. . . a guest blog by Amman Desai of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition
As the world entered a new age in the Mayan calendar, thousands of Zapatistas silently descended from their communities and marched into the towns of Chiapas, donning their famous pasamontañas and paliacates around their necks, reigniting the hope many of us had felt since their inception in 1994. “Did you hear it?” a Marcos communiqué asked. “It’s the sound of their world ending. It’s that of ours resurging.”
The excitement of the Zapatista’s silent march, a deft display of political theater, reignited my own commitments to seeking justice along the US/Mexico border and put into conversation three seemingly disparate but political contiguous happenings of 2012: NAFTA’s 10 year anniversary of being signed, Barack Obama’s successful bid for reelection, and the Zapatista’s silent march.
The US’s beloved Barack Obama has made more waves with his rendition of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” than with his immigration policy. Perhaps he’d rather have it that way, since this Nobel prize-winning president has been responsible for more deportations than any president ever before.
At the same time, Obama continues to pursue the ends of NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement. Since its inception on January 1st, 1994, NAFTA has deepened the chasm between the US/Mexico agricultural economies and displaced small farmers (many of whom cross the US/Mexico border in search of better paying work and end up being deported).
January 1st, 1994 is also politically salient for another reason, and it’s no coincidence. It’s the day that the Zapatistas officially declared war on the Mexican government, criticizing its inability to act on the will of the people and simultaneously critiquing NAFTA for the horrific implications it had on Mexico’s small and indigenous farmers.
So what does this cycle of cause, effect, and punishment have to do with non-human animals? Plenty, in fact.
Live animals and meat make up a staggering $4.5 billion of US trade through NAFTA. NAFTA is nothing more than a tool of economic expediency – it helps mobilize capital faster than ever. And as Nicole Shukin might remind us, the question of the animal and capital are not independent, but rather mutually constitutive. And she’s right, NAFTA has not only seen a surge of importation and exportation of alive and dead animal bodies across the US/Mexico border, it has also witnessed a boom in the US food and agricultural industry.
Free trade has opened up the channels for US based companies to expand their markets and export their business across the border. The first Mexican McDonalds set up shop in 1985; today, there are over 500 McDonald’s across the country, where one can trade the standard McMuffin for McMolletes. Both McMuffins and McMolletes feature factory farmed meat, both of them trickle pennies back up into the pockets of a few people who do business in exploitation.
The opening of the US/Mexico border for select capital has meant huge opportunities for big businesses that can now profit from political and economic differences. For companies like Tyson, which have been profiting off animal slaughter for decades, this meant the opening of up of new markets and the opportunity to avoid US environmental regulations.
In his article on swine flu, Al Giordano traces the emergence of swine flu from the US, across the border to Mexico. While many pounced on the opportunity to advance xenophobic political projects within the US by blaming Mexico for the outbreak, Giordano traced the flu’s origin back to the US. – the outbreak came from a factory farm in Mexico that was owned and operated by Smithfield, a US-based animal agricultural behemoth.
Following a record-breaking $12.5 million lawsuit in 1985 for polluting waterways, Smithfield was able to escape US environmental regulations by moving some of their factories outside of the US. As Giordano notes, “none of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate…and threatens to become international pandemic…Welcome to the aftermath of ‘free trade.’ The real name of this infirmity is ‘The NAFTA Flu,’ the first of what may well be many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws”
We are living the shadow of the animal industrial complex. Last year, some 50 billion land and sea animals were killed for human consumption in the US. One cannot simply go into the wild and kill 50 billion animals to feed a nation. It takes several countries to feed one with such bloated and blind consumption as the US. It takes a system for producing, reproducing, and transporting the thighbones and breastmeat and rumps of those beings we call animals. Following Ford’s example, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations have transformed the factory into its most precise and economically successful incarnations, building upon animals as its cogs.
My point here is to problematize the political and economic power relations that are shifted by the border and to expose how border politics advance the interests of the industrialized animal agriculture sector. That’s why a transnational animal liberation movement is needed now, more than ever.
This April, the Justice sin Barrerras tour will embark on a 14-stop tour across Mexico, delivering over 40 presentations to animal rights supporters and activists from coast to coast. Almost certainly, this tour will be an important historic moment in the timeline of the modern animal rights movement, marking perhaps the first truly transnational grassroots collaboration in the movement. And while we can only hope that this campaign acts as the catalyst to bring transnational consciousness to the animal rights movement, we can at least take the time to reflect on the opportunities that such an event might offer us. I must admit my contribution to this project has been limited to this article, but I want to offer my humble hopes for the ways in which the effects of this tour will manifest:
1. Highlight intersectionality:
Already, feminists in particular have done a good job of articulating the simultaneously invested political projects of animal liberation and feminism. Environmentalists have also done similarly. However, a consciousness of animals surrounding state politics has yet to be clearly delineated. A cross-border collaboration invites such an exciting premise.
2. Build transnational analysis:
The mainstream animal rights movement continues to take its philosophical and social cues from the global north. This is not to underscore the immensely important contributions that people outside of these borders have made in building movements and developing alternative philosophical arguments around the animal. However, the mainstream discourse around animal rights is largely Eurocentric and continues to export itself around the world through imperial access to power. Transnational analysis and work in feminism was instrumental in helping third world womyn of color feminism achieve its supple and nuanced foundation. Such a horizontal stretching of coalition building has the possibility to bring similar things to animal rights.
3. Confront colonialism
Undoubtedly, one of the greatest contributors to dominant discourses on animals is colonialism. Colonialism and its various technologies (among which NAFTA is definitely one) have succeeded in producing very particular geographies of power in human-animal relations. These geographies have been used to legitimize deeply oppressive systems of power, both between humans and animals, and humans and othered/racialized communities. A decolonial approach to animal justice, then, may serve as an important tool in rethinking the animal. That is, an unlearning of the animal as we know it, and a building of knowledge around indigenous/third-world approaches to the animal may rescue the movement from its imperialist suggestions and provide new answers to envisioning the human-animal.
4. Prioritizing anti-racism
Almost three years ago I interned at an animal rights organization and left the experience completely frustrated with the whiteness of the organization. But it soon became evident to me that this wasn’t just a problem of this non-profit, but of the movement in general. This isn’t to suggest that animal liberation is a white idea. But rather, the rhetoric and epistemology that govern the movement are tinged by the post-racial brand of racism. In a transnational coalition that runs across racial difference, an expressedly anti-racist politic is not only obvious, it is necessary. This opportunity to articulate anti-racism and animal justice within the same conversation can maybe help open a similar dialogue we’ve been refusing to have in the states.
I realize that to think about the border is to, at first, recognize it as real. This ran contrary to the political poster emblazoned on my bedroom wall from where I write, one that reads “My body is indigenous land…THERE ARE NO BORDERS.” But it is only from a position of acknowledging the immense power and privilege that borders signify, that we begin the messy work of envisioning a utopian future beyond borders. What that utopian vision is, I’m still unsure, but one thing I can be sure of is that no Shangri-La of mine harbors neither human nor animal oppression.