Susanna

Yesterday I met with Susanna Gonzalas for lunch. Daniel came along. We met in Bolivar square and she led us to a restaurant which worked really well because it was not too noisy. Daniel brought his audio recorder, but it ran out of space mid way through, so I will have to check to see what we got.
The interview was useful, but with ordering and eating it was not really a formal interview.
I started out by explaining that I am interested in learning about the Consejo Comunales, what women are doing in their communities, and her experience of working in her Consojo.

Susanna explained,
The Consejos are a very good way of giving power directly to the people, it is real power and a very different structure. Consejo Comunales are a way of concreting what the gov. has been talking about all along.
It is a good idea because the things that need to be done in communities are designed from and by the community members. Before you had to struggle with the gov. institutions to fix things like a road. Now you decide what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.
However, the people are not prepared yet. The people have to un-learn many things from the past, but they are trying. People now have different values from what is needed to organize effectively.
She mentioned how it has been delightful to hear young people in her barrio talking about their worries about their community and the world.
She said that much of the challenge in organizing in her community is that “we are working with normal people who before maybe never worried about their neighbors.”
Then she talked about part of the culture which is very appearance obsessed, to a point where plastic surgery, specifically breast implants, are very common. Teen age girls ask their parents for them for their Birthdays. “And we are in a revolution, what does that mean?”
Even though many things existed before Chavez, the difference now is that state policies help us.
The Consejo Comunale in my barrio started with 13 people. It was not very effective, so we had a new election and suddenly there were 70 people on the council.
A lot of us are still thinking in the old way of organizing, we think about representative democracy, not participatory democracy. So the process is slow. I learned that you can’t do things for other people. So when others ask me to lead because I know how to get things done, I say no, we have to all figure out how to do it and do it collectively.
“It is a process, we learn in the process.” We are having to figure out how to do things, and sometimes work outside of the regulations because they are not working.
We have gotten a lot done. We have our electricity system done. We are going to have out road. We are going to have more new housing with the program Substitution of Shacks for houses. We have a news paper.
We have four or five opposition people in our council of 70.
I wrote an article about the same event as another community member, who was opposition, and it was a process to agree on how to present both views of the same event.

I asked her about the effects of the mission Madres de Barrio.
She replied that sometimes she thinks that what the gov. is doing is populist. Because programs like Madres de barrio don’t go to the root of the problem. But then I think about the economic divide.

I asked her to speak about other community work she has done.
She talked about the school in Nuevo Tenagua that she worked on, the barrio Charlie lived in. I did not get a lot of details about it, but she said that it was an integral project. Adults would participate, and it was very flexible. If the water came on, everyone would be let out of school to go help with laundry. Sometimes there would be school on holidays. It sounded like it ended badly, with very painful interpersonal conflict.

She talked about a co-op she started when she was younger and had no children. She started making things out of clay, never having experience or instruction before. Then she and a few other people from the community went to a work shop. They started a co-op business. This was before the gov. was promoting co-ops. It was mostly women, and two men. The women who has children and others to take care of earned more, even if the weren’t as fast or good as others. Some of the extra profits went to food for the kids at school, and other causes.

Now, by law there has to be half women in the gov. Some people say is that good if they are not trained and ready? I think it is, gaining experience is the only way to show people how to do it.

Susanna then gave us a few other people to contact who are involved in cultural co-ops, and said that she would think about more people and email us if they agreed.


Later we called the Italian couple to see if we could meet them. They told us about a free video screening they were putting on that evening, so we got the directions and sowed up on time. They are showing a series of films every Tuesday for a few weeks, all on the theme of drugs. The film last night was Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas. There were other youngish people there, and they were serving pasta.
Before the film started, while they were waiting for people to show up, we spoke with the Italians, Alexandro and Clementino, and they told us about what they do in the barrio Petare. They also told us about the cultural center we were in, which has a small hostel upstairs and all sorts of classes such as capuera, and salsa.