La Voz - May 2015

a publication of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

May 2015, Vol. 28 Issue 4

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Mothers resume their hunger strike at Karnes Immigrant Detention Center

San Antonio, Tejas

1

La Voz de Esperanza May 2015

vol. 28 issue 4 Editor: Gloria A. Ramírez Design: Monica V. Velásquez Cover: Image - Rommy Torrico www.rommytorrico.com; Text - Las Madres de Karnes City Detention Center

Contributors

Kenia Galeano, Gordis, Victoria GarciaZapata Klein, Virginia Marie Raymond, Roberto “Dr. Cintli” Rodríguez, Victoria Rossi, Susana Segura, Verónica

La Voz Mail Collective

José Luis Cossio, Juan Díaz, Rachel Jennings, Debi Jiggits-Hall, Mildred Hilbrich, José López, Josie M. Martin, Rachel Martinez, Ray McDonald, Angie Merla, María D. Plemmons, María Reed, Blanca Rivera, Mary A. Rodríguez, Cynthia Spielman, Dave Stokes

Esperanza Director Graciela I. Sánchez

Esperanza Staff

Imelda Arismendez, Itza Carbajal, René Saenz, Saakred, Susana Segura, Amelia Valdez, Monica Velásquez Esperanza Interns Elizabeth Joy Delgado, Iliana Medrano, Elisa Pérez, Gianna Rendón Conjunto de Nepantleras

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

-Esperanza Board of Directors-

2

Brenda Davis, Rachel Jennings, Amy Kastely, Jan Olsen, Kamala Platt, Ana Lucía Ramírez, Gloria A. Ramírez, Rudy Rosales, Tiffany Ross, Lilliana Saldaña, Nadine Saliba, Graciela I. Sánchez, Lillian Stevens • We advocate for a wide variety of social, economic & environmental justice issues.

• Opinions expressed in La Voz are not necessarily those of the Esperanza Center.

La Voz de Esperanza

is a publication of Esperanza Peace & Justice Center 922 San Pedro, San Antonio, TX 78212

210.228.0201 • fax 1.877.327.5902 www.esperanzacenter.org Inquiries/Articles can be sent to:

lavoz@esperanzacenter.org Articles due by the 8th of each month Policy Statements

* We ask that articles be visionary, progressive, instructive & thoughtful. Submissions must be literate & critical; not sexist, racist, homophobic, violent, or oppressive & may be edited for length. * All letters in response to Esperanza activities or articles in La Voz will be considered for publication.

Letters with intent to slander individuals or groups will not be published.

Esperanza Peace & Justice Center is funded in part by the NEA, TCA, theFund, CoYoTe PhoeNix Fund, AKR Fdn, Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Fdn, Horizons Fdn, New World Foundation, y nuestra buena gente.

En nombre de todas las madres residentes en el centro de detención de Karnes City, esta mos escribiendo esta petición donde pedimos ser puestas en libertad con nuestros hijos—ya que habemos madres enserradas en este lugar hace casi ya 10 meses. Habemos, ta mbien, madres que por tener una deportación no nos dan el derecho a una fianza—les han dado fianza a nuestros hijos pero no dan la salida a nosotras, las madres.

Por ese motivo hemos tomado la iniciativa de unirnos y iniciar una huelga de ha mbre para hacer ver y sentir nuestra desesperación. Nosotras hemos venido a este pais con nuestros hijos en busca de ayuda de un refugio y se nos esta tratando como delincuentes y no somos eso— mucho menos somos un peligro para este país.

Durante esta huelga de hambre ninguna madre trabajará en el centro de detención, tampoco enviaremos a nuestros hijos a la escuela—no utilizaremos ningún servicio de este lugar, hasta que sean escuchadas y aprovadas. Queremos nuestra LIBERTAD! Todas las madres exigimos que nos den una solución. Habemos incluso madres que es la primera vez que venimos a este país, oficiales de asilo nos dieron “positivo” como result ado de nuestra entrevista de miedo creible y aún seguimos aqui detenidas porque se nos impusieron fianzas muy elevadas que no pudimos pagar—y algunas no tuvimos ni la oportunidad de pagar una fianza. Deben saber que éste es sólo el comienzo—no pararemos hasta lograr nuestro objetivo, esta huelga seguirá hasta que cada una de nosotras sea puesta en libertad. Las condiciones en las que están nuestros hijos no son buenas—nuestros niños no se alimentan bien—cada día nos pierden peso, su salud se deteriora. Sabemos que cualquier madre haría lo mismo que nosotras hacemos ahora por nuestros hijos. Merecemos ser tratadas con dignidad y que se nos respete nuestro derecho de emigrar—es un derecho que tenemos—llevar un proceso migratorio libres con nuestros hijos.

Hay algunas madres que perdieron su asilo y por su desesperación se vieron forzadas a firmar deportación—cosa que no concideramos justa porque ellas han venido a este pais piediendo asilo porque corren peligro en su pais y estan siendo deportadas de regreso a un lugar donde pueden perder hasta su vida.

Esta petición esta firmada por todas las madres de este centro de detención.

A

t the end of March, over 80 mothers in the Karnes Immigrant Detention Center signed the above letter demanding their freedom. A week-long hunger stirke ensued with about 40 women participating. On Tuesday morning, April 14, Kenia Galeano—one of the mothers who was able to post bond after 5 months there with her 2-yearold child—spoke at a news conference organized by RAICES in front of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. Her speech is included in this issue of La Voz along with articles by activists and lawyers working to release the mothers. A second hunger strike by ten of the mothers began anew on April 14. The women continue to ask Director of ICE, Sarah Saldaña, to respond to their demands for freedom or be given parole.

Among the protestors on April 14th was Yasmina Codina, a graduate student and graduate assistant at UTSA. Yasmina was targeted by ICE after she delivered bottled water to the mothers. Contaminated water due to fracking in Karnes County is a concern of the mothers.

As a result, the mothers pay $3 for bottled water—a whole day’s pay at the Center. Yasmina was notified shortly after her visit that ICE had called her supervisor at UTSA. Fearing reprisal, Yasmina wrote to Rep. Joaquin Castro about the incident. He contacted Sarah Saldaña, Director of ICE, asking that she personally look into Ms. Codina’s concerns. He stressed to Saldaña that he hoped that this type of incident was not “common practice”.

La Voz will continue to publish articles on immigrant detention centers and other issues in the coming months. ¡La lucha sigue, sigue! Send articles to lavoz@esperanzacenter.org ATTENTION VOZ READERS: If you have a mailing address correction please send it to lavoz@ esperanzacenter.org. If you want to be removed from the La Voz mailing list, for whatever reason, please let us know. La Voz is provided as a courtesy to people on the mailing list of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.

The subscription rate is $35 per year ($100 for institutions). The cost of producing and mailing La Voz has substantially increased and we need your help to keep it afloat. To help, send in your subscriptions, sign up as a monthly donor, or send in a donation to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. Thank you. -GAR VOZ VISION STATEMENT: La Voz de Esperanza speaks for many individual, progressive voices who are gente-based, multi-visioned and milagro-bound. We are diverse survivors of materialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, classism, violence, earth-damage, speciesism and cultural and political oppression. We are recapturing the powers of alliance, activism and healthy conflict in order to achieve interdependent economic/ spiritual healing and fuerza. La Voz is a resource for peace, justice, and human rights, providing a forum for criticism, information, education, humor and other creative works. La Voz provokes bold actions in response to local and global problems, with the knowledge that the many risks we take for the earth, our body, and the dignity of all people will result in profound change for the seven generations to come.

