CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BOYCOTT
Luis Ávila, thirty-five
Culiacán, Sinaloa/Phoenix, Arizona
IN JULY 2010, SB 1070, the law criminalizing undocumented immigrants and anyone who provided certain services, such as housing, to them, went into effect in Arizona. Daniel Rodríguez and Luis Ávila decided an appropriate response would be to organize a boycott against the state of Arizona.
The concept sounded far-fetched. Who would want to boycott the very state they lived in? But Daniel and Luis’s reasoning was simple: if you don’t want to recognize our community’s worth—the “you” here referring to conservative authorities and anti-immigrant groups—then we’ll hit back where it hurts the most: at businesses and your wallets.
Support for the boycott, which was strongest among potential event attendees and visitors to tourist destinations in Arizona, resulted in a loss of $600 million in state revenue. The valuable lessons in strategy learned from that experience were ingrained in the two activists who had conceived of the boycott, and the opportunity to put them back into practice presented itself in November 2016.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election, Daniel and Luis, now with even more experience under their belts, decided to create a similar strategy. They wondered, What would happen if we asked Mexico to boycott US corn?
Luis Ávila was born in Culiacán in 1982, but he barely remembers anything about Sinaloa. When he was very small he moved with his parents to Tijuana, where he spent most of his childhood. He went to elementary school there, while his father worked in a bank and his mother in a department store. His sister was born there, and as often happens in families along the border, his brother was born in the United States.
A few years later his father, whom Luis describes as “one of those men who gets ideas,” decided to start his own business. Using savings and some loans, he bought some land in Bajío, a region in central Mexico, and started a dairy farm. The family moved to Mexico City for a year and then to the city of Querétaro, which was closer to the little village called Doctor Mora, in Guanajuato, where the dairy farm was. Twelve years old at the time, Luis would go to help out on the weekends.
When talking about his father’s attempts at running a business, Luis uses a less than politically correct metaphor to explain how it always goes wrong: if he were to buy a circus, the dwarfs would grow tall. Just when Mr. Ávila bet it all on milk production, Mexico reached an agreement to buy powdered milk from the US, and domestic milk prices plummeted. The cost of producing the fresh milk that most Mexicans used to consume—in bottles, not in Tetra Paks, or powdered, which they buy now—became very high in relation to the consumer price for the product, so Luis’s father’s business began to fall apart. First, he sold off some cows and scrambled for alternatives. He applied for more loans and decided to grow broccoli instead. But then the price of broccoli fell dramatically, too. He lost land, until he was left with just a small plot that could not be used for much.
When Luis graduated high school, he had the chance to go to the United States to learn English. By that time, the family was experiencing such financial trouble that they couldn’t cover basic expenses such as rent or school fees for Luis and his siblings. Luis’s mother started going to the United States for short periods to work. She got temporary jobs driving a taxi or cleaning houses, and then would go back to Mexico, bringing home her earnings to pay the bills or buy clothing for the children, while their father tried to climb out of the financial hole he had dug.
“That caused problems between them; there were fights,” Luis says. “My dad started drinking. He became more violent, and our nuclear family was broken. My mom was working a lot. I was seventeen, and I got a small scholarship to study English. So I took the opportunity and came here one summer, assuming I would go back to Mexico to enroll in college.”
That was the plan initially. But once Luis was in Arizona, he decided to experiment a little: what would happen if he applied to college there? Without giving it much more thought, he completed and submitted an application to Arizona State University. Then, much to his surprise, he was accepted.
“I was the first person in my family to go to college, so to them, being accepted to an American university was like I had gotten into Harvard,” Luis says with a laugh. “Everyone said it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And I was really lucky, because when my dad was really young he had gone to Oregon to work, and he benefited from the 1986 amnesty. At that time, he applied for legal residency for me, and eighteen or nineteen years later, I got my green card, just in time to come to the US.”
By then Luis’s parents were separated, so he and his mother and siblings began making plans to move. On July 31, Luis’s birthday, he rode a bus to go live with one of his aunts. The others arrived later, and his mom started working driving a shuttle bus between Nogales and Phoenix.
