In response to my classmate Niklas’ recent blogs about Anthony Bourdain in Detroit as well as Nicaragua, I’d like to comment on my perspective of the famous chef’s recent presence in travel television.

First of all, I’m completely biased in this argument because I think Anthony Bourdain is a total badass. I’ve read his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and frequently watch with both his TV shows on the Travel Channel. Niklas mentioned that his presence in media reflects the Western trend of “othering” impoverished populations. I will admit I did cringe when Bourdain stood amongst trashpickers in a Nicaraguan landfill just saying how depressing he thought everything was. Yo, Bourdain, why don’t you pitch in a little bit, or maybe get a translator and have down-to-earth conversations with these people without flashing a camera in their face? I contend that it is unfortunate that the show blatantly objectifies their condition in comparison to Bourdain’s privileged one.

At the same time, I don’t agree that Parts Unknown is on the same page as God Grew Tired of Us. GGTU glorifies the American dream and Western privilege by shipping over Sudanese refugees to show how their lives significantly improve in this radically different society. However bad Anthony Bourdain is at empathizing with Nicaraguan trashpickers and other developing countries he visits, his prerogative has nothing to do with helping people. The TV show is about underground food scenes around the world, and shedding light on the communities which create it.

The audiences of the two films are wholly different. From a personal stance, I watch Bourdain’s shows to get inspired about food culture, to see amazing footage of different landscapes around the world, and to laugh along with his uncompromisingly dry humor. Bourdain is a strong presence with real culinary talent, and shares a fascination with the international food scene just like his audience members. Bourdain is not demanding a humanitarian response, and has not established that he wants this kind of attention; Bourdain acts as a chef, not as a representative US political interests. Conversely, the GGTU film morally compromises international relations by just showing how the US does so much good for suffering populations. The audiences of GGTU are looking for a feel-good documentary on how their country is helping the world. While I see the validity of Niklas’ arguments in the scope of modern television and its influence on the Western mindset, in order to further global citizenship, I’d argue that we need to be careful in how we contexualize examples of globalization and objectification.

It’s not necessary to over analyze every single film or television show as a representative of Western interests, when in reality TV presences such as Anthony Bourdain are maybe just not being as politically correct as we want them to be. While ignorance reigns in Western media, hypersensitivity is not the most productive way to respond to it.

P.S. Niklas I’m not telling you you’re wrong, your perspective just reminded me of how all the things we’ve been talking about in class respond similarly to the problems of globalization. I just wanted to bring in another viewpoint.

Every couple of weeks, the Amnesty International UBC club gets together to write letters to governments who are currently committing human rights violations against one or more citizens. Ana, our letter writing coordinator, gives us her spiel on a human rights issue which correlates with a monthly theme (e.g. LGBT rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, etc.) We each then write an individual letter with envelopes to the government involved. I was skeptical at first, but apparently these letters are super effective in getting the governments’ attention and changing the situation of political prisoners. It helps that other Amnesty clubs around the world are often working on the same issue, so governments get bombarded with hundreds if not thousands of letters on an issue. Power in numbers, eh?

This past week we talked about the imprisonment of two gay men in Zambia who were charged with alleged homosexual behavior, as well as the case of Cao Shunli, a Chinese activist who was detained for rallying public support for a UN report on human rights in China. According to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, their imprisonments violate freedom of expression, security, conscience, and sexuality. Also on Friday, the club held a formal event where we set up a booth on campus so that people could stop by and sign pre-written letters. The cases are outlined on Amnesty International Canada’s website if you’re interested.

From all that we’ve been discussing in class about Human Rights organizations, I thought it important to evaluate Amnesty’s influence on a larger global platform. A few weeks ago in Political Science we discussed the inherent bias of many NGO’s in their humanitarian endeavors, specifically that with monetary funding. While humanitarianism by definition requires indifference to those in need, often the funding necessary to help people comes from governments or government-sponsored organizations with subjective prerogatives. On the funding page of the official Amnesty International Website, it appears that they are supported by not only government-sponsored overseas development funds but also Western organizations like the European Union. This has a significant effect on which human rights violations Amnesty and other human rights organizations choose to pursue and publish.

Although I believe that Amnesty International does a pretty good job at expanding its causes to a number of nations, whether or not in line with Western politics, it also has bias from the ways in which the Declaration is held as a Western ideal of human rights. I argue that there are significant differences in developing countries which may push higher importance of economic reform rather than human rights responsibilities, and other societies which value women’s rights differently in correspondence with family ties and norms. Often as a Westerner it seems as if we label others as purely sufferers who need to be enlightened by the ideological goals of our hemisphere. However, it is important to look beyond this and objectively evaluate political happenings, conflicts, imprisonments, and the like from a strictly moral and ethical point of view. If we take a step back and say, look, is the impact this political prisoner has on the larger global community potentially damaging to modern ideals of justice and equality? If we don’t do anything about this situation, are morals on a global scale on a decline? Were the reasons for their imprisonment legitimate, or just another way for a corrupt government to keep its people from speaking out against it?

