Interest Group Meeting
Monday, June 9th from 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Want to learn more about prison abolition? Looking to explore the role of information in the prison industrial complex? Excited to discuss ways we can collectively offer resources to address violence caused by mass incarceration? Join the club (literally!). The Prison Library Support Network is collaborating with METRO to host Abolitionist Futures: A PLSN Discussion Group, which will meet quarterly on the second Monday of the month in the evening.
The June event brings together activists working on the frontiers of immigrant justice, community defense, cultural fortification, and political solidarity, all of which have grown increasingly urgent in light of the escalating criminalization of immigrants and people of color, dismantlement of the social safety net and civil rights enforcement, and heightening of economic injustice.
These threats have already funneled or are poised to funnel more money and resources into the carceral state’s varied institutions and agents. How can we mobilize and resist? How can we resource and show up in solidarity while holding space for our differing proximities to privilege and power? How can we work across sectors and siloes to build movements that represent our shared humanity?
This event’s speakers, from Mijente and Organized Communities Against Deportations, will share their organizing and advocacy strategies to inspire visions and vehicles for us all to move this critical and intersectional work.
Speakers:
- Cinthya Rodriguez, Mijente
- Antonio Gutierrez, Organized Communities Against Deportations
Mijente was born in 2015 after the #Not1More Deportation campaign in recognition that we needed to build a vehicle to confront the challenges of our time and respond to the growing threats to the Latinx community. For too long we have been conveniently portrayed as a voting bloc that only cares about immigration. To add insult to injury, we’ve seen immigrants’ lives worsen. Our futures are peddled and traded off as if they are pawns in a political game.
It’s said that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu—or they expect you to pick, cook and serve the food. We believe that the change we need isn’t just going to happen, we have to make it happen. To do that, we’ve got to organize. We’ve got to become the people who make things happen rather than those that things just happen to. At Mijente, no venimos de rodillas. We want to feel pride and confidence in our communities’ ability to not just survive, but thrive and bring about tangible change.
We believe our people can’t afford 4 more years of despair, fear and growing systematic criminalization. Our plan of attack is to win Sin, Contra, and Desde el Estado: by creating self-sustaining networks of care; exposing harms and challenging power through direct action and narrative work; by mobilizing Latinx voters against authoritarianism.
Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) emerged out of the fearless movement led by the young people of the Immigrant Youth Justice League. We are an intergenerational collective of undocumented, unapologetic, and unafraid organizers building a resistance movement against deportations and the criminalization of immigrants and people of color in Chicago and surrounding areas. Many of us know first-hand what it is like to live as undocumented people in this country and have ourselves experienced the brutality of detentions and deportations.
We defend our communities, challenge the institutions that target and dehumanize us, and build collective power through grassroots organizing and cross-movement building. We fight alongside families and individuals challenging these systems to create an environment for our communities to work, organize, and thrive with happiness and without fear.