Mexico City’s zocalo, called Plaza de la Constitucion, has seen many a coming together of activists and protesters, peasants and professionals, revolutionaries and those with no ideology other than wanting to be able to live with dignity. I happened upon a peaceful march consisting of all the above, a workers’ rights demonstration that massed at the zocalo. Union members representing miners and airline employees, small-scale farmers inspired by Zapata and Che, skilled men and women making ends meet in factories, carried banners and sang songs as they walked.
On the same day, workers were marching at the Super Bowl festivities going on in downtown Indianapolis in protest of the Right to Work legislation that was later passed in the state.
I walked out onto the zocalo and snapped some photos, all the while thinking: the similarity and direct correlation of this march and the one in Indy is striking. American and Mexican workers taking a stand for their livelihoods, yet often portrayed at odds with each other…
…jobs being exported, jobs being taken away from Americans by Mexicans on U.S. soil, trade, farmers in Mexico migrating to Indiana to pick tomatoes and de-tassle corn, economic decisions by governments…people marching for the same reasons.
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