Vol. 11 Presenter: Allegra Love
Presenting
Movement is Not Moral
Summary
My presentation is about the US/Mexico Border as a boundary and the devastation that the American fascination and fear with that boundary has wrought. For the last decade I have been working with asylum seekers on both sides of the southern border and inside of our deadly ICE detention centers. I have witnessed human suffering that most would not believe occurs at the behest of our government under unwatchful eyes of our lawmakers and leaders. Yet the ghastly mistreatment of migrants and refugees persists and worsens in part because of our deeply held conviction that the border as a boundary, no matter how invisible a political construction, is so holy to our country that we are entitled to torture anyone who breaches it.
How did we get here? What can we do to change this? Where can we begin with radically shifting our understanding of this border and all borders to chart a different course in our national and global responses to the perfectly human phenomena of migration?
Bio
Allegra Love lives in Santa Fe and works extensively as an activist and attorney in the borderlands and detention centers of New Mexico and West Texas. She is the founder of Santa Fe Dreamers Project, a legal services non-profit where she was the director for many fun and challenging and heartbreaking years. Now she is working with the El Paso Immigration Collaborative, a group of advocates hell bent on not just representing people detained in this region but also taking down the entire system of immigration detention because it is terrible and unnecessary. She recently received the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Fellowship, which is pretty exciting. Aside from those professional pursuits, she loves country music and doing all the amazing things one gets to do when you live in Northern New Mexico.