Chicory Center: wild turkeys in the mist

On-the-Fly Farms Update #6

September 10, 2004

Greetings from Bridgman, Michigan, home to the burgeoning tomato
hornworm population, and the aroma of roasting coffee emanating from
the Bean Boss, a standard American grill retooled to turn a big steel
drum full of five pounds of green coffee beans.

You know the old adage, about when you are starting a radical retreat
center and anarchist-oriented organic farm and you are sending out
periodic updates, you should mix up the tone of those updates from
time to time? Yeah, that old adage. Well, Update #6 exposes
the unseemly side of Chicory Center and On-the-Fly Farms, and
to some degree touches upon issues of class and race. To protect the
innocent (yours truly), let's just say that some of the details below
are 'fictional.'

So it was a late Friday afternoon early in September, the sun was
shimmering through the hundred-year old trees around the house and
barn, and I was out in the garage roasting coffee in the Bean Boss
and the Aerorost roasters. Listening to Springsteen's 1973 album The
Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle blaring from the tinny
broken speakers in my little white car backed up to the garage with
the hatchback open. I lazed around on the couches in the garage
living room setting, brushing the spiders off now and again,
listening for the first crackle of the beans. Drinking Wild Turkey
101, I was relaxing from another week of maybe 80 hours of work, a
pause before the weekend's work of harvesting produce to deliver to
the city and a dozen visitors.

Somehow that early Springsteen, like some of the more recent
Springsteen (Ghost of Tom Joad, title taken from Steinbeck's saga
about the Depression-era Oklahoma dustbowl), is like a salve for
tired muscles. Where The Doors at the time sang of surreal collegiate
angst a la Nietzsche, Springsteen brought a working-class perspective
alongside an equally surreal vision. And
sang of workers' struggles not just as an observer, but as a
participant with a vision that included radical dock workers and
Black Panthers conspiring "to someday own the rodeo" ("Does This Bus
Stop at 82nd Street?" from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.).
That rodeo reference reminded me of the bonafide cowboys who show up
on Saturday mornings at the nearby Schmaltzes' farm, which is where
we get the steer shit that will become next week's tomato. On a
recent Saturday, the cowboy Johnny walked around with his arms
crossed, bleary-eyed at 8 a.m. We loaded my pickup truck with a
mountain of manure, a pitchfork full thumping against the rear window
now and again, and standing atop that mountain that smelt of fine
Turkish tobacco, it looked like a big mechanical camel, with truck as
body and steer shit for a hump. I jumped down and asked Johnny, who
was not a big talker, how much shit he thought that was. He squinted
his eyes, furrowed his brow, the works, and after a while said "I'd
say about a ton and a half."

Unclear on the math because I was pretty bleary too, I did realize
that one and a half tons is more than 3/4 tons, the capacity of the
truck, so I said to Johnny, "Do you think that's too much for the
truck?"

Johnny sauntered round to the side of the truck again, thought for a
minute, looked, squinted, the works, then said, "So long as the wheel
wells ain't touchin' the wheels, you'll be alright."

Another cowboy got there. He and Johnny stood next to each other,
sort of wondering who I was, what I was about, I suppose. Silent for
awhile, expressionless, they began to speak in short sentences, very
oblique, and only minutes after each utterance did I realize, they
were saying these hilarious jokes and puns, just at a real slow pace,
almost undetected.

In a song called "Lost in the Flood," also from Asbury Park, Bruce
Springsteen sings of a very particular madness sweeping through the
streets of the U.S. in the early '70s, at the height of the Vietnam
war and Nixon's domestic War on the Poor. A Black veteran returns to
Jersey, starts racing Sundays in a Chevy stock super eight, "while
everybody's wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood."
Empty, desolate, revered, Jimmy the Saint rides off into the horizon
in a race, crashes into that violent tide sweeping this violent land,
smashing his car, his body, his life.

