Latin American Studies Association (LASA) 2022 Conference: Polarización socioambiental y rivalidad entre grandes potencias

Saturday May 7, 2022, 4pm

Bordering Insecurity: How Systemic Violence Affects the Lives of Central American Youth Migrants

Abstract:

This study examines the role that structural and pervasive violence plays in the lives of youth migrants fleeing the Northern Triangle. Our research employs comparative case study analysis to better understand the push factors that influence the exodus across Mexico, where, we argue, youth migrants are commoditized by those seeking to profit from their destitution. Once viewed as resources to be exploited, youth migrants suffer worse physical and psychological ruin. For the fortunate who reach American soil, the hardship may diminish somewhat but the distresses remain. The personal narratives that we use in our examination are the voices of those who have made the trek themselves. Our three protagonists – Anderson, Colel, Nuria – provide first-hand accounts of why they decided to migrate and what they encountered along the way. The harrowing, sometimes riveting, portrayals of their experience form the basis of our analysis. We rely heavily on the standards and measures of human security defined by the United Nations Develop Program and others, which we apply to our analysis. This study also utilizes literature on structural violence in efforts to better place youth migration within the context of Sen’s deprivation. Our findings suggest that the lack of human security and the strong prevalence of structural violence push youth migrants from their homes. We learn that during the journey through Mexico the threats associated with structural violence increase greatly. The paper concludes by offering several policy recommendations that aim to reduce the flow of youth migrants from Central America.

Denis Rey, University of Tampa

Steven Mayers, City College of San Francisco, Solito2Solidarity

Jonathan Freedman, Independent Journalist, Solito2Solidarity

We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Denis Rey, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Tampa, on two articles. This is the first, and we’ll be presenting a longer paper with three case studies at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference in San Francisco this May.

“Human Security and Youth Migration through Mexico: The Case of Anderson Gonzalez.” National Social Science Association Journal. International Borders Issue. Spring 2022. Denis Rey – University of Tampa, Steven Mayers – City College of San Francisco, Jonathan Freedman – Journalist and Author

Amplifying Sanctuary Voices (ASV) has been developing an exhibit on Climate Migration featuring stories from narrators. We would love it if you could join us for our launch event next Wednesday, April 13th, 2022, at 6pm. Steven and Jonathan have been on ASV’s advisory board and Steven hopes to bring their original exhibit, and timeline of the sanctuary movement, to City College of San Francisco. We will share a few brief remarks and officially unveil the exhibit on the second floor of the MLK ASUC Student Union (near the sky bridge). This will also be the first time our team members, student interns, and partner organizations can meet in person, and we would love to see you there! 

This exhibit is a collaborative effort between migrants, climate experts, and educators to bring to light the stories of those displaced by climate change and encourage collective empathy and action. The exhibit highlights the climate-induced displacement and migration of the Rohingya people, as well as those from the Northern Triangle of Central America, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Syria. We invite you to visit the exhibit in person starting April 13th, and to share with your friends, family, and networks the importance of learning and taking action with regard to climate change.

Imagining Home: CCSF Oral History Project

CCSF Faculty Flex Day Presentation
Tuesday 3/1/22 12:30-2pm

Panelists: Steven Mayers, Isabela Nangca, Miguel Morales Valtiera

For the last decade, I’ve been having my students in my English 1A class at the City College of San Francisco conduct oral history research. Our class is focused on listening to and learning from the stories of people who have migrated to the U.S. After reading and writing about US history, the history of immigration law, false myths about immigrants, and personal testimonies of forced migrants who have experienced abuses to their human rights, each student interviews someone who has moved to the U.S. After making audio recordings of their interviews, they then transcribe the interviews, capturing the voice of the narrator.

Imagining Home: Stories of Migration, Exile, and Imagination from the City College of San Francisco Community is a collection of sixteen essays written by City College students and based on oral history interviews they conducted with people in the City College community – classmates, friends, family members – who have immigrated to San Francisco. The narrative essays celebrate the diversity that is San Francisco. They speak of what they go through to get here, what they go through trying to start a life here. They speak as individual and as a whole. In this workshop, we’ll have the chance to speak to a few students about their experiences participating in the project and learn about conducting oral history research with students.

We came so close. Hear their voices now!

by Jonathan Freedman

We came so close. A 71 year old granny who pedalled a pink bike for six weeks from Sweden to Glasgow to deliver a message on a cardboard sign in the rain.

