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Lecture: The Role of Geography in American Radicalism

The Role of Geography in American Radicalism A lecture by Mars Dietz November 26th, 2012

The word geography literally means earth-writing. We all write the world into being, constructing and reconstructing it as a landscape in which we can live. We reinscribe place through our actions and our discourse, drawing up maps for survival and culture. It is the disciplinary responsibility of geographers to transcribe and edit the writing of the earth. Geographers are taking note of this responsibility in radical ways, making antiracism, anticapitalism, and people’s history cornerstones of their scholarship. Like direct action, like the telling of history, like visual studies, and like critical theory, geography is another tool for us to implement as we write our worlds into being.

PAST DUE, The People's Library PDX at PNCA's MFA Gallery

Thank you Matthew Leavitt, Forrest Loder, Mark Nerys, Anna Grey, and Ryan Wilson Paulsen; thank you Micheal Martinez and Val Hardy; and thank you to those who came out to share a wonderful evening of discussion!

The Role of Geography in American Radicalism

I am here to share some of my research in the fields of human geography, cultural geography, and radical geography. As an artist I have been entirely self-taught in these fields, moving through readings encountered completely on my own, woven together in large part by isolate interpretation. This solitary method has afforded me a rich tapestry of understanding, yet I still happily acknowledge that I speak to you as no expert, I represent no particular academic field. However, I have developed an interest in the value of the discipline of critical human geography, because it is under this umbrella that I have found the most crucial examinations of power that I have ever read from within academic institutions.

I am not here to explain the radical movements upon which I would like to comment. Not only am I no expert in the field of geography, but I am certainly no expert in the social movements of the Wobblies, the Zapatistas, the Chicanos, or the American Indian Movement. Knowledge of these movements has come in very lightly through osmosis and independent research. I started my learning of radical history as a zine librarian in New York, where through ABC No Rio’s collection I came upon some primary texts from the Black Panthers. Again, this occurred most often in isolation, and is thus heavily filtered through my own ever-changing subjectivities. It must be stated outright that the most stable factor of my subjectivity is my whiteness. As a descendant of European immigrants to New York in the 1800’s, I have experienced four generations of the privilege of light skin in a nation formed by racism. I literally wrote chunks of this talk from an armchair. This potentially problematizes the brevity with which I speak of movements predominantly driven by people of color. I invite you to take note of these things as we go on.

I’m interested in speaking about geography because what has happened as geography has historically constituted many of the densest, most intrinsically socialized ways of seeing and thinking of the world in which we live, but also because things are happening within the discipline that are actively unmaking the power structures that affect us every day and at every level. Tonight I’ll maintain specific attention to issues of race and racism, because, as geographer Ruth Gilmore said this past winter “The twentieth century was completely shaped by racism, both its implementation and the fight against it.” This was the conclusion of a speech that she gave as a keynote to the last meeting of the American Association of Geographers, at which she spoke on a panel of other scholar-activists. It is worth remembering that we are only twelve years into the twenty-first century, and we have yet to identify a large-scale unequivocal epistemological break from the power structures of racism and imperialism.

The movements upon which I have chosen to comment are concentrated in North America from the beginning through the end of the 20th century. Despite my lack of commentary on South American movements, I’ve decided somewhat tenuously to use the phrase “America” in the title of this event because the movements reach across hemispheres and across time. The phrase the Americas also relies on a bifurcation of the world into North and South, which is a geographical imaginary that orders the world in keeping with hierarchies of power. To define my terms here, a geographical imaginary is a taken-for-granted spatial ordering of the world. I remember when I first saw a map of the world that did not include political borders. I was completely surprised, and I actually felt my conception of the world shifting in my mind. This shift occurred because political borders were a part of my geographical imaginary - I had taken them for granted as facts of space.

The construction of race as we know it today can trace part of its heritage to the description of space in Enlightenment geography. Immanuel Kant, the profoundly influential Enlightenment philosopher, delivered more lectures on geography than on any other subject. His formulation of geographical space was composed by racializing “the two primary forms of geographical knowledge, that of ‘space’ by asserting the relative position of persons of various skin colours across the surface of the earth, and that of ‘place’ by establishing what kinds of human landscapes ...are most civilized.” I just quoted from Audrey Kobayashi, the president of the American Association of Geographers, who contends that space as an unquestioned phrase and concept for geographers has to be reconsidered according to its fundamental relation to Enlightenment notions of human differentiation.

