Join Justin Akers Chacón, Yanny Guzmán, and Magally “Maga” Miranda Alcázar for a discussion about the history and function of the US-Mexico border, why we should fight to open it, and the way forward for the migrant justice movement.

This event marks the release of Justin Akers Chacón’s latest book, The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.

Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished.

But despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations—the migra-state—migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.Bios:

***Tickets are $0-25. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and have live captioning.***

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Speakers:

Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator living in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is a Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College. His most recent book is The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border. He is also the author of No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis) and Radicals in the Barrio.

Magally “Maga” Miranda Alcázar (she/they) is a graduate student in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Using methods that emphasize the co-production of knowledge with rank-and-file workers, their research explores the contested meanings of care, work and Latinidad in the context of the global economy of care. Maga is also the co-founder of the multimedia platform SAL(T): Xicana Marxist Thoughts.

Yanny Guzmán is a Xicana living on Lenape land, now known as the Bronx. She is a daughter of immigrant parents indigenous to Mexico and Ecuador. She is a socialist, activist, organizer and rank & file union member. Currently she is a tenant organizer and member of the South Bronx Tenants Movement, a legal advocate for low income tenants in the Bronx, and a member of Southern Solidarity, a grassroots, community-based group of volunteers in solidarity with the unhoused in their quest toward liberation. She previously was a writer, reporter, website administrator, and a graphic designer for the Working Class Heroes Radio.

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This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.

Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international,” having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.

Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.

Our second webinar theme is “Green” and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be life-sustaining, and how abolition demands we center questions of climate justice, land, food sovereignty, and environmental racism.

While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of commissary and mutual aid for our incarcerated participants.

***Tickets are $0-25. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and will have live captions available.***

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Speakers:

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane’s scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History and Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame, Roane was 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Bigg Villainus is an artist, musician, founder of Overthrow Media and a radical revolutionary who has been dedicated to radical struggle and revolutionary growth for over a decade. Currently an organizer with Fight Toxic Prisons they bring a lot of abolitionist and direct action history and experience to the table. As well as a lumpen proletariat perspective and Analysis.

They are firm advocates of bottom-up organizing. As well as having a firm decolonial Praxis. They have a long history of organizing with groups such as black Frontline movement, outside agitators, black lives matter, occupied, and many more. They are currently on a national tour, networking, spreading abolition and music.