Join Justin Akers Chacón, Yanny Guzmán, and Magally “Maga” Miranda Alcázar for a discussion about the history and function of the US-Mexico border, why we should fight to open it, and the way forward for the migrant justice movement.

This event marks the release of Justin Akers Chacón’s latest book, The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.

Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished.

But despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations—the migra-state—migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.

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Speakers:

Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator living in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is a Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College. His most recent book is The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border. He is also the author of No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis) and Radicals in the Barrio.

Magally “Maga” Miranda Alcázar (she/they) is a graduate student in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Using methods that emphasize the co-production of knowledge with rank-and-file workers, their research explores the contested meanings of care, work and Latinidad in the context of the global economy of care. Maga is also the co-founder of the multimedia platform SAL(T): Xicana Marxist Thoughts.

Yanny Guzmán is a Xicana living on Lenape land, now known as the Bronx. She is a daughter of immigrant parents indigenous to Mexico and Ecuador. She is a socialist, activist, organizer and rank & file union member. Currently she is a tenant organizer and member of the South Bronx Tenants Movement, a legal advocate for low income tenants in the Bronx, and a member of Southern Solidarity, a grassroots, community-based group of volunteers in solidarity with the unhoused in their quest toward liberation. She previously was a writer, reporter, website administrator, and a graphic designer for the Working Class Heroes Radio.