Finding the Border Prison Complex: Syracuse-Batavia-Attica-Belmont-Syracuse

I found my way through a little section of the migration-prison infrastructure of western New York recently. Batavia is about 12 miles north of Attica. And Belmont is south by about two hours from Batavia in the Southern Tier, the border with Pennsylvania. I had never been to these places. Attica is notorious. And it just so happened that I was driving through there on the anniversary of the 1971 uprising. I can only imagine, and expect to learn about, how Attica’s remote location faraway from loved ones in downstate New York makes that time inside more difficult. Batavia is not as notorious, but it’s where ICE detains and deports migrants who don’t have the right papers.


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Here’s what the travel process of posting bail looks like, if the judge allows them to post bail, and if they can come up with the money. For folks detained in this region, Batavia is where one goes to post bail regardless of where they’re actually held. On a pleasant fall day like the one I had, the drive to Batavia from Syracuse was about 1:45, with a little bit of thruway construction. Buffalo’s another 45 or so minutes west. There had been an ICE raid in Syracuse the week before where at least five guys were arrested. ICE claimed they were looking for one person, but, as is common practice, they rounded up other folks. After ICE took them into custody, they drove them to Batavia and then transferred them to county jail in Belmont, NY. Belmont is a tiny little town in Allegany County, a jurisdiction that decides to make a little extra cash by renting space in its jail to ICE to detain migrants. In 2006-2007, the Buffalo Detention Center in Batavia transferred over 40% of people to other facilities. The Allegany County Jail detained 179 immigrants during that year.

Back to the Border, US Northern Front

I shall be spending the coming year in another border region, this time the overlap of soverereign spaces named the United States and Canada.  There are other sovereign nations in this place, including the six nations comprising the Haudenosaunee, the Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.  These are the many official boundaries that I can pass.  Some require a passport; some police their space and movement through it.  Some, like the United States, apply the idea of border expansively, and use it to justify policing movement within a long range (typically 100 miles) of the international border with Canada.  This means that people who are not crossing an international boundary are treated as if they are.  As I reported years ago, the Border Patrol routinely stops train and bus traffic in upstate New York stops of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. 

Nina Bernstein reports in the 8/30/10 New York Times that this practice continues.  One of the persons interviewed in the piece likens the policing to the SB 1070, concluding,  “At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped."  This conclusion relies on the presumption that troutine police stops rest on "doing something wrong," rather than reflect the poling of status, a combination of racial-ethnic-national profiling.  "Doing something wrong" is essentially being the wrong sort of person in the wrong sort of place, a determination simultaneously arbitrary and cumulative in its categorizing/categorical effects.

The question of how people in one border region can relate to people in another - take what's known as upstate New York and southern Arizona - is part of what drove this trip and this blog.  Now that I'll be inhabiting this region again, the project is to figure out what this looks like on the ground.

A bench by the road

"There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves, nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower. There's no small bench by the road." - Toni Morrison inscription on plaque facing First Church of Oberlin
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Battle of Osawatomie

"John Brown of Kansas // He Dared Begin // He Lost // But Losing Won" - inscription of statue erected 1935
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Civil War in the West

Little did I know that when I set out to follow John Brown –which is to say, the historical struggle over slavery and how this was tied up with the struggle over the territory and boundaries of what is now the western United States – that I would end up at so many Civil War battle sites. The latest was Fort Union in northeastern New Mexico, an imposing Adobe structure situated on the confluence of two paths of the Santa Fe Trail.

Fort Union storehouse,
north of Las Vegas, NM

The programming at that site was unremarkable, and the far less resourced than Fort Craig, sited on the Rio Grande between present day Truth or Consequences and Albuquerque, NM, which gave me a lot more to think about.

I grew up in Colorado, and for me the Civil War was something that took place back east and had little to do with the settler colonial history that I inherited.  Not unlike many other folks, I was schooled that the Union was always ever going to win, and what was won was emancipation.  But as John Brown understood it, abolition was not just about the South, but was about the “cowardice” of the North: “If the American people did not take the courage and end [the conflict in Kansas] speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would soon be empty names in these United States” [JB, 129-130]. Fort Craig tells of the America that was won.
Fort Craig was near the Battle of Valverde, one of the most important battles in the Confederate's Southwestern Campaign (lots, if not all, of these sites claim a significance of that magnitude) to secure access to the Pacific and Colorado mineral prospects. Some accounts say the South won the battle, while others say the Confederacy lost. What is clear is that by the time of Reconstruction, and the Indian Wars, the territorial prison that was sited there was racially segregated. So too were the soldier barracks and hospital.

