by Smadar Ben-Natan*

The Israeli public was outraged in December when a video of Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl from Nebi Salah in the occupied West Bank, went viral. The video documents her and her cousin, Nour Tamimi, slapping and kicking Israeli soldiers out of their house. The soldiers’ justified restraint towards young unarmed girls was nonetheless portrayed in Israeli media as impotence, an insult to masculinity and national dignity. Little was said about the fact that shortly before that, Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin, Mohammed Tamimi, was shot in the face by an Israeli soldier, and while the Israeli soldiers positioned themselves in front of Ahed’s house he was fighting for his life. The revenge of the military was not served cold: Ahed, Nour, and Ahed’s mother Nariman, a longtime activist who filmed the incident and posted it on Facebook, were promptly arrested in the middle of the night. This is a routine procedure for the arrests of Palestinian minors, who are often brutally pulled from their beds in their pajamas.

Ahed and Nariman are still detained by the so-called “world’s most moral army.” Ahed is facing charges of assault, while Nariman is charged with incitement (for posting the video), and they will both stand trial in an Israeli military court, where detention pending trial is the default, even for minors. The arrests are being protested by a widespread #freeahedtamimi campaign. In the media and public opinion, young Ahed has already won the battle, but she is paying a dire price, celebrating her 17th birthday on January 31 in prison.

Ahed’s arrest comes as no surprise to many who know the Israeli mechanisms of arrest and prosecution of minors in the West Bank. For over 50 years, Israel has held Palestinians under military occupation. In the Israeli military courts, the army is the legislator, the prosecutor, and the judge. Palestinian minors are routinely and sometimes brutally arrested, isolated from parents and lawyers, interrogated in the middle of the night, pressured to confess and incriminate others, convicted in around 99% of cases, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from months to years.

In the United States, Congresswoman Betty McCollum, together with 19 other co-sponsors, has introduced the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, HR 4391. The bill seeks to ensure that US military aid does not support these practices, which are subject to fierce human rights criticism by UNICEF, other dedicated NGOs, and foreign governments. The United States has also detained and violated the rights of children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. However, the Israeli military detentions and courts, affecting thousands of minors as young as 12, are still full steam ahead.

Responding to growing criticism, the Israeli army established a Juvenile Military Court in 2009, promulgating it as yet additional proof of its high moral commitment. However, the changes that the military juvenile court introduces to the ordinary military procedure are so minor that it doesn’t resemble any decent juvenile justice system. The Juvenile Military Court’s jurisdiction is limited only to the trial phase. All detention and (extremely rare) bail issues are still in the hands of the adult military courts, where detention pending trial is the rule rather than the exception. Minors thus typically arrive to trial and sentencing by the juvenile court after they have already been detained as adults for the duration of their trial. Evidence is predominantly based on middle-of-the-night confessions and incriminatory statements by terrified teenagers who have just been pulled from their beds. There are no alternatives to imprisonment, which is the default punishment. The Juvenile Military Court is thus undeserving of its deceptive title.

Israel defends its military courts by the claim that the Fourth Geneva Convention allows and even mandates military courts during belligerent occupation. Human rights advocacy accepts this claim and is thus trapped in a limbo, where only fair trial and due process are the focus of advocacy and challenge. It is time to change course: The Geneva conventions do not mandate military courts of occupation, but only allow for them. The convention never envisioned a 50-year-old occupation, and thus never intended to allow military courts that in fact replace ordinary civilian courts. The rule in human rights law is that civilians should not be subjected to military courts. At least since the Palestinian Authority had established its own legislative council and justice system in 1996, there is no justification or legal ground for the continued operation of the Israeli military courts. The Juvenile Military Court should be the first to vanish.

I propose to demand that Israel should completely renounce the prosecution of children and teenagers in military courts, abolishing the Juvenile Military Court altogether. Two alternatives are available: handing minors over to the Palestinian Authority, or, in cases that implicate the security of Israel, charging minors in Israeli civilian juvenile courts, where Israeli children, Palestinian children from East Jerusalem, as well as settlers’ children are charged. Obviously, under current circumstances, the power to decide which cases implicate Israeli security remains in Israeli hands, which use that discretion expansively to justify violence and violation of fair trial rights. But hopefully, such violations would diminish under a more inclusive juvenile justice system that is not set up only for Palestinians. Each of these alternatives is far better than the Juvenile Military Court. The oversight of civilian courts, I expect, would also reflect on detention and interrogation mechanisms. Ahed Tamimi would not have been detained beyond 24 hours by Israeli civilian juvenile courts, since in these courts, detention of minors is in fact the exception rather than the rule.

