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October 20, 2019

The Anti-Migrant International

In early December of 2017 the Trump Administration officially withdrew the United States from the UN Global Pact on Migration, claiming the 2016 accord “undermine[s] the sovereign right of the United States to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders.” The aligned governments of Israel, Hungary, Poland, Australia, Austria, and several other countries followed suit in withdrawing their support, or by publicly repudiating the agreement. Rightwing parties in Germany, France, Italy and Denmark also vocalized their opposition, pledging to withdraw once in power.

October 20, 2019

by Justin Akers Chacón

Rent control rebels

The Tenant’s Union arose from the need to avoid further displacement in low-income communities. I have been a community organizer for more than 15 years in City Heights (a community in San Diego). City Heights is a predominantly immigrant, multicultural, and low-income community. I began organizing alongside 300 other parents to improve the schools for our children, including providing access to bilingual education. Through this work, I learned that there were a lot of problems with housing, and we began to focus on this issue as well as living conditions are highly connected to school dropout.

October 20, 2019

by Héctor Rivera

Towards a new history of Black-Latinx solidarity

Paul Ortiz’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States (2018), is a refreshing work that has opened broader vistas of the possible by recovering a wealthy history of Black and Latinx resistance. I hope to highlight important takeaways for those of us looking for a compass and to convince readers of puntorojo to engage with and expand on our people’s history outlined in the book. As I will outline below, the book allowed me to discover a proud history of Black-Brown of solidarity that shows that we are at our strongest who our struggles are united. It also provided inspiration to wage this fight in the present and I hope that it can do the same for others.

I came to An African American and Latinx History of the United States with the desire to understand Ortiz’s premise for an American history centered on the combined struggles African Americans and Latinx peoples. In this respect, the book did not disappoint, and like Howard Zinn’s classic, the historical breadth and solidarity-based ethos of Ortiz’s work is comparable. However, Ortiz’s book goes beyond the bounds of a traditional national history as the title might imply.

October 20, 2019

by Blas Reies

La situación mexicana en los Estados Unidos

La intención de este artículo es dar una breve mirada a la vida de las y los mexicanos en Estados Unidos actualmente. También se darán a conocer algunos aspectos de la vida de otros grupos en EE. UU., tales como las personas Latinas como conjunto, personas centroamericanas, negras, blancas y asiáticas. No me adentraré en detalle acerca de muchos aspectos pero espero poder hacerlo en futuros artículos. Ojalá que los siguientes hechos puedan plantear preguntas que lleven a discusiones fructíferas.

September 6, 2019

by Héctor Reyes

U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different

If you live in the U.S. and are not indigenous to it, you live on stolen land.

Frequently, racism and colonialism are used as substitutes for each other. The technical term for this type of conflation is metonym, as Chickasaw Nation scholar Jodi A. Byrd asserts. I want to argue that the currently popular use of the terms racism and colonialism as interchangeable qualities among social justice activists, and even academics, is not only inappropriate, but that their frequent conflation is the result of more than simple expediency.

The failure to recognize that colonialism is structurally different than and not just another manifestation of racism does irreparable damage to the victims of colonialism. In the specific context of colonialism, failure to recognize colonialism as a continuing crime of erasure and dispossession, the liberal prescriptions of inclusion and civil rights exacerbate the harms of colonialism.

September 6, 2019

by Héctor Rivera

The women’s movement reverberates across Mexico

Once again, the women’s movement has been making headlines across Mexico. This time after a militant protest shocked the media and the political establishment. On August 12, images of angry women destroying the glass windows of a police station were broadcast by mainstream media outlets and shared widely on social media. The media sought to sensationalize the protests and to mobilize public opinion against an insurgent feminist movement.

The protests came about after a series of reports which accused police officers of raping a teenage woman in the Azcapotzalco neighborhood of Mexico City. Upon hearing of this police rape, many other cases came to light and feminist collectives called for a national day of protest which took place on August 15. The protest resonated across Mexico and saw demonstrations and actions in large and small cities outside the capital.

The protesters were even more enraged after the new Morenista mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, called the women provocateurs arguing that their actions sought to provoke the use of force by the police. However, the popular indignation in the movement, and the large protest on the 15 of August forced Sheinbaum to apologize to the women’s collectives and forced the city government to publicly re- commit to reduce violence and rapes against women in Mexico City.

August 2, 2019

by Justin Akers Chacón

The Mexican condition in the US

As of the 2010 census, there were 31,798,258 Mexicans in the U.S., out of a total population of 308,745,538 and out of a total Latino population of 50,477,594. Mexicans make up 10.1% of the total population in this country and 62.9% of Latinos. Most Mexicans live in the Southwest, 46.5% of Latinos are in California and Texas alone, an area that used to be part of Mexico.

Of the 31 million Mexicans in the U.S., 11.7 million were born in Mexico. In 2010, the average median earnings for them was $23,810, lower than the average of $33,130 for foreign born residents in the U.S. The percentage of these Mexicans living in poverty was 29%, higher than the national average of 10% and the national average for foreign born residents, which was 17%. 54% of immigrants from Mexico had less than a high school education, which is more than the national average of 9% and the national average for all foreign born of 27%. The percentage of Mexicans immigrants without a high school diploma was higher than for immigrants from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and Central America.

Of these Mexican immigrants, 4.9 million were undocumented in 2017, a drop from 6.9 million ten years earlier. The significant numbers of immigrants deported under Obama is in large part responsible for this decrease in numbers of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Over half (53%) of these immigrants live in California and Texas, with 10% living in Los Angeles County alone.

August 1, 2019

by Julian Guerrero

A base building primer for the socialist movement

Millions of people are coming to radical conclusions over the nature of the social problems they face. The deceptive promises of the free market to rationally organize social life is falling apart in the neoliberal wasteland people find themselves in. And this is powering the resurgence of interest towards socialist politics and the growth of a new, if still modest socialist movement.

The growth of interest in socialism and the number socialist activists has raised a series of strategic paths towards reconnecting the politics of socialism with the working class. This is necessary because if one were to survey the current socialist movement they would notice the predominance of academics in its leadership and a high number of white-collar white workers in its ranks. The need to root the socialist movement in the multi-racial working class remains the litmus test for the movement’s continued growth and development.

It’s against this background that socialist electoral strategy has dominated as the main way to reconnect with the working class. But as several socialist campaigns have shown, without a strong social base from which the socialist movement can exert power, socialists in office will struggle to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles and political pressure the state has thrown in the way of political movements intent on challenging the status quo. The low level of working class self-organization and dominance of non-profit organizations leave the movement without a way to make that connection immediately.