#migrants from central america

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

most unhinged take ive seen in a while was that activists were to blame for the exploitation of child migrants by companies around the country because they wanted the kids out of cages for their own egos apparently

#you are a migrant child from central america. you have two options: indefinite incarceration or child labor

[headspace-hotel]

Many people, especially USAmericans, are very resistant to knowing the plants and living according to the ways of the plants. They lash out with a mix of arrogance and fear: "Don't you know what bad things would happen if we lived a different way? There is a REASON for living this way. Would you have us go Back—backward to the time without vaccines or antibiotics????"

Ah, yes, the two immutable categories that all proposals for change fit into: Backward Change and Forward Change! Either we must invent a a futuristic, entirely new solution with SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY that further industrializes and increases the productivity of our world, or we must give up vaccines and antibiotics and become starving illiterate medieval peasants.

Every human practice anywhere on Earth that has declined, stopped, or become displaced by another practice, was clearly objectively worse than whatever replaced it. You see, the only possible reason a way of life could decline or disappear is that it sucked and had it coming anyway!!! Pre-industrial human history is worthless except as a cautionary tale about how miserable we would all be without *checks notes* factories, fossil fuels and colonialism. Obviously!

Anyway, who do you think benefits from the idea that pesticide-dependent, corporate-controlled industrialized monoculture farming liberates us all from spending our short, painful lives as filthy, miserable peasants toiling in the fields?

First of all, I think it's silly to act like farming is a uniquely awful way to live. I can't believe I have to say this, but the awful part of being a medieval peasant was the oppression and poverty, not the fact that harvesting wheat is a lot of work and cows are stinky. Same goes for farm labor in the modern USA: the bad part is that most people working farms are undocumented migrant workers that are getting treated like garbage and who can't complain about it because their boss will rat them out to ICE.

Work is just work. Any work has dignity when the people doing it are paid properly and not being abused. Abuse and human trafficking is rampant in agriculture, but industrialization and consolidation of small farms into gigantic corporate owned farms sure as hell isn't making it better.

Is working on a farm somehow more miserable than working in a factory, a fast food restaurant, or a retail store? Give me a break. "At least I'm not doing physical labor in the sun," you say, at your job where you're forced to stand on concrete for 8 hours and develop chronic pain by age 24.

When you read about small farmers going out of business because of huge corporations, none of them are going "Yay! Now that Giant Corporation has swallowed up all the farms in the area, we can all enjoy the luxurious privileges of the industrial era, like working RETAIL!" What you do see a lot of is farmers bitterly grieving the loss of their way of life.

And also, the fact is, sustainable forms of polyculture farming that create a functional ecosystem made up of many different useful and edible plants are actually way MORE efficient at producing food than a monoculture. The reason we don't do it as much, is that it can't be industrialized where everything is harvested with machines.

Some places folks are starting to get the idea and planting two crops together in alternating rows, letting the mutualistic relationship between plants boost the yields of both, but indigenous people in many parts of the world have been doing this stuff basically forever. I read about a style of agroforestry from Central America that has TWENTY crops all together on the same field.

Our modern system of farming is necessary for feeding the world? Bullshit! Our technology is very powerful and useful, but our harmful monocultures, dangerous pesticides, and wasteful usage of land and resources are making the system very inefficient and severely degrading nature's ability to provide for us.

What is needed, is a SYNTHESIS of the power and insights of technology and science, with the ancient wisdom and knowledge gained by closely and carefully observing Nature. We do not need to reject one, to embrace the other! They should be friends!

Our system thinks land is only used for one thing at a time. Even our science often thinks this way. A corn field has the purpose of producing corn, and no other purpose, so all other plants in the corn must be killed, and it must be a monoculture of only corn.

But this means that the symbiosis between different plants that help each other is destroyed, so we must pollute the earth with fertilizers that wash into bodies of water and cause eutrophication, where algae explode in number and turn the water to green goo. Nature always has variety and diversity with many plants sharing the same space. It supports much more animal life (we are animals!) this way. The Three Sisters" are the perfect example of mutualism between plants being used in an agricultural environment. The planting of corn, beans, and squash together has been traditionally used clear across the North American continent.