Tim Ingold is a social anthropologist who writes extensively on the relation between human beings and their environments. In his essay Against Space, he describes how the very notion of space, rather than place, is the result of a dense compartmentalization of life. He links this to transport, which is different from wayfaring. In transport, I get on the plane in New York and arrive six hours later in Portland. What happens in between has no relation to movement, let alone place. I have no understanding of where I am except through the strangely picturesque scene outside my window or the image of a map on my personal in-flight Television. So I relegate my understanding of geographical places to the map as points existing in space, space being, in this example, the 6 hours of placeless time on the plane. This way of moving is in direct opposition to wayfaring, which would be tied to place, in which I walk from my house to the PNCA campus, moving through weather, across terrain, and in relation to my environment. The conception of being epitomized in the concept of space is essentially modular and compartmentalized. It is modular because I can move from place to place without feeling like I am moving along terrain. This way of thinking can also be seen in the way we relate to mapping more and more in our everyday lives. Think about how the map and the territory function together when I hold google maps in my hand or drive around with a GPS. What I move through, what I drive through, is a blank space in between points a and b.

The idea of blank space is one that characterized the implementation of settler colonialism that changed America forever. The “New World,” as this hemisphere is still sometimes called today, had to be conceptualized as blank space in order to be opened up to colonialism. This neutralizes the agency and sovereignty of the already-established civilizations that were present. I suspect that this conceptualization had much to do with the Occidental cartographer’s eye, from which America had to be drawn as if out of nothing, on the blank page. The conceptualization of space-as-nothing or tabula rasa is absolutely fundamental to the popular understanding of the world in which we live today. The practice of erasing bodies and prefiguring oppression by designating places as spaces reached a high point in the mythos of United States history during the 19th-century period of manifest destiny. “The West” was mythologized as empty space. This is closely tied to the idea of “wilderness.” The US Government sent countless geological surveys crawling over the territory stretching out to the Pacific Ocean who came back with careful cartographies of space. The land was parceled into squares and offered up to white settlers. This was part of a still-ongoing project of organizing space and eradicating native people. This period of time in the 19th century, this nation-building ideology, and this pictographic way of conceptualizing and creating space has become my area of interest over the past year and will be the subject of my study beyond this talk tonight. This time period, during which the Industrial Revolution wrote itself across the American landscape most heavily through the mining and railroad industries, was a crucial moment for several of the radical movements I’ll briefly go through tonight. The International Workers of the World began organizing in 1905 in Chicago. Their goal was to establish one big labor union that would eventually dismantle the wage labor system for a worker-owned system in its place. Known then as the Wobblies, The IWW is still based in Chicago with offices around the country. However, the history of the IWW is periodized in such a way that the Wobblies are always referred to in the past tense, having been effectively disbanded the when union leadership was illegalized by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1950. Regardless, the Wobblies were a massive and highly mobile organization, sending representatives wherever there was need for unionization. A large faction of the Wobblies organized right here in the Pacific Northwest around the lumber industry. Wobblies were known for being all-inclusive, defining themselves as workers and constituting the only labor-rights group of its time that included women, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans, and all nationalities of European immigrants. The Wobblies self-published and performed huge strikes that changed the structure of labor in the United States, now wrongly historicized as having been the decision of so-called progressive industry barons.

In the West, the Wobblies often dealt with the fight for the rights of migratory laborers who often had to live in company labor camps to work. Not so different from the Mexican immigrants who comprise a large portion of the workforce of agribusiness in places like California right now. When the workers tried to organize in a union, they were promptly kicked out of the labor camps. IWW organizers were also cleared out of the streets by liberal legislation which ensured that free speech was still technically legal but could be forced out of the street by police on the basis of trivialities. We still see that kind of governance in the streets today at the public organizations of the Occupy Wall Street movement that this library is a part of. Like OWS, the IWW built an encampment, the largest one being in Sacramento outside of the capital buildings of California. While this encampment was dispersed by government hands, IWW camps continued to pop up across the landscape of the West.

