Last week, the Department of Justice sued Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—self-styled as “America’s Toughest Sheriff”—for civil rights abuses and obstruction of justice. The policies Arpaio has adopted to justify that moniker are well documented. Here are some of the highlights of two decades of Sheriff Joe:
A year after being elected sheriff, Arpaio set up “Tent City,” an outdoor jail camp where more than 427,000 people have been housed. Besides touting the camp as one of his “proudest innovations,” Arpaio has also jokingly described Tent City as his very own concentration camp. Tent City, exposed to Arizona’s tough elements, has experienced temperatures as high as 140°F. Inmates are made to wear pink underwear as some sort of statement on the “loss of the prisoners’ masculinity.”
What’s more, Tent City has been a lucrative experiment for Arpaio, who has made about $3 million annually by charging inmates high premiums for phone calls and other commissary goods, and by keeping the costs of feeding prisoners well under a dollar a day per person. Tent City aside, there is also the near $100 million dollars of taxpayers’ money misspent by Arpaio’s staff over the last 8 years.
Perhaps worst of all are the hundreds of cases of sex crimes that were reported to the sheriff’s office—including child molestations—that were found to be inadequately investigated or not investigated at all. Arpaio’s office has “virtually no policies or procedures” in place to safeguard against discriminatory policing or misconduct on the part of police officers.
Mother’s Day has always been one of my favorite holidays. For my family, it is a time to celebrate and honor motherhood — my mother, grandmother and mother-in-law.
Now I’m a mom to three amazing children. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law passed away and our family relocated. So, this year for the first time I will be the only mother to be celebrated and to experience the tender Mother’s Day moments with my children.
As much as I love spending Mother’s Day with my kids, it breaks my heart that there are many mothers around the world who aren’t able to share special moments with their children that day.
Today, there are more than 4 million close family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who are waiting to be reunited with their loved ones in the United States.
Asian-Americans are the most likely to have family members caught up in the visa backlogs. Nearly two-thirds of Asian-Americans are foreign-born — the highest percentage of any major ethnic group. With so many close loved ones overseas, Asian-Americans rely on family sponsorship to keep their family units intact.
Although Asian-Americans comprise 6 percent of the U.S. population, we sponsor more than one-third of all family-based immigrants, and nearly half of family members in the visa backlogs are relatives of Asian-Americans.
These backlogs have a real and disturbing impact. U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents must live without the love and support of their spouses, children grow up without one or both parents for years and the elderly live without the support of family during a period when they need them the most.
For many moms, Mother’s Day is a constant reminder of how broken our immigration system is. They don’t get to enjoy their special day surrounded by the laughter of their children.
It’s cruel that after all of these years we still haven’t achieved comprehensive immigration reform. I urge our congressional leaders to address our immigration system right away so we can stay true to our heritage as a nation of immigrants.
By next Mother’s Day, let’s reunite millions of families so they can finally enjoy this holiday.
Mee Moua is the president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
As a real-life superhero, she’s just the thing to boost the morale of embattled DREAM Act advocates. Backed by the North Carolina DREAM Team, one Luchadora DREAMer is using her sporting celebrity as a springboard for a national debate on a just policy solution for undocumented students.
It’s her biggest fight yet, reports Jorge Rivas at Colorlines:
Alicia Torres Don is a luchadora who fights in the wrestling ring but she’s also fighting a daily struggle to keep her mother alive. And that’s just the beginning of her story.
The short film “The Fighter” by Josh David follows Don and illustrates the complexities of the lives that many DREAMers face outside of their organizing efforts.
In the ring she is known as La Aguila Dorada, or the Golden Eagle, a luchadora character Don says she developed around her fight for justice and what is right. However, outside the ring she is best known for another fight: for the rights of undocumented youth that she says are living in a state of fear and uncertainty inside the U.S.
“When I’m down and getting beat, I’m not thinking that I’m down — I’m thinking how the hell do I get out of this,” Don says in the video.
“The more involved and the more active you become, the more you realize that you’re not going to be able to do it forever — you get burned out, honestly and all of it is a result of my status and how hard it is to be an undocumented immigrant in the United States,” Don goes on to say.
Paul Cuadros at Huffington Post reports on the campaign that brings these masked rebels onto the political stage:
Members of the North Carolina Dream Team are used to taking on fearsome foes, whether demonstrating for the DREAM Act, the federal legislation that would allow students without papers to attend college and get legal, or organizing campaigns to keep undocumented youth from being deported. Now female members are donning masks to get in the ring and literally grapple with their opponents to help raise support for their cause.
