Here’s an innovative new campaign coordinated by the Center for American Progress, America’s Voice Education Fund, and Define American:
In June 2011 Alabama enacted H.B. 56—the most extreme state-level anti-immigrant bill passed to date—which went into effect in September. Now Hollywood director Chris Weitz has turned the camera on Alabama and is asking “Is This Alabama?”
You be the judge. Watch and share the videos…
Watch a replay of the “Is This Alabama?” launch event with director Chris Weitz and Jose Antonio Vargas at the Center for American Progress.
Wet Books: We are smuggling banned books back into Arizona this March 2012. Get involved. Arizona, we’re throwing the book at you. Filmed at an undisclosed location by the HighTechAztec. Orale Vatos!
Here is the full announcement, issued this week from mission control:
The Librotraficante Caravan will travel from Houston, Texas to Tucson, Arizona with not only a payload of contraband books, but it will also create a network of Underground Libraries, and other community resources in its wake. As one of many responses to Arizona’s unconstitutional laws prohibiting Latino Studies, The Librotraficante Caravan has captured the imagination and hearts of activists, writers, educators, and workers from all walks of life who want to preserve Freedom of Speech.
The Librotraficante Caravan will launch from Houston on Monday, March 12, 2012 at 10 a.m. from Casa Ramirez Folk Art Gallery (241 West 19th Street, Houston, Texas 77008.) It will stop in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas; then Mesilla and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and culminate in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday, March 16. On St. Patrick’s Day, Saturday, March 17, we’ll host a huge literary celebration of El Batallion San Patricio at 6 PM, celebrating Irish and Mexican collaboration of the past. The caravan celebrates Quantum Demographics, or multifaceted cultural unity throughout its tour. The entire schedule and updates are available online at www.librotraficante.com.
“Every great movement is sparked by outrage at a deep cultural offense,” said Tony Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, which has led the charge, “Rosa Parks was denied seating on a bus. For us, when we heard that Tucson Unified School District Administrators not only Prohibited Latino Studies but then walked into class rooms, and in front of young Latino students, during class time, removed and boxed books by our most beloved authors -- that was too much. This offended us down to our soul. We had to respond.”
Diaz added, “With their record of anti-immigrant legislation, politicians in Arizona have become experts in making humans illegal. We did not do enough to stop that, thus that anti-immigrant legislation spread to other states such as Alabama and Georgia. Now, these same legislators want to make thoughts illegal. If we allow this to happen, these laws too will spread. Other branches of Ethnic Studies will be prohibited, and then other states will follow suit.”
With its radio program and its blockbuster literary showcases, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say has 13 years of experience promoting Latino literature and literacy with authors and thinkers from across the country. This once informal alliance of artists, activists, educators, and professionals has galvanized to create cornerstone structures for a network that will remain in place for future causes as well.
The full spectrum of this network links the talents of such people as Genius Mac Arthur Grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, whose beloved novel HOUSE ON MANGO street is prohibited in Tucson High School class rooms; to the Southwest Organizing Project -- who have extensive experience organizing national caravans, and are helping with the New Mexico portion of the route; to Unidos, the student group in Tucson that is organizing teach-ins, while still attending classes and pursuing their education.
Banned writers have embraced the caravan and will participate along the route, including Mac Arthur Genius recipient Sandra Cisneros, who kicked off our fundraising efforts by making a generous donation; Guggenheim Fellow Dagoberto Gilb, whose work recently appeared in the New Yorker and Harpers; and best selling author Luis Alberto Urrea, who was the first to enthusiastically support the project through Twitter.
Other literary giants participating in the Librotraficante Caravan include Rudulfo Anaya, whose seminal novel BLESS ME ULTIMA is banned; Denise Chavez, FACE OF AN ANGEL, who is hosting the caravan in Mesilla, New Mexico and organizes the Annual Border Book Festival; Lalo Alcaraz, creator of the syndicated column La Cucaracha and coined the phrase “Self Deport.” Institutions that already confirmed to host the caravan include the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The caravan is intended to:
1. Raise awareness of the prohibition of the Mexican-American Studies Program and the removal of books from classrooms.
2. Promote banned authors and their contributions to American Literature.
3. Celebrate diversity: Children of the American Dream must unite to preserve the civil rights of all Americans.
4. Create a network of resources for art, literature, and activism.
Specific outcomes:
1. Underground Libraries: Librotraficantes will donate copies of the banned books a local nonprofit in Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Tucson. These sites will not only be given copies of the banned titles, but from now on, all multicultural authors are encouraged to mail copies of their books to these sites when they are published, so that our community will always have access to our literature.
