A history question for you

  

As you know by now, Mexican history if my thing. Two years ago I published my second book, and since then I have been researching another aspect of Mexican history. This time I have narrowed the focus to the silver mining town of Taxco in the seventeenth century, drawing on the parochial records which are now available online. I have come across a question which has been puzzling me. I wonder if any of my blog readers could suggest interesting ways to address the question, or even solutions. There follows some background to the question, and then the question itself. Suggestions by email or via the comment feature on the blog please.

 

CONTEXT

 

20 January 1685 was a big day in Taxco, a silver mining town, by modern roads about 170kms or so southwest of Mexico City, for the Archbishop of Mexico, Don Francisco de Aguiar y Seyjas, was visiting. Don Francisco himself reported that he was greeted with the peeling of bells by members of the religious brotherhoods and parishioners. Father Bartolome de Pineda, resplendent in his best cloak greeted the Archbishop and a tall cross stood beneath a platform built for the ceremonial welcome. Don Francisco had a busy time – during his visit he confirmed some 944 individuals (priests could baptize, marry and bury, but only bishops and archbishops could confirm). But the archbishop’s main purpose was to conduct a Visita, a formal inspection of the church’s records, its ornaments and so on.

 

In his address from the pulpit the Archbishop was particularly concerned that the priests should diligently ensure that the church received due payment for masses for departed souls. He sternly lectured those who administered the affairs of the brotherhoods that there should be no expenditures on bullfighting, nor on chocolate, plays or other frivolous entertainments. Priests should maintain records of baptisms, marriages and burials. Marriages of Spaniards, Mestizos, Mulattoes and Blacks should be recorded separately on loose sheets, unbound, and remitted annually to the Notary Public in Mexico City to be stored in the archive. Don Francisco did not mention records of the same sacraments for the Indigenous people of Taxco, but they were recorded and still exist. I’ve been reading them.

 

This concern with people of different ethnicities was a feature of Spanish policy in New Spain, as Mexico was then known. Different ethnicities had different rights, obligations and privileges. Indians, as the Indigenous Mexicans were known, were obliged to provide labour and services, but they were exempt from some taxes, and could not be enslaved nor prosecuted by the Inquisition. Spaniards could own Black African and Mulatto slaves (some Blacks and Mulattoes were free), and some Spaniards were entitled to Indian labour and services. All were subject to the Inquisition.

 

The priests of Taxco no doubt did their best to obey the Archbishop’s instructions by keeping separate books for Indians and, and before his visit, for Spaniards and Mestizos, where they also recorded details for Mulattoes and Blacks. Unfortunately, human nature and love did not obey the nest boundaries specified by the Archbishop. For example, on 14 March 1690 Bartolome Curiel, an Indian, and his wife Maria Antonia, a free Mulatta, brought their daughter Josepha to church for her baptism – their happy day was recorded in the book kept for Spaniards, Mestizos, Blacks and Mulattoes. On 4 June Bartolome de la Cruz, a free Mulatto, and his Spanish wife Beatriz de Orduña Beatriz de Orduña had their child Nicolasa Manuela baptized. Such relationships across ethnic boundaries were not uncommon.

 

A surprisingly large proportion of baptized children were abandoned; in the case of Indians the rate could vary from 19% to 49% per year, and in the case of Spaniards and other ethnicities from 19% to 57%. The priests designated the children (in seventeenth-century spelling) as either “de padres no conosidos” (of unknown parents) or as an “hijo [or hija] de la yglesia” (child of the church). For the first few decades these two terms seem to have been interchangeable. Initially, priests preferred hijo/a de la yglesia, but later de padres no conosidos. Then in the last two decades, hijo/a de la yglesia came to mean something specific: a child left “at the doors of” a named individual or couple. Presumably, children de padres no conosidos (the majority) were simply abandoned, no care being taken about where to leave them.

 

On occasion a priest guessed the ethnicity of an abandoned child. For example, Juan, baptized on 15 July 1675 was “al pareser mulato” (apparently a Mulatto). Tomassa, on the other hand, on 20 March 1682 was apparently Spanish, and on 27 May 1670 Jhoan Alonso was seemingly a Mestizo. Given the racial admixture of 17^th century Taxco, I am not at all sure how reliable the priests’ judgements may have been.

