Mariachi band brought by LASA and Iniciativa Mexicana to party at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, September 16, 2009.
Mexicans who work in Deloitte at the Chamber of Commerce dinner, September 18, 2009.
The CUNY system was proudly present, encouraging Mexican youth and Mexican-American second generation immigrants to apply to college.
By Ernesto Castañeda
Given the hard work, charisma, and influence of U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, his passing was rightly considered an event of public and national significance. The coverage of the funeral mass for Ted Kennedy on Saturday August 29th, 2009 at the Boston Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is an interesting case study of the role of religion in the political life of the United States of America. Here I make some brief observations about the role of religion, politics, and pluralism in modern America.
Ted Kennedy was driven from the Kennedy Library, his casket covered by the American flag that waved over the U.S. Senate during its last session. Kennedy arrived to the Basilica as a public man, a man of state guarded by the American armed forces, but once inside the Church, he was turned into a private man and his casket was covered by a white blanket with a cross, marking him as a Catholic. In between these moments his casket lied naked - holding a human body inside.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Father Donald Monan, S.J. (former president of Boston College, who celebrated the Mass), Father Mark Hession (who offered the homily) and members of the Massachusetts Catholic Church welcomed Kennedy’s casket in the Basilica’s hallway. This was a strong signaling of the moral and political strength of the Catholic Church and its hold on earthly issues. It was hard to do away with memories from old monarchical Europe, Anglican Britain (or even current Iran) - all contexts where Church and State have close relations. It also occurred to me how difficult it would have been for such an event to take place in this day and age in a strongly secular country such as France.
The priest mentioned both private and public aspects of his life and commented on how his Christian duty to help the poor and the hungry gave him strength and purpose to pass legislation to help the have-nots. Nothing could be closer to the real social teachings of all three major monotheistic organized religions (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim).
In the sermon the priest emphasized the obligations and expectations of all Christians (not only Catholics) to help the disposed and also named the role that Hebrew prophets played in connecting faith, personal character and public duty to aid the needy. The connection between this and the strong emphasis and practice to help the poor and to give charity in Islam was not mentioned, and was thus a lost opportunity to continue building bridges between these three major religions based on deep historical commonalities.
The live coverage of the two hour mass was indeed a great moment of Catholic rite and faith on display, one that could have also been, for some, a moment for proselytizing. I wonder if the public nature of this event will gain the Catholic Church any new devotees, or bring back some wandering members. This may have been an emotive moment that highlighted Catholic religious practice as distinct from the one that is associated with the inquisition or child abuse. This was also a good moment to break down some of the symbolic boundaries between Catholics and non-Catholics; and for Protestants, Evangelists, religious and social conservatives to realize the historical roots of their religion and how much in common their beliefs may have with the teachings of the Catholic Church. And if this were to happen this would also ease governance by Democrats and strengthen Obama’s vision of a civil religion of American- one that stresses service and the desire to work to make the United States a better place where citizens from diverse backgrounds and faiths work together to advance the common good in a way that appeals to both secular and religious members of the polity (For more on the phenomenon of Barack Obama and civil religion see Philip Gorki’s Class, nation and covenant ).
In terms of boundary-work, an interesting question I was entertaining since the beginning of the ceremony was whether only Catholics who had performed the first communion would (be allowed to) participate in the Eucharistic part of the celebration, the communion; this issue would concern Presidents Obama, Clinton, Bush and Carter - all of them Christian yet not Catholic. But the television cameras on all of the channels were broadcasting the same angle; they did not broadcast the Eucharistic service, effectively guarding the privacy of those who participated in communion and those who did not. The pretext, conscious or not, was to focus on the great performance of Placido Domingo; this view happened to afford the public at home a partial view of family members who received communion. But members of the White House and the Congress where given de facto privacy at that moment to receive communion and act in non-presidential or congressional ways, including their acts of kneeling, or not, as each one decided individually, without the pressure to perform in front of the cameras, how he or she would navigate this moment. What is the meaning of taking communion while not a practicing Catholic? Yet would it be somehow construed as disrespectful to not take communion at the solemn funeral of such a distinguished friend and colleague, regardless of one’s religious affiliation? But the way the cameras dealt with it was a great success for an accommodating secularism, maintaining faith as a private issue, while celebrating Kennedy in a religious way.
