By Patrick It wasn’t hard finding the hotel set to host the conference where I was headed. These things are usually held in buildings tall and proud, four or five star hotels. I’d never spent time in Mexico City but I found my way around quite easily. The evidence of former mayor and center-left opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s collaboration with Rudolph Giuliani in the “management” of his city rang true with my first steps outside. The sidewalks were clean of trash and police were constantly visible, assuring that a significant radius around the Zócalo upheld an appearance of opulence within a city receiving impoverished immigrants daily from a militarized and economically liberalized south. Hotel Bristol was neatly tucked away at one end of a roundabout in the gleam of barbed wire from the nearby United States Consulate. I walked into doors held open to spend the next few days observing the MenEngage Regional Consultation with Latin America and the Caribbean. MenEngage “is a global alliance of non-governmental organizations that are involved in an array of research, interventions, and policy initiatives seeking to engage men and boys in effective ways to reduce gender inequalities and promote health and the well-being of women, men, and children.” I came with the intention of learning from communities represented by delegations from seventeen different countries. I wanted exposure to new educational tools and strategies used to reach men in gender violence prevention. But I was also coming from two years spent in Washington, D.C., steeped in the world of the non-profit world dominated by a desire for money and access to power, in exchange for progressive social change (or so we’re told). I worked with the organization Men Can Stop Rape, which understands the need to see men’s violence as an issue requiring the attention of an entire community, old and young, male, female and transgender, professional and working class, black, brown and white. However, it was a constant challenge in the office attempting to focus on work deep and direct with communities rather than solely responding to the centralized institutions (health departments, universities, corporations) that provided the financing and placed the demands for the direction of our work. My time in the big Capital to the northeast of my western Virginian home was my first experience being paid to do social change work. I was a trainer, facilitating workshops around the country, and it was nice to not have to pay for my own gas when traveling. However, at the most fundamental and personal level, more often than not, I felt like my Pisces-self, a fish out of water. It was expected that I be the “expert,” and travel to where people could pay for that expertise. I was used to working with a community that I was a part of, rather than imposing a prepackaged vision on someone else that I had little real relationship with. I continually felt the need for my own men’s group, my own community, addressing a problem that is about our most basic and intimate relationships. In a recent interview with a member of VOCAL (Voces Oaxaqueñas Construyendo Autonomía y Libertad) about the influence of non-profits here in Oaxaca, I heard similar frustration with this profit before strategy organizing style, common to the non-profits increasingly gaining influence since their big influx in Latin America starting in the 90’s. And different from my previous experiences, I also saw non-profits come together as the Espacio Civil (an assembly of non-profits formed to support the APPO) in Oaxaca City, discussing ways to interact together with social movements larger than themselves. This was different from previous experiences because in the U.S. I mostly saw organizations, even focused on the same issue, competing with one another for access to funding and prestige, often with a very thin veil. This was all very present in my mind as I sat in the back of the room during the first presentation of the conference. This introductory presentation (before which I bitterly whispered to a friend on my left, “The inventor of power-point must have wanted to communicate with robots”) was an overview of the problem of traditional masculinity and men’s violence against women. We sat and listened to a review of international statistics revealing a painful reality – of more women than not experiencing violence in the home, in the hospital, and at work through unjust pay and treatment. We read information about the number of men that commit suicide each year and abuse drugs and alcohol, either in the pursuit of a version of manhood that resists any vulnerability or as a coping mechanism for not meeting that impossible standard. At the most basic level however, I felt like we couldn’t honestly talk about the problem – traditional masculinity and violence against women. Variables were left out of the equation; the role of state governments and capitalist economics didn’t enter the room. And this wasn’t because there weren’t appeals to do so. I remember a man from Paraguay speaking to the group openly about his desire to reconcile a need to make real change for people’s lives at the same time as working with a legal system that organizes itself based on the same domination from above as patriarchy. No, the conversations were limited and controlled because the MenEngage initiative depends on the state