http://www.monthlyreview.org/080531hylton.php
by Forrest Hylton
May 2008
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra
Years (Boston: South End Press, 2005), 304 pages, paperback, $18.00.
Groundings
Few U.S. revolutionaries of her generation have "lived to tell the
tale" like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, to borrow the title of Gabriel
García Márquez's memoirs. Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra
Years is the last volume of a trilogy including Red Dirt: Growing up
Okie (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir
of the War Years (City Lights, 2001). Although influenced by oral
traditions in his "native" Colombian Caribbean, García Márquez has
little to say about his own political commitments, or Colombian
politics more generally.1 In contrast, influenced by traditions of
storytelling native to rural Oklahoma and Native American communities
throughout the U.S. West, Dunbar-Ortiz's latest memoir puts flesh on
the bones of the slogan "the personal is political." The phrase, she
notes, was coined within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee and carried into the women's liberation and antiwar movements.
Unlike most historians, Dunbar-Ortiz has been a leading participant
in the movements of her time, which makes memoir rather than
professional historiography a logical choice of genre. Dunbar-Ortiz
explains her preference:
I can no longer bear to writeor to readtexts in which the author is
present only behind a maze of screens, pretending objectivity.
History is never the "objective" account found in academic
writing....I write this memoir recalling this form's influence on
me....I write that the younger generation may have access to an
earlier generation's political experience and theory. I write this
book to give a human face to the consequences of the Contra war in
the destruction of the Sandinista revolution, resulting in a setback
for a better future for the indigenous peoples of the world, and for
all peoples struggling for self-determination and a better life. (13)
Dunbar-Ortiz's method of knowing the world, or more exactly, knowing
liberation struggles around the world, is what Walter Rodney
described as "grounding."2 To "ground," one goes where oppressed
people are struggling to liberate themselves from imperialism, or
meets with their representatives in metropolitan settings, and learns
with them in an open-ended dialogue about what is to be done.
Humility, along with a clear understanding of what scholar-activists
can and cannot contribute to peoples' struggles, is what makes this
dialogue possible. Without it, intellectuals end up talking at people
or among themselves.
Memoir and testimonio are closely associated with the development of
feminist consciousness, subjectivity, and agency, especially in Latin
America; they can be thought of as radical extensions of the idea of
"groundings."3 Like previous volumes in the trilogy, Blood on the
Border highlights the enormous contribution feminism has made to
radical theory and practice, especially through its emphasis on
consciousness and subjectivityon emotions as well as ideas and
ideology; on domestic and sexual violence as well as the violence of
imperialist wars and settler-colonial conquests. This helps
Dunbar-Ortiz discuss painful personal issues that do not often find
their way into the writings and conversations of U.S. radicals, in a
way that is moving yet politically instructive.4 The links between
feminist, African, and indigenous liberation are made concrete
through Dunbar-Ortiz's own story. Blood on the Border is not a work
of theory or method, offering instead a radical, underground history
of the "imperialism of our time."5 Through memoir, Dunbar-Ortiz is
able to avoid the discursive "violence of abstraction," to use
novelist Barry Unsworth's phrase; the artificial distancing
characteristic of most history and social-science writing.6
Provisional Endings
Blood on the Border picks up where Dunbar-Ortiz left us at the end of
Outlaw Woman. Following her arrest, torture, and trial, Dunbar-Ortiz
left the armed underground cell she founded in New Orleans, and
re-located to Lake Tahoe with the help of an extraordinarily generous
sister-in-law. "I was thirty-five in 1973," Dunbar-Ortiz remembers,
"and I was a wreck. I spent my nights working the graveyard shift in
the casino, and my days drinking away a history of broken
relationships and crushed dreams, personal and political" (17). At
the time, Dunbar-Ortiz's daughter, Michelle, born in 1962, lived in
San Francisco with Dunbar-Ortiz's first husband (who had won
custody), a step-mother, and half-siblings. The pain of separation,
more emotional than geographic, hardly registers. This emotional
numbness and disconnection plagues Blood on the Border, as the reader
wants to know more about the difficulties of being a long-distance
mother, but the text offers a clue: "I was a functioning alcoholic
working in a Nevada casino, burnt out, and isolated from the radical
movement that had been my family for the previous decade" (15,
italics added). It would seem that for Dunbar-Ortiz, as for many
Marxists of an ascetic bent, being a professional revolutionary meant
renouncing blood ties for political kinship: "None of the elements of
my life had reality except the revolution. Every minute, whether I
was eating or watching television, my mind was on revolution. It had
been that way for fifteen years. Revolution had become my identity"
(108). One wonders how her daughter made sense of this.