This practice of seizing land and creating encampments is necessitated because juridico-political power forces people into exile by defining places in exclusion of them. This is a geographical issue. The response, to redefine an area in practice, is to embody a critique which is essentially geographical in nature -- it identifies the unjust frameworks along which spaces and places are produced, and then promptly overturns them.

During the height of Wobbly organization in 1923, Native Americans still did not have United States citizenship and were blocked from obtaining it as European immigrants could --- it was in 1924 that the Indian Citizenship “granted” that to Native Americans. In the system of land allotment, native North American tribes were forced to privatize their land and assimilate into the now ubiquitous system of property. The Indian Reorganization act of 1934, which ostensibly restored a degree of sovereignty to Native Nations within the reservation system, was signed when the process of allotment had already privatized two-thirds of Native American land, most of which was sold out of Native control.

To reclaim the land itself has been a driving impetus of the American Indian Movement which was most active in the 1960’s and 70’s. Dennis Banks, the founding member of the American Indian Movement, found inspiration to organize when he heard of the Black Panther movement, among others, during a nine month sentence in solitary confinement at Stillwater prison. During AIM’s early years, the group engaged in multiple forms of direct action, including things as small but symbolic as intervening on the production of a racist high school Thanksgiving play forty years ago. AIM was eventually called upon by the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge Reservation to stage the very prominent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee in 1973. The American Indian Movement had been banned on Pine Ridge by a corrupt leader Dick Wilson. Wilson was endorsed and protected by the Special Operations of the US government when AIM leader Russel Means was said to be on his way to the reservation. The US Government’s direct involvement and control over the territories of the Native American reservations, which are supposed to be sovereign, demonstrates a nexus of colonial power that is active every day. Right now. Many Native American Reservations are sites of institutionalized racism and are an example of the crime of apartheid in the United States. I’d like to make an aside right now to say that at the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the United States refused to sign a law making apartheid illegal. This was the same year of AIM’s occupation of the town of Wounded Knee. AIM took the symbolic meaning of this town, and staged an occupation that was historically resonant with the infamous massacre of 300 Lakota Sioux at the site in 1890 by the US Military. This is considered historically to be the last battle of the American Indian War. AIM also organized at this site to create a platform from which to force negotiations with the government. They sought to impeach corrupt tribal leader Dick Wilson and abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a fundamentally racist government arm used toward the systemic oppression of Native people. In the 71 days of the occupation, countless standoffs and negotiations occurred between the US Government and AIM. At the end of the occupation in May 1973, many AIM leaders were put in jail and the bunkers from which they staged their siege were burned down. The town was returned to tourism. However, the stand at Wounded Knee in 1973 is a strong, brave and vibrant example of the establishment of autonomous territory. This moment can resonate across time not only because it echoes through a past of hundreds of years of oppression, but because the gesture can be a source of learning and inspiration for radical organizations for years to come. It is a testimony to the influence and power of AIM that the government reacted so harshly, even enlisting the illegal use of the military. The positive testimony of power is the establishment of the Lakota Sioux struggle in the public eye of the United States from which Native history had been routinely and systematically erased. The struggle for Native justice has been fabricated by history as one that is closed, over, dealt with, in the past. It is our national responsibility to refuse to be complicit in the propagation of these histories that are, to put it simply, wrong. Not just because they are not true, but because they are unjust, and they structure a world that naturalizes systemic violence.

I’d like to state here that just because many of my small historical summaries note radical events that took place between 15 and 90 years ago does not mean that these movements do not have contemporary continuations, iterations, and corollaries. We are, after all, gathered together in a people’s library. We are talking about our radical heritage. We are talking about our radical present.

The Chicano movement, another movement for Native rights, reached its height in the decade preceding the American Indian Movement. Considered by some to be an extension of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1940’s, the Chicano Movement cited much earlier origins, hundreds of years old, beginning with the Spanish colonization of Native Mexicans and continuing with the annexation of Mexican lands by the US government at the end of the Mexican American war in 1848. The end of the Mexican American war and the taking of Mexican land stretching from California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Arizona, to New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Wyoming changed the landscape of the Western region of this part of the continent from Mexican land to US territory overnight. At that time, Mexico had only held freedom from Spanish colonialism for 25 years.

