Blog from the Book Tour IV: The Snow Belt

Readers,

9am Thursday

Back in the La Paz airport, drinking coca tea in the small café upstairs, watching the morning news show and gasping for a bit of oxygen. In a moment I will pass from this odd life of spare beds, of hearing my voice far too much, bouncing from airport to airport, and meeting so many great people. I will disappear into my 'real life' of home and my family, of the cows and the corn. Cool, no?

We began our tour more than three weeks ago at UC Berkeley in an auditorium at the School of Law. We ended it yesterday with a large group of Chicago public high school students, almost all of them immigrants, African American, and Latinos. They as well saw something of themselves in Bolivia's stories – in the teenager who watched her innocent mother jailed courtesy of the U.S. War on Drugs, or in the story of Cassimra Rodriguez, enslaved as a teenager to be a maid and rising to be an organizer of those same women and her country's Minister of Justice.

Thanks again to one and all who helped along the way, by organizing events, giving us a place to rest our heads, and showing up in event after event, city after city, more than 1,500 of you. And thanks for buying the book.

I'll resurface in a few days, after I get my shoes good and dirty.

Jim

NOTE: For those who are interested, this morning Chicago Public Radio aired an hour-long interview that we taped yesterday. The interview covers a range of stories from our new book, Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization. You can listen to it here.

On the Banks of the River Charles

I love that dirty water.
Oh, oh, Boston, you're my home.

--The Standells

The Democracy Center book tour rolled into Boston last Thursday afternoon by bus, to cold weather and warm receptions – Melissa Draper, Roberto Fernandez, and I did six events in three days.

We began at Harvard University, at the Kennedy School of government. A quarter century ago I was a student there. I was happy to see that the tree outside the library window, whose leaves had shown me the change of the seasons, was still there. Thirty students, faculty and visitors gathered to hear about Dignity and Defiance and to share their own thoughts about what Bolivia's recent experiences teach us. Several were young Bolivians, studying at the school, or just living in the U.S. The love they have for their home country was obvious.

From there we set off across the Charles River to Boston University. Almost 100 students filled up the front section of an auditorium. At BU as in many stops across the country we ran into the familiar faces of students who had studied in Cochabamba with the great semester abroad program sponsored by the Vermont-based School of International Training. One of them rose during the discussion part of the program to ask my advice about what students could do to help close the gap between the U.S. rhetoric about global justice and its actions which too often undermine that justice. The BU student paper carried an article the next day about our visit and the exchange (you can read the article here).

“What does this gap mean for you students?” Shultz asked. “That as soon as you graduate, you need to get the hell out of here and go somewhere in this world and see what it means to live on the ground with what this country has to deliver, both good and bad, around the world.”

Brandeis University junior Nadine Channaoni, who spent her fall semester in Bolivia during a School for International Training cultural and development program, said what she had observed on the ground in Bolivia was very different from what she is being taught about the country in her university classroom. Shultz told her to not be afraid to speak up and refute any inaccurate academic theories. “I will definitely take his advice and use concrete examples from my experiences and not be too intimidated to speak up,” Channaoni said.

University of Massachusetts-Boston senior Michelle Tracchia said she was drawn to the event because of her research on the effects of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies concerning water access in the African country of Senegal. “I wanted to understand why the people of Bolivia were able to revolt and not Senegal,” Tracchia said. “It was really important for me to hear from people living in the U.S. and Bolivia because there is so much more to take from their experience in both.”

At every stop on the tour I have been inspired by the young people that have come to hear us. These twenty-somethings belong to a generation dedicated to making their country a more moral actor in the world and they are struggling to understand what that truly means and how they can be a part of it.

On Friday we were invited to meet with a small group of undergraduate student activists at Harvard, and then ran off once more across the frozen-over River Charles to the Jamaica Plain Forum. Again, nearly 100 people came out in the biter cold to join us, filling up all the folding seats laid out across the wooden floors of a gracious old New England Church. It was a roomful of activists – people who are dedicating great energy to ambitions as distant as Middle East peace and as local as making Boston one of the most bike friendly cities in the nation.

For me, this was the first time in a decade that I have had so much interaction with people in the U.S. working for social justice. They came seeking what lessons Bolivia might have to offer but I told them that their own works were a model of citizenship.