And in North America, the weeds we have here are mostly edible plants too. Some of them were even domesticated themselves! Imagine a garden where every weed that pops up is also an edible or otherwise useful crop, and therefore a welcomed friend! So when weeds like Amaranth and Sunflower pop up in your field, that should not be a cause for alarm, but rather the system of symbiosis working as it should.

A field of one single crop is limited in how much it can produce, because one crop fits into a single niche in what should be a whole ecosystem, and worse, it requires artificial inputs to make up for what the rest of the plant community would normally provide. The field with twenty crops does not produce the same amount as the monoculture field divided in twenty ways, but instead produces much more while being a habitat for wild animals, because each plant has its own niche.

#plants #plantarchy #the ways of the plants

[1americanconservative]

𝔹𝕦𝕕…

@bud_cann

My wife and I have walked up and back down 5th Ave, NYC from Greenwich Village to Central Park hundreds of times in our 17 years living in Manhattan together. Beautiful 5th Ave, famous for its exquisite shops and iconic department stores, the Empire State Building, St Patrick's Cathedral, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. There’s no forgiveness for a political party that purposely destroys every magnificent city they come into contact with. NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco, devastated with crime, racial tensions, homeless, and now, out of control illegal immigration. Joe Biden is just an ignorant, mentally challenged, malicious puppet, for a regime fixated on destroying America and rebuilding it as part of a New World Order. Barack Obama, a vile, manipulative, closet homosexual, racist, pulls Joe Biden’s weak aging strings, but whoever is controlling Obama is who we need be concerned with. NYC is ravaged with criminals, homeless, illegal migrants, and tens of thousands of pro-Islam protesters. The incomparable Miracle Mile in Chicago, is a diseased homeless encampment, and San Francisco’s amazing Tenderloin District is a homeless sea of human excrement, filth, and illicit drugs. If Democrats are voted back into power in 2024, the ‘United States of America’ will sadly complete its transition into a third world country.

https://x.com/bud_cann/status/1739795947922792833?s=20

[posttexasstressdisorder]

#modern day slavery ring trapped hundreds migrant workers south georgia

[bighermie]

[soberscientistlife]

nytimes Migrant children, who have been coming into the U.S. without their parents in record numbers, are working some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation has found. This shadow workforce is part of a new economy of exploitation that extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century.

The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion and who feared they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. Its examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.

Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. The number of unaccompanied minors entering the U.S. climbed to a high of 130,000 last year — three times what it was five years earlier — and this summer is expected to bring another wave.

Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses.

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

Three buses coming from Texas dropped off about 140 recent migrants — including babies and young children — near Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in Washington, D.C., in historically frigid temperatures on Saturday evening.

The drop-off appears to be the latest example of an effort by governors in Republican-led states — including Gov. Greg Abbott — of busing migrants to liberal strongholds like New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. 

But immigration activists said Saturday’s incident was particularly cruel because of the freezing temperatures in the nation's capital and because it occurred on Christmas Eve.

Madhvi Bahl, an organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, confirmed the arrival of the migrants on Saturday to NBC News. Bahl called the stunt "awful" and said that "it shows that the cruelty is the point."

Her organization was one of several that helped provide shelter to the migrants arriving Saturday.

“D.C. was prepared and we showed up and welcomed folks, as we’ve been doing for months now,” she said.

Bahl said the three busses of approximately 140 migrants arrived from locations in Texas, including Del Rio, Laredo and Eagle Pass — all towns along the U.S.-Mexican border — and that most of the arrivals were originally from countries in Central and South America, and the Caribbean. 

The buses dropped the migrants near Harris’ residence at the Naval Observatory.

There were young children and babies on the buses that arrived, though Bahl said he group did not immediately know how many. Many of the adults who arrived lacked shoes, while others wore flip-flops or sandals, she said. 

Temperatures on Saturday night in some parts of Washington, D.C., reached as low as 10 degrees — one of the area's coldest Christmas Eves in recent history.