W

years earlier.

Quickly converted to house women and children, Karnes became part of the rapid re-expansion of family detention centers throughout the United States and southeast Texas in particular: More than 1,000 women and kids are now being held at Karnes and a new detention facility in Dilley, Texas, alone.

Two months after Obama’s announcement, Karnes stopped housing immigrant men. The first bus of women and their children pulled up to the newly minted family detention center in August 2014. Far from humanely treated, the new arrivals were to be made examples of, warnings to other potential asylum seekers that they should not make the journey to the United States. They would find no refuge here.

Gone were the average 30-day stays afforded to Karnes’ immigrant men.

Caught in a legal limbo between Obama’s policy of migration deterrence and the United States’ global commitments to protect refugees, as of April 2015 many of the asylum-seeking families at Karnes had been held there for more than 8 months.

The women work for as little as $1 a day and widely report that their children have grown skinny and malnourished from their months in detention. “We see our children suffer, they don’t eat, because the food they give us here is not prepared well, not even those that work here will eat it,” says a statement from 20 detained women. “There are detention officers that when we ask for water, they mock us and speak amongst themselves in English.”

On March 30, 2015, 78 women launched a hunger strike to protest their prolonged confinement and poor treatment at Karnes. “We will not use any of the services provided by this place until we have been heard and our freedom has been approved,” they announced in a declaration written in Spanish. “We know that any mother would do what we are doing for their children.”

Response to the strike, according to reports from several ...continued on p. 5

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4 •

hen the Karnes Civil Detention Center in southeast Texas first opened its doors to undocumented immigrant men in 2012, it was hailed for its “gentler approach” to immigrant detention. The New York Times remarked on Karnes’ landscaped courtyards and library access; National Public Radio noted its walkup pharmacy and commissary. The Women’s Refugee Commission called the unrestrictive atmosphere at Karnes a “positive step.”

Built from the ground up to provide a less jail-like setting for detainees, Karnes was put forth as a symbol of the Obama administration’s efforts to reform the country’s immigration detention system and improve harsh conditions for detained immigrants. Karnes was “a first in the entire history of immigration detention,” John Morton, then the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in a press release. The agency’s contract with GEO Group Inc.—the corporation that built and managed Karnes— would prioritize “the health and safety of detainees.” Karnes was, Morton added, “part of an ICE detention reform program that is sensible, sustainable and attentive to the unique needs of the individuals in our custody.”

The new 608-bed facility also marked a shift in the agency’s treatment of immigrant detainees, said Gary Mead, then head of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations. “It was never our authority or our responsibility to punish people or correct their behavior,” he said in a 2012 interview with NPR. “Our authority is only to facilitate removal. So we have to treat them very differently than how the state prison system or county jail system would treat people in their custody.”

The average detainee stay at Karnes, he told the Houston Chronicle, would be 30 days.

This was before women began arriving with their children at the United States’ southwest border in the tens of thousands, fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, many of them turning themselves in at government checkpoints to ask for refuge. Responding to the border’s “urgent humanitarian situation,” in June 2014 President Obama announced an “aggressive deterrence strategy” aimed at southwest border crossers—one that placed most migrant women and children in detention facilities and signaled a return to the practice of family detention, which Obama himself had all but ended five

by Victoria Rossi

3

YOU are an arriving alien. X erónica* left her home in one of the countries of the “Northern Triangle” of Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—after her mother and brother were kidnapped and killed—and after her own life had been threatened. She brought her children, a five-year-old boy and a girl of two and a half years. They had spent what money they had on the bus tickets to Mexico and on modest provisions for their trip; they had no money to pay someone to help them cross the Río Bravo/ Río Grande. The children were too young to swim. Verónica walks with her little ones across the bridge and presents herself to the first U.S. official she sees. She tells the man that she can not go home. She wants to apply for asylum.

The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers arrest Verónica, her little boy, and her little girl. They interview her, “take” her fingerprints, and formulate a set of allegations. She and her children spend two days in the “hieleras” and then are loaded into a van. Hours later, they arrive in Karnes City.

An asylum officer interviews Verónica; the officer determines that she has a “credible fear” of returning to her home country.

Whew! This means that Verónica will not be immediately “removed” (the legal term for deported), at least not yet. An officer brings her a NOTICE TO APPEAR. The notice is in English, a language Verónica does not speak. One of the pages is in tiny letters, but she signs it anyway.

She is afraid. The kids won’t eat the strange food and they cry when she tries to get them to drink the foul-tasting water.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

V

4

You are an arriving alien. X You are an alien present in the United States who has not yet been admitted or paroled. (The box for this charge is blank.)

You have been admitted to the United States, but are removable for the reasons stated below. (This box, too, is blank.) The Department of Homeland Security alleges that: 1. You are not a citizen or national of the United States; 2. You are a native of [A different country] and a citizen of [that same country].

3. You arrived at or near McAllen, TX on or about January 8, 2015; 4. You did not then possess or present a valid immigrant visa, reentry permit, border crossing card, or other valid entry document; 5. You were not then admitted or paroled after inspection by an immigration officer.

On the basis of the foregoing, it is charged that you are subject to removal from the United States pursuant to the following provision(s) of law: Section 212(a)(7)(i)(l) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended, as an immigrant who at the time of application for admission, is not in possession of a valid unexpired passport, or other suitable document, or identity and nationality document if such document is required by regulations issued by the Attorney General pursuant to Section 211(a) of the Act.

These words might mean something to a person who had studied immigration law. Had Verónica and her kids arrived a year ago, immigration officials might have gone through this process, released her and her children on her own recognizance, or required her to pay a bond. She would have received strict instructions to report to a particular ICE office on a certain date and to keep every subsequent appointment with ICE, and to let both the immigration court and ICE know if she changed her address. If she moved without telling officials, she might miss a court date and receive a removal (deportation) order in absentia.

They might have gone to live with relatives, or stayed for a time in a shelter – perhaps the RAICES casita in San Antonio, or Casa Marianella in Austin. A church whose congregants and clergy understood that it was perfectly legal to offer hospitality – that providing sanctuary to a family released from detention breaks no law—might have taken them in.

But since Verónica entered the U.S. after June, 2014, she is locked up. That’s when the U.S. government radically changed its practice and started detaining women and children, supposedly because they presented a “danger” to “national security” in the form of “mass migration.”

ICE started detaining all Central American families; Mexicans and Brazilians are also trapped in Karnes. It refused to set bond for anyone; it released a handful of families in extremely unusual circumstances (such as a child with a brain tumor).

Verónica can not go to the judge, because she’s an “arriving alien”; by statute, the immigration judge reviews the DHS decision to keep her locked up, as he could have done had she crossed the river and been arrested then. Eventually, DHS will tell her she can leave if she pays $ 7500—the standard amount for “arriving aliens”—but Verónica has nowhere near that amount of money. Her family at home has scattered, and they wouldn’t been able to come out with that much, anyway.

Verónica joins the fast, although of course she still feeds her children—although they protest. They are losing weight.

In court, without a lawyer, Verónica admits to the charges.

Or she doesn’t. Either way, the judge finds her removable. A judge tells her she must turn in her asylum application in two weeks, or he’ll consider her to have abandoned it. When she turns it in, she receives a date for a hearing on her application for asylum, another three weeks. She has her voice, her story, and her fear of returning. Will it be enough? v

¡Ya basta con niños encarcelados!