Now an admission. At first I was not all that happy when the book tour team decided to take my one day off in 10 and turn it into a driving expedition to Western Massachusetts. I had visions of maneuvering a rental car through a winter's blizzard, to have a chat with a handful of people in a bookstore, followed by another tiny handful in a college classroom. But on Saturday under clear skies Roberto and I made the trip and it was wonderful.

Thirty people crammed into the small but fabulous Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley to hear us. A couple came up afterwards to introduce themselves. They had driven in an hour and a half from Albany, NY. With them was their young daughter, adopted from the same Cochabamba orphanage as my youngest. Several such families have traveled to greet us on the tour. They are each a reminder of how important it is that the U.S. and Bolivia sign a new agreement, reopening the adoptions that have meant so much to so many children and which have been closed for almost a decade. Afterwards students and faculty at Mt. Holyoke College, just across the street, hosted us for lunch.

Our event at Smith College was hosted by an extraordinary group of young women, the International Students Organization. We were led there by a pair of two bright young women from Bolivia – one from La Paz and the other from Santa Cruz. As we walked onto campus they presented the team that had organized things for us on campus, a half dozen women from every corner of the world. Globalization's hope.

A hundred people filled the auditorium where we spoke, standing room only in Western Mass. – students, faculty and visitors. It was Roberto's last stop on the tour before heading home and people listened to him intensely than anywhere else. "In Bolivia, for decades, a whole system was constructed to put our natural resources and our finances into the hands of foreigners," he explained. "Laws, bureaucracies, international agreements. Taking it apart is not going to happen overnight."

On to Minnesota

Across the U.S. there are communities that for certain reasons have become especially connected to Bolivia. Arlington is home to the U.S.' largest Bolivian community. San Francisco sent Bolivia both Bechtel and the Democracy Center. Minneapolis/St. Paul is another such place.

The Twin Cities-based group Mano a Mano has built dozens of Bolivian health clinics. Macalester College seems to send more students to the Bolivia S.I.T. program than any other. On Monday night Melissa and I were there to speak to a large gathering of students and faculty, and friends from the community. Among them was one of the young Peace Corps volunteers that the Bush administration pulled out of Bolivia last fall. We talked about how to get the Obama administration to send the Peace Corps back.

Then this morning we started the day bright and early by visiting with a class that had been assigned the book to read.

They met us armed with questions:

What's the IMF's version of the things you write about in your book?

What is the state of Bolivia's feminist movement?

Is the U.S. government intervening in Bolivian politics?

We answered as best we could, acknowledging that the issues in the book are complicated ones, and encouraged them to get directly involved in issues of U.S. policy abroad. Then we left one more time for an airport.

Wrapping it Up in Chicago

There is a poetry, I suppose, in wrapping up a book tour that challenges market-driven globalization at a place known for the celebration of unregulated markets, the University of Chicago.

This morning Chicago Public Radio ran an hour-long interview that we taped yesterday, talking about a wide range of issues, from the Water Revolt to Coca, to the misdeeds of the U.S.' former ambassador to Bolivia. You can listen to the program on-line here. Then on Tuesday evening the program's host, Jerome McDonnell, one of the most thoughtful radio journalists we know, did us the honor of moderating the event with Melissa and I at the University.

This was out last big public event, so I spoke about one of the stories in our book tat got the least attention outside Bolivia, even though it was directly linked to a U.S. corporation, Enron. I shared the story of how, in January 2000, Enron and its partner Shell let 29,000 barrels of toxic oil spill into the Disaguadero River. I read aloud from the book's chapter by Christina Haglund:

A week after the spill, the silence of the altiplano was interrupted by noises from above. Doña Julia, an almost toothless woman who speaks Aymara and only a few words of Spanish, came out of her adobe home where she was peeling potatoes. She bent her neck to the sky. For the first time in her life, Doña Julia saw up close a machine that flies. Enron and Shell’s representatives appeared out of the sky, arriving to villages not found on any map. The rural people were awed by the arrival of helicopters and anxious for answers to get their lives back to normal.

Six years later, Doña Julia kissed the banana that I handed her. She smiled wide and told me that she thinks her sheep are actually pigs. They never stop eating and never seem satisfied.

“They told us the petroleum was fertilizer,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“The oil spill people.”

These are the stories we came to the U.S. to tell. These are the voices from Bolivia that we felt it is urgent to bring before U.S. audiences.