President Obama underlined the humanity and yes mortality of Ted Kennedy and all the ones present, and thus the commonalities of all beyond faith. Doing this Obama took the high road and made the eulogy really about Ted Kennedy the man and did not turn it into a political event or an event to advance his view of civil religion. But he did not need to do that then, it would have been redundant. A great example of civic religion was the life of Ted Kennedy and the religions undertones behind his lifelong legislative agenda. The best example of the marriage of Christian faith and civil religion was how the Cardinal, Priests and congregants respectfully and joyously sang “America the Beautiful” at the end of the service with the same vigor and tone as the religious hymns that had been sang earlier. As Ted Kennedy was brought back to the public street again, he left his Catholic habit behind and his coffin was covered once again with the American flag.
My final questions are whether Catholicism has now finally made it into the mainstream after a full length funeral mass was broadcasted live on a Saturday morning by NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, among others? Or was this just another exception made for the Kennedy family - were the funeral masses for Ted’s two other brothers who devoted their lives to public service just as public? Was this a sign of the entrance of Catholicism into the WASP consensus? Or was this only the confirmation of a previous acceptance of Irish-American Catholicism? Sociologists of religion claim that Italian-American versions may have also been accepted in the mainstream, as Judaism has been. Such a wide acceptance of Catholic politicians and their religious practice as we saw in the ceremony in honor of Edward Kennedy would have unthinkable 60 years ago. But who is left outside the religious American mainstream now? Islam? And how about the Latin American brand of Catholicism en Español?
Still, for most of high school, one opportunity seemed like a farfetched dream. Though I had a great deal of support from many different people, nobody seemed sure how I could navigate the system to gain a college education. Information on all aspects of that process was sketchy, so I was stepping onto an unmarked path. It was difficult to live without any assurance that high school would lead, as it would for most of my classmates, to the next stage. I found solace in my studies. I took seven AP classes to test my abilities as a student and delighted in the fact that I could walk into AP English ready to dissect a Shakespeare play. I played the cello to calm my soul, dreaming of a place where music filled the air. I joined my school's leadership ranks and took pride in my ability to motivate people. And I joined clubs that enabled me to give back to a place I loved, organizing two toy drives and devoting more than 300 hours to community service.
Every activity allowed me to cling to some sense of normalcy in a life that was changing. My parents' marriage had begun to crumble, slowly and painfully. I had to learn to stand on my own, to be accountable to myself. School felt safe, and I was fortunate to have a support system in a special program for economically disadvantaged students who hoped to attend college. Every student in the program had a story of hardship, so I no longer felt quite so alone and isolated in my struggle.
I eventually came up with a small list of possible colleges—state schools that I might be able to afford or schools that offered scholarships for undocumented students. That April, I received my acceptance to UC Berkeley, and soon after, a few small scholarships. It was a bittersweet triumph. Though I was qualified to attend the best public university in the nation, I couldn't afford it. My funds barely totaled $5,000, only about one semester's tuition. Still, I wanted to attend my dream school for at least that first semester. So after graduation I hopped on a Greyhound bus with two suitcases and headed to Berkeley.
I found a tiny room near the campus, enrolled in classes, and landed a job selling jewelry in a San Francisco mall. From Friday through Monday, I worked full-time, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get to work by 9. I couldn't spend the weekends like other students, lazing in the sun or exploring neighborhoods. Still, for two glorious days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I had classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was taught by some amazing professors. I would run from one class to the next, using my breaks to stop by the library. I slept odd hours, many days finishing homework at the crack of dawn. I was very well organized. Wednesday was the day I took care of business—everything from food shopping to laundry to paying bills.
Surprisingly, I found time to make friends and, perhaps more surprisingly, mostly with political conservatives. They proved to be remarkably open-minded, and I loved their outlandish conversations and unabashed candor. They never questioned my odd hours, nor did I offer to explain. They apparently believed that I was simply another workaholic. Perhaps not so "simply," but I was a workaholic for sure. I had no choice.
As expected, my funds ran out right after that first semester, forcing me to leave that very special school. I am back home now and attending community college. And I am back on the same taxing schedule—two days of classes and four days of work. My goal is to save some money while finishing up my associate's degree. I still enjoy school, but dream about someday attending Berkeley again."
