It almost takes effort to feel gloomy when the sun persists in shining as it has this past week, yet The Guardian Weekly insists France is suffering from a bad case of Gallic Gloom. I’ve just renewed my subscription and am learning all sorts of things. For example, the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne has just been delivered a $100,000 bronze statue of Carla Bruni Sarkozy, the multimillionaire heiress, depicted as a labourer – courtesy of Nogent’s tax payers. She’s hauling something over her shoulder and it looks vaguely like a head: could it be Nicolas Sarkozy’s? But no, the article explains she has been portrayed as a “plumassière,” the Italian factory worker who once plucked away in sweatshops to provide fancy feathers for the aristocraticos. What she has hoisted on her shoulder is a bundle of feathers. Not Sarkozy’s head after all, but I was close.
While France is mired in morose projections for the future, neighboring Spain has reason to be hopeful. Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, the radical mayor of Albolote, is kicking up dust in Andalucia as a modern-day Robin Hood. Gordillo has been leading a series of “workers marches” during which his Merry Men raided two Mercadonas, stuffing twelve trolleys with food to give to the poor. This gesture, Gordillo and his men claim, was largely symbolic and meant to underline how the rich are now stealing from the poor. Indeed. For having tread the symbolic quick sands, however, Gordillo risks up to five years in prison, a considerable sentence compared to Jose Bove’s, the French farmer and activist, who got forty-four days in the pen for the peaceful dismantling of a McDonald’s. Gordillo has excellent credentials in activism according to The Guardian. He has helped landless labourers occupy and win control over the estates of absent aristocraticos and directed a system of self-built homes. In short, in the Crumbs vs. Crusts battle, Gordillo is determined to see the Crumbs through. Thank you, Gordillo, for fighting the fight.
On page 9 there’s a whole spread on Lydia Cacho, “one of Mexico’s most fearless journalists.” Lydia’s reporting focuses on sex trafficking and trying to understand how the international markets are connected. When she started writing about violence against women in her early twenties, she was brutally attacked and raped by a man whose intention was to punish her for it. In 2005 several police officers stuffed her into a van an tortured her for twenty hours before putting her in jail where she was told by a female guard she would be raped. Fortunately a network of friends and colleagues were able to take action and put up bail to get her out. Since then she has lived with death threats and recently received one serious enough to make her leave the country. She has founded a women’s shelter in Cancun that provides refuge or psychological and legal help to 30,000 women a year. Cacho is quoted as saying, “…the more I traveled, and the more women I interviewed, the more worried I got. I’m absolutely convinced that all forms of prostitution are just a way of normalizing discrimination and violence against women.” Thank you, Lydia, for boldly going where no man has gone before.
What Cacho and Gordillo share is courage and the creative urge to act. Unlike Carla, they will not be made into bronze statues during their lifetimes. Neither, I suspect, is given to gloom.