 

Ethnic boundaries could be fluid, especially in the case of prestigious individuals. In the baptism records I have found a few references to the Moctezumas, a family of Indigenous nobles, originally from Chilapa (a town to the south of Taxco) who intermarried with the Aztec rulers in Tenochtitlán, and became significant landowners. Under Spanish rule, their noble status and landholding were protected. Don Josep de Quiñones Moctesuma appears in a book of Spanish baptisms in 1663 as the father of Alonso. He is given the honorific title Don, and had now acquired a Spanish last name, as well as a wife, Doña Michaela de Ribera (“his legitimate wife”), who was a member of an important family of mine owners. In 1696 he was recorded minus his Spanish Quiñones last name, but identified as a Spaniard. In 1698, Doña Augustina de Moctesuma was the godmother of Diego, son of Lucas Felisiano and Juana Contreras. The record tells us that Doña Augustina was a legal resident of Chilapa, hometown of the Moctezuma clan. In 1697 and 1698, Doña Juana Moctesuma appears with her husband Antonio de Rivera Ulloa y Taboada (another member of that very prominent mine-owning family) as godparents of sons of other members of Taxco’s mining elite. In December 1697 Juana and Antonia brought their own daughter to church all three were described by the priest as Spaniards. In short, if you had pedigree and wealth you could cross ethnic boundaries.

 

On a more humble level of the social scale, beginning in 1668, when Catalina, whose ethnicity is not stated, brought her daughter Maria to church, baptism records began to note children whose mother was known but not the father. On 6 August 1680 Maria de la Cruz, an unmarried Indian, brought her son Manuel to Father Joseph de Nagera, the Sacristán Mayor, to request that her child be baptized. Maria declared that she wanted to serve God our Lord and to abandon the sinful behaviour in which she had indulged for many years. Two Spanish men accompanied her as witnesses that her repentance was genuine. Maria’s request was approved and little Manuel was baptized.

 

In the last decade or so of the 17^th century these single mothers were almost all classified either simply as a slave, or a Mulatta (and very occasionally Black) slave. Records carefully note the name of the owner of each slave mother, and occasionally record that the child had been born a slave. An exceptionally careless entry dated 5 January 1697 recorded the baptism of Manuel. His entry in the baptism book records that his mother was a Mulatta slave of Don Martin Verdugo, but neither the priest, Don Martin, nor the godfather saw fit to record the name of the mother.

 

THE QUESTION

 

Or rather questions.

 

Records of the Baptism of Indians survive from 1621, for Spaniards and other groups from 1643. There is plentiful evidence of child abandonment, but only in the last two decades of the century do the records tell us of children of named unmarried mothers. And, apart from Catalina in 1668 and Maria de la Cruz in 1680, they are all slaves, mostly Mulattas, in one or two cases Black women.

 

What might account for this sudden change in the baptism records?

 

Is it likely that Mulatta women almost exclusively were prone to bearing a child who father they could not name?

 

Or was there perhaps some ulterior reason for not naming the father?

 

Any other ideas?

México lindo

  

Chris had booked us into some cabañas on the beach at Villa del mar, a hamlet south of Puerto Vallarta. So we left behind Vallarta, its multi-storey condominiums, multi-million dollar villas, night clubs and bars with tribute acts (the real Robbie Williams is scheduled to perform later in October at the hideously sprawling Vidanta World resort). This brief excursion reminded me of the colours, sounds, landscapes and people of Mexico that so entranced a young man from Ipswich in the early 1970s.

El Pueblito restaurant, El Tuito.