Quantitative “Easing” and Qualitative Uneasiness
Something that the current economic crisis has shown are the systemic contradictions, the un-sustainability of the new "products" of the financial sectors, and sometimes the hypocrisy of economic experts and the proponents of free market and neoliberal reforms who preached throughout the world deregulation, a reduced role of the government in “the economy”, independence of the central banks, and inflation control at the expense of unemployment but now are engaged in the opposite. These experts were especially against the irresponsible printing of money which they saw as dangerous as it could produce inflation and corruption, even when some world leaders claimed that they needed the money to support social programs, protect national workers, and to avoid negative growth and deflation. But just when these experts had convinced almost everyone about the supposed truth of their claims which had become almost dogmatic, we see that with the current crisis the United States Federal Reserve has been engaged in “quantitative easing” i.e. printing dollars. Sure printing dollars is not the same as printing pesos or Dirhams since the dollars has actually strengthened lately in relation to the Euro and the British Pound!
The scandal around the Madoff Investment Securities has shown how bonds traded in Wall Street and other financial markets also depends on trust sometimes deserved others not.
Similar if to a different degree is regular activity in the financial sector, as see in this first person account from :
"To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. "
"I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."
More from Liar’s Poker
At the same time it seems that the French authorities have let out of prison the defrauder that goes by the alias of Lionel Doyen and Ernest Koumang since people continue reporting scam attempts for fraudulent departments in Paris through Craigslist.
Are these all examples of the same phenomenon but at different scales? Who is responsible for all this? Those who play this game willing knowingly or not? How about those who watch in the sidelines? Leaving these hard questions aside there is no doubt that the State can still play a role in regulating the bounds for how much can be gambled and how. Yes, this is a global exchange but what the government of the countries where the leading financial centers are located decide to do should rein these transactions. The remaining question is how much and at what cost? Can this genie be brought back into the bottle?
 Both candidates support an eventual path to citizenship for illegals |
Both McCain and Obama addressed a conference of Hispanic some 700 people attending the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Washington, DC both were looking to cater their favors but underlined different points:
Obama, "admired Mr McCain's attempt last year to get an immigration reform bill approved by Congress...But he said that Mr McCain had since walked away from that commitment." Obama said, "We must assert our values and reconcile our principles as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. That is a priority I will pursue from my very first day."
"Robert J. Hildreth, 57, is the public face of the National Immigrant Bond Fund, a fledgling organization that helps immigrants swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raids post bonds...Since spring 2007, the fund has paid more than $180,000 to bond out immigrants snared in ICE raids in California, Massachusetts and Maryland. Word of the fund is spreading, but not quite fast enough for some immigrants caught up in the recent crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants. In the past nine months, ICE has detained about 4,500 undocumented workers and 111 employers, according to ICE statistics."
After a raid in Houston, "on June 25, bond fund organizers struggled to find "on-the-ground support" to help mobilize the families of detained immigrants... One of the principles of the fund requires detainees' families to make matching contributions, which helps ensure they appear in court, organizers said."
"It wasn't until two weeks later that the attorneys got a notice the bond fund was available, we only had one person who was still being detained and whose family couldn't raise the bail money," Jimenez said.
"Hildreth, the son of schoolteachers, said part of his motivation to help immigrants came from his father, a historian."
"One of his big themes was that the immigration story in the United States is vital to the health and growth of our country," he said. "He drilled that into me."
"After graduating from Harvard University, Hildreth worked for the International Monetary Fund from 1975 to 1980, living in Washington, D.C., and La Paz, Bolivia. He returned to the U.S. and worked for major Wall Street firms until starting his own business in 1989, Boston-based IBS Inc., which buys and sells loans in international markets."
"I've been involved in Latin America since college," he said. "I know many, many, many Latin Americans, including many, many Mexicans, so I have a personal friendship, a personal affinity."
In all, Hildreth said he paid $130,000 to help the New Bedford workers, and detainees' families chipped in $100,000, securing the release of 40 people, he said. He said none of them skipped bond.
The fund has infuriated some advocates for stricter immigration reforms, who have called it "traitorous" on Internet message boards.
"There's one more reason — besides humanitarian — that this bond fund was created and it's just as important. It's political," he said. "We hope that if we get a lot of history helping people in raids, plus a lot of contributions, even if it's only a buck, then we can really have a voice next year in the immigration debate."
