By Patrick I grew up and currently live in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. My grandfather’s family migrated from Germany over a hundred and fifty years ago and entered the local apple industry, whose orchards still bear fruit today despite encroaching development from the Washington, D.C. metro area. These seasonal jobs later attracted poor white immigrants from West Virginia, and as the effects of neoliberal economic policy took hold in Latin America, from Haiti, Mexico and Central America as well. I’ve been investigating the immigration history of my family over the last few years, in spurts of conversation with older relatives and periodic trips to the forgotten shelves of the local library’s historic documents. I don’t know the specifics of how it happened, but as my family threw off the remnants of their German language, culture and heritage to embrace American whiteness, they also ascended to positions of power and influence in the Valley. Three generations of men starting with my great-great-grandfather were professors at the local university, and each played a prominent role on their city council. We have apples in common, but beyond that, differences between my family and more recent immigrants pronounce themselves dramatically. I know that my comfort and condition here is largely dependent on the fact that my ancestors didn’t have to face repressive legislation, racist policing, or wages kept low by them both. Immigration, beyond simply the fact of its occurrence, and towards the whys and hows at its root, has been a force in the life of the place, the idea I call my home. Political and business leaders in the U.S. took advantage of the shock of 9/11 to create policy that pushes more money into the hands of private corporations paid to track and detain immigrants, and scare people into taking the lowest paying jobs around. This coercion affects us all as our expectations lower, and the richest among us climb and climb, putting profit before all of our lives. Before deciding to spend a few months in Mexico, friends and coworkers of mine told me about the connections they feel to their communities in places like Oaxaca or Guanajuato. They often reminded me that if social movements were to succeed in bringing a just economy, empowering education, and accessible, appropriate health care system to Mexico while actively acknowledging the autonomy of indigenous communities, not nearly as many individuals and families would feel it necessary to travel thousands of miles to a country where a powerful elite defines its nationhood through the exclusion of people like them. So when Oaxacan society revolted in 2006 against government repression designed in part to shock the population into the acceptance of development projects benefiting multinational corporations, and created new horizontal forms for running their capital city for six months, I took the opportunity to learn from a place that has become part of my daily reality, and support a movement that is simultaneously rooted in Oaxacan history and identity and branching out to have implications in how we move forward in creating honest revolution in the United States. Instead of trying to find these implications in the shade of my own experiences over a short four months in Oaxaca, I’d like to highlight the notes from a dialogue with Oaxacan activists facilitated by the organization, Colectivos de Apoyo, Solidarid y Acción (CASA), I volunteered with while in Mexico.

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