Faulkner-like, the song jump shifts to the point of view of an
onlooker, whose poverty tells him to look for parts of the wreck,
"but there's nothin' left that you could sell/just junk all across
the horizon, a real highwayman's farewell. And I said 'Hey kid, you
think that's oil? Man, that ain't oil that's blood,'" a
prognostication of the wars the U.S. government has visited now on an
increasing number of countries.

So I am thinking about all that as I listen to the roasters turn
those Zapatista coffee beans, thinking about the drag racing we did
out on the bypass around South Bend, Indiana back in the day,
thinking about this 1977 monster 3/4 ton pickup truck sitting in
front of me, and notice that the temperature has plummeted inside the
Bean Boss; Fuck! gotta get to the gas station two miles away and
exchange the propone tank in a hurry, so those beans don't wreck. I
jump into the little white car, and race downtown, and just as I am
about to turn in to the gas station, the trooper behind me turns on
his flashing lights. I think, man, this is really going to slow
things down; I breathe heavily to try to get some of the Wild Turkey
aroma to dissipate [remember, parts of this are 'fictional'].
The trooper asks for my license and registration, and I'm still
listening to Bruce and directing the flow of my breath downwards, and
now I am also thinking of the song "Mister State Trooper" from the
Nebraska album. I sit there facing the glaring sun, glancing in my
mirror at the cop, wishing he'd pick up the pace. After five minutes,
he brings my license back, says "Do you know your brake light is
out?" I say, "I had no idea, I'll fix that first thing in the
morning, thanks, bye." Off he goes, off I go to get the propane.
Aware that if I'd been Driving While Black, things might not have
gone so smoothly, I feel a combination of anger and relief. What is a
privilege ought to be a right.

I zip back home, and hook up the propane and fire up the Bean Boss
and the beans are saved from destruction, and my mind turns to
Springsteen's late '70s Darkness on the Edge of Town album. My
thought process is so literal sometimes, maybe my mind turned simply
because this farm is on the Edge of Town, and as the sun was setting
there was an increasing Darkness. Who can say.

Backing the car up to the garage, I opened the trunk to hear the
tinny speakers, and the tape flipped to the other side. A fan of
bizarre juxtapositions, the other side of the Springsteen tape is Don
Cherry, the trumpet player who made his name initially in Ornette
Coleman's wild, unprecedented late '50s free jazz experiments, a
music that appears intimately linked with the growing consciousness
of the need for action against racial oppression, and the need for
new voices, new structures of thought and struggle. A prognostication
of the civil and human rights uprisings soon to follow.

The Wild Turkey flew a bit more into my mouth and down through my
veins. I'd spent some time that morning communing with this family of
wild turkeys, real birds, out in the next field over. For some reason
the turkeys didn't realize I was a real person (meaning, A REAL
THREAT; there's A LOT of guns out here, including assault weapons [or
'menacing-looking weapons,' as the gun shop owners prefer to call
them]), and I crouched low to the ground. The baby turkeys
now-turning-adolescent continued to peck at the ground around me,
ever closer. They have different personalities. Their bland dishwater
gray-brown colorings are changing into the brilliant colors of the
mature turkey, with fire-engine red cheeks and ten shades of purple
spreading across their rumps and backs. Maybe they thought I was a
scarecrow or something, I don't know why. I decided to scare them
off, for if they get too used to being around us who hold menacing
weapons, they will likely get shot down this fall.

The coffee roasting continued into the night, and the Wild Turkey
continued to crack off the intensity of the week's work like chaff
from a roasting coffee bean, and friends from Stone Soup South pulled
up sometime, and we roasted beans and played guitars and trumpets and
a melodica named 'pianica,' and a bat came and flew around the garage
living room and I didn't even scream. And I think that if I had a
religion it would be to gather people together for food, song, and
dance.