Wednesday morning Melissa and I make out last stop, to speak with a group of high school students in Chicago. Then I board a plane to Miami and onward to Bolivia and home. Many of you reading this have joined us on this tour – in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Santa Fe, Washington, New York, Boston, the Twin Cities, and here at the end by Lake Michigan. Thank you, all of you. Thank you for the spare beds we slept in, the events you pulled together, the meals you served us, the ideas you shared, and the solidarity that you offered.

And stay tuned for what comes next!

HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF DIGNITY AND DEFIANCE
Order the book today from (click the links):

Amazon.com
University of California Press
Powell's Books
Independent Bookstores

Blog from the Book Tour III: The Tour that Never Sleeps

On a bus headed from New York to Boston as the "spare bed tour" moves north. In the U.S. you can ride a bus with an Internet connection. Bolivian buses don't have Internet; they have Jackie Chan movies dubbed in Spanish. It's a tossup. But New York has bagels so you have to factor that in too.

We began our work here on Monday, which was technically supposed to be a holiday, but no such luck. I went to the lower Manhattan studios of Grit TV for a panel discussion on U.S./Latin America relations. You can see the short program at this link or just by clicking on the screen above.

"The danger here is that President Obama's Latin American policy is essentially on Bush holdover autopilot," I said (there or somewhere, after three weeks and a half dozen cities it is starting to run togehter). "At the State Department and elsewhere the people calling the shots on Bolivia and Latin America are the same people who held those posts before."

In the near term, I think the Obama administration is unlikely to give Latin America much attention at all. For good reason it will focus on the global economic crisis and the twin wars he inherited in Afghanistan and Iraq. In mid-April, however, he is likely to attend the Summit of the America in Tobago, along with other Presidents from the region. We'll see then what he has to say, who he poses with for photos, and how wide he smiles at their side. But as a colleague of mine close to the new administration on Latin American issues told me, it may be better now for progressive Latin American governments to propose an agenda for change to President Obama, instead of waiting for the U.S., to take the lead.

[Our bus winds its way through the streets of Harlem.]

Tuesday I spent the day at Drew University in Madison NJ, asked by the faculty there to give three talks, beginning with comments in the Drew chapel (the University has a special focus on people training to be ministers). In the pulpit I tried to find a religious connection. I told the story of how the day before I accidently got on an express subway that whisked me all the way to 125th when I wanted to get off sixty blocks earlier. The whole way there I was stuck two feet from a man screaming far too loudly about Jesus.

At one point he demanded of the passengers in the crowded train (in Spanish), "Raise your hand if you believe in Jesus! Raise your hand!" I explained how close I had come to answering back, "I believed in Jesus until 72nd street, but now I am an atheist." My offering to the pastors-to-be – if you want people to listen to what you have to say, try some humility, a softer voice, and speak in a language people understand.

Tuesday night Melissa, Roberto and I were at New School in the West Village. A good crowd of 70 or so showed up, students, faculty, and kind readers of the Blog who have come to all of our events so far. Roberto explained the complex system that the World Bank, IMF, and foreign corporations had spent two decades setting up to structure their influence over Bolivia's economic decisions – bonus payments to political officials, investments laws, and the like. "It is against this system that our people rebelled and dismantling that system is hard." Melissa spoke of her friend Casimira Rodriguez, and of a life that went from the isolation of being an enslaved 15-year-old maid in Cochabamba to helping organize a justice movement for these women worldwide – the flipside of globalization. The globalization of solidarity.

Wednesday morning, while my cohorts set off for a talk at Brooklyn College, I traveled to the Canal St. firehouse where Amy Goodman and Democracy Now broadcast to thousands of people all over the U.S., a dedicated following that includes many of our readers. Her crew tortured me first with make-up (and hairspray!). On the set Amy asked me if people tell me I look like John Kerry.

"Only in the U.S.," I told her.

"Is that why you moved to Bolivia?"

"Yes."

We spent 25 minutes speaking about the book, about Bolivia and about what the future might hold with a new U.S. President. The interview will air in the next few days. Watch for it here.

Last night we wrapped up our New York visit with an appearance at the Brecht Forum along the banks of the Hudson. The forum is a meeting point for progressive activists who briefed me on everything from events in Gaza to a new film on the recent rebellion in Oaxaca, Mexico. Before an audience of activists who already knew much of Bolivia's own rebellions, I took the opportunity to go beyond the myths and legends.