Dunbar-Ortiz's personal-political response to the agonizing death of
the New Left meant that in addition to alcoholism and domestic
violence, both of which surfaced as problems in New Orleans, she
confronted unexplored contradictions of the settler-colonial
mentality with which she was raised. Her violent, alcoholic mother
was said to have been part Cherokee and her maternal grandmother's
people had settled in Missouri after leaving Tennessee, but
Dunbar-Ortiz's Native American ancestry was a well-guarded family
secret. Leaving home at fifteen, fleeing her mother's drunken
rampages, Dunbar-Ortiz would have had little occasion to reflect on
family life in the tumult of the 1960s and early 1970s. However, as
she organized with the American Indian Movement (AIM), she began to
see her family history as "a contradiction or amalgamation of those
two forcessettlers on Indian lands and resistance by the indigenous
inhabitants" (20). This meant overcoming the shame of Indian ancestry
that had been deeply instilled in childhood, in stark contrast to the
quiet pride she felt with respect to her paternal grandfather's
radical activism in the Industrial Workers of the World and the
Socialist Party.
The upsurge of mobilization in the mid-1970s is often overlooked, but
in attempting to reconcile her warring souls, Dunbar-Ortiz refreshes
our memory. In early 1975, for example, the Navajo Nation's strike
and drive to unionize the Fairchild electronics assembly plant in
Shiprock, New Mexico led indigenous liberationists from AIM to link
up with trade unionists in San Francisco, many of whom were
Nicaraguans, some of them Sandinistas, to oppose Holiday Inn's
construction on sacred burial sites in San José. They succeeded.
After AIM dissolved in an atmosphere of paranoia, and following the
killings at Oglala, South Dakota, Dunbar-Ortiz and her third husband,
a former alcoholic and Acoma Indian Pueblo poet, Simon Ortiz, found
temporary refuge in a Bay Area study group linked to another
like-minded group in Vancouver. All were dedicated to exploring the
relationship between Marxist critiques of capitalism and indigenous liberation.
National liberation movements devoted time, energy, and creativity to
international diplomacy, anchored in the UN General Assembly, and
some extraordinary anti-imperialist gatherings resulted. In 1976,
surrounded by FBI snipers on the banks of the Missouri River, in
Sisseton Sioux country in southeastern South Dakota, Dunbar-Ortiz and
Native American delegates met representatives from the Zimbabwean
African National Union and independentistas from the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party while attending the third International Indian Treaty
Council (IITC). Later, in Geneva, Dunbar-Ortiz worked with the head
of the IITC, Cherokee artist and writer Jimmie Durham, a friend of
Amilcar Cabral who coordinated with Mapuche leaders exiled from
Pinochet's Chile to organize the Conference on Indians in the
Americas in 1977.
When relations between Jimmie Durham, the IITC, and Dunbar-Ortiz
soured in 1978, she became the UN representative of the African-Asian
Peoples' Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which had grown out of the
Non-Aligned Movement and the Asian-African Conference in Bandung,
Indonesia, in 1955. With AAPSO, and through her work at the UN,
Dunbar-Ortiz came of age politically. Though most of AAPSO's
representatives were men, Dunbar-Ortiz met Sri Lankan and Palestinian
women, as well as Ellie Mozora, a Cypriot architect with whom
Dunbar-Ortiz worked on women's issues in the years that followed.
Dunbar-Ortiz also worked with Rigoberta Menchu in New York and
Geneva; from Rigoberta, she learned valuable lessons about "the
importance of collectivity and community as opposed to individualism"
(146). These connectionsbetween African-American and indigenous
liberation in the United States, national liberation movements in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and feminist emancipation
worldwidetestify to the vitality of revolutionary internationalism
in the twilight of the period that opened with the end of the Second
World War. They remind us of the ground we have lost.
