The Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcalá

This is a major step towards doing away with the pro-corporate practices that led to low wages, inadequate social services, and privatization. The current charter dates back to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet which began on September 11, 1973. This was a key demand of protestors who took to the streets last year in the largest civil unrest in decades. Arce served as economy minister for twelve years under Morales as poverty was sharply reduced and wealth and land more equitably redistributed.Ī week later, on October 25 th, the people of Chile voted overwhelmingly by 78.2% to draft a new constitution. This was Bolivia’s first elections since Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, was removed in a U.S. On October 18 th, el Movimento al Socialismo (MAS)/Movement Toward Socialism party won a decisive victory electing Luis Arce as its president. The people of Bolivia and Chile have recently given us reason to hope and are providing us lessons for how we might strategize to achieve that better, decolonized world. Tracing the problems to its source allows us to conceive structural, rather than superficial, solutions.” She believes the pervasive problem of white supremacy can only be dealt with in combination with a movement of decolonization. We all have visions of a better world but in Settler Colonialism, Race and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, Professor Saito, who is also a local organizer, urges us to “understand what’s wrong with where we are, and how it got to be wrong. Regardless of who wins the election on November 3 rd, oppressed peoples will still have many struggles to wage against this exploitative and repressive system. With white supremacy as a guiding philosophy, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the labor of enslaved Africans, and the annexation of Mexican territory are at its foundation. Like Canada, Australia, Israel, and South Africa, the United States was formed as a settler colony.

A new book I’ve recently read, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law by Georgia State University Law Professor Natsu Saito talks about how “racism can be meaningfully eliminated only in conjunction with decolonization.” I remembered Trump talking about the taking down of monuments and saying, “How far back are we going to go?”

I’ve really gone deeper in recent months on the question of settler colonialism. Unfortunately, this year the cemeteries will have limited access to Día de Los Muertos due to the corona-19 pandemic, I believe this will be the first time in Mexico’s modern history where this will be the case… ~.

The Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcalá