Transnational Assembly of Remitters
Mexico City, Mexico
Closing Speech by Francis Calpotura, TIGRA Director
May 15, 2008
(Video Link Here)

There was once a time when we were inspired by the possibility of freedom and justice, when our individual and collective efforts changed the world.

One of the signal achievements of the 20^th century was that ordinary people in our countries asserted a sense of historical collective dignity that led to national liberation movements across “the darker nations” – from Chile and Vietnam, to Zaire and South Africa, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Whatever were the shortcomings or excesses of these struggles, one thing is certain: they ignited a revolutionary momentum that moved mountains, and made the intractable seem inevitable.

I submit that we’ve come to a new threshold in this century, represented in part by this Assembly. We are at a crossroads, and where we go could lead to the development of a new imagination.

If the 20^th century was highlighted by national liberation movements, the 21^st will be about the struggle for a new economic and social emancipation through transnational action.

Yet the problems we face are monumental. We are falling behind rather than advancing toward living out this new 21^st century imagination.

In all our countries, just earning enough for food has become harder than ever for the poor and working people. Prices jumped 60 percent in the last year, as domestic economies are geared toward the global market instead of producing for local consumption. Poor families, especially in the expanding urban slums, spend 60 to 80 percent of their income on food.

Poverty is endemic, political systems largely remain inept and corrupt, and the historic realities of racism, sexism, xenophobia and religious intolerance continue to plague society.

The barbarity of neoliberalism, of a development model that prioritizes the market over strategies to raise the economic floor for everyone, has been and continues to be a nightmare for our families and communities.

It has forced us into defensive fights and struggles to survive--whether that be mass migration or saying No to corporate destruction of our lands and natural resources. We see this in our local communities, and throughout the world.

Yet the gift of our common humanity is not to just survive, but to imagine and create.

It is a fact that millions of us are forced into migration under exploitative conditions; and a fact that our hard-earned remittances provide the lifeblood for many of our countries’ economies even while corporations profit from this global market of our labor. But it is also an opportunity to assert a different position than the one forced upon us. Because it’s our money that we’re talking about!

We’ve always claimed that a decrease of the cost of remittances by one-third will result in a five percent decrease in children’s poverty in the world, affecting 17.5 million children. That’s an immediate legacy we can leave our children.

We are not an ATM machine that companies and governments can take cash from with impunity. We are investors of the wealth we create, and we want to devote part of what we’ve earned to make sure that our children have a better future.

We don’t just want to be senders, but also investors in the future of our families, communities, society and planet. Investors in a different, and better world. And we will partner with anyone who believes in this vision.

As valuable as the money we send to our families is, the true significance of remittances goes beyond even that.

I know something about the value of that monthly wire transfer. It meant clothes and books for school, even a celebration feast once in a while. But $250 a month, sent faithfully by my mother working as a nurse’s aid in California, didn’t prevent our family from having to move and separate. It didn’t prevent my father from seeing, one by one, his kids leave for the United States.

The son of a sharecropper, the first of his clan from a small rural town in the Philippines to make it to the capital city of Manila, he had become a self-employed lawyer and helped raise eight kids so that each one could go to college. This proud man was trying to keep his self-respect intact, as he had to accept the fact that he could no longer provide for his family. He had to redefine his role with my mother, with his kids, and with his own image he had of himself. He spent his last years back in the rural town of his youth.  

I never did ask him how he felt about all of this, how he eventually reconciled the course of his life and his family’s. He died in the basement of the house-on-stilts where he grew up, a house that now shelters a new generation of sharecroppers.

Remittances, and the migration of an entire family, failed to fundamentally change the collective destiny of Calpoturas in rural Philippines.

And I suspect that my family’s experience is much like many of yours here.

If we don’t change the significance of each remittance, nothing will change.

If we don’t embrace the potential of remittances to rewrite historic storylines for the next generation of humanity, nothing will change.

If we don’t vigorously assert that all of this is within our grasp, then nothing will change – because we have not changed.

Our agenda is a history-altering agenda. It seeks to redefine our families’ relationship with governments and corporations. It asserts that we, the common people of a globalized world, belong both to Here and There. Our sweat, endurance, ingenuity, and indomitable spirits have carried us to this moment when history demands the transnational action of all of us from below for a different and a better world.

What are the dangers that lurk beneath this vision? I can think of three pitfalls for us to beware of as we make this journey together.

1. Exceptionalism – this is when we put more value on our differences than in what unites us. When each of us say that MY experience is essentially different from yours, or we’ve gone through more, and how dare you speak about “common dreams” when you haven’t worn my exact shoes and felt my particular oppression. In La Liga, we have to yearn to understand, to be curious about each others’ journies, and to unpack our attitudes and perspectives towards our common humanity.  What’s the antidote to exceptionalism? Humility and empathy.

2. Greed – it’s when we think we own the resources that our movement has won, instead of seeing ourselves as guardians or stewards entrusted to use them to dismantle the structures that have forced us to struggle in the first place.  The antidote to greed? Humility and sacrifice.

3. Fear of flying – Sometimes, we achieve some comfort, we get sluggish, or worse, we rail against who we used to be (or still are). Our ideas become stale and predictable. We make hollow pronouncements devoid of action, unsure of our own ability to rise to the challenge of the unknown, and to leave the relative comfort of where we stand. The antidote? Our heart, our imagination, our ability to create what was once but a thought. We’ve done this before – we left not fully knowing what the future would bring, yet we persisted.

The antidote to fear is to fly.

What history demands of us right now is to soar, even beyond what we can currently imagine, lifted by our own tested capacity to surpass even our own expectations.

Look around…Reintroduce yourself to each other, or in fact, bid each other “safe travels” and “til next time”…because what you see (and just practiced this week) is the kernel of the promise of La Liga – a multiracial, global affinity built on mutual respect and fierce love of humanity.

That in itself is the change we’ve been waiting for, where we can embrace a larger segment of our world and proclaim that it will take all of us to change the conditions that affect our lives, forever.

Finally, allow me to revisit a conversation that never was.

My father died before I got a chance to ask him…about so many things. But if I could do it now, I would narrow it down to only two questions.

“How did you decide to stay behind?”

I imagine him saying, “I got tired…after my stroke…remember, you visited us that year when I was recovering, doing physical therapy, when you skipped a whole semester of college because you were figuring out what makes life meaningful…I just couldn’t bear the thought of starting all over, but I tried, I visited you twice…And I wasn’t afraid of facing poverty again. I remember what it means to live with very little…but it was home, my son.”

“But, what about us?” There, I’ve finally summoned the strength to ask the question that’s been lodged deep in my gut.  

“There was never a day I didn’t miss all of you. But you were never far away from my heart. That, as you look back in life, is what brings you peace.  That, and the solace of the place of my birth, makes me live the final days of my life in peace and dignity.”

“Love, Family, Home…those are with you wherever you go.”

I imagine my father saying all this, and what he is really telling me is that in the end, you make of your life its own meaning—driven by a deep longing to assert our full human dignity to carry with us till our last breath. Whatever the hardships and the heartbreaks we and our families have endured, the opportunity is always there to reclaim the meaning of our own stories.

As long as we can imagine a new storyline, we can create it.

I’m honored and humbled to begin this journey with all of you, and I bid all of us safe travels.