Fort Craig Sally Port and Guardhouse,
north of T or C, NM

Here’s a description of the Sally Port and Guard House from the official plaque onsite. It quotes from an 1874 Surgeon General’s report on military posts:

“On one side of the sally-port [of entry to the fort], is the guard room … and in the rear of this a room … used for colored prisoners. On the opposite side of the sally-port is a room … used for the confinement of white prisoners… The guard room and room occupied by white prisoners are warmed by open fireplaces, but there is neither fireplace nor stove [for the] colored prisoners. The prison-rooms had, during a period of three years, an average 16 men confined in them – the greatest number reached was 32… In one corner of the guard room is a trap door opening upon a stairway which leads down to cells where prisoners are kept in solitary confinement…. Each cell is 5 feet 7 inches long, 2 feet 10 inches wide, and 4 feet 10 inches high… Eight augur holes and the chinks around the doors are the only means of admitting air and light from the passage-way into the cells… The men, with seldom more than a single blanket, sleep upon the earthen floor, which, from being frequently sprinkled to lay the dust, contains much moisture. Colds and rheumatism are frequent among the inmates…”

The placards proclaim the construction of the “New” Hospital to be an “advancement, both architecturally and socially” over the jail because the segregated wards were equally heated and ventilated.

I'm not sure how easily John Brown reconciled his abolitionist commitments with the free staters. In the geopolitics of slavery and territory, Brown condemned the cowardice of the North, and its stance toward Kansas after Lawrence was attacked by pro-slavery forces:

“This was just the kind of protection the administration and its tools have afforded the free state settlers of Kansas from the first. It has cost the United States more than a half million, for a year past, to harass poor free state settlers in Kansas, and to violate the law, and all right, moral and constitutional, for the sole and only purpose of forcing slavery upon that territory. I challenge the whole nation to prove before God or mankind the contrary. Who paid the money to enslave the settlers of Kansas and worry them out? I say nothing in this estimate of the money wasted by Congress in the management of this horrible, tyrannical, and damnable affair” [JB, 137].

Still, Brown seems to have been satisfied with a territorial achievement in Kansas; it was one that tipped the national power relations against slavery. While he vehemently opposed the idea of a free state for white labor alone, it also seems that he thought he could move on from Kansas after rousting the pro-slavery “border ruffians,” having contributed to securing it as a free state. This was so, even though most of the migrants settling there were interested not in Black emancipation, but in the end of slavery as an economic practice that undercut "free labor." Nor were they interested in Black people, freedmen or not, sharing in that territory. As Du Bois wrote about the free state settlers to Kansas: “they found themselves in three parties: a few who hated slavery, more who hated Negroes, and many who hated slaves” [JB, 104].

But what happens when what is territorialized is the color line, and a color line that facilitates the suppression and displacement of indigenous nations? This is the question evident at Fort Craig (and obliterated from consideration at Fort Union), and the one that Du Bois asked.  Following guerilla war in Kansas, a “cruel relentless battle on both sides with murder and rapine – the last expiring flame of the four years war dying down to sullen peace […]

"So Kansas was free. In vain did the sullen Senate in Washington fume and threaten and keep the young state knocking for admission; the game had been played and lost and Kansas was free. Free because slave barons played for an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development. Free because strong men had suffered and fought not against slavery but against slaves in Kansas. Above all, free because one man hated slavery and on a terrible night rode down with his sons among the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan – that long, low-winding and sombre stream ‘fringed everywhere with woods’ and dark with bloody memory. … Behind them lay five twisted, red and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faced and awful. His hands were red and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.

“But behind it was greater cost: a million Indians lived in North America when the white man came, with a world of cultures behind them and may beginnings of civilization. … They received the white Europeans with curiosity and kindness. They gave them food and gold. In turn the white man stole and killed and tried to enslave, and their last theft was land. They stole the land of America from the Indians, used its wealth of fruit and gave it over to the rape of aristocrat, Puritan, slave and immigrant. Kansas was the last chapter of this great theft” [JB, 108-109].

