Provided a "Home" for Social Commitment

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In a way, LAWG gave me a home for my social commitment. I think you know, I came from Italy when I was 14. And I had been in a parish which was very socially active, with a very progressive group of young people. Arriving in Canada I was terribly disappointed because young people I met were into organizing parties and wearing high heels. So I was always kind of on the search for how to give expression to this desire or the ideals I had formed there. I started to get involved with the Cesar Chavez grape boycott. Somehow I was led to LAWG, although I’m not sure how. Probably it was through Youth Core or the Student Christian Movement that I started to get involved in Latin American solidarity. I’m not really sure how I got to LAWG but it was through those networks. And that gave me a “home” for that desire or commitment that I had, being with like-minded people. And I guess the flipside of that is that it formed me and further developed that commitment and led me to new places along that path. I found people who knew a lot more than I did and who had a lot more skills and experience and brought me to, I would say, a new level, and to new opportunities.

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I was involved in the collective and several subcommittees, including the editorial committee of the Central America Update. I remember Monday night was LAWG meetings, Tuesday night I wrote my article, Wednesday night was Central America Update meeting, so … it was almost every night there was something … when I should have been going to the discos!!  I was thinking about the Update as I was going through my files. Some of the drafts are cut with scissors and taped together. And I think, how did we do it. I look at the Central American Update and it’s so thick! And 8-point type. “I think, oh my god, who used to read this?!” And no webpages. So how did we even get all this information? Through faxes. Through visits. It’s unbelievable.

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There were some very strong leaders in LAWG who had a lot of knowledge of Latin America. There were the people who knew a lot. And then there were the pillars, those who had an intimate knowledge of the organization, those on staff who sort of knew where every little piece of paper was located. I would say there were “circles” within the collective. I think for myself, I felt that I was a bit in an outer circle. So in some ways the collective wasn’t a totally equal collective. There were certain different levels. However, in some ways I think it was related to what we could give. Or, to our level of knowledge and our capacity. Probably if I was there now I would be more vocal, because I would be more confident and because I have more experience, and partly because I’m older. In some ways it was reflective of where I was at the time.

 

Always Looked Through a Political-Economic Lens

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Could an organization like LAWG exist now, as it did?  There are probably things which we would want and have to do differently now, because of that issue of representation, the question of gender analysis, and power issues, and voice, all those things, I think now there’s more talk about that, and perhaps more action on all those things than addressed by LAWG. But as for the political, maybe there’s other groups like Black Lives Matter which are doing it, or the LEAP manifesto, but that’s one thing LAWG did very well. And it gave me a ‘home’ for something that I was already kind of carrying because of my previous experience, but also with the whole structural analysis to be able to look at issues from a political and economic lens. That is not done as easily now. I think you’ll find it in some academic circles, or with some researchers, maybe a few NGOs, but my impression is that it has been diluted. The political/economic lens has been diluted. That justice edge has been lost quite a bit! And it’s hard now to find a home for that. Going to a LAWG meeting, people would bring in what was happening in foreign affairs, in global economics, in companies, who was saying what politically. In the olden days, I would have brought a question to the LAWG meeting and said, “help me understand this.” But now the only place I can turn to, is maybe some academics. I still carry with me the need to look at things that way. I always say, “OK, let’s look at the political economy of this” or “let’s look at the underlying course”. I think that’s an important lasting influence from LAWG because now you don’t necessarily find that elsewhere.

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I always appreciated that LAWG used the tools of conjunctural analysis, or Marxist analysis or whatever to look deeper and look for hard stuff, but not from a world view that wasn’t going to accept information that didn’t ‘fit’. That was really very helpful to me when I was skirting around the edges of some of the left organizations that had a very strong ideological line,that the world had to fit into that. I think it was because of that seriousness with which people did their work. If a foreign affairs policy paper came out today, by the time we got to the meeting half the people would have actually read it. It was not just based on some knee-jerk reaction that it must be wrong.

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