The United States issued the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the time of annexation to grant Mexican peoples freedom to their property, including their land, as well as U.S. citizenship. However, the treaty was usually not honored in the United States as racism and the engine of white migration pushed Westward to the Pacific. More than one hundred years later, after longstanding oppression and marginalization of Mexican people on land seized from them by war, Reies Lopes Tijerina rose as a key figure at the beginning of the Chicano movement. Tijerina’s focus as an activist was on the land grants and treaties broken by the US Government. He organized an occupation of part of the Carson National Forest in Northern New Mexico in 1966. The land rightfully belonged to the Chicano descendants of Mexican peoples to whom an older Spanish land grant was addressed. When forest park rangers came to try and remove the occupation, which occurred under the auspices of Tijerina’s Alianza, the Alliance, Chicanos staged the rangers’ arrests.

AIM leader Clyde Bellecourt’s refrain, spoken ten years later, comes to mind: ��We’re the landlords of this country, the rent is due, and we’re here to collect!”

Independence activists organized at the Chicano Youth Liberation conference in Denver, Colorado in March of 1969, where the poet Alurista presented the work Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán. This poem became profoundly significant to the movement because it envisioned a homeland. Aztlán is the name Alurista gave to the territory that was annexed by the US government in 1848. El Plan de Aztlán, a manifesto of the Chicano movement, outlined a nationalist agenda for la raza, the Chicano people, to declare their sovereignty in the land of Aztlán. This new mythology, grounded in ancient Aztec mtyh, established a landscape of liberation. To envision land is to reaffirm the fact that one belongs in place. To be without a homeland, dispossessed of our right to be somewhere, is to be robbed of our livelihoods. This is what colonization has done to native people across America for hundreds of years to this day. And this is what happens every time I pay rent to my landlord, albeit in a much smaller and significantly different way.

The creation of twice-colonized and racialized bodies by overlapping patterns of colonization necessitated a re-envisioning of an American landscape in order to create a place among the spaces of governmental exclusion. The imaginative landscape of Aztlán is sovereign from both the United States and Mexico. It is a land of la Raza, the people. To envision a homeland amidst dense and hundred-year-old layers of imperial oppression, territorialization, description and control, is a radical act and a direct intervention with the geographies of power.

Indeed, the creation of symbolic landscapes, has been examined in the discourse of geography as something quite everyday; in fact, we imagine landscapes into being all the time. That is how landscapes are formed. To quote the late geographer Denis Cosgrove, “landscapes emerge from specific geographical, social and cultural circumstances.” What geographers have been examining since the 80’s is in large part this social formation of symbolic landscape -- not only to study the geography in itself, but also the way that it is examined, the way that it is constructed, and the way that it is lived.

Within the Chicano movement there was a repeated call for the institution of a Chicano nationalism, of which the creation of Aztlán as an imaginary landscape was a part. Subcomandante Marcos, the leading figure of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, has stated in his wide array of publications that nationalism is a key component to the Zapatista rebellion. The Zapatistas, as many of us know, are an indigenous rebellion that began on January 1st, 1994. This was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Among many things, NAFTA cancelled Article 27 of Mexico's constitution, the cornerstone ofEmiliano Zapata's revolution of 1910–1919. It was Article 27 that protected Indian communal landholdings from sale or privatization. Through NAFTA, the Indian communal landholdings were considered a barrier to free trade investment. The Zapatista uprising that began in 1994 took their name in honor of Emiliano Zapata and sought independence for Native people in Chiapas, and, through solidarity, for oppressed peoples around the world. The Zapatistas have instituted autonomous zones all over Chiapas that are active today.

When asked about his use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism” in much of his writings from the Zapatista rebellion, Subcomandante Marcos replied "When we speak of the nation we are speaking of history, of a history of common struggle with historical references that make us brothers to one group of people without distancing us from other groups". Known for his poetic provocations, Marcos has written of a world in which a plurality of worlds can be present, in resistance to a hegemonic worldview instituted by notions of capitalist progress, which say that the world is one singular narrative landscape. The word "nationalism" is fraught with complication, but search for rebel nationalism can be seen as a tactic for building a world and weaving together a landscape in which communities can live and thrive. That differs from the landscapes created by power, in which entire peoples are excluded, erased from geographic narrative, and systematically oppressed.

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