Don Rumsfeld, who under George W Bush supervised the invasion of Iraq, shaking hands two decades earlier with Saddam Hussein. At the time Rumsfeld had been in a functionary for Ronald Reagan (that great supporter of Latin American dictators) who was supplying Hussein with arms.

Deciphering Hugo Chávez?

"Hugo Chávez’s presidency (1999-2013) was characterized by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees" (Human Rights Watch).

"Over the last fourteen years, Chávez has submitted himself and his agenda to fourteen national votes, winning thirteen of them by large margins, in polling deemed by Jimmy Carter to be “best in the world” out of the 92 elections that he has monitored. (It turns out it isn’t that difficult to have transparent elections: voters in Venezuela cast their ballot on an touch pad, which spits out a receipt they can check and then deposit in a box. At the end of the day, random polling stations are picked for ‘hot audits,’ to make sure the electronic and paper tallies add up). A case is made that this ballot-box proceduralism isn’t democratic, that Chávez dispenses patronage and dominates the media giving him an unfair advantage. But after the last presidential ballot—which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded electorate—even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man. [. . .]

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Chavismo’s social-welfare programs will endure now that Chávez is gone and shelve the leftwing hope that out of rank-and-file activism a new, sustainable way of organizing society will emerge. The participatory democracy that took place in barrios, in workplaces and in the countryside over the last fourteen years was a value in itself, even if it doesn’t lead to a better world.

There’s been great work done on the ground by scholars . . . on these social movements that, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Venezuela might be the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere." (The Nation).

"Hugo Chávez Frias . . .  was probably more demonized than any democratically elected president in world history.  But he was repeatedly re-elected by wide margins, and will be mourned not only by Venezuelans but by many Latin Americans who appreciate what he did for the region" (CEPR).

"Without doubt, chavismo will outlive its founder. Many ordinary Venezuelans will look back on his rule with fondness. But his heirs will have to grapple with some intractable problems.

Venezuela comes towards the bottom of just about every league table for good governance or economic competitiveness. For 14 years Venezuelans have been told that their problems were caused by somebody else—the United States or “the oligarchy”. Getting ahead has depended on political loyalty rather than merit. The mass enrolment of millions in “universities” that mainly impart propaganda have raised expectations that are almost bound to be dashed. [. . .]

A majority of Venezuelans may eventually come to see that Mr Chávez squandered an extraordinary opportunity for his country, to use an unprecedented oil boom to equip it with world-class infrastructure and to provide the best education and health services money can buy. But this lesson will come the hard way, and there is no guarantee that it will be learned" (The Economist).

"This is an important difference between the classical and radical populist eras. Juan Perón and his cohorts co-opted a rising Left. Chávez has seemingly resurrected one and has at times struggled to keep up with the forces he helped unleash. The Bolivarian Circles represent with exquisite precision the ethos of the Revolution: These community councils were organized in an attempt to bury the state deep into civil society, to bypass potentially hostile local elected officials and to dole out patronage directly from the center. But they are, as Nikolas Kosloff puts it, at once “anti-democratic, creating a kind of vertical dependency around the cult figure of Chávez” and simultaneously creating a real terrain of democratic deliberation" (In These Times).

"He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke. Hugo Chávez, whose death has been announced, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average of 40 hours per week. As president, he didn't hold regular cabinet meetings; he'd bring the many to a weekly meeting, broadcast live on radio and television. Aló, Presidente, the programme in which policies were outlined and discussed, had no time limits, no script and no teleprompter.

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d'état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Chávez's meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered" (The Guardian).

