Jtatic Samuel’s Legacy

by Ana Luisa Anza | Posted January 30, 2011
Samuel Ruiz

Samuel Ruiz was known as the Bishop of the Indians and became a symbol of struggle for oppressed people in Chiapas, Mexico. Ruiz, who died Jan. 24, came originally from the Catholic Church’s conservative diocese of León, Guanajuato, in the central part of México.

Everything indicated that he would follow the path of an extremely conservative Church. But the social upheavals of 1968, as well as new streams of thought that emerged within the Catholic Church, influenced him considerably and he opted to work — like Church bishops Hélder Cámara in Brazil and Óscar Romero in El Salvador — with the poor. read more

Afromestizo Musical Tradition Falters

by ChicoSol staff | Posted January 26, 2011

In her third in a series of reports from Mexico, Lindajoy Fenley explores the Afromestizo traditions of southern Mexico’s Costa Chica that includes parts of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca.

 


               video by Lindajoy Fenley

by Lindajoy Fenley

Silvestre Tiburcio Noyola is one of the few remaining son de artesa musicians on the Costa Chica of southern Mexico. I recently sat with Tiburcio in his front yard in the dusty town of San Nicolas Tolontino near Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. “You don’t know my life story,” he said, and then, as if he could summarize it this way, he added, “In 2001, I won the Premio Nacional [the national award for science and the arts.]”

Tiburcio is a member of Los Cimarrones, an Afromestizo group I had seen present the Costa Chica’s version of son in Mexico City a decade earlier. A large percentage of the Costa Chica population is Afromestizo, and many are the descendents of escaped slaves. Son is that music particular to Cuba, Mexico and other Latin countries with a 6/8 count.

Tiburcio’s aunt, doña Cata, had danced gracefully atop a large hollowed parota tree trunk called an “artesa” when I saw the group perform. She passed away two years ago. Others, Tiburcio said, had stopped playing Afromestizo music because there was no money in it. He had run out of recordings featuring his style of son, and I left after buying a CD of corridos and ranchera songs.

The next day, however, he sang a few songs in the style I wanted to hear, accompanying himself by either strumming guitar or pounding a rhythm on a wooden box. Tiburcio recalled how local blacks had performed their traditional music before a road connected the town to the main highway, and television and amplified music became readily available.

On my last day in the Costa Chica, I tracked down one more son de artesa musician across the state line in El Ciruelo, Oaxaca. Primitivo Efrén Mayren allowed me to record the son he composed for President Barack Obama before he performed at a Smithsonian festival in Washington, D.C., last June. He’s now awaiting confirmation of an invitation to perform in France. Tiburcio, meanwhile, is hoping to spirit support for their music by creating a non-profit organization, Los Negros y su Fandango.

My desire to see the people of Costa Chica singing and dancing son de artesa remained mostly unfilled. Fandangos and festivals celebrating this tradition happen infrequently, and didn’t happen at all during the two weeks I visited the area.

The son de artesa is related to son Tixtleco, covered in the first report in this series. Lindajoy Fenley founded Dos Tradiciones, a Mexican non-profit that promotes the traditional music of that nation.

Fight for Records Access Scrutinized

by Leslie Layton | Posted January 19, 2011

When Glenn County newspaper publisher Tim Crews gave a seminar in Chico on Saturday, he wore his standard fare — suspenders over a Sacramento Valley Mirror t-shirt. Had Crews worn a cautionary button on his lapel, it might have read: “Lie to me and I’ll ask for the goods.”

During the seminar at Cal Northern School of Law, “Getting Access to Public Records,” Crews mentioned that he hates being lied to. Incidentally, this is a man who can recite, by heart, sections of the California Public Records Act that gives citizens access to official documents. And he can recite the entire Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s Open Meeting Law.

During the past 20 years, Crews has become skilled at using sunshine laws in reporting. Since 1991, when he launched what is now a twice-weekly newspaper based in Willows, he’s made more than 100 record requests under the state’s Public Records Act. Many of the stories he’s published about corruption, racism and injustice in one of Calfornia’s poorest counties have been based on documents pried from the hands of those in power.