“I think people’s minds have been opened more,” says Victoria Bouloubasis, a member of the NC Dream Team and a luchadora herself. “A lot of people care but they have never been politically aware or engaged.”
Here’s a video of a Durham, NC match by Brandon Hoe:
On March 21, 2012, the Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown issued a press release, reading:
‘SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today appointed Juan Felipe Herrera to the position of California Poet Laureate.
‘Mr. Herrera, 63, is the author of twenty-eight books and currently serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He was a professor and chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004 and a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990.
‘Herrera’s work has received wide critical acclaim including numerous national and international awards. In a 2008 review of his work, Stephen Burt of the New York Times wrote, “All life, all art, involves boundaries, if only those of birth and death. Some poets keep us conscious of those boundaries; others, like Herrera, discover their powers by defying them. Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”’
As a California poet, I was beyond thrilled. As a Pinay, immigrant, and multilingual poet of color, reading the news was an emotional experience. Juan Felipe Herrera has been a tremendous influence on my poetry and career as an author, but more importantly, he has been a tremendous force in the way I work and teach in our intersecting communities.
The Harriet staff reported on March 23, stating the much-needed obvious, “Remarkably, Herrera will be the first Hispanic [sic] writer to serve in the post.” What took this state so long, I also wanted to know. The press release goes on to state,
‘The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Mr. Herrera earned a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He was elected to the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2009.’
In addition to Herrera’s impressive list of accomplishments to date, perhaps it’s Governor Brown’s well-known liberalism, the perfect confluence of factors, that enabled this to happen now. Indeed, a couple of years ago, during the Schwarzenegger administration, with a group of poets including Oscar Bermeo, Ching-In Chen, Javier O. Huerta, Craig Santos Perez, and Matthew Shenoda, we nominated Herrera for the position, so very wary of how our then-governor would read such unabashedly political poetry, in which “political” means that the poet continues to directly and critically engage state and federal border policy, as evidenced in his poems, “Everyday We Get More Illegal” (audio | text), and “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border”:
But you know what? No matter now. It’s done, and this appointment is so well-deserved. Perhaps this will change things; at least, I can hope it does. I was privileged to have this brief exchange with Herrera.
BJR: So, first off, congratulations again on being named California Poet Laureate. Where were you when you got the news? Did Jerry Brown call you? How did it go down?
JFH: I was driving my seven year old Civic down 210 about to roll onto the offramp to 91West when the phone rang. It as Tere Holloman from the Appointments Office. She congratulated me and told me that I had been appointed as California Poet Laureate. Of course, I still needed to be sworn in by Governor Brown and confirmed by the Senate. A short call. Then I ambled toward campus a little shaked – it was hard to believe. A week or so later I was in Sacramento as a co-judge for the California Arts Council’s High School Out Loud Recitation state championship. Seconds after Corbin Gomez won, I ran to the Governor’s office and was sworn in.
BJR: Given California’s history of mean-spirited legislation towards immigrants, non-English speakers, and people of color — for example, props. 187 and 209, apparent in the title of your book, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Publishers, 2007) — how do you bring poetry that is unafraid to be political and multilingual to the Californian mainstream?
Good question. Of course, the mainstream has many currents. And that’s the key. Many voices, many communities, many languages, many traditions and points of view. I am interested in being inclusive and in this wider circle I am interested in calling on people to tell their story through verse. Many, if not all of our stories, lives, have faced conflict, challenges – poetry is a way to share. It is not as easy as it sounds because it takes focus, honesty and a willingness to show ourselves to others we do not know. This is the most political thing we can do – to be brave about our lives and be willing to step into a wider neighborhood of lives, to be part of the polity, the city. The questions of color, language, race and class have a lot to do with how we compound suffering in the lives of others based on distorted criteria. Poetry can breathe through these hard perceptions and conceptions of what is right, good, and meritorious, and just maybe provide a little more humanity to make things better, softer, freer, more equitable. Poetry is a potent anti-fear spray.
BJR: Given your own history of collaboration and performance with artists in various disciplines, who are your ideal back up band, supporting cast, and co-stars?