If I had to tie things up in a conclusion to this Update #6, I would
say something about innocence, hunger, wildness, and violence.
Something about the innocence of youth and the hunger for experience
and for life and freedom, the hunger for a world free of torture and
abuse, innocence and hunger which if we keep them alive and healthy
keep us young even though chronologically aging. Wildness is
something I see in nature all round, including human nature if we let
it, and that wildness does not have to continue to devolve into the
violence that is so much a part of the history of this continent for
a bit over 500 years now. Clearly we live in a time where our choices
about how to live and what to do and how to abolish the shackles of
race, class, and gender, the works, are vitally important.
Well I'll fire this off before I turn editor. So long from Bridgman,
Michigan, 15 miles from Benton Harbor.

Food, song, dance; and action.
-David

Chicory Center, 2004: To attack food injustice, open doors to constructive, radical social action.

 

The anarchist Chicory Center was founded on April 30, 2004 to attack food injustice while opening doors to constructive, radical social action, growing out of a do-it-yourself ethic. The project serves as a nucleus for acting upon local and regional food and social justice issues from an anarchist perspective, while fostering self-sufficiency and community well-being. In practice, the project's On-the-Fly Farm serves to model a kind of solidarity that works closely with individuals, poor people, activists, organizations, and communities of color overcoming economic, social, and political oppressions. We believe in sustainable, democratically run food systems not controlled by the state, food systems that function independent of wealth and privilege.

Recognizing that capitalism and corporations like Whole Foods exist to profit the few and have no interest in making quality healthy food available and affordable to all, we work to support a grassroots, class-conscious, people-powered food justice movement. The role of the United States government in generating and maintaining non-democratic, non-participatory, and corporate-controlled food supplies and agricultural policies puts us all at risk of radical food insecurity. The USDA's corporatism makes even the minute trickle of research and funding directed towards supporting sustainable, community-powered agriculture appear as little more than a sugar-coating to keep non-profit, progressive, radical, and revolutionary critics silent or at bay. The Chicory Center and On-the-Fly Farm support flying in the face of conventional wisdom in an effort to show that people acting creatively, on their own initiative, can not only feed themselves but in that effort further the struggle for a just and liberated society.

At present, the Chicory Center runs On-the-Fly Farm, a 15-member Community Powered Agriculture project delivering fresh organic produce to weekly paying subscribers, while donating around 20% of our crop to support community organizations working for systemic change in Chicago. Our Resistance Coffee roasting project raises funds for groups ranging from Chicago's Latino Union, West Town Bikes, Radios Populares, and the Chicago Women's Health Center. We are also in the slow but steady process of forming a small farmers confederation in Southwest Michigan called Just Farming to promote small-scale organics with a focus on justice in the production, distribution, and consumption of healthy organic food. 

The Chicory Center also serves as a retreat available to poor people, activists, and artists. We are engaged in a unique process of experimenting with what a vital, coherent, healthy village might look like in these times - one that is inclusive, not exclusive.

Participate in the On-the-Fly Farms CSA!

[In the Spring of 2004, the Chicory Center rented a farm in Southwest Michigan, beginning to till the soil on April 30 of that year. By July 1, we were delivering produce to a dozen subscribers in Chicago . . . ]

By the seat of its pants, a small group of activists is starting the On-the-Fly Farm CSA. CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture, and means city people get to take a more active role in the production of their food, while supporting organic, sustainable practices. This could mean a thousand different things, and as On-the-Fly Farm is happening on the fly, we’ve only come up with a couple so far. New ideas are welcome, send them on!

One current option is this: On-the-Fly Farm is growing organic vegetables and fruits at its farm in Bridgeman Michigan. As those crops mature, we will get them to the city one way or another, and either deliver them to your door by bicycle, or you can pick them up. Pricing is subject to barter, trade, or some kind of work exchange. This informality is due to the farm’s on-the-fly nature, and to a desire to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism to the highest degree possible.

As planting is just now taking place, it will be at least several weeks before greens are available, and as the season progresses, many other crops will become available: carrots, tomatoes, blackberries, pumpkins, peppers, squash, melons, watermelons, beans, a hundred other veggies, some herbs, and even flowers!