While the abolition of a court may sound unrealistic, Israel has actually already done something very similar in the past. I uncovered this untold piece of legal history in my research of Israeli military courts. From 1949 to 1966 Israel put its Palestinian citizens under a military regime and subjected them to military courts. Following the 1967 occupation, the Israeli military established another military court inside Israel. This court continued to prosecute Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of annexed East Jerusalem for over 33 years, until it was abolished in 2000. However, it had stopped prosecuting minors long before that, in 1978, after attorney Felicia Langer petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that her Palestinian youth clients were entitled to due process in a civilian juvenile court. In its decision Abu Rob v. Damon Prison Warden, the Supreme Court ruled that every minor is entitled to stand trial in a civilian juvenile court. This long forgotten decision ended the sweeping prosecution of Palestinian minors in the Israeli internal military court. Minors were thus not subjected to a mock military juvenile court but actually drawn out of the jurisdiction of the military court. The US forces in Iraq also transferred minors arrested by them to face charges in the civilian Iraqi legal system. Finally, both the Israeli internal military court and the US military courts in Iraq were abolished.

With these historical precedents, there are even more reasons now to support HR 4391, Promoting Human Rights by Ending Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, and to send a clear message to the government of Israel: Abolish the Juvenile Military Court and release Ahed and Nariman Tamimi.

• • •

*Smadar Ben-Natan is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Center for the Study of Law and Society, and a PhD candidate at Tel-Aviv University. Her research centers on national security prosecutions in military and civilian courts. She has been a practicing human rights and criminal defense lawyer in Israel for 18 years, representing many Palestinian prisoners.

by Hilda Lloréns, Ruth Santiago, Carlos G. Garcia-Quijano,
and Catalina M. de Onís*

Image source: panopticopr.com

Hurricanes are thought of as “natural” disasters, but the social and environmental devastation wrought upon Puerto Rico by Hurricane María last September is really an unnatural disaster resulting from a long history of colonial subjugation, economic hardship, environmental injustice, infrastructural neglect, and, at the local level, a broken rule of law. Hurricane María affected all of Puerto Rico to some degree, but in doing so the disaster also exposed the vulnerabilities created by ubiquitous socioeconomic inequality and the differential neglect of the island’s rural regions.

Faraway from San Juan’s hub of government, politics, and power, Puerto Rico’s South has developed a singular and often overlooked trajectory. The establishment of sugarcane plantations after the island’s conquest by Spain, and later by the United States, marked the South as a site of extraction and exploitation. Indeed, the legacy of the now defunct industry still characterizes this rural coast. Local residents overwhelmingly descend from both the enslaved Africans brought to toil in the fields and the indigenous Taíno who dwelled there. The plantation economic model, which benefitted the owners and dispossessed the workers, is also evidenced in the area’s historically high unemployment levels and poverty rates.

The mid-twentieth-century industrialization plan known as Operation Bootstrap marked a turning point for Puerto Rico. This plan, which aimed to modernize the island and stimulate its economy, offered only marginal gains to the citizenry and instead set it on a path of depopulation, unsustainable development, heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels, and even greater economic dependency on the United States. The steady decline of the island’s sugarcane industry and the increasing dependency on food imports meant that thousands of agricultural workers were rendered unemployable. At the same time, in conjunction with the local government, stateside industrial farms began to recruit and employ Puerto Rican agricultural workers. By the end of the twentieth century, Puerto Rican migration to the mainland—both seasonal and permanent—had become a way of life.