"What is left, instead, after Chávez? A gaping hole for the millions of Venezuelans and other Latin Americans, mostly poor, who viewed him as a hero and a patron, someone who “cared” for them in a way that no political leader in Latin America in recent memory ever had. For them, now, there will be a despair and an anxiety that there really will be no one else like him to come along, not with as big a heart and as radical a spirit, for the foreseeable future. And they are probably right. But it’s also Chávism that has not yet delivered. Chávez’s anointed successor, Maduro, will undoubtedly try to carry on the revolution, but the country’s untended economic and social ills are mounting, and it seems likely that, in the not so distant future, any Venezuelan despair about their leader’s loss will extend to the unfinished revolution he left behind" (The New Yorker).
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Update: Here are a couple of other provocative commentaries on Chávez. The first - "The Achievements of Hugo Chávez" - is from Counterpunch and documents the medical/health dimensions of contemporary Venezuela; the second, by a smart young political theorist Diego von Vacano, who is concerned with how we ought to conceptualize Chávez's politics.

Re-designing Medellín

"Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be."

I lifted the comment above from this article in The New York Times which recounts the renaissance of Medellín, Colombia. I just tonight came across the link courtesy of Fonna Forman. There is an interesting entanglement of architectural focus on public space, cultural activism, and democratic participation at work here. No panacea promised, just a hopeful example.

Gustavo Germano ~ Ausencias (Absences)

One of my really smart former students Constanza Iribarne brought to my attention this work by Argentinian photographer Gustavo Germano. The graphic for Germano's project, I think, captures brilliantly the approach he adopts. Not only does it announce the subject - "30,000 Detained-Disappeared and killed by the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983" - it suggests, with the only partly missing 'i' the way los desaparecidos continue to haunt families and politics in Argentina. Germano captures absence by rephotographing families, including his own, prior to and following the disappearance of one or more loved one.

 1969: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano, Eduardo Germano

 2006: Gustavo Germano, Guillermo Germano, Diego Germano. 

Both images © Gustavo Germano.* To the best of my knowledge his work has been exhibited across Latin America and Europe but not in the U.S.. His eldest brother, Eduardo was 'disappeared' by the Argentinian regime in 1976. 
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* See this slideshow for other images (text in German) from this series. 

Daniel Hernández-Salazar (Again)

Daniel Hernández-Salazar is among my very favorite photographers. I respect him immensely and have posted on his work here on several occasions before. His photography - and the ongoing struggle for political memory in his native Guatemala with which it is entangled - are featured in this recent post on the Lens blog at The New York Times. Daniel Hernández-Salazar stands as a striking counterexample to those who blindly insist that art and politics don't mix.

Daniel Hernández-Salazar ~ Memoria de un ángel ("Memory of an Angel")

I have, on a couple of occasions, posted on the work of Guatemalan photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar. You can find those posts here and here. I think his work is remarkable for the way it traverses conventional photographic genres - art, documentary, forensics, photojournalism; because it ignores the boundary between each of those genres and politics; and because he insists on pushing for international recognition of the Guatemalan genocide beyond the local or regional. While I worry about this third aspect of his work - in particular, I have concerns that it may transform what in Guatemala is a truly and deeply political undertaking into a less pointed humanitarianism when he moves his work to distant locations - I nevertheless find his angel a powerfully evocative image.

Having said all that, I received an email from Hernández-Salazar late last week calling my attention to his blog and specifically to this post he has made (Spanish/English) on his more recent installations and interventions at the memorials to those who perished at the Nazi extermination camps at Treblinka, Plaszów, and Auschwitz. I still have my qualms; but I also admire Hernández-Salazar and his work immeasurably. I hope you will visit his blog and see his new works.
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P.S.: You can find Daniel Hernández-Salazar. 2007. So That All Shall Know/Para que todos lo sepan. University of Texas Press, here.

João Pina ~ Fleeting Occurances, Banality, Offical Terror

I stumbled across this post at The New York Times photography blog "Lens." It details ongoing work by Portuguese photographer João Pina (about whom I posted here before) in which he is retrieving the memory and consequences of coordinated state terror across Latin America in the 1970s. The images are extraordinary.

The Uses of Photography ~ Daniel Hernández-Salazar

Late last year I posted about the work of Guatemalan photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar. At the time I noted his 1998 polyptych (above) entitled Esclarecimiento ("Clarification"). I think the images are striking and want to talk a bit about some of the various ways Hernández-Salazar has used them.

