Bringing globalization home: lessons from Miami in projecting the voices of people of color and connecting global forces to local problems

Since making a public debut in Seattle in 1999, the U.S. wing of the global justice movement has often stuttered on a single internal issue: the need to diversify its ranks and take a lead from communities of color most affected by corporate globalization. Part of the problem is summit-hopping itself: one often finds white, middle-class activists and labor union leadership swooping into town for the action, then departing, with the local community serving as a mere stage for the Kabuki play of protest and repression.

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But the mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meetings in Miami last November represented something different. In spite of an overwhelming show of force from the police, financed in part by a special $8.5 million rider attached to the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill, social justice advocates managed to pull off two significant marches. The AFL-CIO, Jobs with Justice, Public Citizen and others brought an estimated 15,000 people into the streets for a high-profile, two-hour march through the thick of downtown. But it was the three-day, 300-person Root Cause march, which panned out before the FTAA ministerial even started, and eventually swelled to nearly 1,000 by its completion, that may carry a more poignant message for the future of the global justice movement in the United States.

An alliance of grassroots groups from South Florida, Root Cause's leadership and issues were decidedly local and decidedly of color. Stressing the negative impact that the FTAA would have on Miami's working-class communities of color, it pushed for months to build a popular understanding of the global-local link in one of the United States' poorest and most diverse cities. And while the numbers of actual marchers were small, it made for a message that reverberated throughout Miami and the global justice movement itself.

Root Cause was much more than an off-the-cuff organizing drive that started when the Miami ministerial meetings were announced. Each of its component organizations has cultivated awareness amongst members by using a long-term popular education approach that stresses a global and historical context for local struggles. As a result, the crunch-time decision to engage the campaign against the FTAA was made not by professional organizers but by a membership base that understood the consequences of remaining silent.

The Miami Workers Center, for example, runs the Circle of Consciousness, a year-long set of weekly meetings for community members that focuses on the broader economic and social trends that structure local issues. And while the technical terminology used in globalization circles tends to bore and intimidate people, Root Cause organizations like the Center analyzed the FTAA in community learning sessions through the lens of privatization and racism, familiar adversaries for people of color and immigrants.

Organizers were also careful to stress the local, everyday impacts on people's lives, including the connection between privatization in South Florida and the market-oriented policies of the International Monetary Fund and other international institutions. They made clear the linkages between the existence and vulnerability of Miami's highly immigrant population--nearly 60 percent of the city's residents are foreign-born--with the increasingly unregulated business practices of multinational corporations.

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As Max Rameau, an organizer with the Miami Workers Center, said, "The Haitian community understands globalization, or at least the end result that it has on Third World countries. Even those with very little literacy ... know how multinational corporations operate. They used to work for these companies or have relatives back home who work for them now. They know these corporations can cross borders at will and pit the unemployed against the employed. We've been able to make the link that corporate globalization causes the conditions in Haiti which force people to leave and come here where they are turned away by the same people."

Community Voice is Global Voice

The centerpiece of the Root Cause effort was a three-day, 34 mile march from Fort Lauderdale to Miami to precede the ministerial. For a year, police had claimed that a "hundred thousand" black-masked "street thugs" would invade Miami, throw "bags of acid and urine" at cops, trash stores and riot in the streets. Instead, Miami residents, fed nightmare visions of violent anarchists storming into town to demolish the city, saw a disciplined yet energetic and vocal march down the right lane of U.S. Highway 1.

At the lead was a flat-bed sound truck decorated with colorful campaign signs that drivers could read as they sat through the delays. In between chants and speeches in Spanish, English, and Haitian Creole, the truck alternately blared hip-hop and various Latino jams. Members of the coordinating organizations (Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Low Income Families Fighting Together, Miami Workers Center, and Power U. for Social Change) were at the front, while white activists in the back kept live drum beats and played trumpets.