Kansas was the last chapter geopolitically in what newly conquered territory would be slave or free, but the territorialization of these spaces – or the process of achieving hegemony over this territory – continued through the so-called Indian Wars, and continues to this day.

Traversing these many forts and battle sites in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico (and soon Kansas), is a reminder of the geopolitics and social relations of territorializing a settler colonial state. Some of these forts have been abandoned, like Fort Bowie, Camp Furlong, Fort Craig, Fort Union, or Fort Sumner.

Fort Bliss military museum,
El Paso, TX

Others, like Fort Bliss or Davis Monthan, or Laughlin, still live and these histories have been built upon and overlaid with new forms of weaponry for territorial conquest or domination, and policing powers that mark a conflict over who may live on this territory and in what forms of (un)freedom.

Disappearing Walls and Shared Horizons

I arrived at Pancho Villa State Park, in Columbus, NM after dark the other evening.  I had spent the previous nite enjoying the thunder rumble through the canyons in the Chiricauhuas, and so a flat, exposed campsite next to roads was hardly appealing.

One of the big questions I have is how to "see" or recognize state violence in the landscape.  On this trip I have been focused on documenting the US border wall to Mexico and historical struggles over the spaces and boundaries of freedom.  First, I'm grappling with questions of interpretation (if that's the word) - some "see" safety where I see harm - so it's a question of recognizing or not recognizing violence.  But this is only part of it because there are many who recognize, accept, and champion the deployment of state violence.  So then it's a question of how the visible and invisible harms of this violence can be recognized and understood in relation to the source of the harms, rather than placed on the people who've been harmed.  In turn, this is all too obviously about hegemony and violence.  And being concrete about these relations is what's important.  Ultimately, this is related to anti-violence, and how organizing against systemic violence is necessary for and a product of building movements of/for freedom and self-determination.

I arrived after dark at Pancho Villa State Park, in Columbus, NM just across from Puerto Palomas, Chihuahau.  The campground was exposed and made even more unpleasant by the lights dotting the southern horizon.  This horizon would be visible only with the illumination of the border wall.  The moon bridged the eery divide in the distance, making a shared reality for neighbors. 

Disappearing Border Wall
Columbus, NM-Puerto Palomas, Chihuahua

In the morning I wanted to document the sun rising to blanch the deeper blues of the sky.  But the wall disappeared before I could set up the tripod.  It was still there, of course, but no longer visible, and the horizon appeared to be united.  It's hard to capture how visceral watching the state horizon appear and disappear was.  Part of it's the violence of dividing the big sky, the possibility of sharing spaces.  Part of it's the fleetingness and strength of perception of state power.  Part of it speaks to the less marked practices and power relations that make and support these state infrastructures. 

Mexico viewed from Villa Hill, Columbus, NM

When the Pancho Villa State Park was founded in 1959, the governors of New Mexico and Chihuaha were on hand to mark this place as an international monument to friendly neighbors.  There is now, as then, heavy irony to this, but they also tried to make this claim a reality by planting a row of sycamore trees stretching between the two nations.  This line of sight could also create a shared horizon.

Siting Chiricahua resistance to settler colonialism

"when I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die - that they carry their lives on their fingernails? ... The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails." - Cochise, Chiricahua Chief, as I found recounted in an official history of Fort Bowie

Interestingly, General Howard, whom President Grant sent to advance his "Peace Policy" with Arizona nations, had been head of the Freedman's Bureau. (He was also one of the founders and namesake of Howard University.). The peace negotiations of the early 1870s established a reservation for the Chiricahua on the Rio Grande, but the Indian Bureau "disliked the location. ... Resting on the international boundary, it not only encouraged and facilitated Chiru raids into Mexico but also attracted other Apaches who used it as a base... And the Bureau had a new policy of bringing all Apaches together on a single reservation, San Carlos, in the parched bottoms of the Gila River some 121 km to the north." Some Chiricahua went to Mexico and continued to resist. After years on ongoing conflict, Geronimo was captured and he and many other resisters and their families were placed on a train to Florida.

This little I know.
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Picacho Pass, AZ - Civil War battle over extension of slavery

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The Sport of Gun Throwing

If you thought the problem was xenophobic (or opportunist) legislators in Arizona, the past few days in US Senate, Congress and Department of Homeland Security should shift the attention back to DC and the feds, where the money for border militarization and criminalization comes from, and where Democrats' and Republicans' election year calculus will give law-and-order xenophobes everything they want. 