"The Water Revolt teaches us not only the power of courage in the streets," I told them, standing before the giant image of a woman in braids, with a sling in her hand standing alone before a line of armed police. "Nine years later the public water company that took Bechtel's place remains inefficient and corrupt," repeating a theme of that chapter in our book. "Resistance is romantic but what comes after is the challenge of the nuts and bolts of governance and we have to make that just as important if not more."

So now Providence slides by out our window, snow covers the ground. We have two back-to-back events today waiting for us up the road in Boston – first at Harvard then at Boston University. Tomorrow we have two more. I'll put the remaining schedule for the tour below.

Thank you to those who made our visit to New York so super, sleepless as it was. Thank you Nancy and Lew for lending us the third floor of your Brooklyn gray stone. Thank you to the wonderful people at New School and NACLA, at Brooklyn College and the Brecht Forum who hosted us. And thank you to the great friends, new and old, who braved cold weather to come out and hear us.

There are bagels in Boston, no?

February 19 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Boston University, The Jacob Sleeper Auditorium CGS building,
871 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA

February 20 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: The Jamaica Plain Forum
First Church in Jamaica Plain, UU
6 Eliot St. (across from the monument),
Jamaica Plain

February 21 - South Hadley, MA
When: 11:00 am
Where: The Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St., The Village Commons, S. Hadley

February 21 — Northampton, MA
When: 3:00 pm
Where: Smith College, Neilson Browsing Room, Northampton

February 23 — St Paul/Minneapolis, MN
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Macalester College, John B Davis (JBD) Lecture Hall, Campus Center, Lower Level

February 24 — Chicago, IL
When: 6:00 pm
Where: The University of Chicago
International House, 1414 E. 59th St., Chicago

HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF DIGNITY AND DEFIANCE
Order the book today from (click the links):

Amazon.com
University of California Press
Powell's Books
Independent Bookstores

Blog from the Book Tour II: From Washington to Washington

Dear Readers:

The Democracy Center team continues on our national book tour for Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization. Support has been great. Half way through the tour we have already had close to a thousand people turnout for our events in five different cities.

A great Seattle-based project called Talking Stick TV filmed our event at the University of Seattle and posted a skillfully produced video of it on YouTube today. If you haven't been able to make it to the tour in person you can do it by Internet by clicking on the screen above.

Also, on Wednesday morning, I'll be an in-studio guest on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. You can watch that live or later at this link.

We still have nearly a dozen events ahead of us, in New York, Boston, Chicago and the Twin Cities. The schedule for those events is below. Please join us if you can!

Jim Shultz

Blog from the Book Tour II: From Washington to Washington

Seattle

Thanks to my flight being delayed out of San Francisco two hours two things happened. The first was that I got to have a long visit with a friend from Singapore who stopped by the airport to see me off. The second was that I landed in Seattle less than 30 minutes before I was scheduled to speak before a packed audience at Seattle University.

Fortunately the 70 people who had gathered – students, faculty, and other friends – were still waiting patiently when I walked in the small auditorium.

The word globalization has a special significance in Seattle. The city that launched Starbucks also put the "G' word into our public vocabulary.

It was there a decade ago that 70,000 people filled the streets to surround what would otherwise been one more obscure meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Labor, environmental, and social justice activists joined outside that meeting to draw global attention to the growing web of global rules that had been shaping the planet's destiny, with remarkably little public notice. After 'Seattle' people did notice. And while much of the media focused on the handful of people who thought breaking windows at Starbucks was the thing to do, the real story was the explosion of learning and activism that began there.

The Democracy Center book tour is our effort to continue that learning, by telling the stories of what globalization has meant – both good and bad – in a country that has become synonymous with it.

The Seattle University audience was wonderful, full of good questions. The university is also the former home to one of my fellow bloggers from Bolivia, Dan Moriarty (a.k.a. Missionary Man) and Dan's mother showed up bringing the gift of a box of Seattle smoked salmon. Thanks for that!

The next night was our main Seattle event, put together by the great people at Global Partnerships and the University of Washington, at the University. Leny Olivera of the Democracy Center's staff in Cochabamba was there with me as well, and the room was packed, a crowd of nearly 200 with standing room only. We have been surprised, pleasantly, by the big turnouts at every event we have had.

