This September 15th, thousands of people will come out to cry in more than
120 cities in the 18 states of our country. These cries, however, will
not be identified with what has been up to now the only national cry,
with an official government character, which has lost its original
content and which commemorates the construction of national independence,
a process which is still not finished in Mexico.

The cries are part of a process initiated by the Cry of the Excluded's
Hemispheric Campaign, which began to be active in Mexico last year. On
the hemispheric scene, 150 organizations have adopted the cause, and on
next October 12th they will join their voices in the Hemispheric Cry,
which will prepare the ground for the Worldwide Cry in 2001.

They are cries of indignation, faced with the impoverishment desired and
generated by those who support an economic model - thereby supporting
themselves - which by its nature produces and amplifies exclusion. As
the Chilean philosopher Helio Gallardo explains, this model creates
exclusion in the economic, the political, the symbolic-cultural, and even
the libidinal areas. (Gallardo is a professor at the University of Costa
Rica and supports the Cry of Mexico through his forums and workshops.)

It is this logic of death, so taken for granted and internalized, which
prompts us to come out and cry. Furthermore, in the context of present-
day Mexico, it is urgent to cry out in order to avoid maintaining the
nearly universal belief that the alternation of power in Mexico is any
guarantee of alternatives for "dignified life". The government offers
alternatives constructed from above, holding itself apart from the very
diversity of processes that is intensively generating a new way of being
and of existing in reality.

For this reason, the Cry of the Excluded Campaign is not just another
event, nor does it stop at merely demanding various things, but rather
hopes to construct another way of obtaining and taking ownership of them.
This "other way" is essentially the "self-constitution of subjects" (and
identities) through, and based in, the struggle of social liberation.
Power, in this way of speaking, is not something to be taken, but
something to be exercised. It constitutes a process and a non-
exclusionary unfolding of empowerment. In this way, politics becomes an
action which is centered in sensibilities, that is, in cultural action.

The social mobilization which is being generated, thanks to the campaign,
seeks not only to incite through its actions, but also to gather and
accumulate forces in order to gain an ever-increasing capacity for action
and for the transformation of the structures and logic of domination
which continually strike at us.

It is important to note that the Cry can be understood as an event which
brings to mind the existence of people condemned to wretchedness,
denounces the injustice inherent in such an existence, and demands an end
to exclusion. If this is so, then the Campaign leads to specific social
actions, which respond to specific incidents rather than structural
issues. But the Cry of the Excluded also involves building a popular
social movement against structures of exclusion.

Therefore, the mobilization exists in order to bring about the conditions
in which everyone, no matter what his social condition (elderly, child,
woman, indigenous, worker, farmworker, businessman, professional, etc.)
has the ability and obligation to express himself as a subject. A
mobilization of this type cannot limit itself to a single occurence or
event, because, among other things, it implies a continual vigilance in
order to protect the gains we are making (and to push for more) within
educational, gender, socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures.

By definition, the Cry of the Excluded needs to take the form of a
permanent social mobilization, although the term may be exhausted and
discredited, even to the point of arousing revolutionary derision.

(La Jornada, Mexico City, Friday, September 15, 2000)