Many of those who stopped by were eager to learn about something rarely mentioned in the Mexican press: there is working-class resistance within the United States to the bosses’ offensive on wages and living and working conditions.

Many appreciated the articles in the Militant and its sister publication in Spanish Perspective Mundial (PM) about the 15-month-long struggle of Co-Op miners in Utah to win union representation. Forty-seven copies and seven subscriptions to PM were sold, along with 14 copies of the Militant—nearly double the number at last year’s fair.

Another indication of the interest in U.S. politics was the fact that 42 copies of the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes were sold. This booklet approaches education from the working-class point of view—as a social question, as the fight for the transformation of learning into a universal and lifetime activity. It also explains how schools under capitalism in the United States and beyond are institutions of social control, and how the obedience and deference the rulers seek to inculcate in the classroom are backed up on the streets by the cops’ clubs and automatic weapons and in the prisons by longer sentences and brutality.

Luis Ortíz, a high school teacher who bought this pamphlet two years ago, came back this time to buy five more copies. He also bought three copies of the book Cuba and the Coming American Revolution and two yearlong subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial to share and study with his students.

“I can’t stand the game being played in the schools, where kids are there just to be disciplined, to stand at attention and salute,” he said. “Students are affected by the class struggle. That’s why I’m buying these books, to help advance their understanding of this.”

Some workers and young people came to the stand looking for books that could help strengthen their struggles against the unrelenting attacks on Mexican workers’ wages, conditions of work, and social services.

Looking over the books stacked up at the front of the stand, they often reached for Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Barnes, which analyzes the international capitalist crisis and the independent action needed by workers and farmers to confront it. Nineteen copies of this book were sold.

Elías Carmen, a worker at a U.S.-owned computer plant of 4,000, told volunteers at the Pathfinder booth that he was looking for books that would shed light on how to organize a union at his plant. He came to the stand twice, purchasing Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, which was available at the fair for the first time in Spanish, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions, and several books by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Leon Trotsky.

During the fair, a “labor reform” law was under discussion in Mexico’s parliament. The bill places limitations on the right to strike, restricts the right to organize new unions, and allows for probation periods lasting from 30 days to six months—during which workers can be terminated without any severance pay.

If passed, the legislation will also strengthen the ability of employers to lay off workers at will and use temporary agencies to avoid paying benefits.

“They increase the hours any time they want, they change our schedule at will, from days to nights, and they only hire you for a few months,” Moisés Rubio told Pathfinder booth volunteers, referring to a temp agency that provides workers for a British-owned plant. Rubio, who gets work through this agency, said he earns 500 pesos ($44) per week.

“A real attraction that hooked people in was that they were talking with people who were part of unions and working-class movements in the U.S.,” said Michael Ortega, a Young Socialist from Newark, New Jersey, who helped at the Pathfinder stand. Volunteers staffing the booth also came from Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Seattle.

Upon seeing the large poster of Thomas Sankara, the central leader of the revolution in Burkina Faso in the early 1980s, many asked who he was. Eleven bought the new Spanish-language edition of We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions and 10 bought Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle—both by Sankara.

Books on the Cuban Revolution were among the best sellers. Che Guevara Talks to Young People topped the list with 65 copies sold. Twelve people bought Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, Pathfinder’s newest title on the revolutionary movement that led to the overthrow of the U.S-backed dictatorship in the Caribbean nation in 1959.

Several publishing houses from Cuba occupied a large stand at the fair, which was always crowded. Many titles were on display. They included books on Cuban history, novels, and poetry, as well as posters, CDs, and videos. The last day of the fair, more than 60 people attended a discussion organized by the Cuban publishers of a new biography of Fidel Castro’s youth, Todo el tiempo de los cedros by Katiuska Blanco. Blanco, a Cuban author, was in Angola as a correspondent for the Cuban daily Granma when Cuban troops participated in defending Angola against invasions of the country by the army of the apartheid regime in South Africa.  
 
Largest book fair
The Guadalajara Book Fair, which is held every year in Mexico’s second largest city, is the biggest such event in the Spanish-speaking world. This year over 1,500 publishers from 38 countries filled the giant exhibition center. More than 450,000 people attended the fair, including many elementary and high school students.

Three days were set aside during the fair for those involved in the book trade to carry out business. Volunteers at the Pathfinder booth took advantage of this time to inform bookstore representatives, books distributors, and librarians of the hundreds of titles in English, Spanish, French, and other languages listed in the publisher’s catalog and on its web site, www.pathfinderpress.com

The fair also included dozens of panel discussions, book launchings, and workshops. These included a panel on Como ves? El aborto (Abortion, How Do You See It?) by Gabriela Rodríguez Ramírez, a member of Planned Parenthood International. This new book contains information on methods of birth control and abortion.

Abortion is not legal in Mexico except in cases of rape or to save the life of the woman. Supporters of decriminalization of abortion were gratified that at last the issue was being taken up openly at the fair. “It is a class question,” said one of the panelists, Juan Manuel Valero. “There are women who are Catholic who don’t die from abortions because they have money to pay, while thousands who can’t afford a safe abortion die.”

Como ves? El aborto states that 17 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, a procedure often performed in Latin America under unsafe and painful conditions. An estimated 1,500 women die each year in Mexico from illegal abortions and 100,000 are hospitalized.

Betsey Stone, one of the volunteers at the Pathfinder booth who participated in the struggle to decriminalize abortion in the United States, pointed out during the discussion that the struggle to establish a woman’s right to choose abortion is a fundamental part of the fight for women’s equality. “If you don’t have control over your own body, over whether or when to have children, you cannot be equal in any area, including on the job,” Stone said. Attacks on the right to choose in the United States today are part of broader attacks on the working class, she said, with employers seeking to bring down the wages and working conditions of all workers.

Sales of books on the fight for women’s equality were high at the Pathfinder booth. Erlinda Loera, an adult education teacher who bought Marianas In Combat, Abortion Is A Woman’s Right, and several books by Bolshevik leaders Leon Trotsky and V.I. Lenin, said that with more women joining the workforce she sees significant advances by Mexican women today. Loera said she traveled 10 hours on a bus to visit the Pathfinder booth.

A discussion of Images and Symbols of ’68, a new book by Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Pérez Vega about the Oct. 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City by the army and police, attracted 70 mostly young people. The student movement of l968 culminated in a national student strike and mobilized thousands of students in demonstrations demanding social justice and an end to police brutality and repression of political activity.

Many of the photographs published in the book were released from government archives closed to the public up until recently. Other pictures have been held by individuals who felt intimidated from making them public because the photos confirm the responsibility of police, army, and government officials for the massacre.

During the fair protesters gathered outside the exposition center with signs demanding freedom for prisoners who were arrested during and after a May 28, 2004, protest at the summit of heads of governments of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the European Union held in Guadalajara.

The protest coincided with the release of a report by Amnesty International calling for an investigation into the May 28 arrests of more than 100 people, including the beating of many. “The way in which many of the arrests were made, the treatment received by those arrested, the complaints of torture and ill-treatment and the lack of an independent investigation brings into doubt the criminal proceedings being implemented,” the statement said.

Pathfinder volunteers at the fair encountered two protests in downtown Guadalajara by farmers hard hit by low prices for their products and seizures of their land by banks and other financial institutions.

On December 6 a group of 100 farmers and their supporters, organized by the Central Campesina Cardenista, closed down the building housing the state congress. Holding corn stalks and picket signs calling for “fair prices for farmers” and “land for those who work and produce,” the farmers demanded that the Jalisco state government comply with existing agreements to turn over to peasants more than 75,000 acres of land.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home