— Kenia Galeano

ita La Virgenc ant migr m I o t s k a e Sp Children

It was supposed to be more humane....cont’d from p.3 detained women, was anything but humane. Though ICE officials publicly denied any knowledge of a hunger strike at Karnes, three women claimed they were locked in an unlit medical room on the first day of their protest, according to the legal aid group RAICES. At least one woman has been charged with insurrection for allegedly chanting with a group of detainees and lifting up signs that spelled “Libertad” as a helicopter passed over the facility’s open-air courtyard.

Others were told by GEO staff they’d be deported for their actions, or declared unfit mothers and have their children taken from them. When asked about this by The New York Times, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security (DHS), that oversees

ICE, replied by email: “ICE has been in constant communication with the residents at the facility. This communication has included discussing the negative health effects of not eating and how the decision of parents to stop eating may affect the care of their children.”

At the end of the five-day hunger strike, more than half the participating women had dropped out—a result, the women’s advocates said, of retaliation and threats. The DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is now investigating these allegations.

The women of Karnes have said they will resume their hunger strike if ICE does not release them.* For now, they say they are waiting to see what the U.S.

government will do.

Karnes has become a new symbol for the Obama administration. It no longer heralds a gentler approach to immigration detention; now, it forms part of a U.S. deterrence policy meant to visibly punish asylum-seeking women and children in order to discourage others from coming to the U.S. for help. It shows us that family detention is never, and can never be, humane. *Update: On April 14th, the women resumed their hunger strike at Karnes.

They have said they will not stop striking until they are released.

Bio: Victoria Rossi, a writer & paralegal living in Austin, was recently banned from the Karnes detention center after publishing an article about the facility—Texas Observer, Feb. 2015.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Mi nombre es Kenia Galeano. Yo soy una madre que tuve que estar en Hijit o s m io s s esa prisión de Karnes City durante to m il a g ri 5 meses (150 días) con mi hijo de 2 años de edad. Se muy bien cuales y ou I a m h e re fo r son las condiciones en ese lugar, in ’s sobre todo para los niños. ¿Cómo th ou g h th e tra r is rea l e es possible que encarcelen a d a n g niños? Unos llegan de 6 meses—y y ou salen ya cuando tienen mas que I a m h e re fo r y el año de edad. El niño que salio g h y ou r jou rn e a k u o th el día que sali yo, habia entrado en ble will be la carcel cuando tenia 6 meses, y y ou salio de año y medio. El pobre estaba I a m h e re fo r sorprendido—con la boca abierta de re nts th ou g h y ou r pae hin d lo que veia: carros, vacas, caballos. A From the La Verdad le ft b section of Te Prometo esa edad empezó a descubrir lo que u o y (Paloma Press, 2015) r fo re desde pequeño hubiera podido hacer. e h A press conference on April 14th, 2015 I am Tambien mi hijo cumplio sus 2 años called by RAICES in San Antonio, TX ve th ou g h y ou h a sh oe s de edad allí en el Karnes City. Yo queria demanded the release of women and n o celebrar su cumpleaños fuera de allí, no children incarcerated at the Karnes y ou adentro.

Detention Center. Pictured are Kenia and I a m h e re fo r Klein rcia-Zapata Gracias a Díos, mi hijo y yo salimos de ese her son who spoke to the press: "No somos Victoria Ga horrible lugar, por la unión y solidaridad de todas las criminales y no somos amenaza a este madres que decidimos comenzar un ayuno o huelga de pais/We are not criminals or a threat to hambre hace 15 días. Gracias a ello logramos llamar la atención national security." Some women at this de ICE y algunas madres recibimos una fianza para salir de ahí. Fianzas "family" detention center were placed muy altas—en mi caso pagamos fianza de $7500. Y gracias a ello, hoy mi hijo esta in solitary confinement away from their libre de nuevo, y feliz—comenzando una nueva vida, pero desafortunadamente aún hay otras children. Others were told they will lose their children if they continue their hunger madres con sus hijos en ese lugar y por eso le pido a la Señora Sarah Saldaña, Directora de ICE, que haga los cambios necesarios para que no haya mas niños encarcelados. strike calling attention to the inhumane Mi hermana Olga de New Jersey me dijo ayer: “Nosotros aquí, tu familia, estabamos and militarized practices in these prisons. dispuestos a recibirte desde que llegaste in noviembre, a cubrir con todos los gastos de ti y —Photo & Caption by Lilliana Patricia Saldaña Alejandro hasta el final del proceso. Pero no, te encarcelaron allí en Karnes City.” v

5

LEGAL CHALLENGES

by Virginia Marie Raymond

TO PROLONGED DETENTION OF FAMILIES

6

obeying the letter of the order but certainly not the spirit. It has just started setting bonds for most women refugees who came with their children at $7500. In principle, and for some people, $7500 is a huge improvement over no bond at all, but for many others, $7500 is also a near-absolute barrier to release. Third,

Rommy Torrico | www.rommytorrico.com

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

R

efugees, immigrants, and their advocates dispute the authority of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), a DHS agency, to hold refugees or immigrants for prolonged periods of time. We insist that refugees and immigrants who pose no danger to individual people, communities, or national security, should be released on their own recognizance, parole, or bond, while they await hearings. The arguments for release apply even more forcefully to children: we know that detention, even for relatively short periods of time (and even under conditions of relative safety), damages children and interferes with healthy development.

Lawyers in federal court in California are attempting to enforce the settlement terms of an old lawsuit, Jenny Lisette Flores, et al., v. Attorney General of the U.S. Janet Reno, et al. (earlier, Flores v. Meese) which required that children not be detained unless there was no less restrictive alternative that would provide for their safety and that of the community. That settlement also required many protections for children who were detained. The current incarceration of children at Karnes and Dilley does not meet these standards. Neither detention facility (or “residential center,” if you accept ICE and GEO terms) is licensed as a child care facility. DHS says that Flores only applies to unaccompanied minors, not to children who are with parents. Kudos to local heroes, Professor Ranjana Natarajan, director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the UT law school, and her students, for their critical role.

In the fall, lawyers also filed a lawsuit against the DHS “nobond” policy for Central American families. On February 20, 2015, Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued temporary orders in R.I.L.-R. , et al., v. Jeh Charles Johnson, et al. The order is worth celebrating: it prevents DHS from denying release on bond or otherwise to Central American women and children refugees, based on the belief that this entire group pose a national security threat to the U.S. Instead, DHS is supposed to consider on an individual basis whether a particular person is a “flight risk” (will she appear at scheduled court hearings and keep ICE informed of her whereabouts, or will she disappear?), danger to the community, or national security. Judge Boasberg’s decision is deeply conservative in a very good sense: it insists that DHS follow constitutional due process and make decisions whether to deprive a person of her liberty based on her individual history and circumstances, rather than making judgments about entire classes of people. Kudos to local hero Denise Gilman, clinical professor of law and co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at UT law school, whose labor and brain power fueled this lawsuit.