What will be a unique addition to On-the-Fly’s offerings, will be fairly-traded, organic things, particularly those created principally through processes of mutual aid, co-operation, and liberation-seeking.

One of the fairly traded items, available now, is home-roasted coffee, roasted at On-the-Fly today, tomorrow, or whatever day you want it, the freshest coffee imaginable. Currently, green coffee beans are coming from the Mut Vitz Coop, a Zapatista project within the Autonomous Indigenous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico. The cost is $6 for a half-pound, $10 for a pound.

Also from Mut Vitz, available now, are 23 oz. jars of honey, made by bees feasting on the coffee flowers on the Zapatista coffee plants! Tasty. These are $7.

The other item, available now, is fairly-traded, organic olive oil from Palestine. This oil is a project of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC), which prioritizes purchasing oil from those farmers most affected by the construction of the apartheid wall, and those most affected by Israeli closure practices. This olive oil costs $15 for a 750 ml bottle, and is the tastiest olive oil! Part of the proceeds go to PARC’s Rural Women’s Development Project, and part to the Chicago chapter of the International Solidarity Movement, to help send a volunteer to Palestine.

In solidarity.

Visions for the Future of Vieques: Vacation Playground or People's Paradise?

 

Why Go to Vieques?

Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2001 23:33:19

I thought you'd like to know that I have decided to travel to Vieques in a day or two, to protest the U.S. Navy's presence on this tiny Puerto Rican island, and I'd like to tell you a little about why I've decided to go.

Everybody likes kids' art, right? The happy little houses, the bright sun, the green flora, the smiling fauna. Well, at an exhibition of art created by the children of Vieques, one finds all the usual images of the joy of childhood overshadowed by an additional element. Bombs, falling near those little houses.

On August 1, the U.S. Navy, along with other branches of the military, resumed its assault on a tropical jewel, the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Some 23,000 soldiers, marines, sailors are practicing an amphibious assault, supposedly with the intention of increasing battle-readiness, in preparation for such real-world attacks as the one on Kosovo in 1999, the devastating bombings of Iraq throughout the '90s, and other attacks conducted by a government increasingly out to flex its muscle, to show off its new world ordnance.

The Navy's practice sessions on Vieques are not new. Begun in 1941, they continue to this day. In April 1999, a civilian guard and Vieques resident, David Sanes, was killed by an errant Navy bomb; close attention to the island's history will show that he was not in fact the first Viequense to die due to the Navy's presence. [Please visit www.viequeslibre.org for more in-depth history.]

David Sanes' death refueled the urge to resist a colonial oppressor among the people of Vieques and Puerto Rico, a people for over 100 years subjected to the tyrannical rule of the United States government. A people portrayed for decades by their mainland rulers as passive, stoic, and resigned to a degrading condition have once again risen to show that, despite the blatant disregard shown by the U. S. government, they too will have a voice, will take and make their place in history.

I feel it is the responsibility of those concerned with human dignity and self-determination, particularly those of us who pay taxes that pay for the weaponry - the bombs, the helicopters, the aircraft carriers, the night vision gadgetry, the guns, the artillery, the insult - to stand by the side of our island neighbors.

On July 29, if there were any questions remaining about the will of the people of Vieques regarding the presence of the U.S. Navy on their land, the Viequenses voted by an overwhelming majority that they desire for the Navy to leave their island immediately, and for all lands seized by the Navy to be devolved [returned] to the municipality of Vieques.

In support of the democratic urge of the people of Vieques, I am traveling to the island, as an act of solidarity with the people of Vieques and Puerto Rico, seeking to help halt the disrespect shown by the U.S. government and military towards the human beings, the creatures, and the brilliant bioluminescent bays and coral reefs of Vieques. The U.S. government is grossly violating not only the will of its citizens, but the very notion of human dignity, of just action. Joining with others on the island, I will seek to contribute in the most effective ways that I can.