Esclarecimiento initially was a triptych No veo, no oigo, me callo ("I Don't See, I Don't Hear, I Remain Silent") to which Hernández-Salazar added a fourth panel Para que Todos lo sepan ("So That All Shall Know"). The "angel" Hernández-Salazar depicts is a young Mayan man whose "wings" consist in the superimposed image of a human scapula disinterred from a mass grave containing victims of the Guatemalan military. The symbolism of the images requires that we understand some background.*

Between 1960 and 1996 Guatemalans endured a protracted, notably vicious civil war. As part of the negotiated end to the fighting, the Catholic Church initiated a project for the recovery of Historical Memory - Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Historica (REMHI). On April 24, 1998 the REMHI project issued a massive written report entitled Guatemala Nunca Mas that estimated that 200,000 civilians, disproportionately from the indigenous Mayan Indian population, had been killed during the civil war. The report concludes that the overwhelming majority of these deaths came at the hands of the Guatemalan military.** The REMHI report consisted in four volumes. The cover of each volume carried one of the four images from Hernández-Salazar’s Esclarecimiento. The final volume, containing the names of over 50,000 victims of the civil war, features So That All Shall Know.

The REMHI had been headed by Bishop Juan José Gerardi. Two days after the project released its report, the Bishop was bludgeoned to death. Ultimately four individuals - three of them military officers - were convicted of the murder. But the immediate aftermath of Bishop Gerardi's murder consisted in mass protests in Guatemala City. At these protests many marchers carried posters, each featuring Hernández-Salazar’s Esclarecimiento, that the REMHI project had printed to publicize its report.

March of Silence, Guatemala City, (28 April 1998).

May Day March, Guatemala City (1998).

So here we have two uses of Hernández-Salazar’s Esclarecimiento. The first, he surely intended, the second he almost surely did not.

To mark the first anniversary of Bishop Gerardi's murder, Hernández-Salazar installed much enlarged versions of Para que Todos lo sepan at some 36 locations around Guatemala City. Some of these locations were simply prominent public spaces, many were directly associated with the military. And many of the "Street Angels" were removed promptly by parties unknown.

The top image depicts a "Street Angel" on Judio Street in
one of Guatemala City's oldest neighborhoods. The bottom
image depicts a "Street Angel" facing the Headquarters of
Military Intelligence, also in Guatemala City (April 1999).

These "Street Angels" were reconstructed from sets of sixty 8 x 10 panels which allowed those installing them to reproduce them on photocopiers and to hang them in such a way that the larger image appeared only incrementally. This was not merely a technological convenience or aesthetic strategy. The effort to appropriate and redefine public space in Guatemala City was, at the time, obviously fraught with risk.

In subsequent years Hernández-Salazar has incorporated large versions of Para que Todos lo sepan into a less localized project called Memoria de un ángel ("Memory of an Angel"). In this series of installations he took Para que Todos lo sepan abroad. The aim was to generalize the need to recognize and recall pain and suffering in diverse circumstances.

Phantom of War. Installation at former U.S. military base,
Fort Malbry - Austin, Texas (2003).

Installation at the Atomic Bomb Dome,
Hiroshima (April 2004).

While I understand the impulse to generalize here, it seems to me that Para que Todos lo sepan loses some of its force and especially its political force as Hernández-Salazar moves it farther and farther from its local context. Given the complicity of the U.S. in the sordid political history of Guatemala - and of Latin America more generally - the installation outside American military installations makes some sense. But moving to memorials for the victims of American use of atomic weapons risks rendering both Hernández-Salazar's image and the memorial site itself banal - each becomes a more or less routinized or ritualistic gesture. Indeed, the installation at Hiroshima immediately brought to mind a 1999 projection that Krzysztof Wodiczko did at the same site.

