I don’t upgrade phones for better cameras, brighter screens, or to get access to the newest cell networks. I like using my phones until they physically stop working. And my Pixel 4a, bought in December 2020, was functioning fine until Google broke it.
The first week of this year, I got an email about the Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program. Buried in the corporate speak was the real message: Google was going to push a software update to “improve stability,” which in practice meant degrading battery performance. It wasn’t optional. And the “appeasement” they offered: a token fifty bucks, or a hundred dollars in credit at their store. Maybe a battery replacement, if you were lucky enough to find a shop that could do it.
In Una lucha más / Another Struggle, I wrote about the weight of carrying history: how every day is part of a struggle that started long before us. This reflection picks up from there but now focuses on how we live while we fight.
Over a century ago, two of Zapata’s manifestos were translated into Nahuatl, a Native Mexican language, and circulated among Indigenous villagers in Tlaxcala. The texts are powerful and worth reading because of how they interpret the cultural, ethical, and political message for people with a very different lived reality. The translator didn’t use the word “revolution.” Instead, he envisioned it as netehuiliztle — the will to struggle — and revolutionaries as netehuiloani, those who come striking with stones. It was a declaration not of ideology, but of moral clarity and collective will.
Birthright citizenship is under threat in the United States, and Europe’s restrictive laws offer a clear warning of what’s at stake.
A 2004 Swiss People's Party poster opposing two referendums aimed at easing birthright citizenship restrictions for second- and third-generation immigrants. Swiss voters rejected both measures.
