people power public property

I apologize for not writing on this more. I love to do it, so I don´t really know what´s gotten into me. It´s easy to become ungrounded when you´ve been away from home for over seven months. You lose track of things, like consistency.

I´m thinking about radical democracy and village republics. I´m in Oaxaca city, our home base, after spending four days at Capulalpam, a Zapotec pueblo two hours north in the Sierra Juarez. (Oaxaca city in in a valley between southern and northern mountain ranges.) It was incredible and short, to say the least. In the 90´s indigenous communities in Oaxaca (the only Mexican state with a majority of ¨indigenous¨ people, which is always a problematic word to define exactly) gained the right to control their municipalities through their own way of governance. This was of course, heavily influenced by the federal government feeling threatened by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, one state to the south. In Capulalpam, they govern all policies through a community assembly, which includes a representative from each household, or simply everyone in the village for important issues. For a town of several thousand, their assembly was about the size of the U.S. congress.

Think about this.

I just got an email from Moveon.org asking me to sign an online petition, contribute $15 a month, and send a pre-written letter to my senators, in order to ¨inject some people power¨into the U.S. federal government.

If only they could understand what people power truly meant.

In Capulalpam, their entire community governs their water supply, sustainable forestry management, community income from community businesses, schools, positions of public service to the community, the local police and judicial system, fiestas, and nearly anything else you can imagine. A multinational corporation has been mining selisium on their communually owned land, so recently they organized dozens of each other, men, women, and children, to take trucks down on Oaxaca city, where they took over the streets for five hours, demanding to meet with a government representative. Now the mine is temporarily suspended, but their fight continues (defendamoslasierrajuarez.org).

In Capulalpam, all land is communally owned. Every family gets a plot of land for a home and a plot for growing food. If you don´t use it, you lose it. Not too bad. It makes a lot more sense than Stinson Beach´s current residency requirement: $2 million dollars.

I had not thought about it like this before, but we, the residents of Stinson Beach, have the power in our town, only if, of course, we choose to take that responsibility. As of now, it seems we are all quite content that land should be monetized and governed by the so-called ¨free market.¨ We think this the best way to live in a community.

Or maybe we don´t really believe this (as I´d guess), but that just means we aren´t really a community enough to organize any real change.