A Sacrifice Zone for an Extractivist Economy

Integral to Operation Bootstrap’s advancement, the mid-1950s witnessed the emergence in Puerto Rico’s South of oil refineries and the establishment of energy-generating plants. In 2002, the privately owned Applied Energy Systems began operating Puerto Rico’s only coal-powered plant. Jobos Bay, Puerto Rico’s second most significant estuary and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) reserve, is home to three of Puerto Rico’s power plants. In fact, the vast amount of the electricity consumed in Puerto Rico is generated along the island’s south coast. The southeast is also home to pharmaceutical companies and to two US military training facilities, Camp Santiago and Fort Allen. Furthermore, in the last decade, over 10,000 acres of agricultural lands from Guayama to Juana Diaz have been cultivated with genetically modified seeds and are also sites for agrochemical development and testing. According to a 2017 report, several multinationals, including Monsanto, have set up operations in the region.

Residents of the southeastern coastal plain have a complicated relationship with these industrial developments. On one hand, the developments provide jobs in the formal economy; on the other, local residents are often employed only at the lowest levels of salary and managerial positions but deal with the brunt of the impact of industrial activities on local ecosystems and human health. Additionally, employment is often irregular and seasonal, leaving workers in precarious, unpredictable situations. Coupled with unjust working conditions, this situation has brought about the displacement of entire communities to make space for heavy industries in coastal areas. Respiratory health problems are common, and at least some negative health outcomes are attributable to industrial emissions from local factories. Fishers and other ecosystem resource users for decades have reported environmental degradation effects on important natural resources. In summary, local residents receive a limited share of the benefits, but most of the social and environmental costs, of industrial development.

Community Mobilizations against Toxic Coal Ash

Communities adjacent to Jobos Bay have long organized against the ecological destruction of their local environment. In the 1970s, Corporación Bahia de Jobos fought off a Monsanto pesticide plant similar to the one that wreaked havoc in Bhopal, India. Concerned about the already heavy burden of polluting industries in the region, members of Sur Contra la Contaminación (SURCO) were vocal opponents of the plans to build the AES coal plant on the Bay’s coastal wetlands. Yet the local government disregarded their concerns. In the last decade, the AES plant, which generates over 300 tons of coal ash annually, has been mired in controversy regarding the disposal of the toxic coal ash.

At the start of the 2017 hurricane season, the AES plant had accumulated a five-story-tall pile of coal ash on its premises. [For pictures of the coal ash pile at the AES-Guayama Facility, click here.] In fact, just before Hurricane Irma struck, the Environmental Quality Board had ordered the company to cover the ashes. The company did not comply with this request, explaining that coal ash “hardens like a rock” when it comes in contact with water. AES was fined $75,000 for non-compliance. Two weeks later, when Hurricane María struck Puerto Rico with 155-mile-per-hour winds, the ash pile remained uncovered. The region experienced widespread destruction and flooding.

Because AES is built on a coastal wetland, when local activists went to investigate they were not surprised to find flooding on the company grounds. The coal ash pile looked smaller and cracked, leading them to speculate that the ash had been blown around and that it likely had seeped into the ground and the bay. Three months after María ravaged the island, little has been said or done about the toxic coal ash still accumulated on the premises of AES in Guayama. The company has remained silent. The national and federal governments have proved unresponsive to residents’ pleas that an investigation be conducted to study possible coal ash contamination and its effects.

Still, residents have not given up seeking answers. They demand to know whether the coal ash has spread to nearby communities, to the mangroves, or to the Jobos Bay, and whether it seeped into the ground or the aquifer. On December 10, 2017, when Philip Alston, the United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, made a fact-finding trip to Puerto Rico, he visited the southeast and heard residents’ testimony about their experiences with environmental injustice and poverty. Similarly, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is documenting the ongoing environmental injustices deepened by the hurricanes. It is unfortunate that it took a hurricane the scale of María to bring Puerto Rico’s environmental and climate injustices to international attention.

A Transformation on the Horizon

Before the hurricanes struck, 97 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity was generated using fossil fuels, and the vast majority of Puerto Ricans had little to no knowledge about how the energy they consumed was generated or where it came from. The storms, which destroyed the neglected grid, had the effect of making energy generation and consumption central to the conversation about reconstruction. Once marginal, discussions about using renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind energy, have now become crucial. If Puerto Rico is to transform, rather than rebuild, its power system, renewable energy projects, advocated for and implemented by local residents and energy experts—not by large corporations in collusion with colonial governments—must be central to building a more sustainable and just energy future.