New Beginnings
The Sandinista revolution burst onto the world scene a year before
Ronald Reagan was elected pledging to rid Nicaragua of its "godless,
communistic" government, but President Carter laid the groundwork for
what was to come (59, 62). Aged forty-two, Dunbar-Ortiz spent 1980
working at the UN in New York, before deciding that local organizing
in New Mexico would have to give way to international work. Once
there, she felt she could not sit back as Nicaragua burned in the
flames of yet another Washington-led counter-insurgency war, so she
resigned from the University of New Mexico, where she directed the
Institute for Native American Development that she and activists from
the Navajo Community College–Shiprock and others had founded in 1978.
Skeptical of reports on Sandinista "atrocities," Dunbar-Ortiz went to
see for herself what was happening on the Miskito or Atlantic Coast
of Nicaragua. In December 1981, as part of Operation Red Christmas,
CIA operatives blew up a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City that
Dunbar-Ortiz, on her way to a UN Conference, was set to board
(122-23). Long announced, the war to overthrow the Sandinistas had
begun. Dunbar-Ortiz engaged with the indigenous (Miskitus, Sumus, and
Ramas) and African-Nicaraguan (Creole) peoples of the Atlantic coast
grouped into Misurasata. She offered constructive criticism of
Sandinista policy in the region where Misurasata demanded autonomy
and self-determination. Sandinista supporters in the United States
did not wish to hear Dunbar-Ortiz's message: "I found it difficult to
talk about the revolution because the supporters were so wedded to
their idea of Nicaragua as a kind of utopia and didn't want to deal
with the reality of the place" (109).
Native American activists in the United States, such as Hank Adams
and Russell Means, who was a veteran AIM leader, stepped into the
public spotlight, siding with Washington against the Sandinistas,
ostensibly in support of indigenous rights for the Miskitu. The
question of Miskitu refugees and indigenous rights, largely of the
U.S. government's own making, had come to divide opinion on the
Sandinistas not only in the United States, but in Canada and Western
Europe as well. Dunbar-Ortiz spent much of the 1970s working to build
unity among, and diplomatic support for, national liberation
movements worldwide. Now, in the 1980s, as she sought to cut through
the dense fog of propaganda and disinformation orchestrated from Otto
Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the
Caribbean, she was "both red-baited and denounced as a fraud for
pretending to be Native American" (18). Dunbar-Ortiz was subject to
rumor-mongering and character assassination.
In 1982, Dunbar-Ortiz began drinking again, and did not stop until
well after the Contra War ended. She provides an insightful account
of how this period related to the early 1970s, since a sharp sense of
isolation and political defeat marked both moments:
Turning to drink in 1982 was a repeat of my first bout of alcoholism
a decade earlier, when the powerful resistance of the 1960s began to
implode. In the early 1970s, I had begun to feel increasingly
isolated until I became involved with the American Indian Movement.
Now again, in 1982, I felt that increasing sense of isolation: AIM
was weakening and splitting, some leaders courting Hollywood, some
even turning to cocaine….I don't think I could have done what I did
in the next five years had I not been fueled by alcohol to dull the
fear and live with the exhaustion. Although the life-threatening
risks I took and what I believe I accomplished added up to perhaps
nothing in the endthe Sandinistas were defeatedI was a witness. (162)
The stories that dot the pages of Blood on the Border,about ordinary
people living in extraordinary circumstances, at a specific time in a
particular place, make the history of the U.S. government-financed
Contra War against the Nicaraguan people human. We register the toll
this period took on Dunbar-Ortiz and many others who, as she notes,
did not survive. Dunbar-Ortiz's careful attention to her own pain is
matched by a capacity for empathy with others, which allows her to
convey imperial counterinsurgency in some of its most intimate,
terrifying dimensionsrape, torture, even dismemberment. It makes for
uncomfortable reading.
We know the bad guys wonElliot Abrams, John Bolton, Robert Kagan,
John Negroponte, and John Poindexter. Along with Greg Grandin's
Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of
the New Imperialism, Blood on the Border demonstrates that the
right-wing coalition that rose to power when George W. Bush was
"elected" in 2000neoconservative ideologues, cowboy capitalists,
revanchist militarists, and evangelical Christianscame together for
the first time in Central America, with the intent of effecting
"regime change" in Nicaragua and preserving a brutal status quo in
Guatemala and El Salvador. Central America served as a regional
laboratory for imperial counterinsurgency wars aimed at overthrowing
foreign governments in the name of "democracy," "freedom," and "human
rights." After NATO atrocities in the former Yugoslavia under
Clinton, such wars were then launched on a global scale under
President Bush in the wake of 9/11.