But one important detail Luis and his family did not know was that since he was not a resident of Arizona, he would have to pay out-of-state tuition—three times more than what state residents paid. So Luis also had to get a job to pay for college. Like many immigrant families, Luis’s family did not speak English, and they all got jobs in the service sector, sometimes working more than one. Luis’s first job was in a Peter Piper Pizza, cleaning. Later he had a job in a Jack in the Box, and also worked preparing food for private events.
Luis worked for five years so he could go to college. Some semesters he could only afford the time and money to take a single class. Although he did receive some financial support for tuition after the first year, Luis still had to cover his other living expenses. His family also depended on the income he earned, since his mother did not make enough to support four people.
“We didn’t have a car; we had to take the bus. Everything cost money,” he says. “Little by little, we got on our feet. We moved into an apartment where we lived for several years, and later I moved out to live closer to the university. Things started going better for my dad in Mexico, so he started helping us out a little financially. While all this was happening, my two brothers and I graduated college.”
Luis decided to study journalism and Latin American literature, and soon he founded a bilingual magazine at the university. That’s how he met Daniel Rodríguez, who would become his comrade-in-arms not only at school but in activism too. And like Daniel, during his years in college, Luis learned all about social issues and politics in the United States.
In that time, Luis also met several undocumented students who told him they could not go to college. It was hard for Luis to believe that he could come to the US and have access to a higher education while other young people who had grown up here could not. This was before anyone had started talking about the DREAM Act and the Dreamers themselves, but Luis got involved with other movements and issues: migratory politics, opposing initiatives to make English the official language of Arizona, and organizing resistance to other anti-immigrant proposals. Along the way, a generation of young activists rose up and came together to create a network that has successfully fought some measures, including the controversial anti-immigrant legislative initiative SB 1070.
On the morning of April 23, 2010, Arizona entered a time machine. With the stroke of a pen, Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law and sent her state careening back to the early twentieth century, when the territory first joined the Union as Arizona. Before that, it had been Mexican territory, inhabited by Native American tribes including the Pueblos, Yaquis, and Navajos. Brigham Young, leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, decided to populate the area with white people of European descent. Under that premise, cities such as Phoenix, Tempe, and Prescott, the heart of the present-day state, were formed.
For a century, the quest to establish white dominance has marked Arizona as a state with the most regressive, racist politics in the country. Some of the most radical, racist laws were formulated there, and the state is considered a legislative laboratory for the rest of country: anti-immigrant laws are crafted, promoted, and passed in Arizona first, and then spread out to be taken up by other states.
This is the state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio operated with stunning impunity in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, the capital, terrorizing Latino residents in the service of “cleansing” communities of undocumented immigrants. Never mind that those very immigrants tend lawns for everyone else, and build their homes, and take care of their children. Arizona also passed Proposition 200 in 2004, which denied undocumented people access to public services.
SB 1070, passed by the Arizona State Senate on April 19 and signed into law by Governor Brewer four days later, went even further. It not only penalized anyone providing support to an undocumented person, even a family member; it also punished law enforcement officers, in the police and sheriff’s department, who failed to detain someone suspected of being undocumented, a practice prohibited by federal law (with rare exceptions).
What is the physical description of an undocumented person? In a country where immigrants come from every corner of the world, and where most immigrants and their descendants have legal immigration status, how do you identify someone as being in the country illegally? For civil rights organizations, the answer was obvious: it would be someone with dark skin, who does not speak English or speaks with an accent, or anyone who speaks Spanish.
Falling under the shadow of suspicion were people who had lived in the region since long before Brigham Young found his way there: people who had brown skin because the hot Arizona sun had darkened their ancestors’ complexions for centuries; people with last names like López and Méndez, descended from the Spanish who had first colonized these lands; and people wearing ball caps emblazoned with the Suns logo, their hometown NBA basketball team, or sporting Cardinals jerseys, Arizona’s NFL team, documented or not. This was not just an anti-immigrant law. It was racist, placing Arizona in an embarrassing position that in no way reflected the principles of the nation’s founding fathers.