 

The only road south took us up into the hills, tropical forest gradually giving way to an admixture of pine forest. Our first stop, for lunch, was El Tuito (from the Nahuatl teutlan, meaning place of the gods), population 3,850, the capital of Cabo Corrientes municipality. We joined Mexican families for Sunday lunch at El Pueblito, a large open-air restaurant on top of a hill with views to the mountains beyond. Now, in Vallarta you can eat Italian, French, English, Cantonese, Vietnamese and so on, but you have to search hard for Mexican food. Not so in El Tuito where Mexican hearty is the only cuisine on offer. First came a shrimp broth, sweet and savoury, with a single carefully dissected sweet and juicy shrimp. Then carne asada (grilled steak) with guacamole, refried beans, a baked chile and sweetly fried chile ancho (bell pepper), gratefully eaten with hand-made tortillas. Others in our group lunched on sizzling chicken fajitas, a half pineapple stuffed with shrimp and other goodies, or ribs.

My carne asada.

 

The plaza of El Tuito.

 For most travellers, El Tuito is a place to stop for food as they head south to larger towns and eventually to Manzanillo, a major port, and beyond to the steel town of Lázaro Cárdenas or the resorts of Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. For the weary, there is a not very inviting hotel on the main road. None of this invites the traveller to explore the town. But a slightly absurd divided road, two lanes either side, with minimal traffic, leads to the town proper, and the heart of even the smallest Mexican town, a bustling plaza, with its inevitable kiosko (band stand). On one side is the ayuntamiento (town hall), where residents queue with their paperwork (much administration in Mexico is still paper-based) for important trámites (procedures/official matters).

The ayuntamiento of El Tuito.

When we stopped in the plaza on our way home for lunch, it was full of the usual activity: children running around or on their bikes, locals relaxing on a bench, patient residents outside the town hall. There was also a detachment of soldiers. Nowadays, one usually sees members of the armed forces riding in pickup trucks wearing body armour and balaclavas and carrying serious-looking firearms. But on this day, the soldiers were in fatigues and one was loading a strimmer into their truck. Chris surmised that they were recruiting. The increased presence of the army, to little effect in terms of public safety but increasingly visible, is a very recent development. The previous president gave the military control of airports, sea ports, customs posts, railway construction, the distribution of medicines, hotels, and no doubt more enterprises than I can remember. This makes for rich generals who will support the government, but whose power, equally, a civilian ruler would challenge at great peril.

El Patio de Mario

 

Lunch on our return was at the Patio de Mario, a decidedly traditional Mexican restaurant, under the arcades in the plaza. The eponymous Mario was sitting outside enjoying a cigarette. He informed us that the building in which his staff cook and serve dates to 1778. After ushering us inside, Mario brought us a plate of deliciously sweet pineapple, a bowl of tortilla chips, two salsas and jocoque, a thick fermented cream to be eaten with salt, chiles or added to soups and so on. He then returned to his seat outside, leaving four young women to take care of us. I could not resist a tortilla soup, strips of crisp tortilla with a small mountain of avocado, cheese, sweetcorn peppers, seasoned with good squeezes of lime. Kourtney had that traditional western Mexico dish, birria, a long-cooked stew of shredded beef or goat. David’s beef quesadillas were accompanied by a hearty beef broth.

El Patio de Mario, interior.

 

Our bill came with little packs of “English mints”. I commented that these were very appropriate since we are English. The young women asked me whether Spanish is spoken in England. I replied that we speak English but not the same English as the Americans. To make the point, I referred to the differences between Castilian Spanish and the language of Mexico (using the Castilian lisping of c and z as an example). One of the girls became very excited: she thought she had heard Castilian spoken, but had never met English people before. So we left in a buzz of excitement, bidding Mario, who was now seated outside chatting over a beer with other men, a fond farewell and promising to return.

 

From our lunch at El Pueblito, once we had left behind the partially finished buildings that characterize most Mexican towns, we found ourselves in a long wide valley of lush vegetation. Settlements are few and far between. Llano Grande, a short distance from El Tuito is a cattle-raising Indigenous settlement. Los Conejos has an estimated population of three! From there, it was vegetation and the occasional cow until Mayto (population fewer than 200) until, after about 40kms or so, the paved road gives way to a carretera de terracería (dirt road) along which you bump until you each Villa del Mar (population 278, of which 157 men).

