Margot Pepper

by Margot Pepper
First published by the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, April 2010

SACRAMENTO, Calif. César Chávez Day came and went without acknowledgment from most mainstream print media of a Chávez-inspired 365-mile march that lasted 48 days and culminated in thousands of Californians converging upon the State Capitol April 21st. Wave after wave of union workers, educators, students, parents, and demanded funding for basic public services that citizens in developed nations expect for their tax dollars, such as functioning schools, roads and parks.

by Margot Pepper
From the forthcoming book by the same title

When Ian W— opened his eyes, his head felt as though it had swelled beyond the capacity of his skull. At first he couldn’t make out anything except the pounding. Or was the pounding merely the reverberation of the disparate din resounding around him like a hundred warring walky-talkies? He sat up on the flimsy cot, eyes still shut, and became acutely aware of the throbbing with each motion of the broken springs. He grabbed the mattress and panicked as his grip told him it was only the size of a camping mat, not the foot or so of luxury wonder-foam top on his Divine® king bed at home.

The 47-year-old blockade now costs the United States far more than it costs Cuba.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Dollars & Sense, March/April 2009
Common Dreams March 7, 2009

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On January 1, Cuba celebrated the 50th anniversary of the revolution against the U.S.-backed Batista regime. For 47 of those years, Cuba has suffered under what U.S. officials call an “embargo” against the Caribbean nation. Cubans’ name for the embargo—el bloqueo (the blockade)—is arguably more apt, given that the U.S. policy also aims to restrict other countries from engaging in business with Cuba.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Canada's The Scoop and Berkeley Daily Planet
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The U.S. blockade is causing more economic damage to the United States than it is to Cuba. A December letter signed by a dozen leading U.S. business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged then-President-elect Barack Obama to initiate the process of scrapping the 47-year old embargo. The letter pegs the cost to the US economy at $1.2 billion per year. Other sources project up to $4.84 billion annually in lost sales and exports.

by Margot Pepper

1.
The night of November 4, 2008,
when Barack Obama was declared the first Black man
to receive the key to the White House,
we danced and sang in the street to stars beyond storm clouds.
Drivers honked and cheered each other through open windows;
pedestrians hooted back, slapped palms,
Families spilled out of porches and driveways
and it didn’t take a ballgame.

We could have been in post-apartheid South Africa,
after Mandella was freed and elected president
or in the streets of post-fascist Spain after Franco died.
“It’s like we’ve been released from jail,” I said

by Margot Pepper
First published by Rethinking Schools, Spring 2008

Six years into the “War on Terror,” my second grade Spanish immersion students found that aggression, selfishness and insults have exploded on national television.

For the last decade, I’ve had my students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley, California analyze television shows preceding National TV-Off week organized by the TV-Turnoff Network, which this year is April 21-27. I ask the seven and eight-year-old students to collect all the data themselves, since I’ve never owned a television. For seven days, students study a random sampling of about 35 English and Spanish-language children’s television shows—and one or two soap operas or reality shows.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Race, Poverty & the Environment, Fall 2007
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No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the program, allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than improve public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB testing is part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools in the United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: first, to divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; second, to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, leaving behind a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the inappropriate use of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Race, Poverty & the Environment, Fall 2007
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

For over a decade I’ve been teaching my six-, seven-, and eight-year-old students to strike against me in the classroom. I drew the inspiration from “the Yummy Pizza company” labor unit1 and my own experience in the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and National Writer's Union. Instead of producing pizzas, students at “Pepper Ink.” produce laminated bookmarks of the best poem they’ve written in a year-long study of the genre. This year, however, the experience took a different turn when one of our potential Pepper Ink. workers was forcibly removed from the school.

by Margot Pepper
Watershed Festival Reading August 18 at noon

I.
They came shackled, scarred, half-drowned on Yemayá’s back:
queen mother of the sea;
children like limbs, severed,
settled by Oshun, the Mississippi river;
clandestine gods and shells stowed behind catholic crosses:
vadu, voodoo, santería.
Where once sweat lodge smoke smudged the view
an auction block now stood.

And so, the great city rose up, multiplied--
cries of birth pains muffled in traffic,
throaty blues and hypnotic jazz,

by Margot Pepper
First published by Counterpunch, June 2007

ZNet, June 2007

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Recently, sending a message of resistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Berkeley and Oakland, California adopted sanctuary city measures disallowing the use of city funds and staff time in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over 60 sanctuary city initiatives protecting immigrants have been promulgated in 21 states across the United States. Critics of immigration reform argue that sanctuary proposals send the wrong message to immigrants who, they argue, are responsible for eroding citizens’ living standards. They claim stiffer penalties and stronger barriers are the answer. Little publicized is the fact that actually the opposite is true. Rather than posing a monumental problem, undocumented migration is a desired outcome of unequal international trade policies, boosting the living standards of U.S. citizens and enriching a powerful sector of the U.S. economy. Rather than discourage migration, dangerous but surmountable barriers and unenforceable, cruel laws only contribute to the “illegal,” status of needed workers, rendering them a cheap, profitable source of labor.