Throughout the march, the signs and speeches drove home the connection between global forces and local problems. Members of Low Income Families Fighting Together (LIFFT) carried signs demanding their right to public housing, one of many social services threatened by privatization. One LIFFT organizer, Stephanie Winfield, reasoned with motorists who had been stalled by the slow march: "They're spending $9 million on this thing, just on the police, and they're telling everybody that we're the ones who are going to destroy the city. We're here to say that it's the FTAA that will take away the only place we have to live. It's the FTAA that's going to destroy our communities."

Indeed, a community impact report, released by Root Cause in the run-up to the FTAA, notes plans in Miami to reduce public housing by 75 percent, which translates into a direct attack on the livelihoods of the low-wage workers that would be displaced. Miami Workers Center and LIFFT have made the fight against these privatization plans a principal campaign for over a year. However, members increasingly came to recognize that fighting a treaty that ushers in privatization on a multi-sectoral, hemispheric level is more practical and feasible than fighting privatization piecemeal if the FTAA passes.

Immigration issues were a clear part of the global-local nexus. Marleine Bastien, director of the Haitian Women's Organization (FANM), stopped the caravan at the INS Center for a 15-minute lashing of the policies that have kept Haitian immigrants imprisoned for years. As INS employees came out of their offices and watched complacently from the top of a parking structure, Bastien declared, "We are in this country because they are in our countries. We are fighting for worker rights, immigrant rights, human rights ... and we want justice now."

The march also paused for a half-hour in the middle of a busy downtown Miami street across from a Taco Bell that had been told by police to lock its doors. While employees watched from their empty store, immigrant tomato pickers from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers stood atop the lead sound truck proclaiming their commitment to continue the already stinging boycott of the fast food giant, which has been sourcing its produce from contractors who pay poverty wages. Rigoberto Almanzu, a Guatemalan immigrant who completed a 10-day hunger strike earlier this year in front of Taco Bell's corporate headquarters in Irvine, California, finished the march with satisfaction. "It's worth it to show up and feel the support, to feel that the struggle is bigger than what we see in a little town like Immokalee," he said.

A Safer Space

Even with extensive preparation and consensus recognition amongst members that the FTAA posed a direct threat that demanded a grassroots response, organizers still had to contend with serious risks before they could mobilize. Most pressing was Miami's reputation for police brutality against people of color. Less than a year before the ministerial, the city hired a new police chief, John Timoney, a man who had been made famous for his harsh crackdown on protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. And just weeks before the ministerial, the U.S. Congress snuck an $8.5 million appropriation earmarked for FTAA security into the Iraq reconstruction bill, making it clear that the police presence would be staggering. Given that turnouts at annual marches in Miami such as the Martin Luther King march have dwindled after police turned violent in previous years, caution and dialogue became priorities for Root Cause.

Throughout the march, Root Cause protesters were completely surrounded by police in patrol cars and on bicycles, horses and motorbikes. The bomb squad even made an appearance when the march passed a few miles from the Fort Lauderdale airport at dusk. Each night, police surrounded the parks where marchers slept beneath a circus-size tent.

One of the most encouraging aspects for Denise Perry, director of Power U. for Social Change, was the visibility of people of color marching in spite of the overwhelming police presence. "I talked to so many of our people in the last week about coming out and walking with us, but they don't want to be anywhere near the cops. They told me they'd rather stay home and watch it on T.V. There's a lot of police brutality here and people are just plain scared. It's an incredible influence when they see us marching in defiance of the police."

In general, Root Cause ensured that their mobilization met three criteria deemed crucial to incorporating Miami's communities of color. First, the march and subsequent events were designed to give members a voice and a platform. Second, everything was held in a safe space for members who had been subject to, and were worried about, excessive brutality by the police. And last, the events were designed to help boost organizational credibility, building on vital and ongoing local organizing rather than diverting attention away from issues already important to constituent bases.

All Together Now?

While Root Cause may have been a snapshot of what the global justice movement should look like, the other, larger protests in Miami illustrated the challenges for the mainstream movement. By most estimates, less than 10 percent of the people that participated in the main "parade march" were from South Florida and there was a strikingly low presence of people of color.