The temporary orders in R.I.L.-R. v. Johnson do not “fix” the problem of family detention, however. First, the judge did not issue a condemnation against family detention on principle; he merely tried to limit the practice. Second, ICE and DHS may be

the order only applies to women who have never been removed (deported) from the U.S. before. A great many refugees come to the U.S. seeking sanctuary, but are or have been deported without ever knowing how to ask for asylum, and without having any legal assistance. Fourth, the decision only applies to women whom asylum officers have determined have a “credible fear” of returning home. Some women who speak Mayan languages, however, and who have little or no facility in Spanish or another European language may not even have such interviews. There simply aren’t enough interpreters to go around. Finally, although many women may still go to immigration judges to request lower bonds, and although the San Antonio immigration judges frequently grant these requests, women and children who are deemed “arriving aliens” do not have the right to have judges review the bond amounts. continued on p.11...

“Not Counting Mexicans or Indians”: The Many Tentacles of State Violence Against Black-Brown-Indigenous Communities

by Roberto Rodriguez, published in Truthout Feb. 4, 2015

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” - Popul Vuh

B

etween my eyes, I bear a scar in the shape of a “T” that I received on March 23, 1979, on the streets of East Los Angeles. It functions as a reminder that my skull was cracked, but more importantly, that I did not remain silent and that I won two police violence trials, for witnessing and photographing the brutal beating of a young man by perhaps a dozen sheriff’s deputies.

This happened when I was doing research for Lowrider magazine, comparing mass violence, mass roundups and mass arrests against barrio youth in the 1970s, to the violence of the Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit era of the 1940s. This mass law enforcement violence against Zoot Suiters, included violence against Mexicans, African-American and Filipino youth. (“Pachuco Yo, Ese,” Lowrider, v. 2#4, 1978) One of the most notorious cases prior to the 1960s was the “Bloody Christmas” incident in 1951, memorialized in the 1997 movie, LA Confidential. It involved the 90-minute brutal beating of seven men, all but one of them Mexican, inside the Los Angeles Police Department’s central station, and one outside of his own home. Only a few were put on trial, though none served even a year. This travesty was considered justice, and an example of how the LAPD could “police its own.”

Even before I worked for Lowrider, I had covered a historic trial of a sheriff’s deputy, Billy Joe McIlvain, who had executed a teenager from San Gabriel named David Dominguez in 1977.

At the trial, it was revealed that it was the deputy who had

kidnapped and killed Dominguez, while the deputy claimed the reverse. He was given a life sentence, an extreme rarity in the history of US jurisprudence, yet he served only 13 years.

Little wonder the expression: “The price of a Mexican.” In most cases, the price is zero. One Texas murder case in 2000 resulted in no prison time, but a whopping $4,000 fine.

This is the prism through which I approach the reality of police violence against communities of color - a reality that I track to 1492, and that today includes the criminalization and demonization of Black and Brown youth. Too many bear physical and psychological scars.

Many are incarcerated due to the travesty of continual racial PROFILING, including beatings and killings by the police or the migra - often for simply breathing, sitting, standing, walking or driving while Black or Brown.

There is no shortage of recent examples of this violence, which is primarily carried out against Black and Brown men and youth, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Eric Garner in New York City, to 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. Of course, it’s not a new phenomenon. I remember having similar conversations in the wake of the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992. Consider that the beating of King was followed, in 1996, by the nationally televised brutal beatings of Alicia Soltero and Enrique Funez Flores, who were brutalized by several Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies after a chase.

Undocumented migrants are also especially targeted. The recent Arizona Republic investigation, “Force at the Border,” revealed that from 2005 through March 25, 2014, immigration

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

These events are seared into my memory because of how I remember them. After coming back to consciousness, amid violent threats, I was handcuffed and left facedown on the cold street, bleeding profusely from my forehead. While in shock and unable to even lift my head, in my own pool of blood, amid flashing red and blue lights everywhere, I could see many dozens of officers giving chase and arresting everyone in sight.

What I also witnessed in the reflection of my own blood was everything that I will relay here.

Art Hazelwood | www.arthazelwood.com

7

officers had killed at least 46 people along the US-Mexican border (seven more since). None of those officers have ever been convicted for the killings. The most egregious recent case is that of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodríguez, who was shot in 2012 on the Mexican side of the border 10 times by two border patrol officers on the US side, purportedly (though erroneously) for throwing rocks at them. These killings do not wind up in police violence statistics, because the culprits are border patrol or migra officers -—whom labor leader César Chávez used to refer to as the Gestapo of the Mexican people— who are accountable to no one, precisely because those they murder are primarily Mexicans. It is reminiscent of an oftrepeated trope in Hollywood movies in which white cowboys brag about how many people they have killed. In the 1990 film, Young Guns II, one of the characters, exclaims: “I’ve killed 65 men, not counting Mexicans and Indians!”

The list of state-sponsored killings and brutality is endless.

Documentation is critical, yet difficult to accomplish because there has never been a uniform standard for accurately reporting instances of police brutality. While the FBI creates an annual list of “justifiable homicides” by US law enforcement agencies (excluding border patrol), it relies on voluntary cooperation.

Also, what authorities deem to be “unjustifiable homicides” by definition are excluded or not even recognized. The FBI tally for police killings in 2013 was 461. A citizen group called “Killed

by Police,” in 2014, tallied more than 1,000 killings, this while culling mainstream media stories. There is no tally for nonlethal cases of excessive force.

Richard Ramírez was executed, on camera, by a Billings, Montana, police officer, Grant Morrison, who was exonerated.

The previous month, Alex Nieto was killed by San Francisco police officers, riddled with more than a dozen bullets because the officers purportedly mistook his holstered Taser from some 75 feet away. The previous month, in February, five law enforcement officers in Moore, Oklahoma, beat and suffocated Luis Rodriguez to death. His last words, eerily, were, “I can’t breathe.” And in a case similar to Tamir Rice, in 2013, a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Rosa, California, killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was carrying a toy BB pellet rifle.

Recently, many of us have been cognizant of the extreme violence in Mexico and Central America, especially the October 2014 kidnapping and disappearance (and presumably killings) by police in collusion with a drug gang, of 43 Indigenous students studying to be teachers from Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. In the past few years, upwards of 26,000 Mexicans have been “disappeared” whereas at least 100,000 have been killed, caught between cartel and military violence.

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Much of the violence committed against undocumented migrants, especially against women and including rape, largely goes unreported for fear of deportation. Violence against women of color, however, is not restricted to migrants. For example, in Denver, the police viciously took down a seven-months pregnant woman, Mayra Lazos-Guerrero, who was pleading with them to stop brutally beating her boyfriend.

8

On January 26, 2015, Jessica Hernández, 16, was shot to death purportedly for striking a Denver police officer in the leg with a vehicle. This adds to the spate of shootings over the past year by Denver Police Department officers. On December 24, 2014, Francisco Manuel Cesena was tasered to death at the Tijuana border crossing by Customs and Border Protection agents. Two days earlier, a Lakota man, Allen Locke, was shot five times and killed by Rapid City, South Dakota, police officers, a day after attending a Native Lives Matter rally in Rapid City. Across the country, five other native people were killed in the same two-month period, while others were attacked by vigilantes. Two weeks before that, a Victoria, Texas, police officer was caught on videotape unjustifiably taking down and injuring a 76-year-old man, Pete Vásquez, then tasering him twice. A few days earlier, in December, Rumain Brisbon was killed by Phoenix police. Two weeks prior to that, in midNovember, sheriff’s deputies in East Los Angeles shot Eduardo Bermudez and Ricardo Avelar-Lara to death.