The Valley Mirror’s tactics have won Crews admirers, but they’ve also come under recent assault and scrutiny. Critics say Crews is too quick to the draw, but how harshly you judge him may depend on how strongly you feel about transparency in government.

In September, a Glenn County judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by the paper in its fight to access Willows Unified School District e-mail was “frivolous.” Willows Unified then filed a claim against the Mirror — a marginally profitable operation — for more than $104,000 in attorney fees.

In perhaps an odder development, the Mirror has itself become the object of public-record requests by another newspaper. The Chico Enterprise-Record is looking at settlements Crews has reached with public agencies. For example, Editor David Little, in a Jan. 7 request sent to the Glenn County Office of Education, asked for copies of documents related to settlements that agency had reached with the Mirror, and the Mirror’s record requests over the past 10 years.

Newspapers often make record requests aimed at information-gathering. But the requests are usually designed to look at the inner workings of government, not at another newspaper. The E-R’s Little was terse when asked for comment.

“Asking for public records is allowable,” Little said. “If we get a story we’ll do it, and if we don’t, we won’t.”

Crews said he’s sued 18 times since 2002 to prod agencies into releasing documents they continued to withhold. The Valley Mirror won settlements in all but two of its lawsuits, but those monies covered court and attorney fees, he said, and the law explicitly prohibits him from profiting. He hasn’t touched settlement money, he said, “not a fucking penny.”

Crews believes the E-R’s probe was inspired by recent comments made by a Willows city official that appeared in a competing newspaper. The official said he suspects Crews uses court settlements to help finance the paper. Crews found the suggestion offensive, in part because fee-splitting is illegal.

On Jan. 12, the Mirror published a scathing commentary topped with a headline reading, “Chico E-R investigating Valley Mirror.” In the commentary, Crews chides the E-R for overlooking many agencies in its “investigation,” and he provides a list of offices that have received his record requests or open-meeting demands.

But the 67-year-old publisher/editor/reporter can probably tolerate some sunshine himself; he’s won a host of state awards in connection with his use of open-government laws in reporting. People who know him believe he’s driven by a sense of moral indignation.

“Tim’s experience is unsurpassed in this state,” said Davis attorney Paul Boylan, who sometimes represents the Valley Mirror. “Tim is the most dogged champion for open government I know; he’s also one of the most principled individuals I have ever met.”

Crews’ problems with Willows Unified began as many of his problems begin: with a records request. Crews asked the school district to provide copies of thousands of e-mails sent and received on district computers. He had heard that a school official was running a political campaign out of district offices.

The school district withheld much of the information he requested, and the e-mails that it provided had been laboriously scanned and transformed into PDF documents. The result was that Crews couldn’t see the heading information, embedded graphics or even attachments. He ended up suing.

Willows Unified School District Superintendent Mort Geivett said the e-mail was scanned because it seemed like the “best way” to redact out privileged information. The attachments didn’t reproduce in the copying process, he said, but those that didn’t contain confidential information exempted by law were eventually turned over to the Valley Mirror.

Geivett said Crews didn’t give the district enough time, before filing a lawsuit, to respond to a request that involved many hours of work by officials and attorneys. “The Public Records Act is there to protect the public and I’m not opposed to that,” Geivett said. “But there were things we could not turn over. I don’t think Mr. Crews trusted that we turned over everything we could turn over. He was basically saying, ‘I want everything.'”
Though he didn’t win access to everything, Crews got some of the attachments only because of the lawsuit, Boylan said. Because he was partially successful, Judge Peter Twede’s ruling that the suit was frivolous makes no sense to Boylan.

Boylan also said Twede’s ruling suggests that an e-mail is nothing more than the message page. He believes the case will be reversed on appeal, and he’s particularly concerned about the school district’s claim against the Mirror.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association and other media organizations supported the Mirror’s initial effort at appealing the claim — which wasn’t successful — but as the case proceeds, Boylan expects many more to file briefs on their behalf.