Looking north from Cabañas Cielito.

 

Apart from our comfortable air-conditioned cabins and a good restaurant and bar, I was reminded of places I had visited on road trips with friends in the 1970s. This is not the Mexico of resort towns like Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco or Cancún. For 12kms. from the rocky cliffs to our north the beach curved gently  south to a point far in the distance, almost entirely empty of people except for one family group, and the odd dog walker or fisher.

The view to the south.

 

Apart from the sounds, colours, smells and flavours of the places we visited, the phrases that tell you that you are in Mexico also conjure up many memories. Con permiso (“excuse me”) is frequently heard when passing somebody on the pavement, the proper response being propio (not really translatable, but roughly “you are welcome”). Ándale (alternatively órale) is a universally useful phrase. It can convey encouragement (“go on”, “go for it”) or confirm that you have been understood or are willing to do something (e.g. when a waiter checks your order, or somebody is unsure whether you wish to do something). When you greet somebody, or when you part: que le vaya bien (have a good day). In a restaurant you will hear many times le retiro su plato? (may I take away your plate/have you finished?); if you are not careful, a brief respite from eating may encourage a waiter to whisk way your unfinished meal.

No Mexico, no ice cream

  

When I was a student at Northgate Grammar School for boys in Ipswich one of my friends, Roderick Strutt, lived nearby in Brunswick Road. His home had a large garden in which there was no space for two young boys to play. The reason was simple Roderick’s father was a dahlia enthusiast and almost the entire garden was dedicated to cultivation of the flowers. So was the garden of his brother next door.

 

What might this have to do with ice cream? The answer – Mexico.

 

Dahlias originated from Mexico and Central America. For ancient Mexicans they were a food crop (they ate the tubers), not blooms for display at Suffolk village shows.

 

Here in Puerto Vallarta Jan and I met another flower enthusiast, T J Hartung, a retired computer systems specialist and former US navy sonar operator. TJ’s love is orchids – Mexico has 1,383 varieties and 609 of them exist only in Mexico.

 

Having made the Mexico connection with my boyhood friend, the next question is what has all this to do with ice cream? Well, what is your favourite flavour? If it is vanilla, then if Hernán Cortés had never drunk chocolate with Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin you would be disappointed to find your beloved flavour missing from the fridge.

Vanilla beans.

Vanilla, TJ told us, is made from the beans of orchids, more specifically from one of three types of vanilla orchid (the remaining 132 species do not produce beans useful for commercial purposes) and all three originate from Mexico. The combined flavours of cacao and vanilla beans in the drink that the Aztec ruler offered him so captivated Cortés that he sent vanilla beans to the King of Spain. Later he sent the vines that produce the beans, hoping to produce vanilla back home. However, Spanish growers were unable to persuade the vines to produce beans. As TJ told us, had they asked the Totonac people of modern Veracruz state, who had produced vanilla for 10,000 years, the Spaniards might have saved a lot of wasted time and expense. But they did not ask, so for 300 years Mexico had a de facto monopoly on vanilla. Incidentally, the derivation of vanilla is the Spanish word meaning “little scabbard” – the Spaniards thought that the dried bean resembled a scabbard.

Vanilla planifolia.

Vanilla is a vine that grows up trees, or on farms on concrete posts. Vines can be as much as 100 feet long. The East coast variety, Vanilla planifolia produces beans that are 6-9 inches long; the west coast Vanilla Pompona 4-6 inches. Cultivation is laborious since the vines must be hand pollinated daily, the life span of a flower. Then begins the really hard work, using the Mexican method (as opposed to the Bourbon method, which is much quicker).

In Mexico, mature pods are dried in the sun, then wrapped in wool blankets, placed in a wooden chest covered with another wool blanket to keep the pods warm. This process continues for about six weeks. Beans are then stored in open air sheds to dry. The curing process can take up to a year. The Bourbon method is much faster: beans are steeped in hot water for several minutes. This alters the flavour slightly, so Bourbon vanilla is not the same as Mexican vanilla.

Killing and sweating of vanilla beans.

Storing and inspecting vanilla beans.