I am traveling with the tremendous encouragement and support of a great group of Catholic Workers in Ithaca. The Ithaca Catholic Worker Vieques Support Group is a community organization that works in solidarity with the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to end the U.S. Navy's bombing and polluting of their island through education and direct action campaigns.

Finding inspiration in the creativity and resilience shown by the people of Vieques; in the land-based struggle of the Zapatistas; from the Haymarket anarchists, the current anarchists of Chicago and the world over; from my companions at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago; from my family and friends; and also from the environment that produces the baby blue chickens' eggs on Vieques, and in the spirit of resistance and of life and love,

David Meyers

Chicago/Ithaca

________________

Back from Vieques

Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001

This is just a quick email to say that I am back in New York, after a brief yet intense journey to Vieques. In a nutshell, I arrived on the island at dawn Wednesday morning, and walked the streets of the town of Isabel Segunda as redheaded roosters crowed from the tops of trees. The town was a veritable billboard for peace, with posters in a bakery extolling the results of the referendum of two weeks ago, and with wheatpasted signs, graffiti, soaped car windows, and chalk drawings all over town, all referring to "No. 2" - the referendum option chosen by nearly 70% of the residents, calling on the Navy to leave immediately. I then sat outside a town museum overlooking the harbor, watching as a massive Navy battleship steamed westward, towards Roosevelt Roads Naval Base on mainland Puerto Rico, I assumed. I had not slept in 24 hours, and was preparing mentally to enter the bombing range.

A few hours later I met with my contact person, a fisherman who is at the heart of the movement to free the island from Navy assaults. He told me that the Navy had announced to the media that bombings were to cease (for this two-week session) that very day, and that the movement was not sending any more protesters onto the bombing range. [Upon my return to Chicago in September, Jose Lopez told a large gathering at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center that my efforts had lead to the bombing ceasing for those two weeks. "Kudos." High praise indeed.] Evidently, the Navy has been getting rougher with the protesters, including with the religious delegation which had gone onto the range the day before, and he did not want to send in protesters alone.

My contact said the most effective thing those in the U.S. can be do right now is organize more people to go to Vieques for the next bombing sessions, coming up in September. I think it is particularly important that U.S. residents who are not Puerto Rican go to Vieques, to show solidarity with the economically poor, yet rich in spirit people of Vieques. If you are interested in going, please contact me at this email address.

I will be sending out a much more detailed letter soon, with impressions of the amazing dedication of the people I met who are struggling for peace on Vieques. For now,

Paz & Peace. David

A Call for Dignity: Day Laborers Strike on May Day

 

A Call for Dignity:

Day Laborers Strike on May Day

On May 1, 1886, anarchists, socialists, and rank-and-file workers went on strike in Chicago, raising the stakes in a campaign that joined immigrant and native-born workers in common cause against the factory owners and bosses. The strike, which saw tens of thousands march north up Michigan Avenue, was part of a successful nation-wide movement demanding an eight-hour work day. On May 1, 2000, anarchists, socialists, and workers from a vast array of industries will take to the streets of Chicago again, in much larger numbers than in recent years, at rallying points all over the downtown area. Diverse activists will present a list of demands born of the anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movement that got a tremendous shot in the arm on the streets of Seattle last November. And if day labor organizer Jose Landaverde is successful, a majority of those protesting on International Workers' Day will be day laborers, or, as he calls them, the slaves of the new millennium. Jose Landaverde is one of those people whose passion for justice is both deeply felt and infectious, whose tolerance for injustice is just about nil. A fiery, 27-year-old radical Catholic from El Salvador, at the age of ten Landaverde suffered the murder of his parents by the Salvadoran military. He and the rest of his family were forced into the jungle, joining the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) guerrilla forces out of necessity. At age 17 Landaverde himself was arrested by the military, for his work organizing among San Salvador's poor. Blindfolded, imprisoned, and tortured, upon his release Landaverde fled north to Guatemala, Mexico, and Los Angeles, where he worked for a time with a homeless organization. Restless, he moved on to Houston and then Chicago, where he came to rest at Su Casa Catholic Worker house on the southside about three years ago. Recently Landaverde worked with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless' Latino Task Force, but he says his ideas fell outside the scope of the Coalition's work. "I wanted to create something bigger, something that respected people's dignity, something that wasn't counting people like numbers," says Landaverde, now 27. He left the Coalition, taking with him a proposal he'd developed while there, the seeds for the creation of a Latino Union. The idea? "To create consciousness in people. To get people in front of the movement. We need to develop and support leaders from the grassroots. It's time for Latinos to move." Landaverde is hard at work generating participation in the Latino Union,which has three goals, initially: support for the rights of workers; opposition to gentrification of poor communities; and the organization of one of the larger of this year's May Day rallies, the Day Labor Strike.