Activists from Root Cause organizations did show up, but most were also quick to leave. Denise Perry spoke about some of the members' experience attending the rally that preceded the march: "It's not inviting to them. It's out of their experience, and it's out of their cultural identity. Nothing happened that spoke to their hearts the way it had during the Root Cause march." Those that did stay felt that the parade march, which followed a route through a deserted downtown, stood in stark contrast to the high visibility of the Root Cause march.

At the same time, Root Cause was purposeful about striking a delicately balanced position between established global justice players. In the run-up to the ministerial, they carved out a separate space from the national organizations working on the parade march, but were deliberate about preserving ties. Similarly, direct action activists that have provided an essential voice in the global justice movement, as well as a militancy that has sometimes drawn police repression, were invited to the march as allies.

Root Cause organizers maintain that they are working to build a movement together with established global justice activists in the U.S. and the Global South. Organizations like Oxfam America did make appearances during the Root Cause march; direct action activists and anarchists were pivotal contributors to the march and helped to swell the ranks from start to finish; and several intermediaries, including Boston's United for a Fair Economy, helped with parts of the training used in preparation for the march.

Another Root Cause event, called the People's Tribunal, brought some of the heavyweights of the global justice movement together to come to a symbolic international consensus conviction of corporateled globalization. Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, Chucho Garcia, a leading Afro-Venezuelan organizer, and Oscar Olivera, who spearheaded the anti-privatization victory in Cochabamba, Bolivia, were amongst them. Additionally, Root Cause was a magnet initiative for other community-based organizations who are doing global justice work from the grassroots level. POWER from San Francisco, Southwest Organizing Project from Albuquerque, Southwest Workers Union from San Antonio and Community Voices Heard from New York were just a few organizations that made the trek to Miami to join with Root Cause.

There's little doubt that Root Cause organizers were able to create more visibility for Miami's working class people of color by pursuing their own agenda and timetable. As a result, the local organizing around the FTAA was not simply a way to welcome the ministerial's arrival in the city, but also proved to be an extraordinary base-building activity. The march attracted new interest in the local organizations and their work, and the favorable publicity Root Cause garnered has led Miami's political movers and shakers to pay more attention to the local grievances now highlighted by national and international media covering the events.

Projecting Local Voices

It is clear that the inequities of corporate-led globalization demand a large-scale response. The challenge facing the U.S. wing of the global justice movement is to build on the mass mobilizations associated with trade meetings by amplifying the local voices of those most affected. Such a dual effort could invigorate the U.S. movement to become more like its counterparts in Latin America and elsewhere--able to spark protests in the hundreds of thousands because communities understand clearly how their livelihoods are threatened by the free trade juggernaut.

For this to happen, grassroots groups of color will need to play a crucial role, framing issues and actions in a way that matters to beleaguered constituencies. Several initiatives are working hard to support community organizations making this global-local link. Grassroots Global Justice, a project coordinated by Jobs with Justice, sends a large annual delegation of local U.S. activists to the World Social Forum, where organizers and rank and file are thrust into a vortex of movements from around the world trying to find common ground.

Meanwhile, community-based and activist organizations like San Jose's Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Atlanta's Project South, and Philadelphia's Kensington Welfare Rights Union have introduced a global context in their popular education work and have begun to conduct exhanges with sister organizations overseas that have changed the character of their own domestic organizing as well. Numerous other organizing experiments abound, offering their own lessons to a global justice movement facing a critical moment in its evolution as a broad-based strategy for change.

To succeed, those resisting corporate globalization will need to diversify their ranks, allies and messages. The Root Cause experience suggests one route to do so: build on local groups that can better situate local people of color to enter larger protests as a unified block with an audible and authentic voice. It also illustrates that well-targeted efforts to tackle globalization can have distinct payoffs for local organizing and base-building. Seattle may have been the beginning, but Miami is likely to be remembered as a turning point in the struggle to forge the global-local link.

Manuel Pastor and Tony LoPresti are codirector and research associate, respectively, at the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Center has been working for the last two years with the InterAmerican Forum of Miami on a project entitled "Globalizing Civil Society" which seeks to bring new voices to the debate about globalization and its impacts in the United States.

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