Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win: TONATIERRA and The Catalyst Project

This podcast highlights the work of two organizations as we speak with Tupac Enrique Acosta about TONATIERRA in Phoenix, Arizona and Chris Crass about the Catalyst Project in San Francisco, California.

TONATIERRA is continuing the fight against racial profiling and the denial of the right to education for Chicano/Mexicano and Indigenous peoples in Arizona. Tupace Enrique speaks about some of the recent education and campaign initiatives of the organization to resist these human rights violations. For more information on TONATIERRA visit http://cdb-tonatierra.blogspot.com/.

The Catalyst Project just released an anti-racist educational manual called "Catalyzing Liberation Toolkit: Anti-Racst Organizing to build the 99% Movement". Catalyst Project co-founder, Chris Crass, speakes about the toolkit and the potentiality of the Occupy or 99% movement. For more information on the Toolkit visit http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2012/02/anti-racist-organizing-to-build-the-99-movement/.

Tupac Enrique Acosta is a Judge of the First Nations International Court of Justice, Tupac is a founding member of the community-based organization of Indigenous Peoples TONATIERRA in Phoenix, Arizona. A long time researcher and activist in the field of indigenous international law, he has served as representative of Izkalotlan Pueblo to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva, Switzerland and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. As Yaotachcauh of Tlahtokan Nahuacalli, he serves as custodian and ambassador of the Nahuacalli, Embassy of the Indigenous Peoples in Phoenix, Arizona. As international observer, he has traveled to areas of armed conflict in Chiapas, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Canada and across the US to monitor and report on the violations of civil, human and territorial rights of the Indigenous Peoples in their ongoing struggles against colonialism.

Chris Crass is a longtime organizer working to build powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective liberation. Throughout the 1990s he was an organizer with Food Not Bombs, an economic justice anti-poverty group, strengthening the direct action-based anti-capitalist Left. As part of the global justice movement, he helped start the Catalyst Project in 2000, and was part of the leadership collective for eleven years. He is now a stay at home Dad, involved in the Occupy movement, and working on his book “Towards Collective Liberation: anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis, and movement building strategy”. He lives in Knoxville, TN with his partner and their son, River.