A single protestor in a red parka climbed  over the razor-wire security fence. He was swarmed by yellow jacketed police and unceremoniously marched out through the crowd chanting, “We are with you.”

The Glasgow police were only doing their job, and one muttered, “Some of us are with you too.”

Over four days, solito2solidarity met and listened to climate-caring people from around the who’d come to COP26 to raise their voices, soft, urgent, pleading, shouting, screaming for ‘ACTION!” 

We reached a wee footbridge separating all of us from the decision-makers negotiating the final UN agreement on climate change.  They held the fate of our planet, our families, our children, our land, air, seas, water, our lungs, our fears, our dreams in their hands!”

Yet we could not reach them. A powerless, stomach-sinking sadness, a keening grief for all the human beings, animals, insects, flora, fauna who are mortally endangered by the high mukamucks brazen inaction at this crucial moment when action is still possible.

We walked way on the littered street, feeling unheard, disaffected,  isolated, alone. Solito, Solita! Yet we had come to join in solidarity with environmentally displaced people, climate refugees; with defenders of the earth, waters, seas; and with climate heroes doing extraordinary work in remote places. Our mission, from Solito to Solidarity is to listen to their voices, here and now! This is your opportunity to join The People’s COP26 hosted live from Glasgow at your time zone. Hear the voices of people who are Doing Things!  With lovingkindness and hope! 

Climate Summit

by Steven Mayers

A wake

of smoke, across

the Atlantic/Pacific behind

them, the World Leaders are

flown in, on Royal British Airways,

while workers stay on a super-spreader

cruise missile/ship on the Clyde to discuss not

only the future of the world they lead, but more

urgently the future of those outside the summit fortress.

Only those invited can attend the summit, the twenty-sixth

RoundUp© Conference of the Parties, while the rest

of us gather in the parched/rainy

streets.

World

Leaders speak of

Partnerships, their Commitment to

the “most Sustainable COP ever,” a COP

of all COPs to out-cop all others, an all-out COP out.

Boris wants to “secure a brighter future for children” inside/

outside the summit fortress

surrounded by

cops.

Joe

wants to

“build back better”

“green economy, and make trillions of greenbacks

selling green energy to us below—“God willing and with goodwill of neighbors.”

Xi may or may not attend the Summit, sending apologies

for emissions, and sends his greetings to

Trump.

Crown

Prince promises to be

“carbon neutral” by a date before he’s dead.

Pope (Francis) has decided that maybe the Earth

is sacred after all, a sister (not

mother and certainly

not Father) and not  

machine.

(He says nothing about children.)

The United

Conference Centre

on the Summit© commands stunning

views of the parched/drenched fields that

surround the city’s smokestack from atop the granite cliffs—Those

on the outside of the pay-wall tread water in the mote, our signs depicting flames.

Inside the Conference Centre on the Summit©, the language is difficult to decipher,

the carbon calculus complex—Leaders will be “delivering,

goals,” “securing net-zero degrees

is within reach,” drafting

questions that are

hard to say no

to.   

Outside

the walls of

the Conference on the Summit©, the rest

talk about air, about water, about soil, about

fire, about floods, about drought, about land we want back.

Inside, “every company, every financial team, every bank, every

investor, every Leader will need to manage the increasing

impacts of climate change—A win-win will

be negotiated among the

Leaders.

Outside,

we will burn,

drown, scream in silence.

Friday, October 29, 2021, 12-4pm, 24th Street Bart station, Mission District, San Francisco

Join S2S & Earth Regenerative Business (ERB) at the dedication of the Jorge Santana Family Mural this Friday @ 12 noon Pacific time. The Carlos Santana band pioneered Latin Rock. Jose Satana, the patriarch of the Santanas, crossed the frontera from Mexico to sing & play mariachi music in the Mission District. Along with thousands of other migrantes, the Santanas made the Mission a cultural center known the world round for its music, murals, poetry and social activism. Carlos and his younger brother Jorge’s sizzling music comes alive in this vibrant mural. In partnership with Mission Arts 415, and painted by Mark Bode, the Santana Family Mural was commissioned by Annie Rodriguez and the Santanas. The mural will be dedicated to Jorge Santana and the Santana Family, on a wall of the San Francisco’s 24th Street BART plaza. Photo courtesy of Lisa Brewer/The Guardsman Solito2Solidarity stands with migrants and climate refugees around the world.

http://theguardsman.com/8_culture_santana_mural_tobin/

Solito2Solidarity presents

The People’s COP26: Voices from the Front Lines of Climate Change

As the global climate summit in Glasgow concludes, we bring together voices of the people left out: environmentally displaced people and defenders of the earth. How is climate change affecting you in your region of the world? What do world leaders need to know? What can we learn from people on the front lines of climate change?