Somethin's goin' on. . . say the Roots, Philadelphia's acoustic hip hop band, who have played benefits for Mumia Abu-Jamal. . . In recent years, attendance at May Day events in Chicago, which after all is birthplace to International Workers Day, has rarely exceeded a few hundred souls. This year's commemorations saw over a thousand, and renewed movement around the country. Why? Dennis Dixon, who worked with the umbrella May Day Coalition and also works with Networking for Democracy, sees the renewed activity as part of a "nascent 'anti-capitalist' sentiment among people" whose wages have plummeted over the last 20 years, who see a government unwilling and unable to tackle crucial social problems. "People see the movement of capital away from areas where there are relatively high wages to places where there are no enforceable labor or environmental laws. They see the sweatshops, and we get a lot of support at our pickets at Nike and the Gap. Corporate greed is a veritable buzzword," says Dixon.

So far, the Latino Union has drawn together groups that range from churches to activist groups like Jobs with Justice and Coalition for the Homeless, as well as radical Latino organizations such as Pueblo Sin Fronteras and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Landaverde hopes to see over 3,000 day laborers at the Strike. Established unions, including Service Employees International Union Local 73, have endorsed the Day Laborers Strike, which will travel the same path as the historic 1886 demonstration, starting at Michigan and Balbo Avenues and proceeding north to the Tribune Plaza. Day Labor in Chicago As in 1886, one issue that ranks high on the agenda for the Day Labor Strike is the length of the work day. According to Landaverde, day laborers often work up to 16 hours in a day, in substandard conditions, without hope of union representation, without benefits of any kind. Day labor agencies deduct payroll taxes from checks, money the laborers never see and that often ends up in the agencies' bank accounts. Non-payment and partial payment of wages is not uncommon. Undocumented workers in particular have feared speaking out, for fear of deportation. "These are not people usually involved in politics, they're just hungry," says Landaverde of the day laborers, who are predominantly African-American and Latino. "They are people reduced to slavery because they are looking for food." According to needs assessments conducted by the Latino Task Force, over half of the Mexican families living in Back of the Yards are involved in day labor; over a third of the Latino families of Little Village and West Town/Humboldt Park support themselves through day labor as well. One of the day laborers who will be attending Monday's Day Labor Strike is Luis Padillas, a stocky, unassuming man who immigrated to Chicago three years ago from Mexico City. Padillas is homeless and lives at Jose Obrero shelter in Pilsen. Padillas has worked through various southside day labor agencies; sometimes he washes dishes at nearby Chinese restaurants. In either setting, getting $30 for a day's work that lasts 12 to 14 hours is the norm, for he and many people he knows. "But you can't complain, because then they treat you bad, or drop you. The day labor agencies also deduct money from your check for transportation to a job, and then the driver will demand another dollar-fifty for the ride on top of that," says Padillas, via translator. The illegal practices are bad enough, but the day labor industry is adversely affecting labor practices across the country, legally. Since the mid-1980s, the replacement of regular employees with temporary workers has mushroomed, as part of the new corporate agenda. The day labor industry saves employers a lot of money, and seriously impacts the ability of all workers to receive fair treatment and decent wages. Most day laborers would prefer full-time, traditional work if it were available, according to a report published by the U.S. Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in December 1999. The average worker in a traditional, non-temporary job earned $540 a week in February of last year; the average temporary worker made $342, less than two-thirds as much. For Latinos working day labor, weekly wages were little more than half of the traditional workers' earnings, at $296. These are the official statistics; unofficially, Landaverde says that Chicago's day laborers fare far worse. Problems of Gender in Day Labor Women face additional societal, gender-based factors that exacerbate the inequalities. Those over age 40 often don't get hired, says Landaverde, because of their age. And, as always, the possibility of sexual harassment on the job multiplies for women workers who are undocumented. "Maria," who like Landaverde is Salvadoran, has lived in the Chicago area for ten years, working for half a dozen different day labor agencies. With her daughter translating, she says, "The agencies treat people badly. Verbally and in other ways. They wouldn't pay our wages sometimes." Worse, male personnel in the agency offices sexually assault young women working for the agency. "Most of the women I know of, who are assaulted, are girls from Mexico, ages 13 to 17. The male supervisors tell these girls to go get fake IDs so they can work. Then they seduce the girls, who can't report the assaults to anyone. The girls feel intimidated, and the men do things like threatening to burn down their houses." One instance witnessed by "Maria" is all too common, she says. "At Western Staff Services, at 51st and Cicero, they send people to work, and they work three or four hours, and sometimes they run out of materials. Well, I saw the men, the other personnel, treat the women workers really badly, screaming at them, chasing them around like they were animals. "I'd like to be able to put cameras in these places, so people can see how temp work is." These young women are the majority of the workers at day labor jobs in the country. According to the BLS, workers for the day labor agencies are "more likely than traditional workers to be women, under the age of 25, black, and[/or] Hispanic." Landaverde shows a mixture of anger at conditions such as "Maria" has seen, and compassion for survivors of such experiences. He sees the Day Labor Strike as part of the process of bringing such injustice to light. He and organizers of the Strike also see it as a means of calling for unions to unify in confronting day labor injustice. The strike and rally will also petition politicians and other leaders to create laws regulating day labor agencies; and propose that the city put up a million dollars for the creation of Workers Centers, to be self-managed by the workers. Workers Centers have proven to be particularly effective in recent years among women and in immigrant communities and communities of color. Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in San Francisco has developed women's leadership while also providing English classes and workshops on contract rights, labor regulations, health and safety rules, and wage and hour laws. In New York, the Latino Workers Center offers similar classes and has led successful protests against abusive employers. Anarchists, the Illinois Labor History Society, and the Day Labor Strike The Day Labor Strike is also being sponsored by the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS), whose participation has drawn some criticism from those whose history tells them that the eight Haymarket martyrs were tried, convicted, and four of them hanged not just for their labor agitation, but for being anarchists. According to Darrell Gordon, a gay anarchist of African descent affiliated with the Autonomous Zone, the ILHS has gone to great lengths to revise the history surrounding the martyrs, who, in addition to being workers, were also revolutionary trade unionists and anarchists. "A lot of anarchists are upset that the Labor History Society is a part of this march," says Gordon. "The Labor History Society waters down who the Haymarket martyrs were." Landaverde is sympathetic to the criticism, but sees the tension as part of the process. As the movement for social justice grows in this country, certain tensions will have to be ironed out. "The anarchists are going to play a real important role" in the future, says Landaverde, who takes inspiration from the Haymarket anarchists. "They're always going to be there supporting the issues. Anarchists take a position like Jesus - fighting the structures and institutions that create top-down problems. " He adds that poor people today, particularly Latinos and African-Americans in Chicago, are living in situations similar to those faced by the immigrant communities from which the Haymarket martyrs came.