2. Teach-ins and a Supplanted Book List: Workshops that include free Curriculum Guides with literary excerpts and lesson plans that can be used in class the immediately and applied to other works.
3. Network of Librotraficantes across the country: This is a case of new media saving the classic media of books. Had Arizona done this ten years ago, we most likely would not have heard about it until it had impacted a second generation of our youth. However, because of new technologies and the number of writers and activists who are communicating on multimedia, we were not only able to hear about it, but to also use new media to organize some classic activist strategies to respond from now on!
The Black List
Dagoberto Gilb: Author of “Wood Cuts of Women” and “The Magic of Blood.” BANNED.
Sandra Cisneros: Author of “House on Mango Street.” BANNED.
Helena Maria Viramontes: Author of “The Moths and Other Stories.”
Stephanie Griest Elizondo: Author of “Around the Block.”
Sergio Troncoso: Author of “The Last Tortilla & Other Stories.”
Richard Delgado: Author of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction J. Stefancic. BANNED.
Manuel Muñoz author of “Zigzagger”: BANNED from the high school that he teaches across the street from!
Luis Urrea: 5 books banned including: “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” and “The Devil’s Highway.” BANNED.
Carmen Tafolla: “Curandera” BANNED. Wings Press is republishing her book for the caravan.
Barbara Renaud Gonzalez author of “Golondrina, why did you leave me?”
Denise Chavez author of “Loving Pedro Infante.”
Rudolfo Anaya author of “Bless Me, Ultima.” BANNED. He charged us to “Occupy Arizona.”
Felipe Montes will be separated from his three U.S. citizen children unless we do something about it, now: http://Presente.org/FelipesChildren
An action launched on Valentine’s Day 2012 by Presente.org and the Applied Research Center is rallying public support to save a family scheduled to be torn apart by the Department of Social Services in Allegheny County, NC. On February 21, Felipe, husband to a US Citizen and father to three US Citizen children, will have his parental rights stripped away in court due to his deportation. The petition calls on the Allegheny County Department of Social Services to ensure that Felipe’s family is not permanently separated, but rather that they be reunified in the United States or Mexico.
A new aimation from the multimedia project EarSay:
This video, animated by Warren Lehrer with Brandon Campbell, features the words of Eugene Hütz--leader of the gypsy-punk-cabaret band Gogol Bordello—sharing his views on ‘globalization’ and putting forward an alternative vision of what he calls “multi-kontra culture.” This video with sound production and arrangement by Judith Sloan is the newest manifestation of Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan’s multi-media project, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, which documents and portrays new immigrants and refugees in the United States.
Speaking at a UAW event, acclaimed scholar Rodolfo Acuña warned of the growing political suppression of his work and the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona. Acuña, who has been one of the key intellectual architects of the ethnic studies movement, calls the political battle over Tucson’s program “ethnic chauvinism” aimed at killing critical thought.
The words seem more prescient today now that authorities have moved to officially strip school curricula of not only his book but of many other progressive works (he is in good company, though, since Shakespeare made the blacklist as well). If anti-immigrant politics lead authorities to push back against progressive pedagogy, he remarks, “they don’t want people to think.”
While their citizenship fates still remained mired in political debates, immigrant youth and artists with Dreamers Adrift, a groundbreaking creative arts project, is producing a brilliant series of videos and theatrical works on the reality of daily life — from working, dating, studying, driving, among other aspects — for undocumented youth today.
“A creative project ABOUT undocumented youth BY undocumented youth FOR undocumented youth,” Dreamers Adrift notes, “We are trying to document the undocumented through videos, art, music, spoken word, prose and poetry. Four lives. Four college grads. Representing one DREAM for countless others.”
In the wake of a scathing federal report on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Democracy Now! interviews Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, and Stephen Lemons, a Phoenix New Times reporter who has helped expose Arpaio’s abuses and antics. The recent Department of Justice report has highlighted many of the most egregious aspects of Sheriff Joe’s reign of terror, but, as Lemons points out, this is hardly news to people who have had to live under Maricopa’s twisted anti-immigrant tyranny for years.
Parraz tied together the various abuses of power that stem from Arpaio’s focus on humiliating and oppressing the Latino community. Not only did he turn his immigrant-bashing into a vehicle for absorbing federal money into his district; his fixation on enforcing immigration law came at the expense of other police work, including a massive accumulation of neglected sex crime cases.