Democrats have mastered the sport of gun throwing and wall building.  The tools are blunt and involve lots of violence workers.  The only fine art is in perception management.  Will the great New York Senator Schumer be able to maintain his image as the Democratic leader on Comprehensive Immigration Reform after getting a $600 million border violence bill passed in the Senate last Friday? 

The House followed suit on Tuesday, and the bill now returns to Senate before being sent to the president for his signature.  The bills include funding for two more drones and 1500 additonal border agents.  Ironically, the costs will be passed on to human resources companies that recruit "skilled" workers to the US on H1-B visas.  The increased exploitation of one set of workers will be used to increase the capacity for violence in the US Southwest.  India has already complained that this fee would discriminate against Indian workers. 

If these bills weren't enough, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that all of the counties that border Mexico are now enrolled in the Secure Communities program, which basically turns the jail system into a dragnet.  Under the program, jails collaborate with ICE by passing them identification information from people who are simply booked into the jail.  ICE can then issue a detainer.  Abuses of the program are well documented; in Travis County, Texas, the program led to a dramatic increase in pretextual traffic stops.  When I visited Nogales, I met one man who was deported from Arizona for failing to use his turn signal long enough, and CopWatch-Migra Patrol in Tucson captured the everyday collaboration between local police and Border Patrol or ICE.  Whether the collaboration is on the pretext of checking identification or calling for translation help, that happens in communities all across the country. 

These everyday stops are the banal, mundane workings of a deportation system that is responsible for disrupting millions of people's lives, families, and communities.  The idea that the rights of migrants (and folks who might be migrants) can be respected within such a legislative context and with the backing of thousands of gun-carrying law enforcement agents, a border wall that siphons money and deposits blood, and tens of thousands of cages is part of the trick that Democrats are trying to pull off (the GOP doesn't seem to bother with dissimulation). 

Throwing lots more guns at a conflict and building fortifications are usually signs of a war, but this is not the primary way that most people in the US understand current police and border policies.  Who's fighting this war, who's the enemy, how are people explicitly and tacitly supporting it?  The simultaneous spectacle and banality of state violence is part of what's confusing about being able to recognize a conflict zone for what it is.  It's also fundamentally confusing to imagine that "immigration enforcement" is anything other than violent or that this violence can be reconciled with rights, much less freedom.

Walls Don't Stop Balloons

Yesterday a group us gathered to launch balloons outside a federal prison near Tucson as part of Running Down the Walls.  This annual event is organized by the LA Anarchist Black Cross Federation to support and raise funds for political prisoners.

Running Down the Walls was an occasion to think about abolition and how abolition connects different struggles for freedom.  It was the day after Hiroshima Day, 65 years later, and I thought of Women Strike for Peace who, in the 1960s, used balloons in their organizing against nuclear weapons to show how wind currents would spread radiation.

Women Strike for Peace, Los Angeles early 1960s
Source: L.A. Public Library

It's still time to abolish nuclear weapons, and Think Outside the Bomb has been organizing around the issues this summer in New Mexico (see video of their Santa Fe action against uranium mining).  The militarization of the border is hard to miss in southern Arizona.  A Trident missile site just south of Tucson is now a museum, and fighter jet traffic from nearby Monthan AFB is ubiquitous.  I imagined the balloons stealing their way across their flight paths.

It's also time to take down the walls holding nearly 500 women in the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility outside Austin, TX where that same day community members and ther loved ones gathered to shut it down. 

For me, these balloons mark possibility and remembrance.  They are vulnerable, yet vibrant. They light the sky and laugh at the cactus.  They seem like a good way to think about what Stevie Pearce wrote about healing and harm intervention in Uses of a Whirlwind:

"We might start to seriously challenge the normalization of violence by considering how to mourn and to organize all at once."

"Pudiéramos empezar a retar seriamente a la normalización de la violencia considerando cómo llorar la muerte y organizar simultáneamente." [thanks to Jenn for translation]

With that, it's a time to remember the hibakusha and the people who continue to fight against nuclear colonialism.  It's time to remember Marilyn Buck, who passed away just two weeks after being back on the outside, and Puerto Rican independence leader Lolita Lebron.  It's time to celebrate that Marlen Mareno will not be deported today and can stay with her family, for at least another year.  And it's time to send strength and love to Dara and all the fierce ladies, their brothers, and their lovers fighting big, bad meanies everywhere.  Movements against war, occupation, border walls, and prison cages are the same struggle for healing, liberation and self-determination.