JFH: My consistent performance ohana family is Margarita Robles, Genny Lim, Jimmy Biala, Francis Wong, John-Carlos Perea. It changes every day. Co-Stars and Supporting Cast: You don’t know how many amazing (I think you do) poets I have met recently at UC-Riverside — let’s see, Rachelle Cruz, David Campos, Michelle Lin, Angel García, Holly Giglio, Stephen Ellis, Kamala Puligandla, Jesus Leyva, Ivy Chen… Poetry is so alive I can’t believe it. Everywhere I turn there is a poet writing a masterpiece. My great poetry familia in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angleles, Fresno — what would I do without them, they are part or me and my poetry. All of California, from fields to the cafeteria.
Everyday we get more illegal
Yet the peach tree still rises & falls
With fruit and without
The birds eat it the sparrows fight
Our desert burns with trash & drug trucks en route
It also breathes & sprouts vines & Maguey
Laws pass laws with scientific walls & detention cells
Husband deported with the son
The wife & the daughter who married a citizen
They stay behind broken slashed unpowdered
In the apartment to deal out the day & the puzzles
Another law then another
Mexican Indian spirit exile migration sky
The grass is mowed then blown by a machine
Sidewalks are empty clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
Peers down from an abandoned wooden dome
In an empty field
It is all in between the light
Everyday this changes a little yesterday homeless
& without papers Alberto left for Denver
A Greyhound bus he said where they don’t check you
Walking working under the silvered darkness
Walking working with our mind our life
Ethnic studies scholar and activist Rodolfo F. Acuña takes a long view of American justice, then and now, and the demise of a public trust.
Direct forms of political control are easy to figure out. For a time, laws and police agencies can keep things together. However, most institutions and societies depend on social control to deceive people into thinking that they live in a democracy. They use processes that socialize them into believing that those in control have moral authority.
Belief systems exert a greater control on behavior than laws. For example, religion maintains control through laws. Nevertheless, institutions such as the Catholic Church maintain control more through their moral authority than their laws. A society does not stay together for a long period of time through the use of coercive powers alone.
Historical events such as the Black Plague in the first part of the 14th Century shook the Church’s moral authority and two centuries later the Protestant Revolt ended the hegemony of Catholicism in Europe. No one can predict what effect the Church’s pedophile scandal will have. One thing for sure is that the scandal has reduced the moral authority of the Church Fathers and their interpretation of what god wants.
In the similar vein, government has suffered a loss of moral authority. This is good and bad; one thing is for sure it is leading to a divided society. Although the number of southern states passing anti-immigrant laws has grown to over a half dozen and they are flushed with emotion, it must be remembered that California and New York alone dwarf the population numbers and wealth of the red states.
Much has been written about the growth of the Latino population and its voting power. But truth be told, Latinos are growing increasingly disaffected with government and most are cynical about its fairness.
The institution that has taken the hardest hit in the past dozen years is the Supreme Court.
To put things in perspective: when I was growing up we understood that Mexico had problems, which was obvious because we were here. My relatives talked about the political and moral corruption of the Mexican government and uttered sighs of relief that we lived in the United States.
There was racism and inequality. Yet in comparison to what was happening in Mexico or what we thought was happening there, U.S. institutions appeared to be free of corruption. This was true as long as we did not read the newspapers – the radio did not carry that kind of news.
Even when it came to the sex lives of elected officials, we believed that the Mexicans were the only ones who cheated on their wives.
That is not true today. The lives of our elected officials are soap operas. The affairs of past Mexican presidents are boring in comparison to the Anglo-American versions.
My grandfather, more cynical than the rest of the family, would often correct us about our misconceptions. He would say that the gringos always did things on a grander scale. They did not take small bribes. It was only the public officials at the bottom who were regulated.
What we did not know was that what those on the top stole affected us; we just did not see it. We lived in another universe.
Thanks to cable news or better still, cable opinion, we know corruption is ubiquitous – it is at the federal, state and local levels. So much so that it seems as if all elected officials are corrupt. I would not call them whores because I don’t want to give the word a bad name.
You look at the Republican and a majority of the Democrats in Congress and they are bought – pure and simple. The entire state of Arizona has been purchased. Lady Justice is dead.
Talking to my students in general they are cynical about the courts. It was once evident that justice depended on the size of your wallet. The rich could hire rich attorneys and get away with murder. The poor especially if they were minorities were left at the whim of the court.