At the end of October 2014, Oscar Alberto Ramírez was shot four times in the back by sheriff’s deputies in Paramount, California. Also, a couple of months earlier, in Los Angeles, Ezell Ford was killed by the LAPD, and nine days before that, Omar Abrego was beaten to death by LAPD officers in the same vicinity. A few months before, in April, unarmed

There has never been a time in the history of this country in which people of color were treated by the legal system as full human beings with corresponding full human rights.

Complicit in this dehumanization have been this nation’s official historians, the educational system and the mainstream media, who shape, teach and cling to fairy tales regarding the founding of this country. That history includes genocide, land theft, slavery, state and vigilante violence (lynchings) against slaves, and against Blacks during the Jim Crow era. That history includes the widespread lynching of Mexicans, between the 1840s and 1920s, including the several thousands killed by the

Texas rangers, on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

Mass state violence against Mexicans is not exclusive to immigration-related matters. Consider the Eastside high school walkouts, which were met by brutal LAPD violence.

Memorialized in the 2006 movie Walkout, they involved 10,000 students, who demanded the end of punitive measures against students, bilingual education and a culturally relevant curriculum. One of the founding members of the Brown Berets from East Los Angeles, Carlos Montes, related to me that the very first issue taken up by them in 1967 was the rampant issue of police violence, then, the walkouts. Of note, on the other side of the country, the Puerto Rican community had rioted for three days in 1966 in Chicago, in protest over the shooting death of 20-year-old Aracelis Cruz.

In those days, the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords formed to counter the rampant police abuse in their communities, and they supported each other.

On August 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War took place, and was attended by some 30,000 protestors. Thousands of rally-goers—who were also protesting against the endemic police abuse in the nation’s barrios—were brutally attacked by riot-equipped Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers. This massive assault was memorialized in Requiem 29. On that day, three people were killed, including famed Los Angeles Times columnist, Ruben Salazar, along with Angel Díaz and Lyn Ward. Salazar, who had been writing about police brutality, was purportedly killed by a 9-inch, armor-piercing tear-gas projectile. No one was ever prosecuted.

Prison and Plea Bargains Of course, police violence is inextricably tied to another mass form of state violence against Black and Brown people: the sprawling US prison system.

That system today has expanded to become the world’s largest, filled disproportionately with Black and Brown bodies. Due to undercounts, the number of prisoners may be as high as 2.4 million, excluding immigration detentions.

During law enforcement encounters, on the streets and in the courtroom, this system demands silence, speedy compliance and, ultimately, complete submission, in effect, emasculation.

Failure to be docile often becomes the rationale for officers shooting, brutalizing and charging those they question with trumped up charges that subsequently cause the prisons to swell. In the past decade, federal immigration detentions have not only skyrocketed, but they have become at least 50 percent of all federal crimes. This translates to close to 100,000 detentions per year, often in for-profit prisons, for “crimes” that before 2000 resulted in simply returning migrants back to their country of origin.

Another method of ensuring that officers never serve time in prison is not leaving witnesses. In Ando Sangrando, author Armando Morales pointed out that never in the history of this country had a police officer been convicted in federal court for assaulting or killing a Mexican (a Spanish-speaking person) since records had been kept, and applicable statutes enacted, in the 1800s (p. 20).

Once in a great while, “punishment” for police abuse consists of suspension or vacation with pay, while sometimes an officer gets transferred or loses his or her job. Society somehow equates that with “justice.” Most of us who have lived or who live these realities have never equated beating back criminal charges or dead relatives winning a lawsuit, which is extremely rare, with justice.

Young people are extremely vulnerable if law enforcement perceives them to be gang-affiliated. This criminalizing of youth has led to the use of gang injunctions and safety zones that restrict the association and mobility of suspected gang members, named and unnamed. These are many of the same youth who are profiled —and when falsely arrested, beaten or killed. In the psyche of the community, these youth are presumed guilty, thus they “got what was coming to them.” Those who are killed or brutalized or who have criminal backgrounds suffer the same fate.

In 1970, the prison system in this country was perhaps onetenth the size of what it is today. Many people attribute this immense growth to the war on drugs. But even more than that, it is a war against people of color, principally, against BlackBrown-Indigenous bodies—the very same colonial war brought to us by Columbus and the conquistadores. The value these “civilizers” who were living in the “Dark Ages” placed on the

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Despite many hundreds of killings, only a few other cases have made such an indelible imprint in national mass media, such as Santos Rodríguez’s execution in 1973 by a Dallas police officer playing Russian roulette on the 12-year-old boy’s head, and the 1997 shooting death of high school sophomore, Esequiel Hernández, by four fully camouflaged US Marines in Redford, Texas, highlighting that the US military has been deployed on US soil since 1981, assisting in the US war on drugs and migrants.

One population that the prison system almost never entraps is police, themselves. One thing I learned when I worked for Lowrider is that plea-bargaining, which has virtually been refined to a science, effectively guarantees that law enforcement officers never serve a day in prison. Police officers brutalize people, and then charge the victims with felonies. In court, district attorneys offer to reduce the charges to misdemeanors, permitting the victims to plead guilty and walk away with no time or time served. After the victims plead guilty rather than face the possibility of many years in prison, the officers incur virtually no risk of being brought up on charges or losing in the event of a lawsuit. Even if a victim were to emerge victorious in a lawsuit, none of the money awarded normally comes from the officers,themselves.

9

lives of Black and Brown peoples was zero. In many parts of the country, that designated value continues to be zero.

The New and Flawed Racial Profiling Guidelines

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Within the past generation, the border has literally become a killing field. It has become a cemetery for migrants from Mexico and Central America. And yet, in many ways, the border has extended to the entire country— everywhere, our skin color is considered suspect.

This expansion, coupled with the complicity of the mainstream media and much of civil society, means that the government can continue to act with impunity. For example, in December 2014, the US Justice Department put forth new racial profiling guidelines that formally ban racial profiling in the United States. There are, however, two huge exceptions that render these guidelines virtually meaningless for Brown peoples. The guidelines exempt both the border region, which “legally” means 100 miles from the actual border, plus much of the Department of Homeland Security.

10

Meanwhile, across the country, brutal and dehumanizing immigration enforcement raids (such as the Pottsville, Iowa, raid involving 1,000 agents) take place, not limited to the border or ports of entry. In many instances, they function like hunter battalions. Immigration authorities hunt primarily Mexicans, but also Central Americans, and Blacks, in certain parts of the country. (It is estimated that there are a half-million Black undocumented immigrants in the United States.)

As most young Black and Brown youth know, it is during these racially profiled law enforcement stops that trumped-up “crimes” are committed, such as failure to disperse, resisting arrest and of course, assault and battery on law enforcement officers. Sanctioning the ability of officers to pull over anyone suspected of being an “illegal alien,” is a recipe for abuse and violent escalation, wherever they operate.

Historically, harassment on the streets has been the norm in this country’s major cities. In New York City, it has been called “stop-and-frisk,” but it exists everywhere, sometimes without that name. For Border Patrol, it is their raison d’être or part of their job description.

The racial profile singled out by Border Patrol is not “Hispanic.” It is often a specific indigenous phenotype that triggers suspicion: brown skin, brown/black hair, brown/ black eyes and the use of the Spanish language, which is racialized as Brown, unwanted and “enemy other.” Immigration enforcement, in effect, amounts to modern-day Indian removal.