From: "The Hiroshima Projection" (1999) ~ Public projection
at the A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, Japan © Krzysztof Wodiczko

Hernández-Salazar's "Street Angel" draws its power largely from the streets it inhabits. The profound impact of the image (and its partners), it seems to me, relies upon a distinctively local resonance. That does not deprive them of power; it merely identifies the source of the work's vitality. The farther it is removed from that original context, the more it is compelled to assume the guise or the concern for humanity writ large, the less political it becomes. That is a cost that in this case - and in others - we should resist paying. In saying that I do not mean to diminish the importance of Para que Todos lo sepan. It is, I believe, a truly profound work. To the contrary, I hope to draw a general lesson from it.
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* My acquaintance with Hernández-Salazar, his work and the historical context in which he produced it derives from the volume I mentioned in my earlier post.
** These conclusions are generally corroborated by the report of a UN sponsored truth commission - Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH).

Daniel Hernández-Salazar

Esclarecimiento (Polyptych, 1998) © Daniel Hernández-Salazar

Daniel Hernández-Salazar is a Guatemalan photographer whose work straddles the line between photojournalism and art in the sense that he labors in both genres. He has used his images to both document genocide and civil war in his own country and to speak out against violence there and abroad. The University of Texas Press published So that All Shall Know/Para que todos lo sepan an overview of Hernández-Salazar's work in 2007. You can find details here.

Meiselas & Jaar at Aperture TONIGHT

Susan Meiselas and Alfredo Jaar
In Conversation

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2008 6:30 p.m.
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street 4th Floor
between 10th and 11th Avenue
New York, NY

Join Aperture for a special evening of conversation between photojournalist Susan Meiselas and artist Alfredo Jaar. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and is renowned for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her widely-published documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Jaar emigrated from Chile at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1981. His installations, photographs, films, and community-based projects bear powerful witness to military con­flicts, imbalances of power, and political corruption.

Please Note: if, like me, you are not in the area the conversation allegedly is going to be streamed live onto the internet here.

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My only remark is that it seem tendentious to distinguish, as this press release does, between art and photojournalism here. I'd like to know what criteria you might use to sustain that distinction in a persuasive manner.

Castro

Fidel Castro has resigned as President of Cuba; he will surely not disappear completely, nor lose influence since his brother Raul has taken his place. My attitude toward Castro is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he came to power by toppling a dictator and U.S. client. He worked with reasonable success, and despite the persistent and focused hostility of the U.S., to improve the education and health care systems in Cuba. And while Cuba remains poor, it is arguably no more so than most of the neighboring countries in the Carribean and Latin America, many of which have enjoyed the 'good graces' of successive U.S. administrations. On the other hand, Castro has been a dictator with scant respect for civil and political rights. He has not managed to bring economic prosperity to Cuba. We can offer all sorts of counterfactuals about what might've happened absent the U.S. led embargo, or about how things might've gone if Batista had retained power, etc., but the actual case on the ground remains unimpressive.

I came across this unattributed photograph* in The Guardian today and it captures the enigmatic character of Castro. Most Americans have, I think, at best a silhouetted image of Castro. But The Guardian also ran this slide show of images** of Castro and the political company he has kept over the years. And those images too leave one ambivalent. On the one hand, Nelson Mandela, Gabrial Garcia-Marquez, Salvador Allende, and Daniel Ortega. On the other hand, Pope John Paul II, Jimmy Carter, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales. On the third hand, a motley crew of Soviet dictators on whom he relied for economic and political support.

There seems to me little to be gained by either vilifying or canonizing Castro. There are many in the U.S. who find him loathsome. Would those people have preferred the dictator Batista or his political progeny? There are those who consider Castro a hero. Can they do more than rationalize his dictatorial ways? I am not sure what criteria we should use to assess the Cuban experience. Consider this passage from The New York Times today:

His record has been a mix of great social achievements, but a dismal economic performance that has mired most Cubans in poverty. He succeeded in establishing universal health care, providing free education through college and largely rooting out racism.

But he never broke the island’s dependence on commodities like sugar, tobacco and nickel, nor did he succeed in industrializing the nation so that Cuba could compete in the world market with durable goods. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its aid to the island, Cuba has limped along economically, relying mostly on tourism and money sent home from exiles to get hard currency.