In a world obsessed with the spice trade, many powerful people wanted to get their hands on vanilla plants to control its source. A British apothecary, Hugh Morgan, introduced Queen Elizabeth I to vanilla – she loved it. Thomas Jefferson ordered the US ambassador in France to send him 50 vanilla beans. It became popular in America as a flavouring, a medicine – and an aphrodisiac.

 

And in 1830, 300 years after Cortés drank vanilla-flavoured chocolate with Moctezuma, Charles Morren, a French botanist discovered that the vanilla flowers had to be hand pollinated, but he did not publish his method, so Mexico remained the only source. But then in 1841 Edmund Albias, an illiterate slave on the island of Bourbon (now Réunion) discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand. That ended the Mexican monopoly.

 

Cultivation and processing make vanilla expensive – only saffron costs more. However, in the 19^th century, a method was devised to produce artificial vanilla flavour from waste wood pulp.

 

As for ice cream, its history goes back to the Phoenicians, and from then until the mid-19^th century it was usually served as frozen cream with fruits and berries. Then in 1847, a Pennsylvania lady, Nancy Johnson, invented a hand-cranked machine for making ice cream. This expanded the market, made room for new flavours and demand for vanilla boomed.

 Information and photos courtesy of T J Hartung. 

Imprisonment of the innocent in New Jersey

  

My friend in New Jersey sent me a new report from a vigil outside Delaney Hall, the ICE prison in New Jersey:

 

“I was at Delaney Hall again last night — it appears that New Jersey is becoming a revolving door. ICE agents are taking anyone they can find just to meet their increasing quotas, and then releasing them when there are no legitimate charges against them and the prison is becoming overcrowded. Yesterday they released over 20, and we found rides home for all. But now, if the detainees post a $7500 bond, they are released with ankle bracelets. One man had only been there 4 days, I don’t even think that is time enough to have a hearing. And now the prisoners are not complaining about the food as much because if their family puts money into a commissary fund, they can spend $5 or $10 and get a “better” microwaveable meal. And where is this money going? Back to ICE. It is really dispicable. People are getting snatched from the courthouses when they arrive for their hearings, so there really is no good end to this.”

 

This appalling abuse of human rights in the former Land of the Free, is surely unconstitutional. It is certainly wantonly cruel and now financially corrupt. You seize people without due legal cause, imprison them and then demand money with menaces to rerelease them.

 

A few days before we left the UK a Channel 4 reporter interviewed people on Miami Beach about their opinion of immigrants. The general view of these seemingly well-to-do, retirement age American was that “they” come here, take from us and do no contribute. Even if this were true (it is not: undocumented immigrants pay taxes and subsidize the people on Mami Beach) does it justify illegal, cruel and arbitrary detention?

 

What adjectives can we apply to the man who has authorized? Tyrannical, cruel, corrupt … Any other suitable terms?

Evading the Laws of Juárez in Tlalpan

“Dios mediante” (God willing) said the nun at the end of our friend Chris West’s phone call. He had reserved two places for us on a tour of her convent’s chapel in Tlalpan, designed by Luis Barragán (1902-2988), probably modern Mexico’s finest architect, and blessed (not finished as the nun leading our tour explained) in 1963.

 

Tlalpan is an ancient district of Mexico City, rather off the main tourist itineraries and relatively untouched since Spanish colonial times by the concrete of developers. Its narrow streets are lined by the walls of many old buildings pierced by just a few windows behind sturdy metal bars, for the light is all interior, hidden from those of us on the streets. The entrance to the convent is an unprepossessing wall and a large wooden door.

The entrance to the convent on Calle Miguel Hidalgo.

 

The nun who led the tour, explained that the convent was originally located in a private home rented from a Spanish family, where the closed order could avoid “the laws of Juárez.”

Juárez, an “Indian” from Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as any school student will know is the hero of Mexican history who doggedly resisted the invasion of the forces of Napoleon III in 1862, and who fought conservative Mexican monarchists in the civil war provoked by the Laws of the Reform. Juárez’s laws decisively separated church and state, confiscated many church properties and restricted the liberties of the Catholic clergy. He may be a hero in school textbooks, but not in convents, monasteries and seminaries.