After showing the video for the book we took turns speaking, sharing some of the stories captured in the book. A woman with white hair sitting in the front row was staring at us angrily. Leny told me later that it looked like she had arrows coming out her eyes. As we wrapped up our presentation she finally could contain herself no longer and began to speak, so we let her have the first question.

"You are blaming America for everything," she declared, expressing a criticism of our work that we hear frequently here on the Blog. I answered her with the story of Christina Haglund, a young woman from Portland who authored the chapter of our book about the massive Enron oil spill in Bolivia in January 2000. I explained that, regrettably, it is a fact that the U.S. corporations, the U.S. government, and international institutions dominated by the U.S. have done the kinds of things we documented carefully in the book – spilling oil, putting innocent people in jail in the 'war on drugs', and coercing the privatization of natural resources.

"But the U.S. is a two-sided coin," and if you want to know the other side know the story of our young volunteer from Portland. I told her how a 25-year-old fresh from a stint in the Peace Corps showed up at my door in 2005, a fan of the Democracy Center's work, and offered to volunteer for six months. She stayed two years.

To bring the Enron oil spill story to public ligt she first poured through a stack of papers and documents a foot high. Then we boufght her a used bike and she put that bike on a bus and headed to the barren highlands where Enron and Shell had negligently poured 29,000 barrles of oil into a sacred river. For 4 months she pedaled from community to community, living in people's homes, herding their aniamals with them, and gaining their trusrt to that she could take their testimony abiut what the corporation from Texas had done to them. It was in these hard-gained testimonies that we discovered that Enron officials has swept down by helicopter into these communities and told the people whose animals were dying and whose children were getting sick that the black in the river was fertilizer that would make their crops grow better. Confronted with this testimony later the corporation admitted it.

That was my answer to the woman in the front row that night in Seattle and it remains my answer to all those who think that the Democracy Center's work is 'anti-American.' Our aim is to lift up what is best about our country, embodied in that young woman from Portland, and employ it to counterbalance what others from our country do in the world that is not beautiful or generous.

Santa Fe

Our next stop was the hometown of my co-editor on the book, Melissa Draper. El Museo Cultural, a space filled with art and culture and a generous spirit, hosted us for an event that brought 60 people out to see us, including, it seemed, everyone Melissa had ever known there. The local paper, the New Mexican, ran a profile of the hometown girl turned book author. At the signing afterwards I wrote to most people, "Thank you for giving us Melissa."

A Bolivian friend played music on the charango and later joined Leny for a duet on the flute. But here in Santa Fe the most important connection we made was with the local indigenous community, and saw first hand the inspiration that Bolivia is to many indigenous people in the U.S. A group of teenage students at the Santa Fe Indian School presented Leny with a resolution of solidarity with their Bolivian counterparts.

The next night we stood before a packed room at St. John's College, welcomed by the college President and faculty. Again people asked most about the new Bolivian constitution and the Bolivian lithium issue highlighted in last week's New York Times.

Washington, DC

Arriving on the east coast Leny Olivera headed back to Cochabamba and Melissa and I were joined by our friend Roberto Fernandez Teran, a professor at the University of San Simon and one of the most knowledgeable people in the country about Bolivia's struggle to reclaim its natural resources.

The three of kicked off the second half of the tour with a bang, at an event hosted on Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies at the popular Washington bookstore and café, Busboys and Poets. So many people showed up for that event, more than 120, that the bookstore had to close the doors to its events room after it reached capacity and people were sitting in the aisles on the floor. A congressional staff member emailed me from his Blackberry to say that he was in the store but couldn’t get into the event. Bolivia's representative at the United Nations, Pablo Solon talked his way in by explaining he was a diplomat. Nearly a dozen former Peace Corps volunteers were in the audience, including several who were part of the group yanked out by the Bush administration last year. I told them all to go talk to Pablo and tell him that the Bolivian government ought to ask the Peace Corps back.

Friday the three of us were at George Washington University. Over and over on the tour people have come up after these events and introduced themselves as avid readers of the Blog. At GW a young Bolivian professional said to me that he doesn’t always agree with what I write but thanked me for the Blog anyway. "I like to read it at work to keep from getting bored."