These guidelines and any future immigration reform will further militarize the “border” and it is sure to at least triple the

size of Operation Streamline, which today facilitates the daily conviction of hundreds of migrants in mass show trials that last an hour only, sending them to private prisons or immediate deportations. Tucson human rights lawyer Isabel García “noted that one time, an African-American delegation [Black Alliance for Just Immigration or BAJI] witnessed the operation and left early in disgust.” They did so “because the brown men in shackles [ankles, wrists and waist], all lined up on one side of the courtroom, created the imagery of Africans in slave ships.”

BAJI is a group that emphasizes the impact of racism and globalization on African-American and immigrant communities as a basis for forging alliances across these communities.

Solutions and Black Brown- Indigenous Unity There is a crisis of state violence directed at Black peoples in this country. While the mainstream media still presents the issue in an extremely biased and ahistorical manner, at least the conversation of police abuse, due to the Black insurrection Black Lives Matter, is on the table.

It is incumbent upon those who also live marginalized realities to both offer critical support to this Black insurrection and to also step forward about the state violence against their own communities.

Many from communities targeted by state violence have been working toward building much-needed Black-BrownIndigenous coalitions. There is precedent for this. At the behest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., many Brown people were part of the Poor People’s March of 1968. And Ron Espiritu - who has

...Legal Challenges cont'd from p. 6

basis, representing refugees and immigrants who would otherwise be left without legal assistance.

Legal challenges : ar e not the solution You, the or ganized er . y’all, ar e the answ

Beehive Design Collective | www.beehivecollective Not Counting Mexicans cont'd from p.10

been teaching a ground-breaking Chicano/African-American Studies class for the past seven years at Animo South Los Angeles High School - notes that the United Farm Worker’s movement itself was heavily supported by both King and members of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In To March for Others, Lauren Araiza chronicles these alliances, which included all the major Black civil rights organizations supporting the struggle of the UFW. Most Native American activists of that era also joined in supporting the UFW’s movement.

Today, too, the silencing and invisibilization of subject

populations is unacceptable. The federal government, elected officials, the states, municipalities and other institutions that hold power over law enforcement must be confronted. The mass media must also be confronted: Silencing and invisibilization also take place as a result of where the lens is focused or where the microphones are placed. As the Zapatistas have proclaimed in their struggle: “Never again a world without us.” v Bio: Roberto Rodríguez, assistant professor in Mexican-American studies at the University of Arizona, is the author of Justice: A Question of Race and Our Sacred Maiz Is Our Mother among other books. Contact him at: xcolumn@gmail.com. Sources for this article can be obtained from lavoz@esperanzacenter.org

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

In immigration court, we have begged judges to review the custody of families who have been detained for many months, —up to 9 or 10 months, at present, for some. DHS argues that it must detain people who have been removed (deported) from the U.S. before, because people in this category have final orders of removal. That statement is just plain false: DHS always has the discretion, on a case-by-case basis, to release people on parole.

Moreover, women whom asylum officers have determined have “reasonable fear” of returning do not currently have “final orders of removal.” They would not be in court if they had final orders of removal! They are pursuing claims for “withholding of removal” and for protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). We also argue that Flores v. Reno requires the release of the children, and that the law and regulations allow for release of parents (even parents who have been deported before).

And we remind immigration judges that even “mandatory” detention does not mean mandatory forever. Indefinite detention is unconstitutional. While some federal courts have required review of even “mandatory” detention after a person has been locked up for 6 months, other courts have said that there is not a single fixed time when they must review detention. That decision, too, should be case-by-case. We argue that the 6-month rule was set in cases involving adults, and typically adults who had been convicted of certain delineated crimes. Six months may be the outside limit for adults—but it’s certainly far too long to wait for judicial review of children!

On March 30, several families who’ve spent close to eight months in Karnes asked an immigration judge to release them, making all of these arguments. They could have found no more effective advocate than Javier Maldonado. The judge acknowledged the compelling arguments for their release but decided that he did not have jurisdiction to do anything. (That night, women began their fast.)

It’s not that immigration judges don’t recognize that the situation is very, very bad. It’s that they are not “regular” judges but administrative law judges. I am privileged to practice immigration law before smart and good judges, but these immigration judges are not sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution. The are not empowered to say that detention in any given case is unconstitutional. Rather, they are only allowed to look at immigration law, the statute itself, as interpreted by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which is part of the Department of Justice, an executive agency. Unlike “regular” judges, immigration judges report to the Executive

Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which is part of the US Department of Justice, which is part of the executive branch of government. In other words, there is no separation of powers: immigration judges ultimately answer to the President. They are not members of the judicial branch of government.

On April 9, Professor Ranjana Natarajan, already busy trying to enforce the Flores settlement, and her students Julia Furlong, Seth Manetta-Dillon, and Sofia Meissner filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division. Maria Estela Marquez Marquez has been locked up in Karnes with her 3 daughters since August 5th. Jackie, Carmen, and Melissa marked their 11th, 14th, and 16th birthdays in immigration jail. DHS says they can leave, as soon as their mother pays a bond—a bond that the immigration judge and DHS say only DHS can set—and that DHS refuses to set.

Will a federal judge release this family? We don’t know. Stay tuned, but don’t passively wait for the answer. We do know this: the most effective way to seek social justice is through creativity (opening hearts), education (telling the truth, countering false assumptions and lies), and organizing. Legal challenges are not the solution: You, the organized y’all, are the answer.

Sing, paint, perform, write poetry. Teach. Assemble. Demand justice. v Bio: Virginia is a lawyer in Austin, TX who is, on a pro bono

11

Honduras y Ayotzinapa Vive

by Gordis

Soad Nicole Ham Bustillos

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

V

12

iolence from the state towards citizens has long been used as a way to control and eliminate dissidence.

It dates back way before the recent massacre of the 43 Normalista students of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero, MX . We know about this despite the media’s lack of mention of the thousands of disappearances in Mexico and beyond. For many Latino Americanos, we witness that—as opposition to authoritarian government intensifies—state actions and violence become more brutal and lethal. The San Antonio community remembered the realities of opposing the government when it hosted one of the survivors of the Ayotzinapa attack, recently. While the media and public focus on the Caravana 43—a caravan of parents, students, and relatives of the 43 disappeared students—more students, parents, journalists, and organizers around the world continue to disappear or are currently being murdered.

Shortly after the Caravana 43 left the state of Texas, four students in Honduras suffered at the hands of state violence with the youngest victim being a mere 13 years old. Remember these names because the media has already forgotten about them:

#SoadNicoleHamBustillos #DarwinJosueMartinezHernandez #ElvinAntonioGarciaLopez #DianaYareliMontoya In Honduras, like many other countries, anyone who opposes the ruling class or institution is punished economically, mentally, physically, and ultimately, with their lives. Four innocent adolescents were killed when only a month before, they had gathered to protest the unjust conditions of being a student in Honduras where the state would rather send in police than provide

them with basic necessities like desks and chairs. The police and, oftentimes, mercenaries disguised as cartels or gang members, do not discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you are a political party leader, a lawyer, a student, a child, a journalist, a mother or father, young, old, gay, straight, transgendered or lesbian. Many in Honduras still remember Soad’s ghastly screams “¡Puta Hey… Puta! ¡Ni Sillas Tenemos Hombre, Compren Sillas!” [Fuck, hey, we don’t even have chairs, man! Buy us chairs!] as she pushed herself against the iron railings screaming at the SWAT officers. Soad, Darwin, Elvin, and Diana had all participated in demonstrations as the student movement in Honduras picked up steam, but the more pressure the government felt, the stronger the need to rid themselves of their problems. On March 25th, authorities found 13-years-old Soad’s dead body in a sack near the bus terminal with clear signs of torture and strangulation. The day before Darwin, Elvin, and Diana had gathered near their High School as an automobile nearby began firing bullets as the students attempted to run away.