Banal Violence

TUCSON, AZ

Living in a militarized border region, even temporarily, forces one to confront paradoxes and contradictions.  The border captures and moves.  It's a place that stops movement and lets some of it continue.  It piles up movement and disperses it.  It concentrates people who search for somewhere else to go.

It's hard to call violence banal, but that's how it feels.  The machinery of the border is intricate and routine.  It's militarized and hi-tech.  It's computerized.  It's a turnstile.  It's Border Patrol agents on bicycles, on ATVs, standing at checkpoints, standing at ports of entry.  It's drug-sniffing dogs.  It's private contractors building bigger walls.  It's Border Patrol trucks topped with camper shells that contain human cargo.  It's ICE transport vehicles.  It's local police calling Border Patrol to "translate" or "verify identification." 

Every bit of this work, and the local, state, and federal policies and funding that support it, add up to what feels like a slow-moving humanitarian crisis.  Any one of the hundreds of thousands of lives of migrants caught up in the system captures a mundane truth of its daily banality.  These repetitions add up and promise to create a single category called illegality that legitimizes these myriad abuses folds in all individual  experiences. 

Establishing the US-Mexico boundary has been a project of military-backed territorialization for well over a century.  But particularly since the 1990s, people living in the border regions have experienced an increased militarization.  The creeping changes do not inure people to the violence; many oppose and protest the border wall, organize to keep loved ones from being deported, conduct know your rights trainings, monitor and document abuses by law enforcement, and provide direct aid.  Some of this work is dedicated to building power to stop the abuses, create freedom of movement. Most of this work is also mundane, how else to confront a crisis that unfolds everyday?

In the face of this systemic crisis, it seems that recapturing the individual makes it all real again, makes the banality horrifying, saddening, sickening (even capturing emotions, the affective dimension, is difficult). And so how to also speak individually, and recognize people who look like my neighbors, people who are charismatic, people who are shy, people who have obligations, people who are searching for some place for themselves? How to support Marlen, one young Tucson resident's desire to be a school teacher and mother and community member and also make it possible for thousands of flowers to blossom? That's the tricky line so many are walking, all the while laughing and crying, mourning and rejoicing, healing and hurting, dropping out and organizing.

We Will Not Comply

I was in Tucson on July 29, the day that SB1070 went into effect. The day before Federal District Court Judge Susan Bolted issued an injunction on portions of the bill, including the section requiring police officers to ask for papers from people with "reasonable suspicion" of being in the US without authorization. Another part of the bill that will target day laborers still went into effect. The injunction is a respite, but it doesn't return things to the status quo, which already polices migrant status on a daily basis. Nor can the injunction be seen as a victory. As National Day Laborer Organizing Network organizer Pablo Alvarado states: “A split decision only serves to split our communities. There is no partial solution to denials of our humanity. There is no partial solution to hatred.  If this is a step, it is another step toward increased encroachments on the human rights of the people of Arizona and a dangerous precedent for the country.”

For these reasons, people took the the streets in cities across the country.  A direct action in Phoenix shut down the Arpaio's jail for several hours, which prevented him from continuing to sweep neighborhoods checking migrant status.  In New York, people spanned the length of the Brooklyn Bridge and shut the bridge for two hours.  There were also direct actions in Los Angeles, and other gatherings in San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Syracuse, and elsewhere. 

In Tucson, my day began with a march from the Southside Day Laborers Center to the demonstration gathered outside downtown's state and federal buildings.  Across town a group calling themselves Freedom for Arizona blockaded I-19 and dropped a banner.

I-19 blockade, Tucson

Like NDLON's Pablo Alvarado, they explained that they shut down the freeway because: "Partial justice is no justice at all! Despite Judge ruling to block parts of SB 1070, racial-profiling, raids, deportations and the militarization of the border will continue unchallenged."

We arrived downtown at around 10am to form a lively gathering of about 300 people.  We were also met with 50-60 counter-demonstrators who flew a lot of US flags and hurled a lot of invectives.  They left by 1130 and did not return. 