and capitalism for its survival. Governments, after all, make the public policy advocated for (one of the organizers once even referred to the government as “we”), and corporations and foundations (in this case The Bill and Melinda Gates and Nike Foundations) pay for the accommodations. I would be more understanding if this group of men and women from across the hemisphere had been opening up personally about work done at the community level questioning the poles of man or woman that we’re forced to choose from, and struggling to build social relationships based on choice and horizontal decision-making. A particular piece of information struck me – that 95% of the world’s prison population is male. I know that some causes for this are certainly found in patriarchal culture, which creates a gendered division of labor as much in the illegal as in the legal economy. However, if on an individual level we convince men that traditional masculinity, and in this case, the need to be the sole provider for a household at any cost, is worth giving up, as much for our own good as for increased options for others, we can’t kid ourselves that state governments are going to decide that their prisons don’t need to be filled anymore. In the U.S. principally (holding more than a quarter of the world’s prison population), but in Mexico as well, prisons serve as both warehouses for “undesirables” (active and potential resisters of authority conveniently held under the auspices of draconian drug laws) and factories cranking out products like road signs and ensuring that the more legitimate economy remains appealing to working people (the big criminals (think Enron, Iran-Contra) tend to remain on the other side of the bars because their hidden money is much too useful for the powerful). Not to mention that prisons also primarily hold men of color, and now increasingly, women of color, despite higher official crime rates among whites. So this statistic thrown at us for dramatic emphasis, notable for its lack of context, reinforces the idea that men of color are somehow more prone to the downfalls of an antiquated masculinity, one we civilized men seated at white tablecloths left behind years ago. As you’ve probably noticed, this ruined my hope for the day, and I really wanted to talk to someone about it. But as a number of people that I was able to connect with one-on-one expressed enthusiastically (these informal fugitive spaces during the coffee breaks were the inspiration I took from the weekend), that there was little time dedicated to getting to know one another, to hearing the strengths and weakness in our work, personally and as organizations. Each of the international non-profits present to lend resources and legitimacy, Save the Children for example, had to make an hour-long presentation easily found in the archives of their websites. As my friend from Oaxaca said, there was “mucha cabeza y poco pie” - a lot of head and not much to stand on. Speaking of what we stand on, I used my two feet to skip out on the last day of the conference. I just didn’t see the value in spending time surrounded by a model for change that was in direct conflict with the lessons I’ve learned both back in the United States and in observations of movements here in Oaxaca. Time and time again I’ve heard stories of communities with little access to money and legitimacy from the state coming together in the streets and behind closed doors to find new solutions to old problems. The centralized hierarchy of the non-profit is certainly a Western version of how social changed should be organized – there’s the organization and its clients, black and white, civilized and savage. What happens when we allow ourselves to move with the community around us, stop aiming for some place above the rest and dig in deep with the very social relationships that aspire to redeem this life for all of us (and boring conferences for the unlucky few)? For me to directly engage with the non-profit sector again, this challenge needs to be center stage rather than pushed aside for a more ideal world. After Mexico City I went with a friend to the beach, and walking on Oaxaca’s eastern coastline during sunset, I watched the tide come in and reflected. As social movements we have a lot to learn from waves; they are relentless in their eating away of the shore. They build a malleable strength and wear down whatever rigidity they come in contact with. When they are sent back to the ocean they prepare for another crashing encounter with anything that imposes straight lines. That border area, right where water meets dirt, is also the most alive. And that’s where non-profits have made their home, between a centralized rigidity organizing our connections to one another and our potential as communities working together. While these shore-clingers may be of strategic use at times (for access to resources for specific projects or to provide a living-wage to those without sustaining community support), ultimately they too will need to be washed away as mud. For a more detailed discussion on the history and influence of non-profits in our work I suggest: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INICTE! Women of Color Against Violence. And an essential article from the anthology to be found online, Social Change or Social Service?, by Paul Kivel.

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