From: Carroll, Susan. "Illegal workers get help from fund." Houston Chronicle. Aug. 7, 2008. Full story at: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5929129.html
Here is an article on the relevance of the work of Charles Tilly for Mexico and the world in English and Spanish versions.Distinguished Social Scientist Charles Tilly Passes Away
By Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco
An expert on Latin America and on the world, Charles Tilly studied the past in order to give us tools and theories to understand the present and the future. After a long and prolific career marked by the writing of more than fifty books and around seven hundred academic articles, Charles Tilly died from lymphoma on April 29, 2008. Tilly was brave in his long battle against different types of cancer: despite submitting himself to intense chemotherapy treatments, including experimental treatments, he persevered, smiling, teaching and writing until weeks before his death. During his long and productive life, he was always a source of human and intellectual light, an example to follow, an exceptional man from whose life and work we have much to learn.
Charles Tilly was born on May 20, 1929 in a small city in Illinois, into a working class family, son of an immigrant mother. With the help of various jobs, scholarships and government assistance, he studied in the Department of Social Relations (a mix of various branches of sociology and social psychology) at Harvard. There he received his undergraduate degree in 1950, and his masters and PhD in 1958. In a department and field dominated at the time by sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), he preferred to study with the also distinguished sociologists George C. Homans (1910-1989) and Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Sorokin, a Russian immigrant, who witnessed firsthand the revolution in 1917, had a great influence on Tilly encouraging him in his interest in combining sociology and history into the systematic study of revolutions and social change. Tilly was also largely influenced by Barrington Moore (1913-2005), a political sociologist and master of the historical-comparative method from the same generation. Charles Tilly was one of the key figures in the establishment and institutionalization of the subfields of historical sociology, collective action, social movements, and contentious politics within contemporary social science.
Tilly was professor in the universities of Delaware, Princeton, Harvard, Toronto, Michigan, the New School for Social Research and Columbia, the two last ones in New York City. He was also a visiting professor in France at the Sorbonne, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris), as well as in Norway and the Netherlands. He received various honorary doctorate degrees and distinguished academic awards. Within the last few years, some standouts include the Hirschman Prize in 2008 from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. He was a member of the most prestigious scientific societies in the United States and Europe. Tilly read English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and some Chinese.
Charles Tilly, sociologist, incorporated history and politics into his work, and had a large influence in currents inside contemporary history and political science. Tilly began his career writing a thesis on the counterrevolution in France. He was an impromptu historian, a coincidence that brought him to create catalogs of contentious events in order to carry out quantitative analytic studies with strong historical and contextual information, information which lends itself to the comparison, across time and space, between phenomena such as revolutions, social movements, strikes, protests, revolts or civil wars (see his Contentious Performances 2008). After many years of maturation, Tilly and his research colleagues created what the research field called Contentious Politics, a new school that has influenced sociology, history, and political science. Many interesting works have recently emanated from this school of thought.
Before working in Contentious Politics together with his colleagues Sidney Tarrow, Doug McAdam, and many others, Tilly contributed the concept of “state-making” (or the theory of the birth of the modern state), showing how the historical formation of nation-states in western Europe was strongly linked to war and the accumulation of capital to finance them. European monarchies fought among each other for control of their colonies and global trade routes. The urgency to finance these wars created in the governments of France and England the need to develop systems to unify militias, govern territories, generate wealth, collect taxes and administrate their estates. From the tools that these governments used, today we have censuses, passports, customs, and accounting systems. These processes resulted in the creation (to a certain point accidental) of strong nation-states, with independent economies, and true governance over a certain territory. The theory of state formation reminds us that nation-states did not arise as a product of a linear evolution but from a particular historical and international context. Looking at the present, Charles Tilly wrote on the illusory nature of expecting the same types of state-society relations in countries more recently formed who copied the western European model and expected to recreate institutions top-down from one day to another by decree. Imitating laws and establishing top-down reforms would rarely mean a bottom up reconfiguration. Local knowledge, customs and traditions have to be taken into account to govern (for more on this look at James C. Scott. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press).
Given the history of state formation in Western Europe, Tilly compares state formation with the criminal activity of the mafia who engage in protection rackets through which they are paid to offer protection from a threat of violence that they themselves create (see Diego Gambetta. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press). Tilly shows how, historically, the art of governing consists of large scale coordination among local leaders, militias, powerful economic classes, and even organized crime. Using this insight one would have been able to predict the terrible consequences (i.e. the steep increase in violence and destabilization) that an open war on drugs by the Mexican military commanded by President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa would create.