Throughout the day we received text updates about actions going on in the city and in Phoenix, and we were all happy to hear that Arpaio had to stop neighborhood sweeps because of the jail blockade.  The Brown Berets occupied A Mountain and hung a No to SB1070 across the top.  When we went up to see the action, one of the women told me that the police had kept the park closed for an extra hour that morning, so they hiked up the hill.  The police also tried to tell them they were defacing a federal monument, but the land is not federal, nor are there any restrictions on using the space or hanging banners. 

People remained gathered downtown in the heat all day.  Food Not Bombs showed up with food and there was a medic tent and plenty of water for folks to stay hydrated. 

More people joined the crowd so that by the late afternoon, we were 300-400 strong.  Sometime around 4pm, groups of three carrying three 20 foot long banners worked to close down the intersection with the help of most of the people gathered.  We kept the intersection closed for over two hours, and kept the energy high with chants, a bit of dance, marching, and observing the police. 

A street theater troupe staged an extended depiction of how free trade policies are the problem not migrants.  Enslaved workers, chained together with pieces of American flags, were led around the intersection being whipped by their boss.  As the workers tried to free their their hands in resistance, their boss continued to berate them, but they eventually broke free and chased away their boss. 

Well over an hour after the shutdown, the police issued an order to disperse.  Most people moved to the sidewalks, and the police directed their attention to the folks who intended to be arrested.  Squads of six riot police brought out each of the 13 people who were arrested. 

The solemnity of their resistance to unjust laws was broken by the arrival of the Critical Mass bicycle ride.  The rest of the crowd had not dispersed, and the police were visibly deflated by this new addition.  Cyclists rode through the lines of police and changed the dynamic of the demonstration, once again making it feel like these were our streets. (I'll publish more images as I process them.)

The 13 people who were arrested were held for a little over 2 hours and were released with misdemeanor charges.   This was apparently the largest number of people arrested in a civil disobedience action in the city's history.

For other coverage of the day, see Arizona Indymedia: http://arizona.indymedia.org/ and Jordan Flaherty's article in Truthout on Phoenix happenings.

Sin papeles

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Southside day laborer March joins Congress Street demo, Tucson

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SB1070 is not New

SB1070 is just the latest in a long process of criminalizing migration in Arizona and at the federal level. The injunction doesn't challenge the idea of "reasonable suspicion," a polite way of saying racial profiling. (Take a look at what "reasonable suspicion" looks like where I live.) The injunction doesn't challenge laws like SB1070, which empowered an already brazen Sheriff Joe Arpaio to detain thousands of migrants. Local law enforcement agencies have formal agreements with the feds in jurisdictions around the country. Nor does it challenge Secure Communities, a program that is even more sweeping in its ability to pinpoint migrants who are in police custody. I'll share more information about these programs in the coming days. For now, check out the timeline of these laws produced by ColorLines.

The Injunction Does Not End the Fight

I arrived in Tucson this evening after a day of following the border from Texas. I met people gathered for a demonstration and candle light vigil downtown and then returned to read news of an amazing banner drop in Phoenix for a day of actions tomorrow, including a workers' march, mass mobilizations at the state building at noon and four, and more I'm sure to find out about. I'll try to post news tomorrow, and catch up on some thoughts from the drive over, but for folks who aren't on facebook, check out some highly selective photos.

This injunction on sections of SB1070 does nothing to prevent the ongoing collaboration between local law enforcement and federal migration officials. Homeland Security policies, known as ICE ACCESS (such as 287g agreements that deputize local law enforcement as federal migration agents or Secure Communities that share data from local law enforcement to migration) are in effect in Arizona and throughout the US, and are not stopped by the injunction, in Arizona or elsewhere. Arizona shines a light on these practices, and it's showing the rejection of them here and throughout the country. Actions on July 29, whether marches or concerts or vigils or art projects, are planned to show solidarity and oppose the borders in their communities. More events are undoubetdly happening, so check in with your communities.

Thinking John Brown

One of the interesting things being at Harpers Ferry was hearing the words John Brown uttered so many times. Seeing the site where he planned to raid a federal armory was not the only reason people were coming to visit. The town sits on the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where the C & O Canal and railroad made it a transport center. It was also an important manufacturing site, including the guns with replaceable parts. Given this, not surprisingly there was a Civil War battle here where the Confederacy scored a win.