•  •  •

* Hilda Lloréns teaches anthropology in the Sociology & Anthropology Dept. at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of “Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family” (2014). Ruth Santiago is a community and environmental lawyer who lives in Salinas, Puerto Rico. Carlos G. Garcia-Quijano is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. His scholarly interests include ecological anthropology, cognitive anthropology, and the use of mixed ethnographic methods to understand complex sociocultural categories and their effects on people’s lives. Catalina M. de Onís is an assistant professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Her dissertation, Energy Remix: Decolonial Discourses of Decarbonization, examined Puerto Rico’s energy colonialism experiences prior to the 2017 hurricane season.

by Edward J. McCaughan & Ani Rivera*

 If going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

The queer aesthetic frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

In the summer of 2017, San Francisco’s historic Galería de la Raza showcased the work of a group of artists who engage the question of what it means to be simultaneously Mexican or Chicanx and queer—that is, to be who they are. To be queerly tèhuäntin, Nahuatl for “us.” To be queerly us. Queer—or cuir, as the term is increasingly used in Spanish—in the sense of noncoventional sexualities and nonnormative gender expressions. Cuir us.

The artwork reveals a decade-long struggle for social justice and dignity by queer communities on both sides of the Mexico–US border. The LGBTQ and feminist movements that emerged in the 1970s in Mexico and among Chicanxs in the United States faced many formidable challenges; not least of these was how to transform a cultural politics of national/ethnic identity that rested discursively on patriarchal constructs of heterosexism and machismo, narrowly defined womanhood, and rigid binaries of gender and sexuality.

Activist art proved to be one of the movements’ most effective tools for producing counterhegemonic discourses about gender and sexuality. Since 1987, an annual art exhibition has been mounted at the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City, as part of their LGBTQ pride celebration known originally as the Semana Cultural Gay. In the assessment of the late Carlos Monsiváis, these cultural mobilizations “constituted for civil society critical proof of the way in which alternative spaces have contributed to the diversity and the democratization of Mexican life.” In addition to the significance of the social space created by these exhibitions, the hundreds of widely viewed images were important in and of themselves in producing new visual discourses about the possibilities of making a home and a future in which one could be simultaneously queer and Mexican.

The year 1987 was also a pivotal one for queer Chicanxs, marked by the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera that gave us an intersectional analysis of the “borders” between cultures, genders, and sexualities. It was against her own Chicano community’s sexism and homophobia that Anzaldúa asserted her determination “to stand and claim my space.” In her “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” she declared: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice.” In doing so she helped to open spaces for other queer Chicanxs. Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, for example, was published in 1991, and in 1995 Galería de la Raza hosted Mi corazón me dió un salto: A Queer Raza Exhibition. Now the new millennium has witnessed the emergence of fierce UndocuQueer artists.

With this exhibition, Galería de la Raza celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Semana Cultural Gay (now Festival de Diversidad Sexual) in Mexico City and the publication of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera by paying tribute to the many brave artists on both sides of the border who continue to engage the question of what it means to be queerly tèhuäntin, cuir us. The show included work by some pioneering elders—Yolanda Andrade, Ester Hernández, Taller Documentación Visual, Joey Terrill, and Nahum B. Zenil—as well as pieces by a younger generation of queer artists: Félix D’Eon, Gabriel García Román, Rurru Mipanochia, Yosimar Reyes, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo. We highlight a few of them here.

Photographer Yolanda Andrade (b. 1950, Villahermosa) received a Guggenheim for her project on Mexico City, which included photos of participants in the capital’s annual LGBTQ pride celebrations. The three we selected for this show reveal a range of Mexican genders and sexualities. We also included Andrade’s portrait of the late Nancy Cárdenas, a writer, actor, theater director, filmmaker, and lesbian rights activist who in 1974 cofounded Mexico’s first gay organization, the Frente de Liberación Homosexual. Journalist and gay rights activist Braulio Peralta wrote that Andrade’s photos give us the opportunity to experience “difference, presence, not being absent, remembering the taste of what’s real: that we are all equal because without political freedom there is no sexual freedom!”

