What Christians can learn from wannabe revolutionaries
Over the course of a few visits to Changing Hands (a fantastic independent bookstore in the Phoenix area), I’ve picked up a handful of books, and as it happens, two of them happen to be separate first-person stories of people who moved to Latin America and joined rebel movements. Or tried to, anyway.
The first book was Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & The Lessons of International Solidarity (AK Press) by an Irish writer named Ramor Ryan, set in Chiapas, southern Mexico. The second was Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the Sandinistas (St. Martin’s Griffin) by Deb Olin Unferth, which takes place primarily in Nicaragua, with experiences elsewhere in Central America as well.
Both set out for their destinations in Latin America with youthful idealism and romanticized views of poverty and of the revolutions in their respective countries. Both come away disillusioned. While I doubt that many readers of this blog are contemplating joining armed rebel movements, I think there are lessons for all of us in these two true tales.
In Zapatista Spring, Ramor Ryan and his friends go to Chiapas “in solidarity” with the Zapatistas, to support the revolution by helping them with a water project that will enable them to survive more or less off the grid. But their sense of solidarity is dashed and their ideals are thrown into question when they discover the peasants are actually fairly conservative, very patriarchal, persistently religious, and for the most part uninformed about the revolution. While the outsiders romanticize life among the poor in Chiapas, thinking of the purity of their cause, the people there want to know how much plane tickets cost, how much revolutionary chic clothing costs, and whether they could find work in the US or Europe where the outsiders are from. And while the gravitas of Subcommandante Marcos’s poetic wit in his written communiques is what drew people to Chiapas from all over the world, the people in this town haven’t read them; those things are irrelevant to their daily lives.
The outsiders' idealism and the pragmatism of the poor clash at every turn. Ryan and his friends later learn that the people in the village had gone on to defect from the Zapatistas, accepting the government party’s offer of support. It had been, after all, about pragmatism all along; the outsiders turned out to be the fools.
Unferth’s Revolution might lack some of the serious depth of Zapatista Spring, but in the end her experience is very much the same. She sets out with her college boyfriend to join the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, only to find that they are unwanted.
In effect, they get fired from the revolution. So they bounce around revolutionary Central America on what turns out to be a long and pointless (but for us, very funny) journey. Finally, after leading the reader through a seemingly endless series of wince-inducing illnesses and other bizarre predicaments, Unferth’s sole desire upon arriving again on American soil is, of course, McDonald’s.
Many of the people I know who have spent time among the poor in Latin America have done so as part of church mission trips, not as part of rebel armies. But the lessons from the stories in these books raise important questions for all of us.
Here are some questions that come to mind...
1. Why do we want to be among the poor in the first place? Is it because of a romanticized view of the poor or their poverty? Is it out of a sense of pity? A sense of duty to our cause? Do we do it with a sense of “solidarity”? Do we do it because we want an adventure? Do we go so we’ll have good stories to tell our friends? Do we know why we want to do it?
2. Are we welcome among the poor? Whose idea was it for us to be there? Were we invited? Did we invite ourselves?
3. When we arrive, what’s our posture? Do we go assuming we know what’s best for them, or are we ready to listen, to be patient, to learn? Do we go with unbending ideas, or are we willing to allow our ideas to be shaped by the people we encounter who have stories of their own and logical reasons for living the way they do?
4. Is our help actually helpful? Is it really their number one priority for us to paint their church building for the fifteenth time?
5. Once we return, how do we debrief? Do we focus on how we feel, on how good our pictures on Facebook are, and on how “blessed” we were? Do we reflect on what the lavish hospitality of our hosts cost them? Do we consider what might have been gained and lost by the community because of our visit?
Don’t get me wrong: there are good reasons for going to spend time among the poor and there are good ways of doing so. It's possible to do it well, thank God. But it’s also possible to have bad reasons and bad ways of going. We may never be 100% sure of our motives, and we may never be truly able to see our visit through the eyes of our hosts, but it seems we ought to try.
It seems we ought to do better than wannabe revolutionaries.
[Image credit: Front Group Design]
Four years in the life of NPR’s Latin America correspondent
There are a handful of podcasts I listen to, though one of my very favorites isn’t even a podcast per se. Rather, NPR allows you to subscribe to Latin America news stories -- three to five minutes each, more or less -- and then listen to them without interruption. Because I don’t listen to them every day or even every week, they tend to add up, so sometimes while cleaning up the kitchen or doing something else around the apartment I’ll just listen to a string of them. Last year in Pennsylvania, when Katie and I lived 45 minutes apart, I’d often listen to these snippets on the drive back and forth between Reading and Lancaster.
And invariably I’d wonder what the life of an NPR Latin America correspondent must be like.
Then I came across Gerry Hadden’s Never The Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti (Harper), and I got my answer. Though he’s since moved to Europe and has switched over to PRI, Hadden was based in Mexico City from 2000 to 2004, covering stories for NPR in Mexico, Haiti and Central America.
First off, Hadden’s a great writer, so even if you’re not up on all the ins and outs of Latin American politics, economics and social issues, it’s lively and fast-paced and reads like a novel. Except, of course, unlike a novel it’s true. Well, most of it is anyway.