“It’s a strange and unusual case,” he said. “As a legal one, it’s exciting and very important. A citizen should have the right to test whether or not a public agency has to turn something over; if the citizen can be punished for being wrong, they’ll never test.”

Boylan has recently taken a position with the Glenn County Office of Education, but thrived on his work with the Mirror. In a 2008 interview with ChicoSol, he said settlements had provided only a “fraction” of what he could have charged a private client. But he said the paper has changed the Northern Sacramento Valley for the better.

Many people believe Crews’ reporting affected the outcome of a Glenn County Office of Education superintendent’s race, for example. Crews had won access to e-mail and other documents that served as the foundation for stories alleging the fradulent use of county resources for private purposes.

Crews has also reported on the treatment of mentally ill inmates at the Glenn County Jail, and published several stories about Reny Cabral, a college student from an immigrant family in Orland. Cabral was jailed in the midst of his struggle with schizophrenia, and guards declined to give Cabral his medication. In a moment of terror, Cabral smashed his head against a cell wall and broke his neck.

Now a 27-year-old quadriplegic living in Chico, Cabral said earlier this week that he’s grateful for the coverage Crews gave his case. “He’s the voice of the people,” Cabral said of Crews. “He said things that needed to be said, but we could not say them.”

In 2009, when the California Press Association named Crews “Newspaper Executive of the Year,” First Amendment advocate Terry Francke wrote that the Mirror’s pages reflect “a poor valley community and its abused and neglected wretched of the earth as well as its happier moments.”

Crews views the power structure in the region he serves as an oligarchy, and the area’s high unemployment as a product of policy. Open-government laws are for him a tool for probing, reporting and confronting. He said he files lawsuits only when he has no other recourse; suing, he said, is “distracting” and expensive.

Muckraking has social, as well as financial, costs, and Crews believes there’s an effort afoot to shut the paper down. “There’s a small drumbeat among people who don’t want the Valley Mirror investigating anything,” he said.

But Crews doesn’t seem likely to duck any blows coming his way. He runs the newspaper out of a downtown Willows storefront. There’s no heat in the winter; when his attorney complained, Crews told him to “man up.” He does much of the newspaper delivery himself.

In an e-mail to this reporter, he said in characteristic Crews fashion, “We are slowly prying the place loose from the masters.” He quoted the abolitionist and writer Sarah Moore Grimké, who said in 1837, “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God designed us to occupy.”

American Journalist Covered Social Movements in Mexico

by ChicoSol staff | Posted January 17, 2011

JOHN ROSS
1938-2011

by Mary Jo McConahay, Elizabeth Bell and Sandina Robbins

Journalist, investigative poet, and social activist John Ross died peacefully Jan. 17 at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico, where he had lived on and off for the past 50 years. He was 72. The cause was liver cancer.

A young generation Beat poet and the national award-winning author of 10 books of fiction and nonfiction and nine chapbooks of poetry, Ross received the American Book Award (1995) for “Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas,” and the coveted Upton Sinclair Award (2005) for “Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left.”

The first journalist to bring news of the indigenous Mexican Zapatista revolution to English-speaking readers, Ross was widely regarded as a “voice for those without a voice,” who stood with the poor and oppressed in his brilliantly stylized writing, suffering beatings and arrests during many nonviolent protests.

An iconoclast who took every chance to afflict the comfortable and educate the public, Ross turned down honors from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009, which had praised him for telling “stories nobody else could or would tell,” and as an organizer for tenants’ rights. In the chamber, Ross recalled an appearance before the Board 40 years before when he was dragged from the same room for disturbing the peace. He blamed an “attack” by the San Francisco Police Department for the loss of his left eye. Ross told the Board, “Death was on our plate” when he went to Baghdad as a human shield during U.S. bombing, and again, when he was beaten by Israeli settlers alongside Palestinian olive farmers.

“Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence,” he said. “Pardon me for having lived it so fully.”