 

The legacy of the Reform could still be felt in the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in western Mexico where a cruel civil war between followers of Christ the King and the federal government was fought. Barragán was born in Guadalajara in western Mexico and was profoundly Catholic. In 1955 he offered to convert the convent of the Clarisas Capuchinas into a modern complex, at the heart of which is the chapel and its associated spaces.

The altar and the santísimo. To the right the latticework separating the main chapel from the chapel of the faithful.

 

The chapel itself is a small, spare space quite adequate for the 60 nuns who then occupied the convent – there are now only 12, all of advanced years. Barragán designed the spaces, the colours of the walls, the latticework work and stained-glass that admit plentiful natural light, and the furniture. The altar is unusually simple for a Mexican religious space, pride of place given to El Santísimo (the Holy Sacrament). There is but one side chapel, to the left of the altar and shaped like the prow of a boat, a tall stained-glass window at its front, and a huge wooden cross at the rear. The. cross is lit directly on only one day of the year at Easter, when the nuns worship in the side chapel. On an upper level at the rear of the main chapel is the choir, no longer used because too few nuns are able to walk up the stairs, where more latticework work admits more natural light. There are only two small electric lights set in the ceiling to supplement the natural light, used only for vespers, which the remaining nuns no longer celebrate. In fact, there are probably no more than half a dozen electric lights in all the spaces designed for the nuns by Barragán. They must have the smallest electric bill in all of Mexico.

 

The side chapel, shaped like a prow, its stained glass and the cross.

 

Our tour took us to a corridor through which the priest enters for daily mass. Here there is a small wooden opening through which the nuns confess to the priest, who is seated in the confessional in the Chapel of the Faithful. The corridor leads to the sacristy where a mother superior ordered that a full-length mirror be installed because priests came to mass with their robes in disorder (Barragán made provision for no mirror). The Capuchins are the second order of the Franciscans (the first being the male friars/priests, the third the secular faithful). Technically, mass should be conducted by a Franciscan priest, but there are now so few that only one of the four priests who preside in the chapel is a member of the order. The remainder come from the Pontifical University in Tlalpan.

The altar seen from the side chapel.

 

Next came the Chapel of the Faithful, where the nuns’ family members and the public can gather on only two days a year (Christmas and Easter). The faithful have a full view of the altar and cross, but cannot see the nuns. The last two rooms visited were provided for family visits (one permitted every three months). The room for the nuns is small with sturdy wooden furnishings and two starkly modern paintings by Chucho Reyes (1880-1977). On one side is yet more latticework and behind it a solid wooden door that closes off a much larger room, again with one or two of Chucho Reyes’ paintings, which is opened to allow conversation between visitor and nun. Because there are now so few nuns, visits are no longer conducted in these rooms.

 

Barragan also designed a refectory (not open to the public tours).

 

After the tour, the nuns offer for sale a variety of items: some religious charms, bookmarks featuring Santa Clara (the patron saint of the order – hence Clarisas Capuchinas), assorted sweets, and a very Mexican drink, rompope (a sort of egg and cinnamon punch). The bottles had no labels, so I assume that they were made (and consumed?) by the nuns. A Japanese couple who took the tour and understood very little (they spoke no Spanish and understood only a little English) asked me to find out for them what was the mysterious liquid in the bottle.

 

The oratorio de Amaxalco.

Our next visit in Tlalpan was much less successful. The Oratorio de Amaxalco is an 18^th century chapel saved from demolition by the citizens of Tlalpan, but as we discovered, not open to the public. We could view it only through the iron of the gates.

Me and my MP

My MP replied to my letter about a new Conservative Party policy concerning public housing as follows (my original letter is copied below). His response ignores many of the comments I made in my letter.