The Supreme Court is currently listening to arguments in Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation. If the Court rules for Arizona the decision will give legs to every racist legislator in the nation who will repeat that it (racism) is the law of the land.
They can say whatever they want but that does not make it right or less corrupt. Only the most naive and ill-informed person would make the case that Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and John Roberts are not corrupt. Well documented articles prove the same. Thomas and Scalia have family members who are feeding at the corporate trough.
I do not want to call these justices partisan – it would be giving partisanship a bad name.
Frankly, we are not going to be able to do much about Gore v. Bush (2000) that gave George W. the presidency. At the time we shrugged our shoulders and the Democrats rolled over. In Citizens United (2010), the Court delivered the presidency to corporate interests.
Now healthcare will probably be dismantled and the anti-immigrant legislation will be upheld. Racism will be legal in the United States.
When and if this happens the moral authority of the Court will be irreparable. The Supreme Court might as well be honest and set up shop on K Street.
I don’t want to sound cynical but the worst thing that could happen to you when I was growing up was que te vieran la cara de pendejo (literally meaning that they took you for a fool or a punk).
Six degrees of separation is the notion that everyone on earth is on average approximately six steps away from any other person. If this is so, we should accept that only one degree separates our justices from the Mexican border guard and his grubby mordida (kickback).
My grandfather was right – the border guard took five pesos. Our elected officials are higher paid (escorts). Who does more damage to democracy?
Yes, that’s a picture of me carrying a box of grapes. Home from college in the summer of 1993, the only way to spend time with my family was by joining them at work. My father insisted on taking the photograph because he didn’t want me to forget where I had come from. Why am I smiling? Even working among family and friends didn’t lessen the burden of the heat and exhaustion and aching muscles. I had cuts on my fingertips from mistaking their dusty roundness for a rotting grape. Grape picking and cleaning are skills I never mastered.
The dominant theme of my posts on Harriet this season, in case you didn’t notice, is the border: the banned border, the bilingual border, the science/ spirituality border, bordercrossings, and today this: a discussion of the centerpiece poem to my next poetry collection, Unpeopled Eden, which is about war and borders. “Our Deportees” (which you can find in the March/ April 2012 issue of American Poetry Review) is a long poem that took me a decade to give shape, but it started brewing long before that.
Shortly after migrating from Mexico in 1980, I made a school friend, Demetrio Chapa, who had been raised in California and was hip to all things American. At home, I was subjected to my grandfather’s folk music from Veracruz and my grandmother’s pirekuas, folk songs in her native indigenous tongue. So Demetrio introduced me to pop music . He had a funny little record player with colorful vinyl records, and among the tunes that made us get up and dance was Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”
That song carried such positive memories of my first friendship, that when my family moved again I wanted to take it with me. I found it at a department store and begged my father to buy it. I have no idea what compelled him to make this purchase, except that over the years I knew not to ask for anything, so this was a rare occasion indeed. He bought me the full-length album called 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, with Dolly wearing glamorous heels as she’s hauling all kinds of work equipment: a lawnmower, a hoe, a hose, a paint roller–objects I associated with my family’s world of labor.
I was such a “good boy” that my grandparents humored me and allowed me to play my album on their precious console once in a blue moon. And that’s how I discovered two other tracks, “House of the Rising Sun,” which I suspected was about prostitutes (thank goodness my family didn’t understand English!), and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which also sent me for a loop: a song about 28 farmworkers getting flown back to the border, only to die when the small plane goes down on Los Gatos Canyon.
The song, I would find out later, was a Woody Guthrie cover. He wrote this song as a protest poem back in 1948, shortly after he read an account of the accident, which named the four white casualties (the pilot, co-pilot, flight attendant, and border guard), but referred to the 28 Mexican casualties as simply “deportees.” This was the era of the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which was an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to allow entry to Mexican laborers particularly during wartime. (My maternal grandfather participated in the early 1960s.) The “deportees” on that plane had overstayed their welcome, but Guthrie called them bordercrossers, connecting them to a much larger social issue, undocumented immigration and the open contempt against them, which continues to this day. Here’s a cool YouTube video with a song version by Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son:
When I began to search more consciously for material, I kept going back to this song, haunted by the father’s gesture. I could not forget where I had come from. Yet somehow I couldn’t quite get into the writing of it. For years I tried creating lives for the nameless, much like Guthrie gave life to the plane wreck, but it seemed wrong–these people had names already, but the world had refused to hear (or remember) them. I felt uncomfortable making a fiction of them. And then in 2008 I came across an article written by Chris Mahin, a historian and anti-war activist, on the 60th anniversary of the accident, and that motivated me further: I had to get this poem down on paper.