The first paragraph seems fair enough. Not effusive, but accurate. The second paragraph raiases some obvious questions - perhaps questions that might illuminate the first paragraph too. Which Carribean economy does the author have in mind that has industrialized, freed itself from economic dependence on agricultural exports and tourism, and so forth? Is Cuba more or less dependent on remittances from abroad than other developing countries? Can we be more specific?

I guess my question is whether it is possible to have anything like a reasonable conversation about Cuba and Castro.
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* The photo credit is: "February 2003: Castro addresses a crowd in Havana." Photograph: STR/Reuters.

** (22 February) The Guardian has changed the slideshow to which I referred; they now have two others up here and here. These contain some but not all of the images they originally posted as well as many others.

“Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000,”

Today in The New York Times is a review by Roberta Smith of an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio. Smith essentially raves about the exhibition and notes that:

"The exhibition contains far more documentation than actual artworks, but this is not such a limitation. Dominated in its early sections by black-and-white photographs and videos, it is foremost an archive, with an archive’s aura of dense, ordered information; mysterious images; and new information and understandings. It delivers on all counts.

Its main message is that while Latin American Conceptual or nonobject artists were heterogeneous, they tended to differ from those in Europe and North America by emphasizing accessibility, audience participation and sociopolitical relevance."

Creating this sort of "archive" is inspiring insofar as it preserves ephemeral works wherein art and politics effectively abut, intermingle, overlap, conjoin, intersect, work in tandem, or whatever. Here are a couple of images from the accompanying slideshow, folllowed by a discussion from the review.

Both photographs © Marta Minujín.

"In December 1983 the Argentine Conceptual artist Marta Minujin and a group of helpers spent 17 days building a full-scale model of the Parthenon in a public park in Buenos Aires. Except for a metal scaffolding, it was made almost entirely of books wrapped in plastic. All the books had been banned by one of the most oppressive juntas in the country’s history, which was just being dismantled after Argentina’s first democratic election in a decade. “The Parthenon of Books/Homage to Democracy,” as Ms. Minujin’s work was titled, stood for about three weeks. Then the public was allowed to disassemble the piece and keep the books.

Even in grainy black-and-white photographs, the temple of books looks awesome, if slightly disheveled. (No matter the distance, books can’t be confused with marble.) It juts above the heads of the crowd gathered around it, as if sitting on its own printed-matter Acropolis. You had to be there for the full effect, I’m sure, but just seeing the photograph, reading the caption and thinking of the previously banned books funneling into circulation are both enlightening and moving."

You can find Marta Minujin's web page here. She created this pretty astonishing work directly following the fall of the Argentinian Junta (1976-83) that brutalized the country by seeking to "disappear" anyone who might display even the slightest independence of thought. This is the second exhibition at El Museo del Barrio that I have posted on ~ here and here. The earlier exhibition, Los Desaparacidos clearly has affinities with at least parts of the current show. Arte No Es Vida is currated by Deborah Cullen who as "the museum’s director of curatorial programs" likely was involved in bringing in the earlier show too. That is great work. Fortunately I get to visit NYC later this spring and definitely will include a trip to El Museo.

Diego Rivera

Photographs of Mexican artist Diego Rivera in Mexico City's Munal.
Photograph © Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times.

This picture is from a slideshow in The New York Times notice of the large Rivera exhibition now showing in Mexico City. I've not personally seen much of Rivera's work with the exception of the fabulous murals at the Detroit Institute for the Arts (detail below) which I visit nearly every summer.

The Gaze of 45 Mexican Photographers

From the series "The Line, Mexican - U.S.A. Border" 2001-2002.
Photograph © Pavka Segura

AIDS, 1997, Plaza de la Soledad, La Merced, Mexico City.
Photograph © Francisco Mata

These are two of the 450 photographs that make up this exhibition of Mexican photographers at The Guangdong (China) Museum of Art. Although it completely escapes me why anyone feels the need to invoke "the Gaze," especially in a so heterogenous a group as those collected in this exhibition, a lot of the work is interesting.