Born in New York City, Ross grew up amidst the pre-Civil Rights era folk and jazz scene, influenced at an early age by the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach and legendary sports figures like the Harlem Globetrotters. He is survived by his sister, artist Susan Gardner; his children, Dante Ross and Carla Ross-Allen; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen.

In addition to his popular accounts of Mexican life and politics, chronicled in the series “Mexico Barbaro” and “Blindman’s Buff,” John Ross reported for the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly, Noticias Aliadas, La Jornada, Sierra Magazine and many other print and radio organizations. In 2010, under treatment for liver cancer, he toured nationally with his latest book, “El Monstruo: True Tales of Dread & Redemption in Mexico City,” already a cult classic, using a hand-held magnifying glass to read his words before packed audiences.

One of the earliest resisters to the Vietnam War, Ross spent two and a half years as a prisoner of conscience in a federal penitentiary for refusing the draft. On release, he recounts in a poem, when a prison authority walked him to the door,

Ross he told me with a look of disgust
written all over his smarmy mush,
you never learned
how to be a prisoner.

Memorial services to be held in San Francisco, Mexico City, Humboldt County and New York City will be announced at a later date.

Sick and Struggling in Butte County

by ChicoSol staff | Posted January 6, 2011

Sugar Spot
photo by Leslie Layton

by Leslie Layton

Kenyatta Aarif knew her high blood-pressure reading had startled two student nurses from Chico State. The nursing students were conducting a public-health outreach project in Oroville’s depressed Southside neighborhood, checking the blood pressure of the willing every Thursday during their fall semester.

She assured the students, stationed across the street from her small soul-food restaurant, that she’d refill her prescription for medication right away. “I scared those kids to death,” Aarif said of her first screening.

Aarif told herself something different — that she’d watch her diet more carefully. Then, a few weeks later, Aarif — who says she’s in her 40s — had two heart attacks and a stint inserted into a clogged artery at Enloe Medical Center in Chico.

Aarif had no health insurance, nor the money for the exam she needed to get her prescription renewed. She hadn’t been able to access routine health care — a problem that’s common amongst California’s uninsured, but more acute in rural counties where there are fewer low-cost clinics, public-health services and non-profit health initiatives. Aarif has no car, and public transportation out of Southside is limited.

The lack of care probably led to an emergency that was far more expensive than the cost of an exam and a bottle of pills would have been. “It doesn’t make sense that in the richest country in the world, I can’t get health care,” Aarif said.

The federal health-care reform law is designed to address Aarif’s complaint by making millions of low-income adults who have no dependent children, eligible, for the first time, for Medicaid — government health insurance that has traditionally been provided poor families and disabled individuals.

But Second District Congressman Wally Herger, who represents rural Northern California, pledged Jan. 6 to “help lead the effort to repeal ObamaCare” in his new position as chairman of the Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health, according to his website.

The funds for the Medicaid expansion — the largest since the program’s creation 40 years ago — have already been earmarked. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 also has a public-health component that would support the kind of healthy-lifestyle program that might have helped Aarif avert heart problems in the first place.

Funding for the public-health component still has to be appropriated by Congress and is very much at risk in the upcoming battles over the new law, said Anthony Wright, executive director of the consumer-advocacy organization Health Access. Yet, especially in rural counties, better preventive care could help reduce spiraling health-care costs.

Aarif said she was stunned that she was released from Enloe with only the most general of instructions. Lose 100 pounds, lower your cholesterol, don’t smoke, doctors told her. Until she begins cardiac rehabilitation this spring, she’s on her own.

In a late-December interview, Aarif said she hadn’t smoked since the day of her heart attacks, but wasn’t sure how to go about such a huge weight-loss task. She said she made some notations from a nutrition chart on the wall of her cardiologist’s office, but no one could find an extra copy of the chart for her.

“Nobody has told me how to take care of myself,” she said. “Not a lot of care has gone into this; I’m kind of flying blind. I guess keeping poor people alive is not good business. If you’re poor and alive, you’re using up too dang much money.”

