We talked with 1968 Pátzcuaro, Mexico alum, David Ginsberg* (Ginnes) about his Encampment experience and how it influenced his life.
*My last name in 1968 was still Ginnes (my dad changed from Ginsberg to Ginnes in the ’30s to assimilate), so no one from the ’68 Encampment would recognize Ginsberg. I changed it back to Ginsberg during law school because all of my political friends were reclaiming their identities as Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, etc., so I figured I should also do that. What’s ironic is that my mom’s family was Scots-Irish (which could have been consistent with Guiness), while my dad’s family was Ashkenazi Jewish from Ukraine.
Tell us a bit about your life now.
I retired in 2022. For 22 years, I was general counsel of a software company. Then they got acquired by somebody else and it was time to retire anyway. I stayed on a year for the transition. I’m enjoying retired life. I play bagpipes, take lessons, and am in a pipe band. My wife and I live in Southern California. Our son is grown and got married in December 2024. We have horses and cats. We have a cat that needs specialty veterinary care, so we were on the freeway this morning for an hour and it reminded me how much I loathed commuting on the freeway every day.
What did you learn at the Encampment?
I learned a lot about people from different backgrounds, which was the most important thing for me. I come from a funny background. My mother was from a wealthy WASP family and my father was from an immigrant Jewish family. He was a writer and had been successful in radio and the early days of TV, and then he was blacklisted and couldn’t write under his own name for six or eight years in the 1950s. He found some success after that, but during the blacklist, my parents split, and my mother went back to her roots. She had been radical in the ‘30s through ‘50s, so I was a “red diaper baby” [child of parents who were either Communists or radical before the McCarthy era].
[After the divorce] My mother was doing well and we lived a nice upper-middle-class life in the suburbs of Chicago. I had come from the left-wing red diaper baby background, in bohemian Greenwich Village in the ’40s and ’50s, to living in Highland Park. I thought of myself as progressive — I went on open-housing marches and Martin Luther King rallies to fight housing discrimination with my mom when I was in junior high school — but in reality, I was pretty insular and didn’t have much experience with different kinds of people. That was the best thing about the Encampment: We had people from all different kinds of backgrounds. I don’t know how much it opened my eyes, but it broadened my experience with people who were different from me. It sensitized me to their concerns and point of view. David Sandoval was the first Mexican-American I met. I grew up on the East Coast with Puerto Rican and Dominican kids, so I was used to the sound of their language and culture, but meeting people from the Southwest was new to me.
In high school, I had met people and traveled internationally because my mother and aunt were active in the Experiment in International Living. We had hosted students from Mexico, Tanzania, and Brazil. My mother worked for the International Visitors Center in Chicago. They did programming for State Department grantees, so, for example, if a cardiac surgeon from South Africa or an agronomist from Romania got a state department grant to travel to the United States and meet people, her job was to find people who had compatible professional experience and hook them up. Through her, I was able to meet a fair number of those people from all over the world.
When I was in ninth grade, my mom and I were having problems, so she thought it would be good for us to be apart for the summer. I went to Peru as an exchange student. The next summer, I went to France. Then, when I heard that the Encampment was going to Mexico, that seemed like a logical thing to do. In the ’60s, international travel was not as common as it is now, so spending the summer in Mexico was really interesting to me.
How did you hear about the Encampment?
I saw a brochure on the bulletin board in my high school and thought, “Wow, that sounds fascinating!” I went to the North Shore Country Day School, a prep school in Winnetka, Illinois. They were pretty liberal. [As a junior] I was involved in a group called Project 67–68, then Project 68–69 in my senior year. We would go to the west side of Chicago, where we had a connection with a church, and we would tutor some of the kids from the church. I was looking for something relevant to do because ’68 was when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It felt like the whole world was coming apart and I wanted something that was relevant to my life and making the world better.
What was your first impression of the Encampment?
We had several days before the actual beginning of the Encampment, because we met in different places around the U.S. and drove down separately in several vans, passing through Little Rock and Austin, and finally getting together with all the Encampers for the first time in Laredo. We had workshops along the way getting us ready for what we were going to do in Pátzcuaro. Pátzcuaro is in Michoacan. It’s as far south as Mexico City and about halfway to the western coast. It’s gorgeous there — deep-red soil and green plants. This was before drugs took over the economy there.
The West Coast and East Coast and Midwest Encampers converged on Pátzcuaro at the same time. There were 31 of us. I had a great time.
How has the Encampment influenced your life?