#Immigration #Christmas

[treethymes]

“In his study of [the international coffee] market, scholar Joseph Nevins finds that the big changes occurring between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s are related to the “longer-term struggle over the distribution of income related to the crop.” In the early part of this period, growers pulled in an average of around 20 cents for every dollar of coffee revenue. They were aided by an agreement called the International Coffee Accord (ICA) of 1962, which acted as a sort of cartel plan, constraining and arranging supply. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration supported the ICA and its concessions to Third World workers as a Cold War tool to head off communist onshoring in the Western Hemisphere. But as the U.S. strategy changed, the country and its free-market Latin American proxies abandoned the ICA in 1989. The results were quick: By the mid-1990s, the grower share was down from 20 to 13 percent. Roasters, traders, and retailers in the drinking countries improved their share from 54 to 78 percent. That big, fast shift was partly thanks to repressed grower wages, partly thanks to repressed domestic service wages in the West, partly thanks to consolidation in the industry, and partly thanks to new high-priced coffee drinks. Starbucks went public in 1992, and if it seemed to be growing like a tech company in the ’90s, that’s because both thrived on the same social changes.

“Worsening conditions for workers in Mexico and in the rest of the Americas pushed people north, rapidly increasing the undocumented immigrant population in the United States. The Bracero program was over, but the jobs still needed doing. Caught in between employers who were hiring migrants and nationalist restrictionists, the Reagan administration legalized a few million undocumented workers while increasing border enforcement. Even though the vast majority of narcotics came into the country via legal ports of entry, conservatives and liberals alike framed border enforcement as a central front in the war on drugs. Increasing the costs of crossing couldn’t stanch the increase of people—they were responding to larger factors: Out-migration from Mexico’s coffee-producing areas increased after the dissolution of the ICA, for example. This tendency intensified after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, pushing Mexico further toward cheap manufacturing exports and cheap imported American corn.

“The glut of cheap labor and commodities in this period undermined labor protections in the center as well as on the periphery, and the United States lost union jobs at a rapid clip. Reagan undermined the bulwark of government jobs by bringing Boulwarism to the White House. His signature incident occurred in his first year, when he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers and decertified their union. To the press, the president quoted an air traffic controller who quit the union and reported to work as ordered: “How can I ask my kids to obey the law if I don’t?” Once again, questions of individual criminality put the Reaganites on firm ground. Organized labor took to rearguard action, holding on to its institutions by agreeing to two-tiered contracts that reduced benefits and protections for new or future members. Capital shook off the midcentury labor agreement like a bad habit, reducing its accountability to its own workers the way it previously reduced accountability to the broader communities. The second part didn’t require as many votes.”

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[wizardnaturalist]

the US: *spends 75 years destabilizing central and south american nations*

the US: damn why do we have so many migrants coming from central and south america? a mystery that cannot be solved

#'the crisis at the southern border' this is a crisis that you have created and perpetuated #you have the power to fix it. but you prefer to punish the people fleeing for their lives rather than change policy #and risk losing profit and power

[proton-wobbler]

Warbler Showdown; Bracket 9, Poll 4

Connecticut Warbler (Oporornis agilis)

IUCN Rating: Least Concern

Range: migrant; breeds in Canada, from British Columbia to Quebec and overwinters in central Bolivia and a small, adjacent portion of Brazil

Habitat: breeds in open, scrubby, and slightly boggy habitats, such as jack pine forests, black spruce-tamarack bogs, and muskeg, though in their Western range they prefer aspen and aspen-conifer forests. Overwintering habitat is often early successional growth, with a lower canopy and dense understory.

Subspecies: none

Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivorum)

IUCN Rating: Least Concern

Range: migrant; Southeastern US is where they are most dense, though they will breed up to Massachusetts and along the Mississippi River into Wisconsin; overwinters in the Caribbean, as well as southern Mexico and Central America.

Habitat: found in mature deciduous and deciduous-coniferous forests, especially where these overlap with hillsides and shrub patches; overwintering habitat not well known, but it has been found in a variety of natural forested areas within its range.

Subspecies: none

Image Sources: CONW (Tony Dvorak) WEWA (Peter Schreck)

#NWW Showdown #connecticut warbler #worm eating warbler #wood warblers #parulidae #passeriformes

[odinsblog]

To really understand the legacy of racism and exploitation in the U.S. Agricultural industry, we need to go back to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which became law nearly a century ago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.

This law fundamentally changed working conditions in the U.S., it gave us a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week, overtime pay –you know, the good stuff.

But these benefits didn’t apply to farmworkers, who at the time in the South were overwhelmingly Black.