Aarif exemplifies America’s working poor — a group growing in numbers that includes many self-employed and small business owners — who are among the uninsured or under-insured. She has a small income that precludes her from getting full coverage under Butte County’s health plan for indigent adults, County Medical Services Program.

The eligibility criteria for California’s CMSP hasn’t been adjusted in more than 25 years; for a single person, anything over $600 a month is likely to be considered disposable income that can go into health care. That means that many CMSP recipients must pay such a high monthly deductible they can’t afford routine care.

The lack of routine care for the poor shows up in the chronic illnesses that plague Butte County and in hospitalization rates for preventable disease. More than half of Butte County residents diagnosed with heart disease in 2007 earned $30,000 a year or less, UCLA research shows.

In most parts of the Northern Sacramento Valley, obesity and smoking — factors that complicate disease management — are more common than in other parts of the state. And the counties pay a high price in hospitalization rates for several illnesses that can usually be managed by seeing a doctor, a new state study says.

High hospitalization rates for the illnesses that were studied suggests that “people aren’t getting the primary care they need,” said state Research Analyst Mike Kassis. (See sidebar: “Sickness in the 2nd District.”)

The federal law, set to take full effect in 2014, will extend Medi-Cal programs to thousands of low-income adults by removing most asset and resource limitations and raising the income roof for eligibility. That expansion could begin this year in California counties that have large public-health systems and have moved to take advantage of the state’s early implementation program. But implementation will take longer in small counties like Butte that have no public hospitals.

The earliest that Medicaid expansion could begin in Butte and 33 other small counties is July 1, 2012, said the state’s CMSP executive director Lee Kemper. Counties must put up matching funds for early implementation and meet dozens of federal requirements, he noted.

Cristi Roach, a Butte County eligibility program manager for food stamps and Medi-Cal, said social service agencies as well as the medical community will have to jump infrastructure hurdles. Roach said she already has 40 new caseworkers in training to handle the growth in caseloads over the last two years. With social workers sometimes managing up to 500 cases each, a Medi-Cal expansion would force her to “staff up” further, and she’d need funding for that, she said.

Meanwhile, the federally-funded Del Norte Clinics are expanding to meet what could be a dramatic increase in demand for doctors who accept Medi-Cal insurance. CEO Benjamin Flores said the Chico, Lindhurst and Hamilton City clinics are expanding with funds provided in connection with the new law.

Specialists in rural Northern California who accept Medi-Cal will continue to be difficult to find, health-care providers say.

That’s one reason the public-health components in the new law are crucial. “Preventing disease is very important to lowering costs and bettering outcomes,” said Ken Logan, a doctor who works at Chico Family Health Center. “This cannot be done without strong preventive medicine components.”

Logan said that too often in the United States, instead of providing preventive care, “we wait and do the fancy bypass when they come in.”

The new federal law’s public-health components would include tobacco cessation and nutrition programs, and an expansion of breast cancer education and screening.

That could be welcome news in Butte County, which struggled to meet demand for breast cancer screenings for uninsured women this past year.

In October, when Chico organizations and businesses partnered with the California Health Collaborative to run a free, one-day mammogram screening for uninsured women, they were overwhelmed by demand. Women began lining up at the local radiology clinic at 4:45 a.m. in the rain. One man asked permission to spend the night before the screening in the parking lot to ensure that his wife would get her first mammogram.

Laverna Hubbard, who helped run the screening as both a member of Soroptimist Bidwell Rancho and as executive director of North State Radiology, assured the couple they could return early the next morning.

While Northern Californians form pre-dawn lines for cancer screenings, Congress is poised for a fight over funding the new law and the law itself.

Health Access’s Anthony Wright says this next battle will be fought at both the state and federal levels. “There will be awful proposals to cut the budget for health and human services infrastructure,” Wright said. “To cut these programs harms the ability to care for patients now… and [under] the new federal law.”

This series was funded by a New America Media health reporting fellowship. Part III will look at health care reform and women’s health.