By the time Governor Brewer signed SB 1070 into effect, on July 29, 2010, civil and immigrant rights groups had already crafted legal strategies to try to block the law, arguing that no state law can be above the US Constitution and federal laws that prohibit racial profiling. Some of these legal challenges proceeded in court, and the components of the law that encouraged racial profiling were eliminated—at least on paper, although in practice profiling still occurred. Not successfully thrown out completely were the prerogative to deny access to some services to undocumented people and sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers, which are significant and rigorously applied.
Meanwhile, just a few days after SB 1070 was signed in April, a group of activists, including Luis and Daniel, put out the call to boycott the state of Arizona: do not spend your money there; do not plan any trips there. The idea of a boycott against a whole state may have seemed ludicrous, but the concept had a precedent, and a successful one at that.
In 1983, the third Monday of every January was declared a national holiday to honor civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But the Arizona state government refused to pass a law that would designate the day a holiday on the state level. In response, in the early 1990s, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister, human rights activist, and leader in the African American community, organized a boycott against the state that garnered wide support across the country. In 1991, bowing to pressure from many of its African American players, the NFL moved the location of the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix to Pasadena, California. The following year, Arizona passed the law.
With that precedent in mind, in response to SB 1070, activist organizations in Arizona called on the Latino community to start a boycott. Leaders urged people to stop attending the games of Arizona sports teams, no matter where they were playing, and asked popular Latino performers to cancel upcoming concerts in the state. They told everyone to stop using US Airways, headquartered in Phoenix, and asked residents of Sonora, Mexico, to stop crossing the border into Arizona to shop. Boycott organizers asked major corporations and business groups to cancel conventions and meetings to be held in Arizona, and they asked the whole country to stop purchasing agricultural products grown in Arizona. Truckers from the Port of Los Angeles, the most important commercial port in the country, pledged to stop transporting shipping containers to Arizona.
The boycott threatened to ostracize some of the state’s key industry sectors. Arizona lost thousands of hotel reservations, and major musical acts, such as Manu Chao, Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, and Kanye West, came out in support of the boycott with what they dubbed “The Sound Strike.” Other artists, such as Lady Gaga, did not cancel their shows, but they did make public statements condemning SB 1070. All of these actions caught the media’s attention; coverage went viral, and the boycott dealt a crippling blow to Arizona tourism, to the tune of $140 million.1
Even more important, the passage of SB 1070 sparked an outpouring of criticism against the state in the national public discourse, which in turn inspired organizations, businesses, and thought leaders in other states to sign on to the boycott. The convention industry was the first to be affected when groups and associations started canceling upcoming events in the state. The meetings and conferences that were canceled over the next three years would have helped sustain 2,800 employees, and the economic losses surpassed $86 million in lost wages, plus $250 million in overall lost revenue.2
The Arizona Lodging & Hotel Association reported a loss of $15 million in just the four months right after the law was passed, while the Center for American Progress think tank concluded that amount would have been triple, at $45 million. Between July and August 2010, when the law went into effect, the state’s Convention and Visitors Bureau received 35 percent fewer reservations than in the same period the previous year.
Estimates calculated at the time also found the state would have lost revenue from taxes, as well as lost salaries, from the goods and services that workers would have purchased with that lost income, totaling approximately $9 million in two or three years. The Arizona Republic figured total losses were $600 million.
Los Angeles; Austin, Texas; and St. Paul, Minnesota, among other city governments, passed measures officially boycotting Arizona, and dozens more made public statements calling for the repeal of SB 1070. In that climate, the Mexican Consulate issued a travel alert warning Mexican citizens that in Arizona they were at risk of being questioned by police for no apparent reason.
The general outcry and social pressure were reflected in the various lawsuits challenging the law, which succeeded in overturning its most draconian aspects. Some parts of the law remain in effect. Though the young activists had not won the war, they did win the battle to minimize the damage.
When Luis and Daniel got together to brainstorm the response to the Trump administration—which ended up being the Mexican boycott of US corn—statements from a former president of Mexico, along with the lessons learned from the Arizona boycott, gave them an indication of what path to take. Luis had just seen former president Felipe Calderón on television, whose administration had maintained a bumpy relationship with the United States because of the “war on drugs” and its effects on bilateral relations. In an interview, Calderón suggested that Mexico stop buying agricultural products such as corn and soy from their neighbor to the north.
Luis told Daniel about it, and Daniel thought that, aside from being a symbolic act, it could actually have a strong impact, without punishing consumers. Some days before, a general boycott of all US products had been initiated in Mexico, which was in practical terms very hard to pull off, not only because of the huge range of US goods that are regularly consumed in Mexico—and the difficulty in identifying them—but also because that would mean boycotting small Mexican business owners who had invested their own money in US products and created jobs for other Mexicans.
“It had to be something really easy for the consumer, and we remembered the boycott that Cesar Chavez had organized,” Luis explained to me. “The message was very clear: ‘Don’t eat grapes,’ and that’s it. In considering this, we remembered how Cesar Chavez had even gone to Europe to tell them [to] ‘stop buying California grapes.’ It was very simple, and that was more or less what we did in 2010. The boycott was ‘Don’t do business in the state of Arizona.’ That was very easy, because it didn’t imply any big changes in the lives of average Arizonans.”
To Luis, corn also had a powerful symbolism. As soon as he and Daniel started talking about the idea with others, a group of young Mexicans decided to support it by making a video with a pointed message: we used to export it, now we import it; migrants headed north, and now we buy corn.
As Luis and Daniel started talking to more people, they realized they were touching on a tremendously relevant issue, which for whatever reason was not on the national public agenda in Mexico. “Before, the only thing we knew about corn was that it’s used to make tortillas,” Daniel said, only half joking. “Now we know a lot more. Almost 5 percent of all the corn grown in the US is exported to Mexico. That might not sound like much, but that’s almost 70 percent of total corn consumption in Mexico, worth billions of dollars. But it’s not nixtamalizado corn [the type used to make tortillas], which is what people eat; it’s yellow corn, which is used for animal feed and in oils and high-fructose corn syrup in sodas. Ninety-nine percent of yellow corn [bought] in Mexico is from the US, and it’s used in states that raise a lot of livestock.”
A boycott of US corn would deal a strong blow to that country’s economy, but it would also put pressure on Mexican industries that depend on that corn, because they would need to find another source. Luis and Daniel believe there’s a challenge as well as an opportunity there, and they wanted to promote their idea on the other side of the border: people well-versed in the subject could advise them on what was practical, and what wasn’t, and let them know what Mexico was doing in that area.
When they started talking about the concept using social media and contacting organizations in Mexico, people in that country reacted positively, but Luis and Daniel also learned something important: Mexicans do not trust their government. In the current political climate, there would be no shortage of politicians who would want to take up the cause and stamp it with their own political party or issue. How could Luis and Daniel move forward with this kind of initiative without being used, considering both of them were unfamiliar with the political context since they didn’t live there?
Almost as soon as they had been warned about the risk of their initiative being exploited by politicians for their own ends, it happened. Just a few days after they began preparing to promote the boycott, starting to build a website and an online petition, Luis and Daniel found out that a delegation of Mexican senators was planning a visit to Arizona. They decided to attend a meeting the senators were having; it was private but Luis and Daniel managed to gain access as journalists along with other representatives of the media. At one point, Luis received permission to speak, and he asked for the Senate delegation’s support for the corn boycott. The idea intrigued a staffer working for Armando Ríos Píter, a senator and member of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). The senator decided to “support” the boycott in his own way. He talked to the press about it, and soon a legislative initiative that he himself signed, based on Luis and Daniel’s concept, was ready to be presented in the Mexican Senate.3
“That got us coverage; it helped get the word out. The most important publications covering trade treaties and media like National Public Radio and USA Today have talked about it, but it’s all been focused on the legislative initiative,” Luis says, somewhat resigned to having their idea co-opted. “So now what we’re trying to do is say, ‘Hey, this was our idea, a couple of concerned immigrants,’ because if it’s just a proposal from the Mexican Senate, then it’s like we didn’t do anything.”