But what did we actually learn about John Brown? The wax museum's portrayal of a man who hated slavery from a young age, and whose eyes flashed with mad passion, was not that different from the National Park Service programming. The NPS provided more context, but this was not context that would help make palpable the conflict over slavery and dispute over strategies for change. The word abolitionist is used freely on site without any discussion of what that movement meant (much less its different strands), what John Brown meant to people in that movement, etc. While John Brown is portrayed as an uncompromising idealist, often a beloved trait, the depiction treats him more like a demigod than a person who connected with hundreds and thousands of others to create freedom.

Frederick Douglass, who had met with John Brown, found Brown far more significant than just an enigmatic idealist, but saw his raid as the first volley of the Civil War. In his speech delivered in Harpers Ferry in 1881, "Did John Brown Fail?", Douglass reminds us of the conflicts that were so left out of the programming:

With eighteen men this man shook the whole social fabric of
Virginia. With eighteen men he overpowered a town of nearly
three thousand souls. With these eighteen men he held that large
community firmly in his grasp for thirty long hours. With these
eighteen men he rallied in a single night fifty slaves to his stan-
dard, and made prisoners of an equal number of the slave-hold-
ing class. With these eighteen men he defied the power and
bravery of a dozen of the best militia companies that Virginia
could send against him. Now, when slavery struck, as it certain-
ly did strike, at the life of the country, it was not the fault of
John Brown that our rulers did not at first know how to deal
with it. He had already shown us the weak side of the rebellion,
had shown us where to strike and how. It was not from lack of
native courage that Virginia submitted for thirty long hours and at
last was relieved only by Federal troops ; but because the attack was
made on the side of her conscience and thus armed her against
herself. She beheld at her side the sullen brow of a black Ire-
land. When John Brown proclaimed emancipation to the slaves
of Maryland and Virginia he added to his war power the force of
a moral earthquake.

There is a lot more in the essay, but in taking up the debate over John Brown's legacy, he was of course talking about how to go about ridding oppression. The concluding line:

Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was
dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one
of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched
forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was
gone — the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the
chasm of a broken Union — and the clash of arms was at hand.
The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Gov-
ernment, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and
thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the cen-
tury.

My Library

I packed a small library for the road, listed in no order:

Raider Nation, volume 1: on Oscar Grant’s murder and organizing for justice
Terry Bisson’s novel Fire on the Mountain
W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the US-Mexico Border 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home
Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Fergus Bordewich, Bound for Canaan
Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush and Coming Civil War
Some other articles and stuff

And the best find so far is Du Bois' The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1863-1870. I found the book, which was his doctoral dissertation, in Harpers Ferry. DuBois, as part of the Niagara Movement, held a conference at Storer College in 1906.

Where is the Border?

i can't get arizona off the brain, so i'm driving down. i'm leaving from brooklyn today and arriving in tucson next wednesday, july 28. while i'm there i'll be working with no more deaths on their organizing and documentation projects, and visiting with other arizona friends & organizers.

what's going on? on july 29, arizona is set to implement sb1070, a law that would require state employees to stop and arrest people suspected of not having proper migration papers. arizona is being portrayed as unique, but its laws are the culmination of local police-federal collaboration policies that are already being enforced nationwide. at least 11 states around the country are also considering implementing policies like sb1070, and president obama is deploying national guard troops to the border on august 1.

today a department of justice lawsuit calling for an injunction on sb1070 will be heard, so we're not sure what's going to happen, but people in arizona and elsewhere have been doing some remarkable organizing against criminalization. i want to learn from and contribute to their efforts.

how do i as a brooklyn dweller respond to calls for solidarity from arizona? the road trip to and from arizona will give me a chance to think through finding the border. having lived in upstate new york, i know that "the border" is not just the us boundary with mexico, but it's also a boundary with neighboring canada and first nations territories. and the border is also wherever people have their documents checked.

so what does it mean to travel from one border state to another? what does new york's history have to do with arizona's history? i'll be stopping at places that were important in the abolitionist movement against slavery. some of these involve finding the mason-dixon line and others are about trying to locate the shifting boundary with mexico. boundaries and freedom were and are tied up with one another. what were the routes to and spaces of freedom created through the underground railroad? what does the history of abolition and maronage mean for resistance to unjust laws look today?

there are protest and solidarity actions planned around the country on july 29, so keep an eye out for ways to get involved in where you are.