What made you decide to spend so much of your time helping to build solidarity between people in the United States and people in México?

Like the vast majority of progressives in the United States, I entered the 21st century with only a vague sense of what was going on in México. We all knew — and know — much more about Central American political realities than about Mexican.

Some of that Central American sense I imbibed first-hand as part of the first U.S. trade union fact-finding delegation to El Salvador in 1983. We met with guerrilla leaders in the mountains and insurgents in the cities. We also met with Salvadoran generals, in mansions behind ten-foot-high walls topped by razor wire and broken glass, and with business leaders around their secure conference tables.

I still remember one of those expensively suited businessmen talking disdainfully about Salvadoran peasants. He clearly and simply saw them as “beasts of burden” and nothing more. So I had a vivid sense of the ongoing class struggle “south of the border,” but that sense didn’t include México.

That all changed when you became part of an extended Mexican family?

Yes, early in the 2000s, I found myself with a Mexican daughter-in-law and a wonderful new Mexican family that included progressive activists who would later become staunch supporters of AMLO and Morena. I learned a great deal from them all, and I began to see U.S. relations with-México through an entirely new prism.

I soon realized that progressives in the United States had more to learn about making social change from our Mexican counterparts than the other way around. Here in the United States, we’re constantly playing defense against the right. They’re playing offense — and winning.

We wanted to help give those Italian progressives the breathing space they needed to forge real change. But we didn’t succeed, partly because we had nothing close to the resources needed to spread the word —  within the Italian-American community and beyond — about what was going on in Italy.

Communication — spreading the word — is job one in organizing. But how can you grab and hold people’s attention?  I see too many groups on the left publishing newsletters that assume that readers want to know all about the work their particular group is doing. No, readers want to know what’s happening on the issues and struggles they care about. These two perspectives certainly do overlap, but not completely. Successful progressive newsletters give off the vibes of the latter.

Do you have more optimism now for the future of international solidarity efforts?

Much more. The online world, social media — all this gives us a real shot at reaching large numbers of people. We can, for instance, publish and distribute a weekly issue of the México Solidarity Bulletin at a tiny fraction of the cost that printed-and-mailed communications used to demand.

But we see real political progress in this new online world only when subscribers become far more than passive readers. Success only comes when subscribers to efforts like the México Solidarity Bulletin become active sharers of information, when they forward the weekly Bulletin issues they receive to friends and co-workers, when they post links to interviews that appear in the Bulletin in their social media streams.

The more that readers play this activist role, the more of a difference we can all make together. Mexicans are marching down a road that has the potential to make their country a worldwide inspiration for progressive social change. We Americans have a lot we need to change. The more we can learn from what’s going on in México, the better our shot at making our own transformation.