Dear Mr Jacobs, 

Mrs Whateley’s views are entirely reasonable, in fact, they are the moderate position. A social home with a lifetime tenancy in London or Sunninghill, say, will in very many instances exceed a million pounds in its financial benefit. Very obviously non-citizens should not be eligible; to think otherwise is not an enlightened position, but rather a rejection of the concept of citizenship and borders. Any non-citizen requiring such a financial subsidy to live comfortably should return home. A majority of British people share her views – as do I

Yours sincerely,

Jack Rankin MP
Windsor

I responded:

Dear Mr Rankin,

Thank you for your concise response, from which I deduce that I am to be categorized as one of your unenlightened citizens. I am pleased to be so classified if it distinguishes my views from those of Ms Whateley and yours.

Sincerely yours,

Ian Jacobs

My original letter:

Dear Mr Rankin,

 

Your colleague Helen Whateley has just convinced me that I cannot in good conscience vote for any candidate representing the Conservative party.

 

My Saturday paper quoted Ms Whateley as stating the following:

 

“Making Britain your home should be earned by working, paying tax and integrating. It should not come with a free ride on the benefits system. Britain cannot be a cash machine for the world.

 

Labour has lost control of immigration and lost control of the welfare bill, and it is British families picking up the bill and sitting on waiting lists. The next Conservative government will make foreign nationals ineligible for social housing. Nearly 230,000 homes could go to British families.”

 

Perhaps you will tell me that Ms Whateley has been misquoted. However, on the assumption that she has been accurately quoted, I write to point out that this asinine farrago of prejudice and misrepresentation appalls me.

 

First, Ms Whateley implies that all foreign nationals who live in social housing came to Britain for a “free ride,” implying that they do not work, pay tax or integrate. How can she possibly know that this is true of at a minimum 230,000 people (assuming that only one householder per home holds a foreign passport) and perhaps as many as 460,000 (if there are two such householders in each home)? Is there any evidence that a significant proportion of these fellow human beings do not work, pay tax or integrate? I doubt it. Would you be encouraged to integrate if the government were to evict you from your home simply because you were not born in Britain?

 

The members of our communities who live in social housing might include retired couples or people in active employment who have taught our children, nursed us when we were unwell, cared for our elderly neighbours, whose children are in our schools, who are our neighbours perhaps attended the events that I help to organize in Sunninghill Library, or participated in activities in Cordes Hall. Would that constitute a failure to integrate.

 

Do you, as my elected representative, know how Ms Whateley will identify those she intends to evict from homes they may have occupied for a long time? If those who determine that a family should be evicted make a mistake (remember the Windrush scandal), will a candidate for eviction be allowed to appeal? And once evicted, if these unfortunate victims of Ms Whateley’s racism fail to find a home they can afford, will she ensure that local authorities have sufficient funds to house them, as they are legally required to do so? In this event, exactly how has Ms Whateley’s policy saved the taxpayer any money at all? Indeed, perhaps the cost will be higher because a private landlord will charge a high rent.

 

Persecution of people simply for being workers in a country of which they are not citizens, is a very personal matter for my wife and me, since we have two immigrant sons, one in Mexico and one in Japan. They earn salaries and are seeking to benefit their host countries with their talents. They both have access to the public health system in the country in which they live. Are they really personally responsible for any waiting lists in Mexico or Japan, and if waiting lists do exist should they be punished for the failure of the respective governments to manage an adequate health system?

 

Closer to home, we have a friend of many years, a Muslim lady who worked alongside my wife in a university library, and who has continued to work in her “retirement years” while I live idly on my pensions. She was educated in her own country but in the British curriculum, speaks excellent English, volunteered during the Covid pandemic, is a friend of Kew Gardens, and a valued friend. Please tell me how I can advise her to integrate? She might well be the target of one of Ms Whateley’s evictions.

 

I hope you will excuse me, if I trouble you concerning one more vacuous statement, in this case something said by your leader Ms Badenoch. Many years ago (when the Poll Tax was so controversial that even Conservative Party members travelled to London to join protests), a Conservative canvasser for council elections called at my home. When I told her that I could not vote for the Conservative candidates, she said words to the effect: “Why not, it’ only bout emptying the bins.” I thought that this betrayed a profound ignorance of the duties of a borough councillor, but she was only a canvasser not the leader of the Conservative Party. However, I understand that Ms Badenoch justified her selection of a former Neo-Nazi for a council seat on the grounds that he would be concerned only with “parking, sorting out bins.” I know that you were once a councillor for RBWM, so I can assume that your knowledge of the functions of a council is superior to that of your leader. Perhaps you can explain this to her when you next see her.