Darwin and Elvin died immediately with Diana managing to make it to a nearby hospital, passing away shortly after.

For Ayotzinapa, the attacks date back to September 26, 2014 when 43 students from the teachers’ school in Ayotzinapa disappeared. Up to this date, the government of Mexico has not been able to adequately explain the true whereabouts of the students despite countless attempts to appease the parents and relatives. Even with the support of Mexican and International organizations, the government continues to provide inadequate explanations. These government officials [includingVicente Fox, an ex-president of Mexico] urge the Ayotzinapa 43 parents and relatives to drop this issue and move on—as if losing a child or a brother does not constitute a significant loss.

Many of us refuse to forget. These students risked their lives in opposition to the cruel injustices and lack of resources for the students and people of Honduras and Mexico. The students of Ayotzinapa demonstrated for an increase in funds for their rural school that caters primarily to indigenous youth. At an historic demonstration in Tegucigalpa, Honduras the students protested against an educational reform forcing students to attend courses for an hour instead of the 45 minute increments already established. The students felt these reforms would force them to remain on campus until late causing many who rely on public transportation to face the dangers of kidnappings, robberies, or murders. Honduras is one of the countries with the highest murder rates in the world.

Political repression towards students with recent confrontations between state police and the discriminating nature of media coverage echoes that of other parts of Mexico and countries such as Panama. Students in Latin America face threats to their lives as they pack the streets protesting while students in the U.S. can pack legislative halls to protect House Bill 1403 or to demand the resignation of Alamo Colleges Chancellor Bruce Leslie without clear threats to their bodies or beings—what a privilege, indeed.

Just as the 43 Normalista students squared off against the government calling for better conditions, Soad, Darwin, Elvin, and Diana, too, called for accountability from the Department of Education and the government of Honduras. Unlike the students of Ayotzinapa, the bodies of the students of Honduras have been laid to rest, but their struggle will not be in vain. Just as the disappeared bodies of Ayotzinapa symbolize seeds of hope for the continued struggle of student movements, so do the lives of Soad, Darwin, Elvin, and Diana. v

Rudy Jr. & Irma B. Escobar, “Mr. & Mrs. Aztec Studio” In the tradition of hundreds of mom and pop small businesses scattered throughout the Westside, Rudy Escobar, Jr., and Irma Banda de Escobar operated the original Aztec Studio on S. General McMullen for over 40 years. During their 42 years of marriage, Rudy Escobar Jr. and his wife, Irma, had been separated from each other only three days. On December 1, 2014, the Escobars left their earthly abode together after a tragic automobile accident.

“Mr. & Mrs. Aztec Studio”, as they were fondly addressed, photographed many a wedding, quinceañera, and special events where they also photographed famous entertainers, politicos and sports figures including Juan Gabriel, Lucha Villa, Toña La Negra, Cantinflas, Bob Denver, Henry Cisneros, El Santo, the San Antonio SPURS and many more. Teresita Escobar, their son Rodolfo III’s wife, noted that their photography studio was a hub of the neighborhood: “Their doors were always open for all; people would come in to talk, connect and get support.” The Esperanza Center staff and buena gente extend our profound sympathies to the Escobar family, friends and widespread community. Their loving spirit and generosity will long be remembered. Que en paz, descansen.

Thank you to the University of the Incarnate Word Faculty Senate who made a recent donation to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in memory of Rudy and Irma Escobar. Dr. Gilberto Hinojosa, Teresita’s father, is a faculty member there in the Dept. of History.

The Esperanza Center buena gente and staff express our condolences to the family and community of Reynaldo G. Rios, Jr., who passed into spirit on April 5, 2014. Susana Segura, staffmember, wrote the following tribute: Rey was always very intentional about what he said. At an early-on march, I saw him squatting alone and asked, “Hey, Rey, what’s up?” He replied, “I just want to be a good person for my mom.” I nodded in simón-fashion. That was all we said that day. I first met Rey over 20 years ago as part of MEXA at SAC. I was heading up the PAC MEChA and had suffered public attacks from an anti-mujerista MEXista—I remember Rey apologizing for the guy’s behavior. I told him “you don’t have to apologize for him.” He responded, “Oh, but I do! That guy makes me feel dirty.” Rey defended my spirit within that organization and I prayed that this humble and gentle guerrero’s nature would rub off on other people in the group.

On April 5th, I dreamt of him. His soul-surfing left me thinking of him and when I opened my eyes, pensé—ya se esta despidiendo. I called him as soon as it got to a decent hour. My anima was hopeful that I could keep hearing his voice and laugh until I was gone from this earth. He suffered after his stroke 8 years ago, but when he would put on those feathers to danzar, all seemed well. Rey was one of those people you want around for the rest of your life because you knew it would make la lucha easier. My heart always knew that we’d be on the same side of any issue. His presence was good medicine.

My heart tries to be strong for his mother, but I know that she’ll be missing her baby. We’ll all miss this warrior, leader and teacher spirit guide. Let’s remember his light, his journey and direction and move forward as one—for the sake of our antepasados and our generations yet to come. —mexica tiahui— Susana Segura

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Reynaldo G. Rios, Jr.

13

The goals of The Big Give S.A. are to: INVEST strategically in San Antonio nonprofits. DRIVE the community forward through collective impact.

LEVERAGE giving with matching funds and prize incentives.

The Esperanza is participating in the BIG GIVE S.A. 24-Hour Day of Giving Challenge and we’re asking for your support! Make a donation to Esperanza on

Celebrate 24 Hours of Rainbow Giving on

GIVE OUT DAY 2015 3rd Annual National Day of LGBTQ Giving

www.TheBigGiveSA.org on Tuesday, May 5th!

Organizations will be awarded dollar prizes based on city-wide results and hourly results. We’ll upload donation stories & pictures on our social media throughout the day, May 5th, so tune in, drop by and donate!! If you don’t have a credit card, stop by and we can register your cash or check donation.

How can YOU help make The Big Give S.A. a success?

• Make a gift to Esperanza MAY 5.

• FOLLOW @BigGiveSA on FB & Twitter and Esperanza at:

Thursday, May 21st join Esperanza on our social media or find us at

www.giveoutday.org

@esperanzactr @esperanzacenter

Join Esperanza for a

Tweets

and

Treats

14

Tuesday, May 5th 4-7PM @ 922 San Pedro

* community meetings *

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Ice Cream Social

/EsperanzaPJC Become a social media champion for Esperanza and spread the word like crazy!

Amnesty International #127 For info. call Arthur @ 210.213.5919.

1st Tues. for volunteer orientation, 6pm, HFHSA Office @ 311 Probandt.

Bexar Co. Green Party: Call 210. 471.1791 or bcgp@ bexargreens.org

LULAC Council #22198, Orgullo de SA, meets 3rd Tues. @ 6:45pm @ Papouli’s (Meeting room), 255 E. Basse Rd. To join e-mail: info@lulac22198.org

Celebration Circle meets Sun., 11am @ Say Sí, 1518 S. Alamo.