Tilly reminds us that democracy represents one of many possible political regimes, reflecting a system of social, political and economic relationships and above all, a certain institutionalization of trust networks. In contrast with the literature which perceives democracy as goal unto itself with a social, linear evolution, in his book Democracy (2007), Tilly shows how democracy is a reversible process and introduces a new concept into the literature: de-democratization. Explaining how even mature liberal democracies can experience drawbacks and closing in civil rights, civil liberties, or in the treatment of immigrants.
Just four days after September 11, 2001, in a reflection that could only be Tilly’s, he predicted the political errors and terrible consequences to come of the international politics of George W. Bush. Tilly intuited how the events of those days had been derived from a decentralized network, with members who did not know each other personally but who shared a political ideology and were trying to make a political statement through non-conventional violent means. Tilly knew immediately that a discursive barrier would be constructed between the two large groups, the self-nominated “us” versus “them.” A resulting armed attack against a certain region blamed for the attacks would change the power relations within these given groups, amplifying the discontent amongst “them.” This would then intensify their attacks, therefore aggravating the situation, leading to an escalation and thus further justifying the confrontation between these two groups. This division would call for the creation of new international alliances, which would obligate the excluded ones to unite within themselves, and paradoxically make room for the creation of new routes and opportunities for drug trafficking and international organized crime. The result of a war declared against an enemy who is invisible, and at the same time categorical, would end up giving more power and outside support to dissident groups inside countries such as Algeria, Turkey, Nigeria, Sudan and Russia. As a result, the level of democracy would fall, as much as in these countries as in the West, product of a major militarization of the forces of security and the reduction in civil liberties and human rights for both citizens and foreigners. Regrettably, such predictions have become part of our current reality.
In his last books, Charles Tilly illuminated for us some of our contemporary daily behaviors. For example, why we see the need to give reasons and tell stories in our social life (Why 2006); why we assign blame and give credit to people around us (Credit and Blame 2008), and how researchers can reconcile the study of culture and the post-modern challenge with a research agenda that generates high quality and useful scientific social knowledge (The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Analysis 2008).
Professor Tilly was also a scholar of migration: he was one of the first social scientists to write on the important role that social networks play in chain migration, which resulted in the accumulation, within the same locality, of migrants in a distant labor market (Tilly, Charles and C. Harold Brown. 1967. "On Uprooting, Kinship and the Auspices of Migration." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 8:139-164). For Tilly, remittances are a way to fulfill family obligations, tangible proof of the importance of social relations despite distance (see Viviana A. Zelizer and Charles Tilly. 2007. "Relations and Categories" The Psychology of Learning and Motivation:47 pp. 225-255).
With his book Categorical Inequality (1998), Tilly demonstrated how inequality and exploitation reproduce themselves through the institutionalization of group behaviors and above all through assigning of professions to certain social categories; for example in post-colonial societies like Mexico: natives working in the fields, mestizos in the service sector, and whites working as managers; or in advanced economies like the US: women in sales, men in production, immigrants as janitors and local male citizens as bankers. The inequality between groups reproduces itself for generations once these roles and different levels of life become invisible and seem natural, spontaneous, or merited.
Despite his fame and intelligence, Charles Tilly, or Chuck as he liked everyone to call him, was above all transparent, accessible, without pretensions; he was a true cosmopolitan, democratic and egalitarian in action. He was helpful and patient with his colleagues and students (me among them). He spent a lot of time helping us develop our ideas, reading all types of drafts and giving valuable suggestions to improve the scientific content of our texts. Because of this, through his death, the hundreds of students and colleagues whom he helped throughout the last five decades remember his great human quality and intellectual generosity. His books and lessons stay with us to guide us in the difficult task of understanding society and the many relationships and mechanisms within it and that sometimes hide in front of our eyes.
Ernesto Castañeda Tinoco is a doctoral student in sociology at Columbia University. He was a student and teaching assistant of Professor Tilly.
Versions of this article will appear in Spanish in the magazine Cátedra, published by the University of Colima, Mexico 2008. And in English in the newsletter of the Institute of Latin American Studies. School of International Affairs. Columbia University.
A conference in Honor of Professor Tilly was held at Columbia on October 3rd – 5th. For more information visit: http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/event/2008