 

I am sorry to interrupt your summer holidays with this matter. I wish you and your family a relaxing summer.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

Ian Jacobs

 

ICE in New Jersey

  

A friend in New Jersey responded to my last piece about prisons in the UK. Her testimony is both moving and appalling. She agreed that I could share it with you. She sent her comments in two messages.

 

Message 1:

 

Oh Ian, don’t even get me started on prisons. I’m part of a program from our church called “Eyes on ICE”. Not a protestor, not getting pepper sprayed or on the news, just standing outside the facility where they are holding the largest number of detainees of Homeland Security on the East Coast in a god forsaken area of Newark, lacking any shade or seats for the people waiting, unreachable for the poor families by any kind of public transportation and the rules for who can visit and what they can wear and what time they should show up change almost randomly and daily.  The other day in the paper they said this particular facility is the most restrictive prison in the state.

We’re documenting how the ICE officers are treating the families and visitors of the people inside — who may have overstayed their visas, who may have wandered across the border, or who may be perfectly legal and waiting for their hearing but just happen to be Spanish and swept up with others so they get to be thrown in with the other 1000 detainees. We also have food, grocery store cards and clothes for the visitors. Last time I was there a man came by UBER from CONNECTICUT and wasn’t allowed in so he got a hot dog meal before his long trek back. It makes me want to cry. So far this particular facility has had 3 deaths and of course haven’t really had anything announced about the causes of the deaths in what would be youngish men who may have not been getting whatever medicine they were supposed to be getting. It’s unbelievably cruel, and designed to be just that. I have no idea what the end game is for these guys, but after the second death this week they started releasing more almost every day. And today only announced the 3rd death happened a few weeks ago, although ICE considers that none of these were in their custody since they transfer them to the hospital when things go south. Along with another woman I drove home a man to Hackensack (since we were going that way anyway) who had been held for two weeks only because he lived with his cousin who was illegal.  I mean, WHAT HAS THIS WORLD COME TO????????.

 

Message 2:

 

I was so mad when I wrote that e-mail that I left out other facts you might want to know. Delaney Hall is run by a private company,  The GEO Co. which received a $1 billion, 15 year no-bid contract. As a federal prison they have so far not let any NJ state elected people in to see it, which has resulted in some arrests when NJ legislators have claimed it’s their right to go inside, and there was a short hunger strike this summer carried on because of poor  (and rotten) quality food, lack of medical help. Apparently two of the deaths that occurred happened when the detainees were not given their seizure and/or high blood pressure medications but then moved to a hospital so technically the deaths were not at the facility. When I was there last week only 2 visitors were allowed at a time and they must be family members. Thus, no lawyers, no any kind of advisors, church, or friend visitors. This is especially significant when they keep moving detainees around different prisons in different parts of the country. The clothing visitors wear must be approved by the guards on duty. No hoodies, no tee shirts with slogans, no ripped jeans, no crocs and no “skin showing” so when I was there last week an 8 month pregnant girl had shown up in a beautiful sun dress and we had her put on an extra large tee shirt and an extra large pair of gym pants over it, as well as exchanging her sandals for high top sneakers. She came in looking lovely but wasn’t nearly as pretty in her gym clothes to see her partner. Of course these rules change all the time, as does the visiting hours in 2 hour blocs — only twice a week, once during the week, once on the weekend — detainees are assigned certain visiting hours and it’s not uncommon for their visitors to show up (in an uber)  and find out that their particular visiting hour has been changed and is already past. And all further visiting for the day for all visitors can be cancelled at the discretion of the guards on duty. The whole thing is so secretive, and sneaky and cruel that it doesn’t even seem like the country I grew up in. I’m just horrified that people are treated like that.