Meditation: Weds @7:30pm, Friends Meeting House, 7052 Vandiver. 210.533.6767.

DIGNITY SA Mass, 5:30pm, Sun. @ St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 1018 E. Grayson St | 210.340.2230 Adult Wellness Support Group of PRIDE Center meets 4th Mon., 7-9 pm @ Lions Field, 2809 Broadway. Call 210.213.5919.

Energía Mía: (512) 838-3351 Fuerza Unida, 710 New Laredo Hwy. www.lafuerzaunida.org | 210.927.2294 Habitat for Humanity meets

NOW SA Chapter meets 3rd Wed’s. For time and location check FB/satx.now | 210. 802.9068 | nowsaareachapter@gmail.com Pax Christi, SA meets monthly on Saturdays. Call 210.460.8448 Proyecto Hospitalidad Liturgy meets Thurs. 7pm, 325 Courtland.

Metropolitan Community Church services & Sunday school @10:30am, 611 East Myrtle. Call 210.472.3597 Overeaters Anonymous meets MWF in Spanish & daily in English | www.oasanantonio.org | 210.492.5400.

People’s Power Coalition meets offers free Syphilis & HIV testing | last Thursdays | 210.878.6751 210.225.4715 | www.txsaaf.org.

PFLAG, meets 1st Thurs. @ 7pm, University Presbyterian Church 300 Bushnell Ave. | 210.848.7407.

Parents of Murdered Children, meets 2nd Mondays @ Balcones Heights Community Ctr, 107 Glenarm | www. pomcsanantonio.org.

SA Women Will March: www. sawomenwillmarch.org|(830) 488-7493 SGI-USA LGBT Buddhists meet 2nd Sat. at 10am @ 7142 San Pedro Ave., Ste 117 | 210.653.7755.

Shambhala Buddhist Meditation Tues. 7pm & Sun. Rape Crisis Center 7500 US 9:30am 257 E. Hildebrand Ave. | Hwy 90W. Hotline: 210.349.7273 210.222.9303. | 210.521.7273 Email: sgabriel@ S.N.A.P. (Survivors Network rapecrisis.com of those Abused by The Religious Society of Priests). Contact Barbara at Friends meets Sunday @10am @ 210.725.8329.

The Friends Meeting House, 7052 Voice for Animals: N. Vandiver. | 210.945.8456.

210.737.3138 or www.

S.A. Gender Association meets voiceforanimals.org 1st & 3rd Thursday, 6-9pm @ SA’s LGBTQA Youth meets 611 E. Myrtle, Metropolitan Tues., 6:30pm at Univ. Presby.

Community Church.

Church, 300 Bushnell Ave. | SA AIDS Fdn 818 E. Grayson St. www.fiesta-youth.org

Notas Notas YY Más Más

May 2015

The 33rd Annual Lowrider Festival takes place May 3rd from 10am to 7pm at Centro Cultural Aztlan, 1800 Fredericksburg Rd., featuring a lowrider competition, classic cars, música, food, and arts & crafts by local artisans. Admission: $7. Children under 12 free! See www.centroaztlan.org or call 210.432.1896.

The Dialogue Institute of the Southwest Dialogue Matters series features Dr. David D. Perlmutter speaking on “Is This the End of the Civilized World?: Religion, Speech, Journalism and Terrorism” on Friday, May 8, 2015 at the Raindrop Turkish House, 4337 Vance Jackson Rd. #203 (behind the car wash). See: www.thedialoginstitute.org or register at DialogueMattersSA.eventbrite.com Join a delegation to Mexico at the border in solidarity with maquiladora workers and Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s from May 29-31 organized by Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera/Austin so Close to the Border. Passport required.

Registration ends May 12th. Fee $325, scholarships available. Email: crand@ austincc.edu or visit www.atcf.org

Latinos in Heritage Conservation Summit: A National Dialogue takes place Friday, May 22nd and Saturday, May 23rd in Tucson, Arizona at the Hotel Congress.

Advocates dedicated to the preservation of Latino places and stories in the U.S. will come together to develop a vision/mission for Latino preservation. Visit: www. facebook.com/latinoheritageconservation The 2015 Critical Race Studies in Education Conference takes place at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville on May 27-29. Hosted by The Social Justice Program, it focuses on critical examinations of systemic racism

and resistance to it within the context of the shifting social, historical, cultural, and political realities in the U.S. and globally. www.crseassoc.org The Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at UT-Austin & The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa host El Mundo Zurdo 2015: Memoria y Conocimiento, Interdisciplinary Anzaldúan Studies—Archive, Legacy, and Thought May 27-30, 2015. Free, but registration is required. See www.utexas.edu/cola/ centers/cmas/anzaldúa-conference-2015/ el-mundo-zurdo-2015-co The Intelligence Studies Project of UTAustin announces an annual competition for the “Inman Award” that recognizes outstanding undergraduate or graduate research/writing on topics related to intelligence and national security. The winner receives $5000: two semifinalists receive $2500 each. Open to students in

2014-15 degree programs at accredited U.S. institutions. Deadline: June 30. See: www.strausscenter.org/inmanaward The MALCS Summer Institute Writing Workshop convenes July 29th to August 1st at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Those interested in participating must submit electronic copies of a letter of application and a final draft of a manuscript by June 19, 2015 at 5 pm to Josie.MendezNegrete@utsa.edu. http:// Check: www.malcs.org/summer-institute/ summer-institute-writing-workshop/ Save the Date! Texas State University College of Education hosts the 20th anniversary of The Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Awards conference and literature fair on Friday and Saturday, September 25th and 26th. For registration information check: www. riverabookaward.org

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

MASB, The Mexican American School Boardmembers Association offers scholarships to students entering college.

Applications due by noon, Thursday, May 21st. For applications: www.masba. info/pdf/MASBA_2015_Scholarship_app_ sm.pdf or call MASB, 210.478.7901.

Brief news items on upcoming community events.

Send items for Notas y Más to: lavoz@esperanzacenter.org or mail to: 922 San Pedro, San Antonio, TX 78212.

The deadline is the 8th of each month.

15

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

Join us for our monthly concert series

Noche Azul

Your vote is your voice!

de Esperanza

San Antonio mayoral elections:

Homenaje a Mariá Felix

SATURDAY MAY 16, 2015 8PM @ Esperanza | $5

Don’t Forget to Vote!

Early Voting Ends: Tuesday, May 5 Election Day: Saturday, May 9

Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

Mother’s Day Monday-Saturday

922 San Pedro San Antonio TX 78212 210.228.0201 • www.esperanzacenter.org

Non-Profit Org. US Postage PAID San Antonio, TX Permit #332

Haven’t opened La Voz in a while? Prefer to read it online? Wrong address?

TO CANCEL A SUBSCRIPTION EMAIL lavoz@esperanzacenter.org CALL: 210.228.0201

Mon, April 27- Sat, May 9 10am-5pm Free handcrafted ceramics made to honor all women who have nurtured and advocated for their families, friends and community

LA VOZ de ESPERANZA • May 2015 Vol. 28 Issue 4•

@ MujerArtes Casita 1412 El Paso St, (210) 223-2585

16

6th Annual

PASEO POR EL

Westside

Saturday nd

May 2 9am-3pm

@ Rinconcito de Esperanza 816 S. Colorado

free event for the whole family!

Join us in celebration of the

HISTORIC and CULTURAL PRESERVATION of San Antonio’s Westside!