Compare the Central Americans to the Irish?

I try to pay attention to what’s going on in Latin America, my major at Cal was Latin American Studies, after all. But Latin America doesn’t lead the news in the US, unless events there impinge on us, and even then the slant is often unsympathetic. The rage on the American right wing against immigrants from the south seems mostly racism — and, yeah, deeply antagonistic, way beyond unsympathetic. Sadly, even in news sources that aren’t pushing an anti-immigrant agenda, the lede is how US authorities are dealing with the immigrants rather than the root causes that force them to leave their homes. I could have delved deeper into what has caused such trauma recently --  in Central America in particular -- but I confess I really haven’t. I remember the civil wars of the 80s and 90s, but I hear that deaths and crime has spiked in the 2010s and 2020s beyond even those horrible times. Yet there are no rebel armies to negotiate with. 

So I’m reading a book on coffee, where it originated, how it spread throughout the world, and what its current situation is, and I come across this passage:

In 2013, coffee rust affected 74 percent of El Salvador’s crop, 70 percent of Guatemala’s, and 25 percent of Honduras’s, causing losses of nearly two hundred thousand jobs in the trio of countries. … Coffee was the livelihood for more than two million Central Americans. For many of those households, it was their sole source of income, money they used to cultivate staple foods. Jobless farmworkers poured into the cities looking for employment. Gang membership increased. Violence surged. El Salvador became the word’s murder capital, only to be overtaken by Honduras in 2016. Parents sent their children north, often unaccompanied and entrusted with coyote smugglers, passing through a series of way stations as they tried to reach extended family in the United States. … ‘To discuss the current Central American immigration crisis without talking about the coffee rust,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is like talking about the 1845 Irish immigration without mentioning the “potato blight.”’

As my source was published in 2017, I looked at current news for an update. Says a December 2021 Reuters story: “[T]his year has been particularly ruinous, according to interviews with about a dozen farmers across the region, the heads of one regional and three national coffee institutes plus an executive at a U.S.-based international coffee association.” Damn. 

source: 

Where the Wild Coffee Grows: the untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup

by Jeff Koehler

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

shoes dangling from wires overhead

When I first saw shoes dangling from telephone lines, I thought them rather whimsical, an ad hoc celebration of ugly, as if a festive ornament could be anything, so long as it swayed in the breeze. The tableau was given a darker spin when I was told the shoes marked places for street drug dealing. Considering how randomly placed such shoes seem to be, the connection is likely a folk etiology, that is, somebody made the connection in their head — and it was an explanation that immediately made sense. Of course, there’s a nefarious reason for the shoes! Who knows, maybe that was the purpose at one time, but with shoes swinging here, there, and everywhere any connection must quickly have lost its usefulness. I’ve come back around to the notion that shoes dangle on overhead lines because it’s just fun to throw them up there, and it feels like a lasting accomplishment to see them swinging away every time you go by. How else are you going to get any satisfaction from throwing away worn out old shoes?

In his book on Mexico City Juan Villoro looks up from the ground level gridlock, the careless drivers, and the gaping holes in sidewalks to those seemingly footloose shoes:

Shoes hung on electric lines offer another parable of transit. Since the streets are dead ends, the final steps must be made aloft. The dead shoes reach that desired beyond, the paradise where the pedestrian strolls the sky.

source:

Horizontal Vertigo: a city called Mexico

by Juan Villoro, translated by Alfred MacAdam

2021. Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House, NY