In fact, you can draw a straight line from slavery, to the Fair Labor Standards Act, to the conditions we continue to see in agriculture today. Nearly a century later, farmworkers across the U.S., mostly Latino immigrants now, are still denied even the most basic federal protections, such as water breaks or access to shade in extreme heat. For many families, the effects of these racist exclusions are real, they’re tangible.

At the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last year, President Joe Biden outlined his plan to reduce the number of migrants seeking asylum at the Southern border. His administration, Biden said, would help “American farmers bring in seasonal agricultural workers from Northern Central American countries under the H-2A visa program.”

What does that mean for a program that’s already plagued with wage theft and abuse?

Since Biden took office in January of 2021, he’s turned “safe and orderly migration” into a kind of mantra. He says it all the time. And just in February of that year, 2021, the White House assembled working groups to discuss the H-2A program. The idea is to divert asylum seekers from the Southern border and into this program. Here’s Biden talking about the plan last summer:

President Biden: “And on this jobs front, our Department of Agriculture is launching a pilot program to help American farmers bring in seasonal agricultural workers from Northern Central America countries under the H-2A visa program. To improve conditions for all workers.”

Here’s the main issue with that. The Biden Administration wants to offer this temporary worker program to migrants who are seeking asylum at our Southern border. A program that is riddled with abuse and trafficking is being offered to people who are fleeing violence and trafficking. 


“They’re only gonna be able to stay in the United States for 6, 7, 8 months outta the year. What happens during those other months of the year? Uh, they have to go back to their home country and they’re gonna be going back to a country that they fled.


Maybe because they were being persecuted, somebody in their family was murdered, you know, you’re gonna send them back to that situation and you’re gonna send them back to that situation with dollars in their pockets, which I think is just gonna make them targets for extortion.”

—Latino USA, Head Down

• Part 1, https://play.stitcher.com/episode/302009156

• Part 2, https://play.stitcher.com/episode/302310113

#politics #joe biden #immigration #asylum seekers #refugees #racism #h2a visas #farm workers #workers rights #h-2a visas #mexico #wage theft #temporary foreign workers

[1americanconservative]

@CollinRugg

Subscribe

REPORT: Chinese gangs known as "Snakeheads" are working with Mexican cartels to smuggle illegals into the United States.

Biden's America.

According to the Daily Mail, Chinese people are flying from China to Mexico and other central American cities and then meeting up with smugglers to lead them into the United States.

Former intel officer Todd Bensman says the Chinese migrants are very well coached by the Snakeheads and know exactly what to say to US officials.

"They're so well coached and, we would get the same story from all of them, and not one variation," Bensman said.

The Chinese have changed their tactics in Mexico. Previously, they specialized in drugs and money laundering. Now they specialize in human trafficking thanks to Biden.

"The Chinese just can't go over there and cut the Mexican cartels out. That just doesn't happen. They've got to be paying the Mexican cartel some kind of a percentage, quota or tax," said cartel expert Robert Almonte.

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1765464965912392135?s=20

[zvaigzdelasas]

Last week, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared that he will boycott this year’s Summit of the Americas, scheduled to take place June 6-10 in Los Angeles, if the Biden administration fails to invite the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Lopez Obrador is not the only leader in the hemisphere who may not show up unless Washington extends invitations to all three countries. Last week, Bolivia’s president, Luis Arce, tweeted a similar intention, while several Caribbean leaders have suggested that at least some if not all members of CARICOM, which consists of 15 English-speaking Caribbean member-countries and five associate members, may decide to stay home. The newly elected president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, has also suggested she won’t go if the three nations’ leaders are not invited.[...]

A summit with critical partners missing would also deliver a huge blow to Biden’s attempts to find solutions to U.S. domestic problems that range from border security to immigration flows to the rise in oil and gas prices.[...]

The Summit itself is not solely to promote U.S. interests [Citation Needed], but to promote the interests of all the countries in the Americas.[...]

The special irony of excluding Cuba and Nicaragua from this year’s Summit is that Washington went to great lengths during the Cold War, including providing critical support to armed insurgencies and imposing severe economic sanctions, to destabilize and eventually overthrow leftist governments in both countries, thus infusing their successor leaders with understandable skepticism about Washington’s insistence that their exclusion reflects Washington’s dedication to democracy and human rights throughout the hemisphere.