This global people-to-people forum will take place on Zoom, so tune in from wherever you are at your local time zone!

Sunday November 14 and Monday November 15, 2021

6pm in Glasgow, Scotland

10am in Santa Cruz, California

12pm in Yucatán, Mexico

9pm in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia

12am in Chittagong, Bangladesh

Sunday November 14: https://ccsf-edu.zoom.us/j/96086948879

Monday November 15: https://ccsf-edu.zoom.us/j/93808550912

Participants will include:

Seifu Assegid works for Save the Children as a Roving Humanitarian Communication Coordinator. Seifu’s photographs and stories have appeared in popular television programs, newspapers, and magazines including the UK Daily Telegraph, Aljazeera TV, and media outlets in Australia and elsewhere. He has been voice to the voiceless by sharing their stories for donors and members of Save the Children. His work mainly focuses on people affected by climate change, and is informed by his personal experiences as a child and adult. 

Gina and Gardner Lund survived the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California in August of 2020 with two of their children. Gina and Gardner have started a community organization based out of their business location in called 3 Sisters 3 Corners, which will be providing workshops and seminars on fire prevention, regenerative farming, and medicinal herbs and plants with the main focus being on community resilience. They are also working to learn from local indigenous groups to care for the forests, replant indigenous plants and trees in burned areas, and restore the Santa Cruz Mountains to health with Gardner recently completing a wild-land firefighter course. Their underlying goal is to put the healing power of the land and all of its magic back in the hands of the people, where it belongs. 

Pedro Uc Be is a poet, teacher, and defender of the Maya land in Yucatan, Mexico. He is a member of Múuch ‘Xíinbal, Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Territory, an organization that aims to defend its territory from the dispossession applied by mega-companies of renewable energy in the Yucatan Peninsula. Pedro is currently a professor at the School of Literary Creation of the State Center of Fine Arts (CEBA), a campus where he also studied. He also graduated as a theologian from the San Pablo Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1985 in the city of Mérida. He has a degree in Secondary Education in the area of Social Sciences from the Escuela Normal Superior de Campeche. He was a professor of Philosophy and History since 1993 in the city of Ticul, Yucatán at the José Dolores Rodríguez Tamayo Educational Center.

Anahí Haizel De la Cruz Martín is a Maya photographer. She was born in Ticul, Yucatán, on July 25, 1993. She has shown her work in various exhibitions including the collective exhibition The Memories of the Mayan Territory at the Museo Maya Santa Cruz Xbáalam Naj in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, Mexico. She was a fellow of the Young Creators 2019-2020 program of the Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the Visual Arts Photography Area. She has published her photographs in the magazines La Ojarasca, Revista Sinfín, in the Italian magazine La Macchina Sognante, as well as in the Mexico News Daily newspaper and the Diario de Yucatán. Haizel accompanies and documents processes of struggle for the vindication of the Mayan language and culture as a member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Maya Múuch ’Xíinbal Territory. She has shared his photographs on Facebook and on her blog for the outreach of the communities.

Prabal Barua, Program Manager of Young Power in Social Action (YPSA) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Jahangirnagar University’s Department of Environmental Sciences. His research topic was “Sustainable Adaptation in Responses to Climate Change for South-Eastern Coast of Bangladesh.” At present he is working as a Program Manager of the project “Addressing the Rights and Needs of Climate Forced Displaced People of South-Eastern Coast of Bangladesh” with the support of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF). He is one of the editorial members of ‘Social Change’, a journal of YPSA, and staff member of Knowledge Management and Development (KM4D) Department of YPSA.

Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman complied and edited Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America, which was published by Haymarket Books as part of the Voice of Witness book series in 2019. Since 2019, they have been listening to the stories of environmentally displaced people and defenders of the land. Steven Mayers is an oral historian, writer, and professor in the English Department at the City College of San Francisco. Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and social activist with more than forty years’ experience reporting from South America, Central America, Mexico, and the US border. His six-year series of investigative editorials for the San Diego Tribune was influential in the passage of the landmark 1986 US immigration reforms that authorized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents.

www.solito2soldarity.org

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1253342611758559/