This is part one of a two-part blog series that tells the story of the founding of La Mujer Obrera and the work it’s engaged in on the ground in the Chamizal community.
There’s a lot of history here in our barrio Chamizal, a mostly immigrant, Spanish-speaking community located along the Rio Grande River in El Paso, Texas. For 100 years, being from the Chamizal meant that you were ‘ni de aquí, ni de allá – not from here, not from there. The Chamizal is known as a place in between worlds, a place of dispute and rebellion, but more importantly, a community where our culture has deep roots.
The past is still present in the Chamizal. The historical stains left by man-made borders, colonization, redlining, segregation, and exploitation continue to saturate our community. Often, when trying to explain the problems that exist here in our neighborhood, we are dismissed, unheard, and not understood. Here, we seem to exist and not exist all at once. We exist within an in-between space; a space ‘frozen in time’ before civil rights or environmental protections. A strange limbo, yet intentional. ‘Death by a thousand cuts’ has been said to describe the long history of waivers, exceptions, and loopholes that exclude our community from basic rights and protections that most people take for granted. The divide is not only geographical, but also political.
‘Death by a thousand cuts’ has been said to describe the long history of waivers, exceptions, and loopholes that exclude our community from basic rights and protections that most people take for granted.
In 1963, when the U.S. and Mexico declared the official international boundary between the two countries, the river was dammed in concrete and our community was divided. At that time, during the planning process, residents were discriminated against and left out of negotiations. Families shuffled and scrambled into ‘new territory’ as boundary lines were drawn. Many unjustly lost their homes and their community.
Residents of the Chamizal demanded inclusion and reparations. The concessions they fought for and won included: the establishment of a new school, Bowie High School; the establishment of Chamizal National Park to preserve the natural integrity of the environment; and a toll-free international port of entry for residents to cross freely between the two nations that divided the Chamizal community, The Bridge of the Americas, commonly known as El Puente Libre (“the free bridge”). The concessions made did not make up for all that was lost – yet residents hoped that these spaces would protect the Chamizal community from demolition and displacement.
Today, all our barrio schools – once known as the Mexican Schools – continue as living relics of and monuments to racism. Our children are trained instead of taught in out-dated, under-resourced schools, prepped for cheap labor and stripped of their language, culture, and identity. The schools are also surrounded by serious sources of pollution. Bowie High School sits between a massive bus hub, an international port of entry overloaded with semi-trucks. Our neighborhood is treated as a dumping ground for international industrial waste, our schools and housing are surrounded by piles of flammable toxic dangers, and we live under a cloud of pollutants that enter our lungs, hearts, brains, and blood on a daily basis. The Chamizal National Park, which students once walked through on their way to school, is now fenced and guarded, access limited, often denied. El Puente Libre, the only toll-free bridge along the U.S. – Mexico border intended for the people, is overloaded with polluting semi-trucks transporting products and industrial waste from the NAFTA maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
It was against the backdrop of these struggles in the Chamizal community that La Mujer Obrera was born. Founded in 1981 by women garment workers and Chicana activists, La Mujer Obrera has become a recognized leader in the struggle against an ‘undeclared war’ on marginalized women of Mexican heritage. Its organizing strategies are based on basic human rights: employment, housing, education, nutrition, health, peace, and political liberty.
Our efforts are grounded in the belief that we are part of nature and part of a lineage of earth-based cultural practices and wisdoms that are key to restoring balance and health not only to our community, but to the soil, plants, insects, and animals with whom we share the Earth. This is why our resistance work is multifaceted and interconnected: we resist by organizing against injustice and building alternative systems that nourish our community. We resist a system that dehumanizes us and continuously work toward establishing an alternative model, along the way learning to heal our relationship with each other and with the land.
Stay tuned…part two in this blog series will feature some of La Mujer Obrera’s recent work and successes. Visit www.mujerobrera.org to learn more.
About the Author
La Mujer Obrera
Founded in 1981 by garment workers and Chicana activists, La Mujer Obrera is a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating historical and environmental racism and implementing alternative solutions. La Mujer Obrera has long called attention to the ‘sacrifice zones’ along the U.S. – Mexico border where the long-overdue impacts of injustice have never been addressed.