It confirmed a lot of what I wanted to do in terms of being involved in social justice. I was politically involved through college. I started college at NYU in 1969, but at the end of my freshman year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia, so students all over the country went on strike and I was part of a group who occupied NYU’s Student Union building. The following year, I transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a drama major and involved in a guerilla theater group and numerous anti-war demonstrations until the [Vietnam] war wound down. In 1973, I moved back to New York to work in film. I also volunteered at the Free Clinic at St. Marks Place in Manhattan.
In 1974, I went back to Berkeley and eventually started working freelance on a lot of films. Later that year, I moved to Los Angeles to attend film school at USC and began working on TV commercials. I also got involved with the LA Group for Latin American Solidarity (LAGLAS). I didn’t know they were related at the time, but I think that [EFC alum and former staff] David Sandoval’s wife, Charon D’Aiello Sandoval, was in LAGLAS at the same time as me. I also worked with a group supporting Argentine political prisoners and fighting against the military junta there (COSPA) — Comite de Solidaridad Con El Pueblo Argentino (SCAP – Solidarity Committee with the Argentine People). Eventually, I had a big fight with the TV commercial production company I was working for because it conflicted with the community work I was doing, so I quit. During this same period, I was a member of the Los Angeles Regional Committee of the Venceremos Brigade (VB). Starting in the late ’60s, the VB organized groups of people to go to Cuba to do volunteer work to “break the blockade” (the U.S. economic and political blockade of Cuba). Initially, brigadistas worked in the sugarcane harvest, but by the time I was involved, we did construction work.
After ’68, I was really alienated from the straight world. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, the Chicago cops beat the hell out of the demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, McCarthy lost the nomination, Nixon got elected, the FBI was sabotaging the Black Panther Party and other progressive organizations, and then Watergate. Unfortunately, going to Berkeley only reinforced my feeling of otherness. This is part of why I got into the VB, thinking, “We’ll go to Cuba — they’re progressive.” As I look back on things from today’s perspective, however, I believe the world is much more complicated than I thought it was at that age.
The current mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was chair of the VB in LA when I was a member of the committee. The former mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, was on the VB with me when I went to Cuba in 1976. Brigadistas are very involved in politics in L.A. and around the country.
Soon after getting back from Cuba, I started law school at the People’s College of Law, a radical law school founded by the National Lawyers Guild, La Raza National Students Association, Asian Law Collective, and National Conference of Black Lawyers. There was a community of legal groups and they wanted to train lawyers who would be community lawyers. I went there for a year, but unfortunately, there was a huge amount of in-fighting and back-biting between the various factions at the school and I felt like I was stuck in the middle.
The next year, I went to the USC (University of Southern California) School of Law. I had to start over because People’s College was unaccredited. I became the chair of the National Lawyers Guild chapter at USC.
While I was in law school, I worked for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and after I graduated, I worked for San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services for over a year. Then Ronald Reagan cut the funding for legal services and I had no seniority, “last hired first fired,” so I got a job in a straight law firm — and hated it. The early ’80s were a reactionary period and I’d lost touch with the folks from the VB and I was alienated from the whole legal thing — I wanted to be a peoples’ lawyer, but I didn’t know how to find a job in another public interest law firm.
I got married in the early ’80s. I worked in a private law firm for a couple of years, but through a series of quirks, I ended up getting a job as a producer in a pioneering computer graphics company. They were having trouble finding people to manage their projects, because the computer people couldn’t deal with the film people and the film people couldn’t deal with the computer people. I had a film background, I was fascinated by computers, and my wife was getting a master’s in computer science, so the guy who ran the company said, “We’ll try it out.” I ended up working as a computer graphics and visual effects producer and director of business affairs for 17 years. Those were 60- to 70-hour weeks, so I didn’t have time to get involved in anything political.
In 2000, I was almost 50, but all the animators I was working with were still 20-something and I didn’t want to be the “old guy,” so I thought I should figure out something I could do for the rest of my career and put my resumé online. Within two weeks, I got an offer to work for a software company. Although they made business software, computer graphics is very much a part of the software industry (it involves a lot of custom software development), so my experience in computer graphics carried over to my new job.
Luckily, I was able to put together things that I was interested in and enjoyed for this job, so I ended up staying there for the rest of my working career.
My wife and I had one child and were very involved with his life. He had some learning disabilities, so I got very active in that and it eclipsed the overtly political stuff. I have stayed active socially in one way or another, just not specifically left-wing like I thought I would.
When we were first married, I was on the board of the 500-unit co-op association where we lived and ended up becoming president — that took a lot of time. As my son got older, I got heavily involved in the special needs school he attended (Bridges Academy). I was on the Board of Trustees for six years, vice chair for two years, and chair of the board for two years. During that period, we converted the school from a sole proprietorship of the founder to a charitable nonprofit corporation that has now become quite well known for teaching 2e students (twice exceptional — i.e., gifted or highly gifted with a range of strengths, interests, and learning differences).
