Responding to a call by TUPOCC founding co-chair Renée Sánchez, and organized by USF 3L and NLG-SF Student Vice President, Aliya Karmali, about ten TUPOCC members and our friends attended the
Applied Research Center's
Facing Race: A National Conference in downtown Oakland, California this past weekend.
Attending plenary panels and workshops from Thursday's opening keynote by
Sherman Alexie to Saturday's closing plenary on Race and the Global Economy, TUPOCC was present and representing radical "queer, colored" legal activism, as we connected with our friends and allies from other organizations dedicated to interracial justice, as a critical dimension of the people's intergenerational movement toward social justice.
That last software, an open source package (as in GNU and the free software movement) seems particularly promising in helping us build TUPOCC's infrastructure beyond our previous and present attempts with
Yahoo! Groups, the
TUPOCC website and our
Legal Activists of Color blog. Liza particularly indicated that Drupal has a module that can realize my idea of literally mapping TUPOCC's membership,
by integrating Google Maps with a membership database that we could create based on the 141 folks in our Y! group.
It's been a while since I've focused my energies on non-law and non-text learning and culture making, and I miss photography and
film-making a great deal.
Melanie's prompts and questions were particularly stimulating and merit mentioning three of the most memorable:
- How do people create a racial justice culture to support social justice movement(s)?
- How do folks who have become artists inspire and materially support others who desire to make art but feel unable to do so vis-a-vis their racial subordination and other forms of oppression?
- How can artists serve as visionaries for the racially just world we want to create?
By themselves these questions may not seem revolutionary to some, but witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha share how they have made their lives and their art into living visions of racial, immigrant, gender and sexual justice was deeply inspiring.
I have lived, loved and worked hard to develop mi conciencia (a radical racial, political, sexual and spiritual awareness of my place in people's history), but to study law I stopped making photographs and films, dancing, journaling and writing poesÃa. While I tried to remain aware of the importance of "in xochitl, in cuicatl, flor y canto, flower-and-song" (art, poetry, dance, singing), my daily practice of making art basically stopped, as I focused on learning the law, reading critical legal scholarship and organizing students.
While directly serving the people as a community lawyer in West Oakland's
Homeless Action Center is a powerful practice of transgression against class norms and teaches me daily about solidarity across the many dimensions of power and identity (especially interracial and gender justice),
Creating a Culture of Racial Justice reminded me that I also need to regularly practice love-inspired art-making -- in order to feel joyful and strong enough to serve nuestra lucha por justicia para el pobre (our struggle for justice for the poor), as the old
La Raza Law Students Association slogan goes.
I will end by mentioning four mujeres with whom I spoke briefly on the last day of Facing Race.
I also caught a glimpse of Evelyn Sanchez of the
Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), whom I spoken with briefly at Friday afternoon's plenary on
The Race Debate: Challenging Colorblindness with Race Conscious Solutions.
I first read Betita's work while surviving law school: as I did at least once a semester, I left campus and got lost until I found myself in a bookstore, seeking words to nurture my spirit against the profound alienation of formal legal education.
In San Francisco's Mission District, I came across
De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, which introduced me to Betita's profound writings on mujerista and youth activism from New Mexico a California and across much of the twentieth century. I had most recently seen Betita across the table during
La Raza Centro Legal's 35th anniversary dinner earlier this year, and when I mentioned it, she told me that she recalled how I was sitting to her right and asked about my work in West Oakland and the meaning of my middle name, Tizoc.
As she carefully composed the brief inscription she wrote on the book's frontispiece, I waited, kneeling before the table and feeling ever more deeply the significance of our brief momento conjuntos. I thought of my dad y abuelitas and my mom y tÃas and knew I was exactly where I should be.
Finally, I had the fortune of seeing
Tommy Escarcega, another El Paso Tejana and long time community activist who was organizing in support of the voting rights of people in county jails this past election.
We first met four or five years ago when she knocked on the door of La Raza Law Students Association at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), saying she had heard there were Raza law students and asking for our support of her work in
Proyecto Common Touch, which she founded to protect the due process rights of convicted women on parole or in custody.
Since then I've seen La Tommy a few times over the years, like when her project was based at
Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland's Fruitvale District. We spoke briefly about her recent work on the voting rights of people in jail, and I introduced her to other TUPOCC xicanas as the conference ended.
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Muchismas gracias a Renée y Aliya for motivating and organizing TUPOCC to represent at Facing Race. We did good outreach work in identifying allies and nurtured relationships con nuestr@s compañer@s across the law / non-law divide.
As Betita wrote, "Thank you for your good work, ¡Adelante juntos!"
