Mexico | Embroidering for Peace and Citizen Education

This piece came to me in Facebook via the Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains) web page. Written by a Professor of Education, it is a beautiful description of the goals and motivations associated with the citizen movement Bordando por la Paz (Embroidering for Peace) now underway in Mexico and around the world. The translation is mine.

Embroidering for Peace: One Victim-One Handkerchief
Among the cities are Pátzcuaro and Zirahuén, Michoacán;
along with many U.S. and International Cities
(Click to enlarge)

"Robert Antelme's axiom:
'Do not strip anyone of their humanity'
is an ethical first principle..."

(Edgar Morin, 2006:115)

Educación personalizante: Martín López Calva*, originally published in e-consulta
Translated by Jane K. Brundage

Daniela is eleven years old and on Sundays, she has been Embroidering for Peace. She and other boys and girls often accompany their mom or dad to this activity that is as simple as it is profound. It is simply about going to the Plaza of Democracy in central Puebla between noon and 3:00 p.m., to sit together with other young people and adults from different parts of the city—people with different occupations, ideologies and beliefs—to embroider white handkerchiefs with the names and stories of the thousands of people who have died in recent years in the so-called "war on drugs" and in other events related to criminal acts, whether a product or not, of organized crime.

"A man died peppered with bullets in front of his house
after receiving warnings from an armed group to abandon the city.
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, August 31"

Sometimes Daniela goes to the Plaza instead of watching television or going to the mall. Perhaps without realizing it, she is learning more about citizenship than she might throughout an entire school year of civics and ethics classes.

It is educational because "Embroidering for Peace" (https://www.facebook.com/BordadosPazPuebla) is an act of peaceful and organized protest that silently cries "Enough Is Enough!" to the spiral of violence that the country is experiencing. It is an educational activity not only for those involved in it but for the people who accompany those who embroider, and even for people just passing through the Plaza who stop to see. For all these people, we who embroider are witnesses of this symbolic act that aims to make visible what until now has been hidden from view.

Each white handkerchief embroidered with red thread gives voice to the name of a Mexican who has been twice removed from humanity: first because he was deprived of his life in a violent, unjust, and absurd way; and, secondly, because in impunity and oblivion, his murder has remained anonymous.

On each embroidered cloth an invisible story becomes visible. Each story acquires names and faces of those who before this symbolic act were just a number, a figure in the statistics of impunity, in a country where everything happens but everyone, beginning with the authorities, pretends that nothing is happening.

Some of the people who embroider describe it clearly:

"Embroidering one of these stories sensitizes me and makes me more aware of how terrible the situation is that we are experiencing; it makes me realize that each of the sixty-thousand dead was a person with a name, a history, a family and aspirations."

Among those who have been sitting to stitch in a timely and permanent way are relatives who tell part of their own history: siblings who lost a brother because he refused to pay "dues" back in a northern state, so the family had to flee, cutting their roots to come live here in Puebla; uncles who ask that the history of a niece murdered one night in the street be embroidered.

And so Sunday after Sunday a community of Embroiderers for Peace is being built of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to provide symbols that make visible what we all hide. A solidarity is being created that extends via the social networks across the miles, holding together other groups of the same movement in distant cities: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/87029.html.

The goal is to embroider all the possible stories that make up this sea of ​​stories cut short by death in a culture increasingly used to exclude "the others", for whatever reason; a culture that suppresses the humanity of "the others", either by killing them or by tolerating and accustoming themselves to death, to the "death toll" that is a segment of any television news program.

The goal is to upholster the Zócalo [Mexico City's main plaza] with white handkerchiefs embroidered with the names of all the victims, to shout with a symbol of peace. It is the rebellion of those who do not believe in violence and who do not want violence as the backdrop of our times, of those who do not want our children to inherit a country at war but, instead, want for them a harmonious and fair country where everyone fits in, and which does not suppress anyone's humanity.

Like Daniela, many children should train themselves to be citizens beyond the school walls. It would be enough for all of us—those of us who sent them to school to be "trained in values"—to waken from the lethargy in which this system has us...that defines us as consumers and denies us citizen status. Instead, we might come to practice citizenship with passion and responsibility. Spanish original

*Martín López Calva holds the Ph.D. in Education; his areas of focus are Human Philosophy and Education, Professional Ethics and "Educational Subjects and Processes."

Still Curious?

I just finished translating this interview with Colombian General Óscar Naranjo, who will be Peña Nieto's outside counsel for security issues. I was skeptical, but Naranjo's enthusiastic embrace of an enlightened concept of law enforcement [in essence, neighborhood policing] working shoulder with a responsible citizenry as the key ingredients for blocking organized crime—well, it makes this article a natural follow-on to citizenship themes enunciated by López Calva in Bordando por la Paz.

Here's the link: Mexico and Colombia General Óscar Naranjo, Peña Nieto's Drug War Adviser.