Then today we had out last Washington area event, a special one. The Virginia suburbs outside of Washington are home to the largest Bolivian community in the U.S. Saltenas can be bought here easily and the newspaper Los Tiempos has its own news racks outside of local Metro stations. At a modest church in Falls Church members of that Bolivian community gathered for an event in Spanish. Midway through our hosts asked if we could take a break in the presentations for a surprise. A quartet of dancers, the women dressed in the traditional skirts of Cochabamba, came out to perform in honor of Lily Whitesell, the Virginia native who was also a part of our book team and wrote the book's amazing chapter about this immigrant community's experience.

As I watched Lily join them to dance a 'cueca' I missed Cochabamba as much as I have since we began this tour two weeks ago. Now we have two weeks left to go – off to New York, Boston, the Twin Cities and Chicago. Here is a list of our remaining public events. Come see us on the road!

February 17 — New York, NY
When: 6:00 pm
Where: The New School, 66 W. 12th St., New York

February 18 — New York, NY
When: 7:30 pm
Where: The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bethune and Bank), New York

February 19 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Boston University, The Jacob Sleeper Auditorium CGS building,
871 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA

February 20 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: The Jamaica Plain Forum
First Church in Jamaica Plain, UU
6 Eliot St. (across from the monument),
Jamaica Plain

February 21 - South Hadley, MA
When: 11:00 am
Where: The Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St., The Village Commons, S. Hadley

February 21 — Northampton, MA
When: 3:00 pm
Where: Smith College, Neilson Browsing Room, Northampton

February 23 — St Paul/Minneapolis, MN
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Macalester College, John B Davis (JBD) Lecture Hall, Campus Center, Lower Level

February 24 — Chicago, IL
When: 6:00 pm
Where: The University of Chicago
International House, 1414 E. 59th St., Chicago

HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF DIGNITY AND DEFIANCE
Order the book today from (click the links):

Amazon.com
University of California Press
Powell's Books
Independent Bookstores

Blog from the Book Tour #1: Return to the Bay Area

San Francisco greeted us with a bright February sun and warm weather. Home to the land by the Bay where I lived more than 15 years, where I went to college, was married, raised my two oldest children, and made the kind of friendships that endure a lifetime. The events we did there were filled with familiar faces.

At UC Berkeley sixty people – students, faculty, old friends – filled a meeting room at the law school. Leny Olivera, Melissa Draper, and I were joined by one of the co-authors of the book, Gretchen Gordon, who is now a graduate student there.

After showing our video about the book, Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization, we spoke briefly about what we learned from the writing of it – about Bolivia, about globalization, and about its impacts on things environmental, economic and cultural.

Interest in and knowledge of Bolivia is strong in the Bay Area so the questions afterwards were well-informed. People wanted to know about the new constitution and relations between the Bolivia and the U.S. They wanted to understand better how institutions such as the World Bank and IMF functioned in a poor nation. Some also challenged us, including a man who questioned my assertion that the mistakes that the U.S. makes in Latin America come less from malevolence than cluelessness. I told him that I like to err on the side of optimism.

Our main event was Tuesday in the heart of San Francisco's Latino Mission district. I took a walk down familiar 24th street beforehand to clear my head – a walk through the very heart of the immigrant community where I had been so involved so long ago now.

Without planning on it I ended up going to visit her. We don't know her actual name, that young woman in braids who, with only a sling in her hand, stood down a row of armed police during the Water Revolt nine years ago. I call her Cochabamba. Her image, drawn from a photograph taken by my friend Tom Kruse, sits now at the heart of a mural at 24th and York Street, a work of art created by that inspired woman who also painted the Women's Building, Juana Alicia.

I asked her what I should say. She told me to tell stories. And so that is what I am doing.

Two hundred people filled the room lent to us by the Mission Cultural Center. It was like traveling back in a time machine – seeing faces that I hadn’t seen in many cases since a decade ago when my family and left to return to Cochabamba. The Peace Women were there (you know who you are), the valiant ones who had worked for justice in Central America by guiding people through war zones in El Salvador and letting themselves get arrested in protests at home. Now their oldest children, like mine, are in college, activists in the making. Wonderful friends at organizations such as Food and Water Watch had spread the word, as did friends in the Bolivian community.