On top of this, the case of Venezuela presents the United States with a dilemma. If the United States invites Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom it recognizes as the legitimate president of the country, the Caribbean states, who have never recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s president, are more likely to boycott. Indeed, Washington is increasingly isolated by its continued loyalty to Guaido whose years-long efforts to unite the opposition against President Nicolas Maduro have come to naught. Even the European Union, which initially recognized Guaido as president after his election as president of the National Assembly, has reduced his status to one of privileged interlocutor” in an implicit acknowledgement of the abject failure of Washington’s de facto “regime change” policy. [...]

The Summit, which was initiated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, is held every three years[...]

It was only just announced that Frank Mora, Biden’s nominee as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, would be confirmed later this week, less than three weeks before the summit.[...]

On the campaign trail, Biden condemned Trump’s inhumane policies toward migrants, promising major changes if elected. [...] Vice President Kamala Harris, the point person in the administration’s Central America “root causes” strategy, famously telling Guatemalans, “do not come” during her June 2021 visit to Central America.[...]

its regional partners are less inclined to work with a northern giant they see as selfish, arrogant, and hubristic. The question is, can the United States momentarily put aside its domestic fixations and great power concerns for the greater good of the hemisphere? [Editors note: no.] [...]

The absence of Presidents López Obrador, Castro, and Arce, and the leaders of other regional partners would be keenly felt and damaging to the forum in future years. It would present China with new opportunities to assert its own growing influence. There is still time for the United States to create a relevant summit and promote successful partnerships in all the Americas, but it is running out.

18 May 22

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

John Cuneo, The New Yorker

* * * *

The House GOP as an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

DEC 6, 2023

          At a time of multiple global crises, the House GOP will vote next week to open a sham “impeachment inquiry” of President Biden. When every moment of legislative floor time is literally a matter of life and death, the House GOP will squander its quickly evaporating legislative calendar to provide political cover for an aspiring dictator. The House GOP will fold a constitutional process—impeachment—into an ongoing criminal conspiracy to help an indicted felon evade responsibility for his crimes.

          Under Mike Johnson’s stunt Speakership, the members of the House GOP are acting as constitutional vandals defacing the charter of our nation with partisan graffiti, overwriting the signatures of the Framers—including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. “Mike Johnson was here, LOL!” will forever mar the face of the Constitution as the House GOP invokes impeachment in aid of insurrection.

          And as Speaker Johnson was whipping the vote on the impeachment inquiry, he announced that GOP staffers will delay releasing 44,000 hours of video footage of the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Why? Because GOP staffers want to “blur” the faces of insurrectionists to prevent members of the public from identifying those who assaulted the Capitol. See The Hill, GOP blurring faces in Jan. 6 security tapes, says Speaker Johnson.

          Johnson said,

We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.

          Johnson appears to be unclear on the central concept of criminal justice—holding criminals accountable by “charging them” with crimes, which is known as “justice,” not “retaliation.” In doing its best to defeat the identification of January 6 insurrectionists, the House GOP is confirming its status as an ongoing criminal conspiracy to frustrate the administration of justice.

          But even those disgraceful acts are rivaled by the GOP’s inability and unwillingness to pass legislation necessary to fund the government, protect national security, and provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel. Mike Johnson has said that immigration reform in the US is “the price” of passing an aid bill for Ukraine (per Punch Bowl News, behind a paywall). See also The Hill, House Democrats reject GOP’s immigration limits in Ukraine aid bill.

          Per The Hill,

The Democrats—including well-placed members of the Hispanic and Progressive caucuses—argue that America’s border policies have no bearing on U.S. efforts to help a democratic ally repel Russian forces, and any drastic changes to U.S. policy toward migrants would dissolve their support for the broader aid package.

          Meanwhile, Mike Johnson’s position is that the House has already passed an aid bill for Israel—the one that calls for billions in cuts from the IRS budget that would increase the federal budget deficit by $12 billion over the next ten years.

          In short, the House is busy serving as an “accessory after the fact” to help Trump and other insurrectionists to evade accountability for their crimes as they fail to perform their most basic constitutional function—passing a budget.