It came to me then: instead of writing about the spaces the workers inhabit, I would write about the spaces they vacate, leave empty, and are forced to occupy or abandon–the fields, the deportation bus, the detention center, the plane, the sky, the communal grave.
While I was working with these parameters, and the decision to use 9-line stanzas as the poem approached each place like the 12 stations of the cross (the poem comes to a close with 6 sections)–yes, all number divisible by the holy number 3–I stumbled upon another article that claimed to have located the names of all but one of the “deportees.” That gave me permission to construct, like Guthrie does in his song, a kind of roll call, in the last section of the poem:
Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Diportado No Identificado.
I was reminded of the precariousness of names, identities and even documents, when I had all of my papers stolen in Puerto Rico in January. All seemed fine until I had to board the plane back to JFK without ID. I had to be interviewed by an IVE–an identification verification expert–from the State Department. It was a stressful 45-minute process that took place after I signed a document that said I would be placed under arrest if I didn’t pass the test. Among the requests the IVE made was that I name one other person who was related to me, who shared my last name, who also lived in the U.S. (read: was in “the system”). I could not name any although I have dozens of relatives living in this country. Undocumented, they don’t have this incredible privilege that I have to hold my name up for everyone to see, to walk into an airport and voluntarily board a plane to wherever it is I want to go, want to be.
Guthrie’s song remains attractive to protest singers. I invite those interested to seek out the versions crooned by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and of course, by Dolly, the country sensation who first invited me not to forget where I had come from, long before my father’s advice, long before the photograph I keep mounted on my writing desk, right next to my computer.
*** First 100 guests receive a free pro-migrant poster ***
On May 3, CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez is teaming up with other creative minds for UndocuNation: An artistic response to the Immigration Crisis. With talks, food, revelry and rabble-rousing, the event offers “an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system.”
Sponsored by CultureStrike, Center for New Community, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), UndocuNation will use various media platforms to raise consciousness about the struggle for immigrant rights: music, installation art, readings and personal testimony--all “working to shift the national imagination on race, migration, and what ‘America’ should look like.” The event will take place at the YBCA Forum on May 3, 6pm, 701 Mission Street in San Francisco.
The event announcement puts artists at the vanguard of a massive and often ignored human rights struggle:
“2011 was a devastating year for immigrants. Once again, President Obama and his Administration Congress failed to administer relief to the estimated 12 million undocumented women, men, youth and children living in this country. On the contrary, they broke records by deporting over 1,000,000 migrants. Various anti-migrant laws were enacted in states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Utah. Alabama managed to come up with a law that far surpassed the evilness of Arizona’s SB 1070.
“Despite the fact that politicians tried to make it a living hell for undocumented immigrants in this country, loads of young folks came out of the shadows as undocumented and unafraid, giving the immigration movement that push of energy that it needed to challenge these laws and demand justice .
“The anti-immigrant movement continues to scapegoat immigrants for social, economic and environmental problems. ‘UndocuNation: an artistic response to the Anti-Immigrant Movement’ intends to encourage inclusive and artistic dialogue on the intersection of race, migration and art.”
The program will feature innovators and change makers like hip hop historian Jeff Chang, author Daniel Alarcón, and the conscious comedians of Laughter Against the Machine. A full list of artists and performers is below.
Janine Brito started doing standup comedy in St. Louis and is now a rising star on the San Francisco scene. A sarcastic, snarky smart bomb of comedy funk straight from the 80’s, Janine has been featured in the SF Chronicle and The SF Weekly called her “a mean lesbian”. But she’s pretty sure that they meant it in a good way.
Nato Green, a San Francisco native and former union organizer, was named The SF Weekly’s Best Comedian of 2010 for putting on “legendary” shows that keep audiences “doubled over.” Nato is the creator of Iron Comic, the Iron Chefspoofing hit comedy game show that packed houses at SF Sketchfest four years in a row and the Bridgetown Comedy Festival 2010 and 2011.
Julio Salgado’s activist artwork has become the staple of the DREAM Act movement. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his illustrations, which depict key individuals and moments in the DREAM Act movement. Along with Jesus Iñiguez, Fernando Romero and Deisy Hernandez, Salgado co-founded DreamersAdrift.com. The website aims to re-claim the narrative being about undocumented folks via music, poetry, writing, videos and art.
