REINVENTING SOLIDARITY
Over its 28-year history, NACLA has been absorbed by the question of how progressive activists in North America can act in solidarity with their counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean....
...Why are U.S.-Latin American relations structured the way they are...
...Just as a variety of "superhighways" are making North-South interaction more practicable, it is now absolutely essential...
...In other cases, groups have followed vanguards, or dominated weaker groups thought less able to chart their own course...
...In this report, we decided to step back and examine the question of solidarity itself...
...From its inception, NACLA has been pursuing the kinds of investigative questions useful to solidarity activists: What kinds of relations and institutions shape the contours of exploitation and oppression in the Americas...
...A decade ago, Central America solidarity activists only had to make contact with the revolutionary fronts...
...In the most genuine kinds of solidarity, groups have respected one another's differences and autonomy...
...As Margaret Keck elucidates, solidarity-whether among trade unionists in a common industry, or sanctuary activists in the U.S...
...While all human beings are deserving of protection and support, solidarity is neither charity nor the formal protection of rights...
...Because maquiladora plants can be shut down and relocated at the first hint of union organizing, and because more and more people work in the informal economy, Northern labor activists have discovered that they must work with people not just within factory walls but also in the larger community...
...But the organized left in Latin America is in disarray, as many parties and movements have split into factions or shifted to the right...
...But in today's age of instantly mobile capital and the global division of labor, North-South asym- metries have been offset by important convergences...
...International solidarity has become a necessary extension of national solidarity...
...Nor is it a given that factory workers will always line up with factory workers, environmentalists with environmentalists, and so on...
...In the case of pan-American solidarity, activists must also contend with North-South asymmetries...
...International solidarity has always had to contend with difficulties of a logistical nature-how to make common cause with people who speak a different language, who are physically far away, and who might not share the same cultural references or values...
...Solidarity is constantly reinventing itself...
...Not that it is always easy to identify allies...
...This report hopes to move the process forward...
...Solidarity across national borders is probably as old as those borders...
...Solidarity-the fellowship arising from shared struggle-is as old as the human community...
...Never has it been so clear that urban and rural workers, the marginal poor, microentrepreneurs, and even many professionals-whether in California or Peru-are being pummelled by the very same economic forces...
...Likewise, Northern environmental activists have forged links with poor peoples' movements such as rubber tappers, indigenous people and communities displaced by damsmovements more likely to raise political than strictly environmental demands...
...Others have chastised Northern activists for diverting atten- tion from the problems of oppression and injustice within their own societies...
...As this Report illustrates, the actual on-the-ground alliances have become more complicated...
...Southwest sheltering Central American refugees-involves a sense of common struggle and, to some degree, common risk...
...At this moment when the globalization of capital has given North-South solidarity such special urgency, we thought it was time to critically examine the nature and history of progressive solidarity, and to look toward its future...
...It is based on the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all...
...Some have claimed soli- darity between activists in the United States and Latin America is solidarity in name only, disguis- ing an inherently unequal relationship...
...How can we intervene to change those structures and relations...
...People of similar backgrounds, religions or political ideals-or simply in similar circumstances-have long made common cause with one another across borders...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 5