Personally I believe that Amnesty International does a great job of initiating a cause for the global betterment of ethics. By telling the stories of individuals in light of violations of the UNUDHR, Amnesty sparks empathy by de-collectivizing voices. The issues we write letters about are extremely specific, and are attempts to call on governments who aren’t upholding their agreement with the Declaration. Wherever the funding comes from, what they’re doing works by improving the power of individual of agency and furthering political and ethical developments in the modern era.

Recently on Alt.Latino, a spanish-speaking branch of NPR (National Public Radio, sort of like CBC but just in the US), I heard about a book called La Bestia: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Salvadoran Oscar Martinez. Published in originally 2010 as Los Migrantes Que No Importan (The Migrants Who Don’t Matter), the book is a non-fiction account of his journey from areas of Southern Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to the United States. The title is named after the infamous freight train, “The Beast,” which hundreds of thousands Latinos take to escape poverty and the effects of the Drug War and immigrate to the US (usually undocumented). While Martinez takes the journey eight times, his writing accounts for the journeys of others along the way. His style exhibits freelance journalism, where he asks many people their reasons for leaving their homes and making the grueling, dangerous trip. Along the way, he runs into gangs, kidnappings, gunfights, stories of rape and abuse, human trafficking, people falling or being knocked off the train, and the like. From these brief autobiographies, the reality is clear: the Drug War in Mexico is still going strong and any attempt to escape will likely end violently.

However, there are two specific aspects to La Bestia that I would like to discuss, the first being life narratives in transit and how Martinez creates a voice for these travelers, and the second in how the media has portrayed the war over the years.

Quite literally, La Bestia is a perfect example of life narratives in transit: the book illustrates the horrors of trying to get from one side to the barricaded other of a corrupted, war-ridden country. Martinez effectively intertwines the lives of the men and women he meets on the trail and does them justice by laying out full interviews for the reader. He interviews not only innocent people trying to get out of poverty, but also violent criminals, ex-gang members (often just teenagers), men who have been deported from the US 4 or 5 times over but who are still making the journey, rape victims, and grieving families. The picture he paints is visually categorized into thematic chapters, but in a broader scheme highlights the overwhelming sense of peril and despair so many migrants face. In doing this, Martinez gives a very clear voice not only to the migrants but also to the larger movement calling on the national and international sphere to end the war.

Throughout the book, Marntinez expresses a solid political stance on how the war has been portrayed in the past several years throughout the media. As we have discussed in class, audiences are often more keen to read stories of atrocities on larger scales, which are more eye-opening to them. In an interview with the Texas Observer, Martinez comments on the way in which the interest of the international community in the Drug War has come in waves but is largely waning:

“So when we realize the complexity of it I decided to stay on that path for three years exclusively traveling like an undocumented migrant through stretches, seeing what happened to the migrants, visiting those places that I think society as a whole had forgotten about. The massacre of migrants in Mexico began well before the 2010 massacre of migrants in Tamaulipas— people simply didn’t pay attention the way they do now.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the media has disregarded most of the chaos and corruption of the war in Mexico. When’s the last time you heard about large-scale disappearances, murders, and violent trafficking across borders? It’s an idea that faintly exists in the back of your head, but in my opinion the lack of media coverage has made it seem like the war was improving. After reading this boo, I’ve realized the situation is still wholly relevant. I was talking to my friend Natalia’s dad who worked for the Mexican government before moving to Vancouver, a super smart and eloquent guy, and he explained to me that there are outside influences which are keeping these stories under wraps. The drugs being trafficked into the US are largely exchanged for weapons, so both the US and Mexican governments are benefitting economically from the war. In a 2009 article, ex-President Felipe Calderon explained exactly this:

“The biggest empowerment of organized crime are the weapons that arrive from the United States,” the president said.

Even if the article is from a few years back, its implications are still relevant. Check out this article from the Atlantic: it explains the present interactions of cartels and gangs in Northern Mexico and the DEA’s fruitless attempts to end the conflict. Current President Enrique Peña Nieto called for policy improvements when he was elected, but so far nothing has been effective as murder rates still hover around 28,000 people/year in Mexico (Canada had 554 in 2012 according to Wikipedia).

I’d definitely recommend this book not only for Martinez’s exemplary, provocative writing style but also because it brings a collective voice to an important human rights cause. The best part about this is that Martinez isn’t an American outsider: this war has been a significant factor in his life and his journalism career, so the stories are legitimate.