These were victims as young as two years old, to young women and girls, were violated, were raped or molested, and those cases were not followed up. In some instances, they even had the name of the perpetrator. They just—cases were just not—were actually said to be cleared or were closed. And so, this was done. And then this is the type of—just of lack of accountability, lack of concern Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies have to those instances. One of the reasons we believe is that most of those victims were either undocumented or were for children of undocumented parents, so it was not a priority on there, in terms of the sheriff’s office. So, again, this is about misplaced priorities.
He said that while the Justice Department’s findings validate the evidence that many have observed for years, the actual impact of Washington’s position boils down to federal and local politics, where, unfortunately, xenophobia plays well:
[A]s far as the fallout from the Justice Department’s report… It validates a lot of what’s been said and already been reported. They use a lot of information that has already been in the press, that is familiar to people in Maricopa County, but perhaps not out of Maricopa County….
Arpaio loves this sort of thing. He loves going up against the Obama administration. He loves going up against the federal government. He uses these sorts of conflicts with the federal government to raise money for his campaign kitty, which at last count was about $3 million. He boasts he has over $6 million now in his campaign re-election fund. And as you’ve noted, he’s going to be running for re-election in 2012. This is also, unfortunately, very popular in Maricopa County, at least with a majority of the population who, you know, may have problems with some of what Arpaio does, his misspending of funds and so forth, but when it comes to discriminating against brown people, unfortunately, that is popular with some segments of Maricopa County.
Sadly, that attitude may also pervade many segments of the country as a whole, and the debate will only get uglier as the 2012 election approaches--thanks in no small part to President Obama’s utter failure to comprehensively address immigration reform. Despite the good-cop-bad-cop game that the feds are playing with Arpaio, Sheriff Joe is a mere caricature of a much larger monster, a phalanx of anti-immigrant hate that is of the White House’s own making.
At this Save Ethnic Studies event organized by students of the Graduate School of Education at University of California-Los Angeles, activists, scholars and students gathered to discuss the challenges facing ethnic studies. Here, Tucson Unified School District alumna Selina Rodriguez reflected on her life-changing experience with a Hispanic Studies class at Cholla High School. She is currently Program Director for the Pico Youth & Family Center in Santa Monica, California.
At the invitation of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Manu Chao traveled to Arizona to witness the human rights crisis facing migrants there and to give a free “Alto Arizona” performance.
Film Director Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) shot a short music video of Manu in front of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City jail before the show on September 21, 2011.
The human rights group Breakthrough has just put out a stunning new video about the militarized border and the underlying politics of NAFTA and the anti-immigrant backlash. The mini-documentary also takes you into morgue housing the remains of migrants who perished on the journey north. It’s worth noting that while the Obama administration pivots toward Latino voters with deceptive promises to ease up on some deportations, the growing crisis at the border shows that unless immigration policy is reformed comprehensively, patterns of migration will grow increasingly desperate and the deaths, family separations and exploitation will go on--at the border, in detention centers, at the workplace, and in the Global South countries that U.S. economic policies continue to pauperize.
Here’s a summary of the project by Breakthrough, which has used media to raise awareness of a variety of human rights issues:
The remains of at least 6,000 migrants have been found in U.S. desert land since U.S.-Mexico border policies were implemented in the 1990s. Some groups estimate that for each set of remains recovered, those of 10 more people are lost to the harsh desert elements. Advocates and authorities attribute the escalating number of deaths not only to rising heat but also to ever-tightening border security forcing migrants into more remote and dangerous terrain. Deserted calls on viewers to recognize these deaths as a humanitarian emergency and human rights crisis.
The video includes chilling images of a morgue in Tucson, Arizona in which row after row of body bags contain human remains that may never be identified, of people whose families may never know what happened to them.
Stand with Breakthrough and recognize this human rights crisis that is taking place at our border. Watch and share this video, and take action against this human rights crisis with No More Deaths (www.nomoredeaths.org) and Coalition de Derechos Humanos (derechoshumanosaz.net).
VIDEO CREDITS: Directed, filmed and edited by Dana Variano with Ishita Srivastava; music by Denver Dalley; post-production audio by Hobo Audio. Produced by Breakthrough.
And then we were at the border wall, made of recycled tanks from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, dividing the countryside in two. On one side: flood lights, border patrol, and empty desert. The other: a litter of discarded black water jugs, and empty desert. The wall now stretches across Arizona in the easiest places to cross, so that migrants are purposefully funneled into the most treacherous conditions. As a result, death counts have risen to record breaking numbers: the human remains of 183 men, women and children were recovered on the Arizona-Sonora border in the fiscal year 2006-2007 alone. And for every body discovered, there are many more not found. The most surprising thing about the wall? How it suddenly ends, leaving a gaping whole- one vast desert land- showing how imagined these “borders” are, and how American policy is literally dividing communities.
