Emancipated

In this episode, we discuss two youth movements for justice and equality with María Varela and Elia Asaf-Shalev, who visited us at the Bradley Center last April. Varela, a photographer and organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), shares her 1960s experiences in the American civil rights movement, highlighting the role of young people in securing voting rights through organizing and protests. Asaf-Shalev, author of the book Israel Black Panthers, explains how Moroccan Jews founded the Israeli Black Panthers in the 1970s to protest racial and ethnic inequalities in Israel. Join us to explore these stories of resistance and change.

This episode was produced by CSUN journalism students in the Multiplatform Storytelling J325 class, with production facilitated by instructor Marta Valier.

Script by Cindy Chavez, Chelsea Corry, Sulor Garretson, Krystal Guevara, Jay Kuklin, Brittney Ornelas, Tony Santos, and Marta Valier. Audio editing by George Camacho, Charlie Gonzalez, and Marta Valier. Special thanks to: Michael Akinfemi, Sophia Cano, Laura Gonzales, Kevin Khachatryan, Ariana Nassir, Melany Rizo, Ryan Romero, Breanna Small, Ayanna Smith, and Anthony Tedesco.

In this episode, Ángela Aurora, a Salvadoran journalism professor and visiting scholar at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, interviews Julia Gavarrete, a Salvadoran journalist working for the digital newspaper El Faro. They discuss, in Spanish, the growing criminalization of journalism in El Salvador, the use by the administration of the current Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele of spyware to monitor journalists' phones and computers, and more broadly about the present state of emergency that, in the name of the war on gangs, has justified the repeal of basic rights. Since April the state of emergency has allowed authorities to intercept communications, suspend constitutional rights, including freedom of assembly and due process, and has granted broad powers to arrest hundreds of people without evidence. In the last eight weeks, authorities claim to have made over 31,000 arrests. Aurora and Gavarrete explain how this lack of accountability and unchecked executive power is having particularly grim consequences for those living in the most impoverished communities.

This episode was produced by Marta Valier.

You can take a look at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s photos on El Salvador by Richard Cross here and you can watch two video clips of the Center’s oral history interview with Óscar Martínez, one of the founders of El Faro on our YouTube channel. One clip is about his experience covering politics for La Prensa Gráfica and why he abandoned the newspaper, and in the second clip, he explains how the Zetas operate in Mexico.

In this episode, Marta Valier discusses deportations of immigrants from the U.S., more specifically about the deportation of veterans, with Héctor Barajas, director and founder of the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana, Mexico, ACLU immigration attorney Andrés Kwon, and photographer Joseph Silva, author of the photographic exhibition Deported Veterans at the Museum of Social Justice of Los Angeles, which will stay open until July 17. 

Visit our webpage, CSUN Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, explore our Border Studies archive, and see some of the digitized images of the Julián Cardona Collection.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode we present a slightly edited version of a conversation with artist Alice Leora Briggs, as interviewed by professor José Luis Benavides and Marta Valier. In her newest book, Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon, she and Mexican journalist Julián Cardona, bring to the forefront life in the Mexican border city of Juárez during the Six Years of Death, from 2006 to 2012, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the so-called war on organized crime sending federal forces into the city and violence exploded. This book decodes and visually represents the new language that rose from a city at war, using Cardona's interviews, definitions, and Briggs's drawings, leaving a strong mark on a much disregarded war.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode Marta Valier talks to Giovanni Batz, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, about his upcoming book, titled The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Megaprojects and Ixil Resistance in Guatemala. He discusses the Ixil resistance, and the struggle against megaprojects in Guatemala analyzing topics like state-sponsored violence, the persecution of human rights defenders and activists, the negative impact of megaprojects on the indigenous communities, and the historical land inequality in Guatemala.

Visit the Bradley Center. You can also browse Richard Cross's photos of the Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, 1983, escaping genocide.

Visit the Center's digital collections and our curriculum website.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode, Marta Valier talks to Brandon Lien, a Cal State University Northridge (CSUN) student that has been working for the last year at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center on The Black Power Archive Oral History Project, a collection of oral histories documenting the African American experience in Los Angeles.  We wanted to hear from a student's perspective what it’s like for younger generations to work with oral histories archived at the Bradley Center. Lien, a film student in his third year at CSUN, shared with us three of his favorite audio clips he discovered working at the archive. One clip is from Kumasi, a member of the Slauson street organization The Slausons and author of the 1970 "Folsom Prison Strike and Bill of Rights Manifesto." A second clip is from an oral history with Watani Stiner, a member of the Black nationalist group US Organization. And the last clip is from Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of Juanita and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, leaders in the civil rights movement and close friends to Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and our Black Power Oral History Project.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

En este episodio, Marta Valier habla con Aída Silva Hernández, una académica de Tijuana que ha estudiado y trabajado con migrantes durante los últimos veinte años. Ella habla de cómo la ciudad fronteriza mexicana al sur de San Diego ha cambiado en el último siglo, de una ciudad donde los migrantes iban y venían cuando entraban y salían de los EE. UU. para encontrar trabajo, a una ciudad en la que se quedaban atrapados durante años, esperando. mientras trataba de solicitar asilo en los EE. UU. La espera, diseñada específicamente por las políticas de inmigración de EE. UU. para disuadir a los migrantes de ingresar legalmente al país, explica, es demasiado agotadora tanto para los migrantes como para la sociedad civil local que se compromete apoyarlos.

In this episode, Marta Valier speaks to Aída Silva Hernández, a scholar from Tijuana that studied and worked with migrants for the last twenty years. She talks about how the Mexican border town south of San Diego has changed in the last century, from a city where migrants would come and go as they entered and exited the U.S. to find work, to a city where they get stuck for years, waiting while trying to apply for asylum in the U.S. The wait, specifically designed by the U.S. immigration policies to deter migrants from entering legally into the country is, she explains, way too grueling for both the migrants and the local civil society that is committed to supporting them. En español.  

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and our border studies collection.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode Marta Valier talks to Amelia Frank-Vitale, an anthropologist that studies the migration of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico. She discusses the caravan of 2018, when strength came in numbers and more than 7,000 migrants joined forces to travel through Central America and Mexico forging a movement that reclaimed the migrants right to mobility in a region where the migration regime dictated by the U.S. forces them into clandestine, and deadly, movement.

Visit the Bradley Center website. 

Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

What are the structural impacts of the rise of corruption and fusion of politics and drug trafficking in Honduras? How do they impact local employment, land use, poverty, and hunger? What happens when the drug lords and the legally elected officials destroy the legal agriculture activity that the local rural population depends on? In this episode Marta Valier talks to Laura Gottesdiener, a correspondent for Reuters based in Mexico who wrote the special report on the links between corruption, criminality, drug trafficking, and migration in Honduras, explaining in practical terms way how these dynamics work at the local level. Here is the link to Gottesdiner's story:

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

Guillermo Márquez and Marta Valier talk with Douglas Oviedo, an Honduran writer, musician, and performer who wrote the book Caravaneros, a dramatization about his travel with the caravan of fall 2018, when around 7.000 migrants, mostly from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, joined forces to walk together reclaiming their right to pass through Central America and Mexico to travel to the United States. This episode is in Spanish. 

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.