About Us

Staff and Board

Bob Stone and Betsy Bowman

This is a joint bio for Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone because we have worked closely together since 1985 on Sartre’s second ethics, theory of self-management, and global capitalism. Since 2004 we've helped start the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, for “research and learning for a better world.” Elizabeth Bowman’s PhD dissertation in French Lit at Columbia University (1987) treated Sartre’s ethical plays. She taught French at Memphis University, University of Hartford, and Middlebury College. Since 2005 she has written and lectured on global capitalism. Bob Stone taught philosophy for 35 years - mostly at C. W. Post College of Long Island University. In 1982 he helped co-found the Radical Philosophy Association and the Review of Radical Philosophy. We are activists in civil rights, peace, feminist, worker cooperative, and solidarity economy movements. Our twin focus remains economic democracy and Sartre’s ethics. We have been on the Grassroots Economic Organizing editorial board since 1994. Our articles have appeared in journals and collections in philosophy, sociology, economics and political science in the US, Russia, Bulgaria, Belgium, France, Mexico and Argentina. Recent work is on www.globaljusticecenter.org We are now studying austerity, the growing social appropriation movement, and the possibility of a global conversation on moving beyond capitalism. We aim to publish our Making the Human: A Reading of Sartre’s Ethical Writings of the mid-1960s which we started in 1985.

Atahualpa Caldera Sosa

Biologist and watershed management expert. Ata received his degree in Biology from the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM) and recently completed his Masters Degree in Watershed Management at the Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro (UAQ).

Ata has participated in various workshops and seminars in Mexico and abroad in Germany and Canada. He was Coordinator of Projects concerning Natural Protected Areas, Ecotourism and Compost for Organizacion Accion y Desarrollo Ecologico A.C. He directed "Cooperativa Ejidal Grutas de Tolantongo," a documentary about a successful Eco-resort cooperative in Mexico. He is also a co-producer of an award-winning documentary directed by Francesco Taboada Tabone called 13 Pueblos: en defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra (defending water, air and land), Winner of Premio Rigoberta Menchu at the Montreal 2008 People's Festival.

His family lives around 15 minutes outside of San Miguel de Allende on a property that is a model of sustainable living -- adobe house, solar panels, dry (compost) toilets, a windmill, solar oven, and a water collection system with filtration and a 90,000-liter cistern. Through his non-profit organization, Grupo de Acción Interdisciplinaria Ambiental A.C., Ata offers workshops on how to construct and maintain some of these alternative energy systems.

Olivia Canales

Liz Mestres

Liz Mestres is a graphic designer and longtime Latin American solidarity activist. For more than fifteen years, she worked with the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee on its publication, Puerto Rico Libre. In the late 80s and early 90s, she worked with New Channels Communications on behalf of the liberation struggle in El Salvador. She was a co-founder in 1975 of the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School in New York City, and its director from 1994 to 2013. She is a member of the editorial board of Socialism and Democracy.

In 2015, she moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and joined the Center for Global Justice. She is also active with the Education Collaborative and the AguaVida Network.

Yolanda Millan Manjarrez

In 1998 Yolanda began working with women from rural communities within the municipal area of San Miguel de Allende in the development of productive projects. In 2001, she was a key part in the legal formation of Women Producers in order to be able to raise funds and receive training (with the support of The Global Fund For Women, IMUG, CODERNORTE, Municipality of Allende, and SAGARPA) for groups of women from various communities. Starting in 2004 she began collaborating with the Center for Global Justice in various projects, such as: micro-loans, field visits. learning and monitoring of productive projects and training, linking communities with organized groups and organizations, among others. Yolanda is a vital part of the Summer Program assisting students and their families in achieving bi-cultural integration.

Our Mission

The Center for Global Justice is a multi-cultural, democratically organized service, learning, and research center. Through our support of the social and solidarity economy, our public education programs, and our research collaborations we seek to empower ordinary people to work to create a more socially and economically just world.

What We Do

The Center engages in local community support and outreach to promote and advance initiatives and movements toward social justice, grassroots empowerment and democracy, and environmental sustainability. It is also devoted to critical analysis of the processes and impacts of globalization, both local and international. The Center works to develop alternative socio-economic systems that conserve and share the world’s cultural, economic, and environmental resources for the benefit of humankind.

Vision Statement

We live in a transitional historical moment. An old social order is striving to extend itself in a desperate effort to survive, while around the world, peoples who no longer find such an order humanly viable, yearn for a new world. We are caught between an old dying order and a new one not yet born. On the global as well as the local levels, progressive social movements are struggling for social justice against corporate rule, inequality, sexism, racism, environmental destruction, poverty and war. Mobilizing a rising tide of people of all ages, many nationalities and social identities, classes, faiths, etc. the social movements of our time are raising the consciousness of men and women in both the First and Third Worlds. They are finding that the existing social order neither meets their interests nor is consonant with their image of the kind of society in which they wish to live. Their protest is not only a radical rejection of what exists but also an expression of faith that another world is possible. Such a moment as this cries out for the committed engagement of intellectuals.

What is required is no less than bold, transformative thinking in service to the emancipatory projects of our social movements. What is needed is not ivory tower intellectuals, but thinkers rooted in the concrete struggles around us. We strive for a dialectical unity of theory and practice based on the understanding that theory without practice is empty, while practice without theory is blind. We must understand that social action tests theory while at the same time theory informed by struggle gives direction to our practice. The Research and Learning Center seeks to be a locus of such praxis. We call together activists of all disciplines to form a nurturing community of thinkers in support of progressive social change. Located in San Miguel de Allende, the Center will incorporate resident members, affiliated members located elsewhere, and visiting members. Here in the tranquility of central Mexico we find a refuge for scholars and activists alike to reflect, discuss, write, and learn together in a supportive community.The specific projects undertaken will depend on the interests and talents of the members attracted to this Center and will evolve over time. Persons are drawn to such a center by elective affinity through shared values, visions and missions. The work of the center will be plural and fluid, depending on the interests of those who join together.

Through dialog, consensual groups will emerge that will undertake group projects. While a broadly conceived radicalism will be the initial principle of unity, over time a common mission is likely to evolve, but the center should always remain open to new currents. Since the inaugural event is a Workshop on AlterGlobalizations, the initial work of the Center is likely to be strongly oriented to alternative globalization issues. But the Center remains open to many other projects as well. We are a thinking community, not a social action organization. We will not be participating in Mexican politics. But we will be engaged in transformative thinking. Being located in this part of the Third World so closely tied to the United States gives us a vantage point for understanding North-South relations. Indeed, we hope the Center can become a locus of North-South and South-South dialogue. This project is embedded in a global network. Such a democratic network, a nonhierarchical and noncentered structure of interconnected nodes, has been offered as the organizational model for an alternative globalization. Indeed, this has always been the structural model of social movements. The research and learning center is one such node in a growing social change network. We invite you to join us, remembering that a new world is possible, but it takes our committed effort to make it real.

History

The Center came out of the social movements against neoliberal corporate globalization. Taking the affects of NAFTA on the Mexican economy and society as its central focus, the Center located in Mexico. It was initiated at a 2004 international conference on "Alterglobalizations" by U.S. academics and activists. As a center for research and learning for a better world, we conduct public education forums, support community led cooperative projects, and organize educational travel. From its inception the Center has been a space for people of all professions, backgrounds and beliefs to come together and work toward making the world a more just and equitable place to live. Please explore our website for detail on our programs. The Center for Global Justice is a project of the Radical Philosophy Association.