latin american solidarity

Posts Tagged ‘latin american solidarity’

Resistance Rooted in Love

Resistance in the wake of Love: A conversation with Oscar Lopez Rivera. Please reserve your space now!
Learn what people and organizations are doing about Puerto Rico’s recovery, what Oscar Lopéz is doing, and how you can help! Watch this amazing promotional video El Batey put together!

About this event

Topics discussed:

  • Recent examples of resistance
  • The Puerto Rican Diaspora
  • The Prison Experience in the US
  • Community Organizing in Puerto Rico
  • The Struggle to Audit the Colonial Debt
  • Decolonizing Puerto Rico

Born in 1943 in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, Oscar López Rivera emigrated to Chicago with his family at the age of 14. Growing up in Humboldt Park, he soon learned that “being Puerto Rican would determine where I went to school, what church I was allowed to attend,” and a host of other injustices. An intelligent student, Oscar grew up as a mischievous, fun-loving young man who loved dancing and music; he was also a hard working young man who aspired to own his own business. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965, like tens of thousands of young Latinos, African- Americans and other minorities, obeyed under the threat of imprisonment for draft dodging.

Returning to his family and community after his tour in Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star, he was profoundly impacted by how he saw the Vietnamese treated, and the similarities with the treatment of minorities in the U.S. He determined to change these conditions, and along with other young Puerto Ricans, organized and fought for improvements in housing, healthcare, education and different needs. Convinced of the need to change the unequal relationship between the conditions of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico to the U.S. government, he became a leader in the struggle to free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were serving lengthy terms for their pro-independence efforts.

His strong belief that Puerto Rico should be free from U.S. colonial control led him to clandestinity. He was arrested in 1981, and convicted of seditious conspiracy and related charges, along with ten others who were arrested the previous year. Sentenced to 55 years in prison, he became the longest held Puerto Rican political prisoner in the history of Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence, regarded as the “Nelson Mandela of the Americas.” In 2017, as the result of a broad human rights campaign, and after he served almost 36 years in prison, President Obama commuted his sentence, only days before leaving office. The Puerto Rican people and their allies celebrated the May 17, 2017, end of his sentence.

Since then, he has continued to energetically advocate an end to U.S. colonialism, and has resumed his role as an organizer, working to establish a holistic community center in Río Piedras, from which he will train organizers as well as deepening his relationship to the municipalities of Loiza and Comerio, working on educational and community-based projects.

The tour will highlight the US and Puerto Rico campaign for an independent audit of Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt.

ROCLA/LASC: Mapudungun Ideologies in Chile

Mapudungun Ideologies in Chile: race, indigenousness, nation, and language

Gabriel Alvarado is a linguist, lexicographer, translator, and educator based in Santiago, Chile. He holds a Masters degree in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Chile (2011), and a Doctorate in Latino, Latin American and Iberian Cultures from the City University of New York (2020). Dr. Alvarado’s doctoral thesis and his current research focus on Mapuche linguistic political struggles and their connection to other broader issues of the Mapuche indigenous people of Chile.

To register, visit rocla.org

EVENT SPONSORED BY:

  • Rochester Committee on Latin America (ROCLA)
  • Western New York Peace Center – Latin America Solidarity Committee

The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border

Join Haymarket Books for a discussion about how re-building the international labor movement requires solidarity with migrant workers and opening borders

About this event

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.