It may look like there’ve been a series of turns in my life, but when I look back on it, there’s a thread that runs through everything. I’ve always been active in one organization or another, but not what I thought it would be back in the ’60–’70s.
Do you have a favorite memory or story from the Encampment?
We stayed in a farm on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. The farm had been the site of a rural development and cultural exchange program conducted since 1960 by Montana State and Purdue University staff members and students, in collaboration with Carolina de Mugica, the widow of General Francisco Mujica, a revolutionary leader in the Mexican revolution and a leading politician thereafter. Mrs. Mugica was a staff member at the Patzcuaro headquarters of the UNESCO Centro Rural de Educacion Fundamental Latino Americano/Regional Centre for Fundamental Education in Latin America (CREFAL). We would gather for classes and discussions. We helped to build a basketball court in town. It was great — and a lot of hard work. Most of us were not used to digging with picks and shovels, but it was gratifying because the people at the school appreciated that we helped.
I had my guitar with me and I remember that we sang a lot of folk songs that everybody knew: Bob Dylan; Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul, and Mary; “De Colores” and things like that. There was a wonderful feeling of camaraderie.
We had a newsletter called Leo, meaning “I read” in Spanish, and I was one of the editors. I remember doing the mimeograph, editing the articles, and helping with the artwork. Everyone contributed articles about things we had done, poems, artwork — each one was four or five pages long. Reading the old issues of Leo now, I almost shudder at how self-righteous I/we sounded, but it brings back many happy memories.
Was there a particular topic you spent the most time on?
There were some conflicts between people from different backgrounds. Virginia Price was director of the Encampment, and David Sandoval and Paul Brown were on staff, along with Dr. Baty.
I don’t remember the details, so I could have it wrong, but I remember one incident involving a young Black Encamper from the South. There was some sort of conflict or almost a fight between Encampers, and he had what we were told was a conversion disorder (what’s now called a functional neurological disorder), meaning that he got so upset about the conflict, it caused a physical clenching up. We were working through those kinds of issues. We were in a big living room. It had some couches and everyone would sit around — some on the floor, some on the furniture.
I remember everybody trying to talk with each other, not at each other or through each other or past each other. As I recall, it probably stemmed from a misunderstanding of some sort between the Encampers, but given the tensions in our society, it’s a wonder we didn’t have more of those kinds of incidents.
Those kinds of sessions were difficult, and that’s why I say that was probably the biggest impact the Encampment had on me. Having people who came from such different backgrounds try to figure out how to get along together and not hurt each other and find commonality was really instructive for me. That became particularly important for me in the VB, because our goal was to recruit people from all kinds of different backgrounds to send to Cuba.
Something the VB did that was similar to the Encampment was that it was not a political organization in and of itself, as were LAGLAS and COSPA. The VB would accept applications from people in all kinds of different groups and put together a group that was supposed to be representative of the broader community. There were Black and Asian and White people from various backgrounds on the committee and we had a lot of issues that we had to work through ourselves, not to mention the organizing to send a contingent each year down to Cuba for six weeks. Also, we had to do fundraisers and educational sessions with people who had never worked with anybody different from themselves before. We all had to learn to get along and not dis[respect] each other.
The Encampment was the first time I ever ran into anything like that, and it stood me in fairly good stead in the VB later.
Unfortunately, in the Left, there was a lot of political infighting. Instead of being mad at the system, we got mad at each other. That was an important lesson I learned: how to empathize with people and find common ground.
Anything you would like to add?
I would love to hear from other alums, especially ’68 Pátzcuaro.
To quote from the last issue of Leo from the ’68 Encampment — our “Last Will and Testament”:
“The ENCAMPMENT leaves a little wiser, a little more sensitive, a little more forgiving with hopes of peace and love in our world.
“GOOD-BYE & RESEVOIR!!!!”
David saved some of the newsletters from that summer.
August 1968 with staff and Encamper list
With fellow Encamper Cindy Woolis in a photo booth on the way home from the Encampment.
Encamper snapshots from the 1968 Pátzcuaro, Mexico Encampment donated by Charles Shapiro, fellow alum and Alum Outreach and Engagement Committee Member.
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Pablo Eyzaguirre, Joan Sapir, Charles Shapiro, Diane Kirschner ...
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Dr. Baty and Kaz Greenberg.
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Charles, Joan, Jay, Diane, Tom
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