The Usefulness of Walls for Politics (3)

Sept. 22., 5 a.m.: The border near Naco, Ariz.,

under the watchful glare of security lights.

Sept. 19, 4 a.m.: Two towns called Nogales, one in Arizona
(foreground) and one in Mexico.
Both photographs © Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures (2006),
for The New York Times

I came across these images by Simon Norfolk in this retrospective of his terrific work over the past half dozen years for The Times. They seem like an appropriate way to extend my series of posts on walls and politics [1] [2].

Francisco Mata Rosas

Cabezones © Francisco Mata Rosas

La muerte del SIDA © Francisco Mata Rosas

It always is a pleasure to discover a photographer whose work you really like but with whom you've heretofore been unfamiliar. Francisco Mata Rosas (b. 1958) fits the bill. He lives and works in Mexico City. I've lifeted a couple of examples here but you can find lots more of his work at his web page which is bilingual Spanish/English.

May Day!

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the May Day march 1929,

© The Estate of Tina Modotti.

This photo seems an appropriate way to mark the Holiday for two reasons. First, Modotti, Rivera & Kahlo are all terrific artists. Second, many May Day celebrations this year - like last year - will be focusing on securing'defending the rights of immigrant workers and a large percentage of such workers in the US are from Latin America - go here and here for information.

May Day was invented (quite literally) in 1890 by European Socialists as part of the campaign for the eight hour day. One of the first papers I ever published used it as an example of an "invented tradition" with crucially important strategic implications for working class politics at the turn of the last century (making an odd couple of historian Eric Hobsbawm and game theorist Thomas Schelling). This basic idea mushroomed into my doctoral thesis. So I have a particular personal fondness for this holiday. As an historical example, it demonstrates (no pun intended) the way political possibilities can be opened even in seemingly dark times.

Los Desaparecidos

Over at Open Democracy you can find a review of this exhibition (curated by folks at the North Dakota Museum of Art - which, judging from their web page, seems like a truly remarkable, progressive place - and now showing at El Museo del Barrio in NYC) of work by Latin American artists who address the legacy of massive "disappearances" perpetrated by dictatorial regimes across the continent. Representatives of these regimes - whether officials of the the police and armed forces or their less formal, but no less deadly proxies - engaged in extra-judicial kidnappings, followed by torture, often in clandestine detention centers, and in many cases, murder.

Among the artists whose work is included in the exhibition are: Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina), Luis Camnitzer (Uruguay), Arturo Dulcos (Chile), Juan Manuel Echavarría (Colombia), Antonio Frasconi (Uruguay), Nicolas Guagnini (Argentina), Sara Maneiro (Venezuela), Cildo Meireles (Brazil), Oscar Muñoz (Colombia), Ivan Navarro (Chile), Luis Gonzáles Palma (Guatemala), Ana Tiscornia (Uruguay), Fernando Traverso (Argentina). The review at OD includes a slide show of some of the works that you can find here.
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PS: (Corrected post 3/23/07 - Thanks Rob!) I have had trouble linking to Open Democracy pages the past couple of days but will remedy that asap.

Depicting Labor and Migration - David Bacon

In The Chronicle Review (17 November), the "End Paper" this week consists of an excerpt from a new book by photographer and storyteller David Bacon. (You can find an earlier excerpt from The Nation here.) His larger focus seems to be on the ways working people navigate the exigencies of (to borrow from economist Albert Hirschman) "exit, voice and loyalty."


Bacon focuses on labor struggles (voice) and migration (exit) within a context where connections and commitments to places and others (loyalty) demand that individuals make very difficult, indeed painful, sometimes tragic decisions. Bacon's new book is Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (Cornell UP) and it combines photographs with interviews to provide insight into the lives and travails of Mexican laborers who criss-cross the Mexico-US border in search of work that will sustain their families and communities. The book contains a pointed essay by Carlos Munoz, Jr. about the ways that Bacon depicts his subjects in word and image. So, calling Bacon a "storyteller" is not meant as condescending; to the contrary it is meant to say that he presents stories of workers in a rounded and respectful manner.