Homecoming
To close on a hopeful note with special resonance for those who have
had the misfortune to come of age in the 1980s and 1990s:
Dunbar-Ortiz's life and work are testament to the tenacity and
vitality of indigenous and national-popular movements in the
Americas, and reinforce the centrality of feminism to those
movements. Looking imperialism and counterinsurgency square in the
face, indigenous and national-popular movements have advanced since
the 1970s, however unevenly, with indigenous women playing
increasingly important roles as heads of households, leaders, and
spokespersons. The recent UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples codifies a series of basic demands, and reflects the
effectiveness of the type of international lobbying and diplomacy
efforts in which Dunbar-Ortiz has been engaged for more than thirty years.
For the most part, repression through political terror, prior to or
concurrent with the imposition of neoliberal economic policies in the
1970s, '80s, and '90s, did not succeed in disarticulating and
dismantling indigenous and national-popular movements in Latin
America altogether, not even in Central America or Colombia. Through
Chávez's foreign policy, Venezuela's "Bolivarian revolutionary
process" poses an unprecedented diplomatic threat to Washington's
legitimacy in the eyes of several hundred million of the hemisphere's
working people, not to mention nationalists around the world. In
Argentina and Brazil, Presidents Kirchner and Lula have taken
important steps toward the construction of a regional market, and are
no longer amenable to IMF recipes. In Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous
movements have been at the forefront of national-popular blocs
demanding new forms of political representation at the national,
regional, and local levels, along with the nationalization of natural
resources. With few exceptions, corrupt neoliberal parties have lost
the upper hand in formal politics. From Mexico to Argentina,
indigenous and national-popular movements have posed the question of
who will govern whom, how, and for how long.
Perhaps inspired by the latest cycle of popular rebellion and
political rebirth throughout Latin America, Dunbar-Ortiz has returned
to academic scholarship. We should not be surprised: "I think we are
becoming increasingly aware that history itself is an issue, often
the issue: Who owns the history of the United States? Do we accept
the history of the Latino and Anglo conquerors or the indigenous
peoples in the Western Hemisphere?" (12). Readers can look forward to
Dunbar-Ortiz's forthcoming volume on the history of the United States
from an indigenous perspective, which will no doubt be informed by
hard-won wisdom acquired on the Miskito Coast.
As readers, we are indebted to Dunbar-Ortiz for going to the Miskito
Coast, for fighting to bring the story to light when it mattered, and
for writing with generosity of spirit, honesty of emotion, and depth
of insight, long after Central America faded from public
consciousness in the United States. At its best, like blues, jazz,
and country music from the southwest, Blood on the Border strikes
notes that are haunting, plaintive, and tragic. It sings of love,
loss, and loneliness, but also community, courage, and solidarity.
--
Notes
1. Perry Anderson, "A Magical Realist and His Reality," The Nation,
January 26, 2004.
2. Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (Chicago:
Frontline International Distributors, 1996 [1969]). Anchored in
Quakerism, the Lynds have made their own path using a similar method.
See Staughton Lynd, Living inside Our Hope: Confessions of a
Steadfast Radical (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
3. See "Interview with Linda Gordon," in MAHRO, eds., Visions of
History: Interviews (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 76–92; and Manning
Marable, "Groundings with My Sisters," in How Capitalism
Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 69–103.
4. Bettina Aptheker's memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red,
Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Berkeley: Seal
Press, 2006), is remarkable in its courage as well as its conception.
5. Aijaz Ahmad, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of Our Time
(Delhi: LeftWord, 2004), 231. Like Ahmad, I prefer the term over the
"new imperialism," which assumes what needs to be demonstrated.
6. Unsworth is quoted in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human
History (New York: Viking, 2007), 12. See also, Derek Sayer, The
Violence of Abstraction: The Analytical Foundations of Historical
Materialism (London: Blackwell, 1990).
.
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