[MORE]

#John Cuneo #The New Yorker #TFG #Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #House Republicans #DOJ #election 2024

[fatehbaz]

The Unsettled Plain defies the conventional framings of the region’s [”Middle East”] history. The protagonists of this book are the people often left out or relegated to a minor role: pastoralists, peasants, workers, and migrants who lived in Ottoman countryside. Many books adopt national or imperial geographies, but I have used a space that destabilizes such geographies. Call it Cilicia, Çukurova, or the Adana region -- the book is about a coherent, interconnected place that is hidden on the map today.

---

During the nineteenth century, this corner of the Mediterranean at the border of Syria and Turkey contained diversity that would surprise Anglophone readers accustomed to images of the Middle East painted with a broad brush. [...] Speakers of Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, and Greek lived side by side there for centuries, not just in cosmopolitan cities but also in the vast hinterland. With large-scale migration during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Tatar, Circassian, and Chechen refugees from the Russian Empire, as well as Cretan Muslims and various people from the Balkans built new settlements in the region [...]. An extraordinary array of communities that made up the population of the late Ottoman Empire shared this one small place. 

Among rural inhabitants, there were many ways of life, ranging from long-distance, nomadic patterns of grazing sheep and goats to intensive, plantation-style cultivation of cotton for global export. And in a space only a little bigger than modern-day Lebanon, there was also intense environmental contrast. Foreigners used to remark that one could set out on foot from a lowland city like Adana, which might have felt just as hot as Egypt on a summer day, and in two or three days be in mountain spaces reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. That is in fact precisely how the local people lived, migrating between the highland and lowland micro-climates on a seasonal basis and spending the summer in those precious mountain spaces. So in all these ways, the world of The Unsettled Plain is more complex than what we get in Ottoman histories written from the vantage point of Istanbul or Cairo, or for that matter the histories of the modern Middle East written inside of nation-state containers. [...]

---

The central issue that runs throughout the book is malaria [...]. Malaria is associated with the tropics today, but it used to be very widespread not only in the former Ottoman Empire but also Europe and North America. I use malaria to show how the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century onward impacted rural people. Settlement policies and the commercialization of agriculture disrupted malaria avoidance strategies that were rooted in an intimate understanding of the local environment, resulting in catastrophic malaria epidemics for resettled or displaced people and the gradual intertwining of malaria with agricultural labor and increasingly uneven relations between landowners and workers. Far from being unique to the Ottoman experience, this story harkens to the experiences of many spaces throughout nineteenth-century empires.

---

Each chapter of the book circles back to the question of malaria through different interlocking themes, and those themes are [...] ecology, the state, capitalism, war, and science. Chapter 1 is focused on aspects of Cilicia’s local ecology and politics before the Tanzimat period, and Chapter 2 studies the impacts of state reform and settlement policy during the high Tanzimat period of the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 3 studies how a new form of capitalism centered on cotton export shaped this region during the last decades of the Ottoman period, and Chapter 4 studies how much of that new world was destroyed during the World War I period and the subsequent Franco-Turkish war. Chapter 5 traces continuities between the late Ottoman period and early Republican period in Turkey, focusing on the themes of science and technology and examining the role of medicine and public health in the remaking of the countryside. [...]

---

Between modern-day residents of Çukurova, those who have settled in Istanbul, Ankara, or other cities in Turkey, and those who have emigrated abroad to Germany or elsewhere, a sizeable percentage of people from modern Turkey either claim this region as home or have some personal connection to it. There is also a substantial portion of the Armenian diaspora in the United States, France, Lebanon, Armenia, and elsewhere who think of Cilicia as their ancestral homeland. 

---

Words of Chris Gratien. As interviewed by Jadaliyya. Regarding Gratien’s book The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (2022). This text and the interview were published at Jadaliyya online on 25 April 2022. [Bolded emphasis added by me.]

[nanowrimo]

The Importance of Filipino Stories: Celebrating Filipino American History Month

October is Filipino American History Month. With more than 4.2 million individuals of Filipino descent here in the U.S., we know there are at least 4.2 million stories to cherish and celebrate! Today’s story comes from Josie Gepulle, our fall 2022 Editorial intern and proud Filipino American. It wasn’t until I was in my second year of college that I got my first reading assignment on Filipino American stories.

At my university, I was taking a history course entitled “American Radicals and Reformers.” Halfway through the semester, I learned about Larry Itilong, a Filipino migrant laborer who went on to lead the five-year Delano Grape Strike in California and later co-founded the United Farm Workers of America.

