In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Countering negative narratives with an event that honors interconnectedness and subverts the border in Agua Prieta/Douglas, and a contested hotel--in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley--that is of great importance for Mexican American civil rights.
There is a reckoning with history happening at an old hotel with a horrific past and the RGV's first and only civil rights museum.
With tonight’s debate, it's the exact right time to learn more about the enforcement-prison-deportation nexus. And how Shah’s vital new book offers a vision out of this mess.
In her classic utopian science fiction novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.” Author Silky Shah has framed an entire book around that quote, and Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition couldn’t have come at a better time. As the narratives about border and immigration continue to deteriorate with the election rhetoric, especially as Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off in a debate tonight, the longtime director of the Detention Watch Network talks withThe Border Chronicle about defying this inhumane status quo.
Here, she shares her in-depth and historical knowledge about how immigration enforcement, the prison-industrial complex, and deportations function and intersect with the criminal justice system. And she offers sharp insight into the current moment, talking about the simultaneous gutting of the asylum system and the ramping up of border enforcement, and the good immigrant–versus–bad immigrant narrative that shows up so often in campaign talking points.
But don’t miss the last part, when Shah offers a new framework beyond these stale talking points, and focuses on creating a world where every person can thrive. As Le Guin writes in The Dispossessed, “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
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In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A vivid depiction of what has been happening during the last eight weeks of resistance against border wall construction in southern Arizona’s San Rafael Valley.
Wall Watch combines geospatial mapping, archival research, and community participation to provide the public with an accurate, continually updated record of border wall construction along nearly 2,000 miles of the international border.
Worried about the future of democracy in the United States? Look to Indigenous histories; they have much to teach us about the struggle between liberty and empire.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