Jesús Iñiguez is a spoken-word reciter, slam poetry writer, hip-hop rhymer, full-time LOVER and forever a freedom fighter. AND, when time permits, a DREAMhead essayist very fond of wordplay. Also a videographer, photographer, and learner not afraid to err. Co-founder of Dreamers Adrift.
Oriana Bolden makes movies, screen prints and an occasional news outlet post/article. The majority of her work is about people trying to get free. Swing by www.projectprojecting.com to see what she is up to at any given moment.
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator and performance poet. She is one half of the poetic duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the hip hop anthology Total Chaos. Walidah has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons.
Daniel Alarcón is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio, winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. He is Contributing Editor to Granta, and was recently named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under Forty.” Alarcón is co-founder and Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a transnational Spanish language storytelling podcast, which launched 2012.
Sean San José works as the Program Director of Theatre for Intersection for the Arts and resident theatre company Campo Santo. For Intersection he works with long term resident companies Campo Santo, the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, the Living Word Project (Youth Speaks’ theatre company), Felonious and host of composers, visual artists, and community groups.
Favianna Rodriguez is a visionary artist on a mission: To create profound and lasting change in the world. In 2009, Rodriguez co-founded Presente.org, a U.S.-based, nationwide organization dedicated to the political empowerment of Latinos.
Yosimar Reyes, a Two-Spirit Poet/Activist Based out of San Jose,CA. He has been featured in the documentary 2nd Verse: the Rebirth of Poetry, and published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press). His words have open up concerts for Carlos Santana in his latest endeavor Architects of a New Dawn. He is currently touring his self-published chapbook For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly.
Cloee Cooper organizes with the Center for New Community to expose and resist nativism. Since 2010, she has worked with people in more than 15 states to target organizations with ties to white nationalism. She produced documentary films on resistance to the anti-immigrant movement including “A Look Inside SB1070”, “Bernard’s Story”, and “Undivided” and is a regular contributor on imagine2050.net.
DJ Sloe-Poke 1) doesn’t mess around with any of the artsy stuff, 2) you won’t hear him tactlessly scratching and 3) he goes to a club to rock it. He has opened for shows as diverse as Mos Def, David Lee Roth, Yellowman & Jaguares. It really doesn’t matter who or what genre Sloe Poke is spinning for — he always has the perfect mix.
Imin Yeh works in the medium of woodcuts, screen prints, and downloadable craft projects to create large-scale installations and interactive artworks. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had recent exhibitions at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Incline Gallery, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.
Here’s a dispatch from CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez on her latest printmaking project with Justseeds and other artist/activists, first published last month, with a preview of some work that we’ll be featuring here at CultureStrike in the near future. Also check out her upcoming event, UndocuNation.
Detail of linocut. Raoul Deal.
I’ve been busy launching an art print portfolio project addressing the immigration crisis. This project is a collaboration between CultureStrike and Justseeds Artist Cooperative. The portfolio consists of more than 40 visual art pieces about migration. The artists share a vision that immigration is one of the most important human rights crisis of our time. Ranging from street artists, to puppeteers, to painters, to cartoonists – the artists explore the complexities around migration, and depict issues from a local, national and international lens.
Above: Close up of Ray Hernandez’s image. “Education is Our Liberation.” Three-color letterpress print.
Above: Close up of Pete Yahnke Railand’s image. Three color letterpress print.
Some of the issues in the art pieces include the unjust detention of migrants, the deportation and separation of families, exploitation and profiteering from the jailing of migrants, the criminalization of undocumented youth, the demand for legalization, and the economic and ecological brutality that results from militarized border policies.
Our goal is to launch a pro-migrant creative intervention into the national and global debate surroung migration – to educate and inspire people, tell stories, and illustrate the struggle of migrants from all walks of life.
The works are being be hand-printed as a limited edition run at a newly opened studion in San Francisco, founded by master printer Paul Mullowney. The portfolio features notable artists such as former Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas; author and posters artist, Josh MacPhee; pro-migrant printmaker power duo, Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza; cartoonist and performance artist, Lalo Alcaraz; UndocuQueer artist activist, Julio Salgado, and many many more.
Above: Close up of Art Hazelwood’s image. Two color letterpress print, printed from linoblocks.