Afterwards I turned my cohorts from the Democracy Center on to the wonders of Mission Street burritos. It made them not want to leave.

Wednesday we shifted into high gear with two events. The first was a classroom full of students and faculty and the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school with a strong contingent of Latinos, and high interest in Bolivia. Then we boarded a Ferry at sunset to travel across the Bay to Marin, for what was supposed to be a small gathering at a Presbyterian Church in Larkspur, hosted by the Marin Interfaith Task Force on Latin America, and organized by one of our former volunteers in Cochabamba, Mike Graham-Squire. Nearly sixty people showed up there as well.

It takes a while on a tour like this to find one's voice.

Last night we had an event at Seattle University, which I made by the skin of my teeth, directly from the airport due to flight delays. Seventy students and faculty were waiting patiently. I did my best to tell the stories from the book that would transmit something of what I have learned, as someone from the U.S. who has spent more than a decade living in a very different country very far away.

Later that evening we received a volunteer application from a young woman, a Mexican immigrant who is student at the school. She wrote us this:

Earlier today, I went to hear Jim Shultz speak on campus at Seattle University about the problems that Bolivia faces today. He talked about the meaning of democracy and how the world outside American tends to attach a negative connotation to the word. He talked about globalization, which is neither negative nor positive, and how it differs from economic globalization, which talks about the rules of the game. Mr. Shultz inspired me to make a difference. I grew up around the poverty and now that I am educated and privileged, I want to make a difference.

The path of inspiration works the other way around. There is a power in this generation of 20-somethings that are coming to these events, young people who want to engage in not just their nation but also the world. In San Francisco I spoke to them directly. "Thank you for showing up to save our country just at the moment when it most needs saving."

They are the inspiration.

Below are the remaining dates for the tour. Come see us on the road!

Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press)

“This is the little-known story of a people that has dared to fight back against the most powerful economic forces on the planet, told by writers with the courage to dig relentlessly for the truth and the humility to stand back and let their subjects speak for themselves. Enraging, unsparing, inspiring.”

—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine


WHERE TO HOOK UP WITH THE DEMOCRACY CENTER BOOK TOUR

Here are the main public events below. A full calendar of all the events, including a number of smaller ones not listed here, with a list of our sponsors, maps and downloadable flyers (that you can copy and post to help spread the word), can be found at this link.

February 6 — Seattle, WA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: University of Washington, HUB 310

February 8 — Albuquerque, NM
When: 2:00 pm
Where: The University of New Mexico, Student Union Building (SUB), Film Center (lower level), 801 Yale NE, Albuquerque
[Part of the Sin Fronteras Film Festival]

February 9 — Santa Fe, NM
When: 6:00 pm
Where: El Museo Cultural, The Santa Fe Railyard
1615 Paseo De Peralta #B, Santa Fe

February 10 — Santa Fe, NM

When: 6:00 pmWhere: St John's College, Junior Common Room, 2nd Floor Peterson Student Center, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe

February 12 — Washington DC
When: 6:30 pm
Where: Busboys and Poets, 1390 V St NW @ 14th, Washington

February 13 — Washington DC
When: Noon
Where: George Washington University (The Elliott School), 1957 E St., Suite 505, NW Washington

February 17 — New York, NY
When: 6:00 pm
Where: The New School, 66 W. 12th St., New York

February 18 — New York, NY
When: 7:30 pm
Where: The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bethune and Bank), New York

February 19 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Boston University, The Jacob Sleeper Auditorium CGS building,
871 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA

February 20 — Boston, MA
When: 7:00 pm
Where: The Jamaica Plain Forum
First Church in Jamaica Plain, UU
6 Eliot St. (across from the monument),
Jamaica Plain

February 21 - South Hadley, MA
When: 11:00 am
Where: The Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St., The Village Commons, S. Hadley

February 21 — Northampton, MA
When: 3:00 pm
Where: Smith College, Neilson Browsing Room, Northampton

February 23 — St Paul/Minneapolis, MN
When: 7:00 pm
Where: Macalester College, John B Davis (JBD) Lecture Hall, Campus Center, Lower Level

February 24 — Chicago, IL
When: 6:00 pm
Where: The University of Chicago
International House, 1414 E. 59th St., Chicago

HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF DIGNITY AND DEFIANCE
Order the book today from (click the links):

Amazon.com
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Independent Bookstores