What happened with the Mexican Senate will no doubt serve as one more learning experience for the two young activists, who are still forging ahead. Luis believes a singular moment in time has arrived, a unique set of circumstances that has sparked a renewed, revitalized feeling of national pride in many Mexicans, and they need to take advantage of it.
“It’s been amazing for me to see this ‘Yes we can’ attitude, for the first time, doubting the relationship with the United States,” Luis explains enthusiastically. “It’s a really interesting reaction, and I believe it’s a unique opportunity for whatever renegotiation might take place now. Another thing that has excited me from the beginning is, I think this is the first time Mexicans in Mexico and in the US can do something together, for a common cause.”
Another aspect of the Mexican boycott of American corn that particularly excites them is the chance to “speak for others,” Daniel explains. They believe that the Trump administration has drawn heightened attention to the US trade agreements, and in the context of a renegotiation, the migration issue will have to be factored into any new versions the agreements. Mexico also has an opportunity to expand its influence: if Mexico starts working with other countries to build a united Latin American leadership, it could change the balance of power with the United States over the long term.
“The United States liked having an economically globalized world. It was very good for the country,” Daniel says, adjusting his glasses. He speaks passionately. It is clear that he believes this part of the argument has implications beyond one hostile president’s four-year term. “This is the first campaign that I’m aware of that is using the same strategy to politically pressure a government action inside the same country. Are we living in a globalized world? Well, we can use Mexico’s influence, which for whatever reason they have not used before, to build social movements. We’re starting to educate ourselves about how we can start to exercise that power.”
“This isn’t just about the Trump administration,” Luis adds. “If agreements are broken, if he insults Mexicans, if he damages the relations with Mexico, what happens after Trump? Are we going to be doormats again?”
The months after the “hijacking” of their idea by players in Mexico’s political game have given Luis and Daniel the chance to learn what people think about that game. Through social media, especially the boycott campaign’s Facebook page, Luis and Daniel receive messages of support from some people who see the boycott as a symbolic condemnation of President Peña Nieto’s administration. They hear from others who are suspicious of the motives behind the boycott and accuse Luis and Daniel of being pawns of the government; these posters don’t want to add their names in support because they fear that information could be used for other aims. Some have accused Luis and Daniel of creating a “distraction” to divert attention from criticisms of the Mexican government.
“We have been very careful in our response, and we’re not moving away from this subject, because we’ve learned that’s what dilutes movements,” Luis explains. “We have focused on the idea that this is a unique moment, and we can renegotiate things from a position of strength. And people tell us things. They post on Facebook that they get paid a miserable price for corn; they know the price in the market is higher, but they have no way to transport it. There are Mexican growers who could be good allies. There’s a bridge, but we don’t know how to cross it. And we have a profile of the people who left Mexico because they lost their land. Between nationalist sentiment and anti-Trumpism, a large part of the campaign’s purpose—to examine migration in terms of rural farming areas and NAFTA—gets lost. And that’s what we have to focus on now.”
Luis and Daniel also see challenges on the US side. One is how to generate interest and awareness among people in the US who are not directly affected by the migration issue. How do you explain to them that what might happen will impact them too? In their research, Daniel and Luis discovered that, with the exception of Illinois, the states with the highest corn-production rates voted Republican. In the 2016 presidential election, Iowa—the greatest corn producer, with 18 percent of total national production—Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas all voted for Trump.
Luis and Daniel are plotting the next steps in the corn boycott. Luis told me that in the coming months they will be building alliances in Mexico to continue the conversation independent of the political party that presented the legislative initiative, and they plan to partner with organizations and groups that can take an integrated approach to make the boycott a reality.
“We have to let this develop in Mexico and from there talk about what has to be done, because it’s just a question of deciding we’re not going to buy anymore,” Luis says. “Is there infrastructure to increase corn production in Mexico? On Facebook some people tell us: ‘I live in an area where there used to be a lot of land for growing crops, but they’ve given it to industrial parks.’ We can’t have these conversations from Phoenix. We have to find allies in Mexico to keep the conversation going and decide what we should do. Should we keep the pressure on in Mexico, or should we focus on the repercussions this could have in the US and turn up the heat on this side?”
We’ll see what happens in the next four years, and beyond.