Here are some pics from the portfolio in progress. We have started out with letterpress prints, and are fortunate to be working with an awesome printer from Portland named Patrick Cruzan.
Stay tuned for more info on how you can get a hold of one of these killer portfolios. A portion of these print portfolios will be donated to immigrant rights groups around the country who will support the project by curating small pop-up art exhibits.
About the Organizers
CultureStrike is an artist-led initiative whose mission is to cultivate innovative and urgent collaborations between artists, writers, musicians, and other cultural workers to shift the national imagination on immigration. Responsive to what’s happening in the moment, our model begins with raising the consciousness of key artists, so their cultural production will inspire others.
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 26 artists committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. We believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action.
Above: Close up of Santiago Armengold’s image. Four-color letterpress print.
Above: Patrick Cruzan, letterpress printer. We are printing on a Vandercook.
Above: Me carving my block. That’s my alien.
Why Immigration?
When it comes to immigration, the messages we get are dominated by criminality and punishment. In 2010 alone, 250 anti-immigrant laws and resolutions modeled on Arizona’s SB1070 were passed.
2011 yielded devastating state laws in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Utah. Even more troubling is the ongoing trauma caused by family separation and deportation after the Obama Administration made Secure Communities (S-COMM) a mandatory program.
In this climate, the arts can help play a key role in telling the stories of how people are affected by these laws. Artists can go to the root of the immigration problem and help shift public perception of the issues.
Love me despite the many times I cry.
Wrapped up in salty seas.
I cannot swim.
Choking on thick gooey insecurity and vulnerability.
Love me even when I fail.
Because of requirements
Rejected from jobs, internships, and scholarships.
Disappointed and confused I may turn to you.
Hold me until it makes sense and it may never make sense.
Hatred and sadness clouds the mirror when I shower.
Fog consuming me.
Hiding my true self behind curtains of fear.
Fear I created. Fear I was raised in.
Identities that aren’t my own.
Skin rough cold texture pushing you away.
But please, don’t go away.
Love me even when the boxes on my applications are empty.
Missing from my life like the opportunities I could not receive.
Gone with the wind are my childhood memories.
Innocence that won’t come back.
Gone with the wind is a piece of me.
Leaving behind
Empty social security number boxes
Empty resident status
Empty alien number
Empty visa type
Empty.
Like the way I feel before entering the dream world,
the nightmare world
questioning the value of my existence.
Love me even when I can’t take you out or treat you,
To something better than this shit-hole.
Lacking both types of green papers.
Green card that is suppose to define me
unite me
with the ones who oppress me.
Green dollar bills that are suppose to define me
unite me
with the ones who oppress me.
Love me despite my calloused blood-pumping muscle.
Burned and thirsty from crossing into the land of the new.
Land of the free and home to the brave
I am brave.
So why not free?
Bruised, oppressed skin from suffocating struggling to keep going.
Trying to hold on tight, but my hands…
can’t grip onto watery-liquidy amor
Love me even when the government and media tell you not to.
Falsely represented and hated by many.
These feelings aren’t illegal or alien-like.
The way our hands meet and lips caress is a universal international language.
Sweat running down my hands, nervously touching your heart.
Burning down each fence and border wall around my heart.
Fearlessly screaming “te amo!” drowning down the evil pumping in my ears.
Breathing life and joy into a country where nothing seems right.
But this, is.
Glowing into darkness like fireflies lighting the way, that’s what love does.
Minutemen gunning down children
and border patrol deporting families
raids
profiling
but this will still remain,
they can’t take it away.
Love me regardless of my mistakes and see me past my status.
Blinded by documents that do not exist.
See beyond my foreign face and notice the potential bursting within like Independence Day fireworks,
during a holiday I cannot celebrate.
Realize that all I am and all I will be isn’t solely identified by numbers
but more than one body can withstand
let me share with you, the little I have.
Love me even when I do not love myself.
Constant struggle
Constant reminder that I do not belong that I am not wanted.
But I do.
And I will belong where I want to be.
Loving you past your papers,
whether they exist or not.
Evil papers that cut and sear our souls,
discriminate us but never controls,
segregates us but never silences.
Endless understanding and patience.
I don’t have answers.
I don’t know what the future holds.
But right now,
It’s me and you.
Crappy pasts, unpleasant presents and uncertain futures
Through it all
I’ll love you too.