Yolanda Andrade, La Alas del deseo, photograph, 1993

Gabriel García Román (b. 1973, Zacatecas) describes himself as a Mexican-Americón, born in Mexico and raised in Chicago. He is a multimedia artist best known for his Queer Icons series, whose subjects are drawn from many facets of the gender and queer spectrum. Several of his Queer Icons were exhibited, including a portrait of undocumented trans rights activist Jennicet Gutiérrez. García Román explains: “Much like traditional religious paintings conferred a sense of safety and meditative calm on a home, the works in this series aspire to provide a similar sense of refuge that’s drawn from the inner grace of the subjects and projected outwards onto a world that might not always be safe.”

Gabriel García Roman, Jennicet, photo printed on collaged paper, 2017

Ester Hernández (b. 1944 Dinuba, California), an internationally acclaimed visual artist based in San Francisco, was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley to a Mexican/Yaqui farm worker family. Two of Hernández’s iconic portraits of queer women were included in this exhibition. Renee, La Troquera is a sexually alluring female truck driver whose sleeveless shirt reveals strong arms as her tongue licks the index finger of her leather gloved hand. In Hernández’s erotically charged La Ofrenda, the Virgin of Guadalupe might be read as “Our Lady of Lesbian Desire.” La Ofrenda graced the cover of the groundbreaking 1991 anthology Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, edited by Carla Trujillo.

Ester Hernández, La Ofrenda, screenprint, 1990

Rurru Mipanochia (b. 1989, Mexico City) received a prestigious Young Creators grant from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) in 2016. The artist, who avoids gendered pronouns in self-descriptions, claims to be “a cyborg built in Nibiru, but discarded to the Earth by defects in its operating system, reborn in Mexico City.” Rurru’s work plays with Mesoamerican iconography representing abject deities, bodies, and sexualities. In Rurru’s images of Tlaltecuhtli, a Mexica diety traditionally represented with female characteristics despite its male name, the god is endowed with both penis and vagina. Rurru’s artwork was made available by ArtSpace Mexico.

Rurru Mipanochia, Tlaltecuhtli 2, acrylic, stylograph, and markers on amate paper, 2017

In the life and art of Los Angeles native Joey Terrill (b. 1955, Los Angeles), the Chicano and gay movements are inseparable: “Since my high school student days . . . social activism and Chicano politics have played a pivotal role in my life while at the same time I embraced the politics of the Gay Liberation Movement and challenged the societal oppression of homosexuality.” His La Historia de amor turns the classic Mexican kitsch calendar image of Popocatépetl and Itzaccíhuatl into gay lovers promoting solidarity with “your bothers with HIV.” His Still-life with Viracept speaks to the ways HIV meds became part of daily life, a presence as common as striped Mexican table cloths, Catholic icons, and sliced bread. And his He Wore Ray-Ban Glasses, a Rolex Watch and He Used to Eat My Ass boldly asserts the centrality of same-sex desire even in the face of a homophobic culture and STDs.

Joey Terrill, He Wore Ray Ban Glasses, a Rolex Watch, and He Used to Eat My Ass, acrylic on canvas, 1985

Nahum B. Zenil (b. 1947, Chicontepec) is a painter and poet who played a leading role in establishing Mexico City’s annual LGBTQ exhibitions. Zenil gained international acclaim in the 1980s as one of the foremost exponents of a school of art that critics called “neo-Mexicanism,” which also included Enrique Guzmán, who committed suicide in 1984, and Julio Galán, who died in 2006. These gay men inserted their own body into dense fields of iconic national symbols, a queer body reclaimed from the shadowy corners of Mexicanidad. At the center of Zenil’s extensive oeuvre are self-portraits in which the artist’s body experiences the pains, pleasures, desires, and struggles of life as a gay, Catholic Mexican. In the pieces shown in our exhibition, Zenil appears as the enduring homoerotic icon Saint Sebastian, as the multitude of gay men haunted by the specter of AIDS, and as the masses demanding respect for democracy and human rights.

Nahum Zenil, El Espectro, engraving, 1994

May the work of these artists guide us toward what José Esteban Muñoz called a “forward-dawning futurity.”

•  •  •

*Edward J. McCaughan, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, San Francisco State University, is the author of Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán. Ani Rivera is Executive Director of Galería de la Raza in San Francisco (http://www.galeriadelaraza.org/).