Teaching young people solidarity

Casandra Clark Mazariego WW photo: Lal Roohk

From a talk given at the May 13-14 “Preparing for the Rebirth of the Global Struggle for Socialism” conference.

My first year in college I decided to write a paper on my country, Guatemala. Guatemala went through a 30-year civil war in which about half of the Indigenous people were killed, and I had to learn all this through research on a project. Through this research I started to realize that this was going on all over the world and being financed by the U.S. government.

I wanted to do something about it. I decided to work with young people to get them to veer away from capitalist values and look toward supporting each other.

I started through social service agencies, [but] I would find they didn’t want to me to teach the youth too much but instead get them jobs to make profits for companies. So I went to another agency that was for teaching different values, and they let me do a youth dance program. They didn’t know I was going to do something that would really change their outlook.

We got involved in the Boston Rosa Parks [Human Rights Day Committee] and the Somerville 5 [case]. I began getting pressure from my agency, and right before the anti-war march they fired me. They cut me off from the youth I was working with, but they all left the agency, along with the music department, to work on this youth project. The Rosa Parks Committee backed us all the way.

We bring together all the different styles of music and we show that although we are different we also have a lot in common. We know that art and music is a tool for social change. We know MTV is using our youth to [sell] expensive sneakers and clothes. They’ve got our youth tied to these things, so we have to give them something just as good: solidarity.

—Casandra Clark Mazariego,
Urban Essence Dance Performance Collaborative