Dear friends, RGers, and MMMCers,
It’s been quite a month of organizing and discussion! The core Arizona funding group that grew out of Puente’s presentation at MMMC is working on a number of interesting projects, the highlights of which I am so very excited to share with you.
Firstly, we have decided to travel to Arizona from all our various corners of the country from March 31st to April 4th. Carlos Garcia of Puente, who presented at MMMC with Marisa Franco, is graciously consulting with us to figure out some of the details on the ground. People and events we hope to see are concentrated in Phoenix, Tuscon, and the Nogales Sonora Border Receiving Area. We hope to build relationships with grassroots organizations representing queers, Indiginas, youth, teachers, non-English-speakers, Latinas and border communities as we find our way toward a resource-sharing model of solidarity and accountability to communities in Arizona. These groups include Tierra y Libertad, 3rd Space Collective, Tonatierra, and No More Deaths, among many others we are still learning about.
We hope to learn a lot from this trip as a group, and look forward to using it as a strategic resource-leveraging tool for (im)migrant justice in the future. We are waxing ambitious on this one, and hope to keep it that way as we envision all that can grow from our group entity. There is open but limited space available on the April trip for those who are interested and able to make a commitment. If you are one of Those, let’s get in touch so we can talk about what that entails ([email protected]).
Apart from the trip, we’re engaging in research about xenophobic injustices in Arizona and elsewhere. This of course means staying on top of the latest news, but mostly interviewing folks we know who live in Arizona and/or have engaged in (im)migrant justice work. This includes folks working on a national scale to build support for the California Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights; organizing for fair housing in cities; promoting community interdependence and autonomy; and fighting xenophobic legislation. We’ve also spoken with folks from various RG-affiliated funding projects such as GSAF (Gulf South Allied Funders), and hope to have many more conversations to inform our group structure and resource-sharing praxis. The results of these one-on-one’s have been so fruitful and have enriched our understanding of solidarity with those most effected by xenophobic violence (spanning many different communities and populations).
Finally, a very exhilarating process of visioning and internal development came to a beautiful point yesterday, when the core group participated in an honest and intentional sharing of wildest dreams for where this group can go. We talked about ideologies and labeling; families and interdependence; solidarity and accountability; grassroots and legislative activism; what it means to be effective; what is actually possible; the importance of language; our unique position; and what leveraging privilege for grassroots groups in Arizona might actually look like in our networks. We still have a lot of thinking and discussion to do, and lots of different frames through which to examine our work, but we’re all very excited for what’s to come.
For people looking to get involved, we welcome and encourage you to do any of the following: join us for the trip in April, chat with someone in the core group one-on-one, or join one of our Sunday afternoon conference calls. We hope to call on you all to do some leveraging sometime in the future!
If you have any questions, comments, or want to talk, contact me at [email protected].
Thanks for reading!
Ro Seidelman