The “love” and “ghosts” in the subtitle refer to his personal life during that chapter of his life. There’s a love story woven throughout, and the house where Hadden lives -- which doubles as NPR’s Mexico City bureau -- is also apparently haunted by ghosts. These storylines add personal, humorous and at times downright odd aspects to the book, but that’s part of what keeps it so interesting and enjoyable.
The story begins when Hadden, who had been all set to go off and become a Buddhist monk, received a call from NPR and accepted this dream job. He arrived in Latin America the year before 9/11, and the story of how that fateful September day changed the course of events south of the border is fascinating in its own right, as it’s a story that has too seldom been told.
From covering Haiti’s tumultuous presidential elections, to interviewing some of the few coffee farmers who remain in El Salvador, to following others north, into Guatemala, through Mexico and on up across the Rio Grande, we learn that the life of an NPR correspondent is at times precarious, and certainly not nearly as glamorous as one might think while listening to the radio in the kitchen or on the freeway. But for Hadden, for a time at least, it was a dream job. And with this book, we’re given some great stories, as well as some difficult, frustrating, saddening ones. And, of course, we have the ghosts.
[Photo credit: Allianz.com]
Repaso: Easterly on institutions; Springsteen’s latest; Christianity in the Americas; Undocumented.tv interview; famous last words; FLW’s unbuilt projects; Half the Sky film
1. Easterly on the roots of hardship
Bill Easterly, economics professor at NYU, has a review of a new book on development economics in the Wall Street Journal, emphasizing the critical role healthy and inclusive institutions play in overcoming poverty. In what he says here (and particularly the part where I’ve added italics), I see this as a huge challenge for Latin America:
The arrival of "Why Nations Fail" is thus a hugely welcome event, since economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson take on the big questions and in doing so present a substantial alternative to the dominant thinking about global poverty. For Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson, it is institutions that determine the fate of nations. Success comes, the authors say, when political and economic institutions are "inclusive" and pluralistic, creating incentives for everyone to invest in the future. Nations fail when institutions are "extractive," protecting the political and economic power of only a small elite that takes income from everyone else.
2. Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball”
Last weekend my buddy Matty (who’s also a remarkable singer-songwriter and music guru in general) let me know I ought to check out The Boss’s new record, Wrecking Ball. “I got a sneaky feeling you’d really like it,” he texted. I got it and he’s right: it’s great. Here’s what Roger Nelson at ThinkChristian.net had to say about it:
Originally written as acoustic folk tunes, Springsteen took this collection of songs to producer Ron Aniello, who pushed them into new sonic territory. Using samples, drum loops, trumpets, choirs and the guitar solos of Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Wrecking Ball has a glossy and varied musical texture. Lyrically, it stands in a direct line with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, but this collection is an eclectic-electric mash-up of gospel, blues, Irish stomps, protest songs, big-stadium rock anthems and even a little rap. What was conceived in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger is transformed into a post-modern pastiche.
3. Christianity in the Americas
In December, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life published the latest data on the size and distribution of the Christian population in the Americas. There’s a cool interactive map and a couple of charts, in case you’re a nerd like me when it comes to these kinds of things.
4. Mexico’s evangelical shift
Speaking of Christianity in the Americas, PRI’s The World took a look at the changing religious demographics of Mexico, with a visit to the town of Zongozotla in the central highlands:
It was once unheard of in Mexico to consider not being Catholic. But here in Zongozotla, where different faiths are gaining ground, spiritual shifts are possible—and underway. And while some members of the Catholic Church stress that change is needed to compete with the evangelical presence, it’s unclear whether Catholicism’s centuries-old traditions and hierarchies will be flexible to reverse its losses here.
5. Evangelicals on the rise in Latin America
How about one more while we’re at it? This is from Al Jazeera English, ahead of the Pope’s visit to Mexico and Cuba. This piece by Chris Arsenault provides some helpful background on the history of religion in the region, including Pope John Paul II’s visit, the liberation theology movement during the Cold War years, and recently, the rise of evangelical churches throughout Latin America.
6. Interview with undocumented student
In case you missed it last week, here is part one and part two of my interview for Undocumented.tv with Ricardo, an undocumented college student here in Phoenix.
7. Last words in Texas
Texas, as well all know, sends a lot of people to death row. Of the 1289 people who have been executed in the United States since 1976, over a third of them -- 481 -- have been in Texas. Another 317 are on death row in that state. Whatever you think of the merits of capital punishment, GOOD has an infographic with the most common last words said by death row inmates.
8. Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt projects
Katie and I recently got to see the FLW exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum. It was really interesting, and while it’s cool that he lived in this area and some of his projects were built here, I really don’t know why I never visited Fallingwater when I lived in Pennsylvania. At any rate, we were both curious about the fact that so many of the renderings on display were for unbuilt projects. Lo and behold, the polis blog (a Repaso favorite, as you may have noticed) has a post taking a look at three of Wright’s unbuilt projects.
9. Half the Sky: The Movie
I’m looking forward to watching the Half the Sky documentary when it airs on PBS this October. I read the book a couple of years ago, and had this to say about it. Here’s the trailer for the film, laden with celebrities.
Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!
[Photo credit: thepolisblog.org]
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