Cancun Dispatch 8/28

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Most of the ideas center around street theater and creativity. Whether or not we can get to the meeting, we can create a carnival of opposition in the streets of Cancun City, and over a week we will need lots of creative ideas.

The action meeting is followed by a meeting to resolve some issues that have come up around working together, and then by a meeting to lay out a plan for getting the convergence space up and running. Which is where I duck out for mochas and food, finally.

In the evening we have our first assemblea, the first general meeting of all the groups planning actions and programs. There are about 20 of us, and we go around and share the different projects. There's a media team setting up a media convergence for the independents who will cover the event. There's a group that will host a festival of films about resistance. The puppetistas are concentrating on three Mayan Gods, Chac, the God of rain, who is upset about water privatization; Itzma, the God of maize, who is angry about the contamination of Mexican corn by genetically engineered pollen; and Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatly, the feathered serpent of all Mesoamerica. "What, no Goddesses?" I ask. They say they are considering Ixchel, Goddess of the Moon and weavers of spiderwebs.

I'm not working on the puppets myself, so I can't say much more, but I trust Ixchel to make herself heard in this process.

In case you are wondering what it takes to pull off a mobilization like this one, here's a list of the various working groups, not counting the special projects like our permaculture project and the film festival:

• Outreach
• Media (dealing with the mainstream media, that is)
• Indymedia
• Food
• Water
• Medical
• Legal
• Housing and encampments
• Convergence space
• Communications
• Security
• Puppets and art
• Action planning
• Training
• Facilitation and translation
• Cultural events
• Materials -- flyers, broadsheets, etc.
• Fundraising

And that's not even including the NGOs organizing forums or fighting to get visas for their participants or any specific action coordination.

By the end of the night, Mike has been translating almost nonstop for about 12 hours. With his quiet, cheerful manner and his long, braided beard, he's an example, to me, of the kind of activists who have somehow been deployed by the cosmos to do this work -- young, smart, studying Latin American political systems, radical without being annoying about it, easygoing and indefatigable, just doing a grueling amount of work without making a fuss about it.

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