'Committed to our neighbors, whoever they may be'
I was 15 years old the day I found out I was undocumented. My parents sat me down at the cafe inside a local Barnes and Noble and explained we had overstayed our tourist visas, meaning I could not apply for a driver’s license. I would be ineligible for financial aid to attend college, and our entire family was at risk of deportation. As my parents spoke, I stared up at a mural depicting a salon of my favorite authors — Zora Neale Hurston, Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luis Borges. I recalled Hurston’s protagonist in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Janie, whose hopes and dreams had ended over and over again — just like mine in that moment. I remembered how Janie said that “God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up.”
Read more at Facing South —>
Do We Need Religion As The World Feels Like It’s Ending? Yes.
I’m writing this while on the road with the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants, a collective whose children were disappeared on the migrant trail by cartels, government agents, or traffickers. For these women, the world has already ended. It ends every time they wake up and confront life without their children.
Read more at The Nation —>
More Than a Land of Open Graves: How the Sonoran Desert Refuses Capture
A USA Today interactive report on President Trump’s border wall—proposed during his 2016 presidential run—opens with the lines: “On a map, the southwestern Arizona desert is an empty stretch, the size of Connecticut, a sea of nothing. On a map of deaths, it is a sea of red.” The land, according to the author, is “harsh.” Migrants who travel across land known as the Devil’s Highway are dying in large numbers—unidentified remains are stored in coolers in government buildings, buried in mass, anonymous graves. The vocabulary of death is pervasive in discussions of the southern borderlands and transnational migration.
Read more at Contending Modernities —>
How water sustains movements from North Carolina to the borderlands
Laine Lewis was returning home after collecting honeycomb from a friend’s beehive on the last day of May when she noticed clouds of tear gas drifting over the bridge crossing the French Broad River in Asheville. She got out of her car and ran over to the crowd — filled with locals protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — and found several street medics tending to the injured. “I went home that night, logged onto my Facebook, and posted ‘we need water and first aid supplies.’ “I knew it was going to happen again the next night,” she said.
Read more at Southerly —>
Abolition: Keyword for Political Theology
“Abolition is a synonym for the end of the world,” proposed Saidiya Hartman during a panel hosted by Silver Press. Abolition is eschatological, in that it involves overturning the conditions that make prisons possible. Abolition is not simply about dismantling or defunding the police. Rather, it is an experiment in refusing a whole damn system that is guilty as hell. From the Latin abolitio(n- ), which derives from abolere, meaning to destroy, abolition is about endings and reckonings, or what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call a “general antagonism” — an ongoing rebellion against the violences of the everyday. Abolition is also creative activity, an invitation to reimagine cultures of punishment and to foster communities rooted in care.
Read more at Political Theology —>
Free Radicals: Abolition’s Roots in Healing Are a Key to Its Future
In the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks, it is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the movement for abolition.
Read more at Bitch —>
Weaving the Wall: Devotional Art Counters State Violence in the Borderlands
When Bolivian artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández first encountered the 1,954-mile–long wall that divides the United States and Mexico, all she could see were “metal slats that violently penetrate the land.” They towered above the desert floor, a hypermasculine violation of the desert’s sovereignty.
Read more at Bitch —>
The Supreme Court Upholding DACA Is a Win, But We Need to Protect All Immigrants
This decision is a significant — if temporary — win for the immigrant justice movement and a relief for so many. But we have to dream bigger. We cannot continue to uplift “deserving” and “good” immigrants while those who cannot fit into those categories are captured and caged.
Read more at Teen Vogue —>
Listening For Footsteps: Offering Brief Safety in a Hostile Place
Less than 24 hours after my dad’s citizenship ceremony, I boarded a flight to begin my dissertation fieldwork in Tucson, Arizona. At his swearing-in, I witnessed my father pledge his allegiance to the American flag after living in the United States for 20 years, the majority of that time spent undocumented and in a state of constant deportability. Later that evening, he confessed to feeling guilty for betraying our home country of Argentina, for disavowing his loyalty to our patria. With the sobering image of my father’s eyes still in my mind, I packed up my hiking gear and prepared to spend a month volunteering with humanitarian organizations at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Read more at Bitch —>