I’m pretty sure my jaw actually dropped hearing about this. An actual Filipino American made his way into the history books, one who had a profound impact on the labor movement. 

That’s also when it really hit me: there was a lack of Filipino stories in my life.

I grew up in a small suburban Texas town. I was the first and only Filipino my community saw, so I don’t really blame anyone for their ignorance. It was frustrating, however, to receive several comments like, “Are you sure you’re Asian? You don’t look like it at all.” or “Where is the Philippines anyway?” I didn’t understand at that time because I’m proud of my heritage, but what does that mean to a world that doesn’t even know you exist? The most recognition I’ve gotten is from veterans recalling war buddies or travelers who visited Manila once.

I learned the history of the Philippines from my dad, not school. The Philippines, it seems, had no place in the story of America, despite being one of its former colonies. Even the mainstream media barely acknowledged our culture and our community. Any reference to the Philippines seemed to only refer to Manila and how the language was Tagalog. I couldn’t relate to that. My parents are from Bacolod, a city in central Philippines, where the community spoke Illongo. The narrative America wanted to tell about the Philippines, as limited as it was, was not one I could fit into.

It took me a long time to identify as a Pinoy writer. That same year at college when I learned about Larry Itliong, I attended a special event where I heard Jose Antonio Vargas, the famed journalist and immigration rights activist, and openly undocumented Filipino American, give a talk about his book, Dear America: Notes from an Undocumented Citizen. He, too, was a storyteller and writer, just like I wanted to be.

I finally realized I wasn’t alone. I didn’t need to be the author who put the Philippines in the history book. Several writers already did that for me. Carlos Bulosan wrote the famous America Is in the Heart, establishing the Filipino American perspective in literature. Then there are the writers of today, like Elaine Castillo with her book America Is Not the Heart, a clear callback to Bulosan. While Filipino Americans may have different interpretations of their identities, these stories are very much in dialogue with each other.

Each story, including mine, is only a small piece in a much larger puzzle. My own perspective that only represents a tiny fraction of Filipino history. The Philippines is made up of 7000+ islands and has 120+ spoken languages. We have our own history and mythology that existed long before the Americans came and long before the first colonizers, the Spaniards, arrived as well. While colonialism has tried time and time again to erase our stories, remembering our traditions and history is how they live on. We don’t want these stories to become forgotten simply because they’re left out of school curriculums. However, I do have to take a moment to be grateful for virtual spaces, especially those for writers. While my family is no longer the only Filipino family in my city, it was online where I met my very first Pinoy friends. Together, we traded experiences, laughing at the little tics that our families share. That, too, is an important part of the story. My friends and I aren’t famous, but aren’t those cherished moments together part of our experience as well?

And well, NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to explore your own stories, isn’t it? I remember being drawn to the challenge a long time ago, when I was a tiny middle schooler who felt so lonely in the giant world. NaNo made me believe that my story truly mattered, not just to everyone in the Philippines and America, but to me, the person who all my writing is eventually for. There’s no way I, or anyone for that matter, can accurately describe the story of every single Filipino, let alone Filipino American, out there. But you can talk about your story. Personally, I want to write characters who speak Ilonggo or grew up the only Filipino in their class. Maybe your characters will speak Cebuano or Ilocano. No matter what, Pinoys will get to be main characters! They’ll have grand adventures or share quiet moments with their loved ones. We’ll share our culture, our heritage with the world.

Together, our story will be told. Dungan ta sulat!

Josie Gepulle is a longtime NaNoWriMo fan, spending her teenage years lurking on the YWP forums and procrastinating her novel writing. She loves hearing the unique stories that come from writers all over the world and believes every voice is worth listening to. She enjoys the many different forms storytelling comes in, doing everything from analyzing TV shows to drawing her favorite characters. She can be found scribbling notes or doodling with an array of pens by her side. If you’d like to learn more about Filipino American History Month, here are some more sites to explore.

10 Ways to Celebrate Filipino American History Month

National Today

Filipino American National Historical Society

FAHM Resources and Creators to learn from (IG Post)

#nanowrimo #writing #amwriting #filipino american history month #inspiration #by nano intern #josie gepulle #motivation