Historia Mexicana - ala Facebook.

Mexican History / Historia Mexicana is now on Facebook. Richard Grabman of Editorial Mazatlan and Jason Dormady (yo) have gotten together to create a Facebook page to post information on history in Mexico. You can find it here. Please sign up or come participate.

In the last years of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, Bishop Banegas y Galvan of Querétaro made the following observation, inteded to chasten the wealthy in Mexico: “You rich men, there is no other way open: either you must open your hearts to charity and reduce the hours of work and increase wages, or you are accumulating hatred and resentment . . . and your riches and yourselves will be buried.” It isn't like we're talking about a flood of Liberation Theology in Mexico in 1900 - even the very conservative Catholic church recognized a disaster coming down the pike when they saw it.

The recent disaster in the Pena Nieto campaign for the presidency of Mexico has given Mexicans another taste of Porfirian-style disdain (let's face it, it is pura PRI-ista, but a historian has to eat, no?). In response the mocking that fluff-boy PN got for his inability to talk about books that have shaped his life, PN's daughter re-tweeted a comment saying "hello to all the idiots in the proletariate that only know how to crticize those they envy." No shocker that a PRI-bot has created a nasty well of anti-worker / anti-peasantry / anti-most-people-in-Mexico sentinment in his home. This is a dangerous time for the PRI to be engaged in such hijinks. With violence in Mexico beyond intolerable levels making the PAN non-viable in 2012, there could be a political response to dig AMLO's credibility out of the ground and "bury" the men of wealth ... and their petty daughters.

Lest the US get smug, spend five minutes on Faux News or looking at the pictures of the Wells Fargo "Homeless" themed party of foreclosure and PN's daughter looks down-right charitable.

Freedom University - F.U.[,] Georgia.

Lorgia Garcia Pena, Pamela Voekel, Bethany Moreton, and Betina Kaplan are four professors at the University of Georgia in Athens that have decided to take on the the not-so-peachy state and the UGA Board of Regents' decision to ban undocumented students from the state's top three campuses. Freedom University is a clandestine (at least the classroom is Bat-Cave secret to protect the alumnos) school for undocumented students where the four profesoras teach on Sundays at no cost to the students and for no benefit to themselves. And I will give my (FWIW) plug for the group: Voekel was my undergraduate advisor and Moreton was a teaching assistant (both at the University of Montana) that I had the benefit of learning from. Voekel is a top flight writer and a PhD out of UT Austin. Moreton is a Yale PhD and the author of a fantastic book on Wal-Mart. Both of them are incredible thinkers and great teachers, and the students at Freedom U. are getting one heck of an education - for free.

Huffington Post did a bit on Freedom University a few months back, and now CNN has run a piece in English and Spanish on the group. CNN does a great job of crunching the numbers and showing that even though the undocumented might be tax payers AND still paying 3X the price to attend a Georgia school, the regents have banned the "flood" (27 students in all) of undocumented students to make sure that every seat in the class room goes to a Georgia citizen. Seriuosly? Watch the CNN interview and see what kind of students Georgia is excluding.

If you feel like donating to the cause (either books or money), visit the group's web site see here. Freedom University.

To see the CNN bits, visit here for Spanish. Visit here for English. To read the HuffPost piece, see here.

And, hey, go F.U. [,] Georgia.

The Evergreen(card) State

Washington's famously conservative East Side (the area east of the Cascades) is reaping the fruit of campaigns to remove undocumented workers from the state. Recent ICE raids have had a chilling effect on the number of workers in the state for apple picking, and at the end of October signs abounded from Wenatchee to Yakima begging for workers - at $10 an hour. When few were forthcoming, pickers called on prison labor - which cost pickers $22 per hour (after the cost of security, etc.). Sow the wind... .

Force, Manda Bala, and Chile

Aside from the upheaval of moving and changing jobs, I've also been distracted from blogging by some long exchanges on Face Book with "friends" in that medium. In one recent exchange a computer programmer from Iowa informed me that all taxation is forced, but that force is justified for security, like police, jails, and the army, but not for "forced" charity. Enter the protests in Chile.

As students in Chile are agitating for the continued funding of education, that nation is getting a taste of what you get when you don't provide education for your population: chaos in the streets. Right now, Chile is "lucky" to experience that in the form of protests, but if the "reforms" to education in Chile take place that transfer some universities to the private sector and make an education beyond the reach of Chile's poorest, the unrest in the streets will be crime, not protest. Enter Manda Bala.

The 2007 documentary from Jason Kohn portrays the kidnapping industry of Sao Paulo laid on top of the corruption of one of Brazil's most powerful politicians - Jader Barbalho. In this case, Barbalho's preying on the poor by stealing funding for programs has fueled the poverty that drives the poor to prey on the wealthy. The wealthy, in turn, are willing to spend millions on security to keep themselves safe, but not the programs and innovations in society that would keep the kidnappers from preying on the they, the wealthy. What a cycle of life. Enter the United States and that computer programmer from Iowa.

There is yet another reason the United States needs to look south to their neighbors: has the investment in so-called "justified" force changed Brazil? Are the changes laid out by Pinera in Chile going to provide a long-term benefit for the nation? As we slowly privatize our education system in the United States - for that is what we are doing as we cut off funding and force students into usurious deals with the banks - are we going to see more economic freedom, or are we simply going to see the jails swell? Considering how U.S. minorities have been denied access to education and experience disproportionate jailing, I think we do have something to fear - in both the short and long term.

Collective Memory

Historians are guardians of our collective memory - something like keepers of the flame of identity. Why, then, are academic historians so frowned on by society in general? I suppose that our contrarian projects (and nature, at times) makes it look less like we are keeping flames and more like we are peeing on the fire.

(Un)employed In Mexico

It looks like the unemployment rate in Mexico has fallen to just under 5%. Back in July when the numbers started to show the number of Mexicans returning to Mexico was hitting agriculture and construction, the U.S. news media began to take notice. Now the numbers look like they've dipped below 5% - something that could have consequences for both the U.S. and Mexico. Not only might the U.S. begin to see an even sharper rise in food prices due to weather patterns, but that problem might be made worse by labor costs as the cheap labor of undocumented pickers is hard to replace.

For Mexico, it might mean a slow-down in productivity if there aren't enough workers to contribute. It might also mean a hike in prices: Businesses like to see unemployment at around 5% to help keep labor costs down. Mexico has already wrestled with higher food prices over the last few years, can it handle another hike? On the up side (well, maybe), this from the Mexican consul in sacramento:

"It's now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico," Sacramento's Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. "We have become a middle-class country." (see more here)

On a down note, sales of port-a-border will fall: