Treescapes

We’ve each been looking to the trees for a long time. One of us painting, the other writing, with, by the trees. In the middle of the city and its noise, finding the branches. Standing, inquiring, returning. Why the trees, how we belong to each other, is a question worth asking again and again. These paintings and poems are part of an ongoing conversation, of many layers, of many trees, of what we lose and find under their canopies, in blooms, in dirt & seasons. What walking among the trees has taught us is that every art is an invitation to the mutuality of life. Through paintings it means creating an opening of treescapes and orchards for people to become a part of & inhabit. & every exchange of poetry is a welcoming to community, listening, growth

Sanctuary Says

In 2018, the New School Working Group on Expanded Sanctuary collaboratively organized a series of workshops in New York to reflect on the question of sanctuary as a conceptual and practical starting point for cross-coalitional politics, including its tensions and risks. This short piece is an attempt to bring together the sentiments expressed in those workshops by activists, organizers, students and academics focusing on anti-racist, pro-migrant, and pro-Indigenous struggles, in a form that engages sanctuary as an ongoing question

Bifurcated homeland and diaspora politics in China and Taiwan towards the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia

The conventional literature on diaspora politics tends to focus on one ‘homeland’ state and its relations with ‘sojourning’ diaspora around the world. This paper examines an instance of ‘bifurcated homeland:’ the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 1949. The paper investigates the changing dynamics of China's and Taiwan's diaspora policies towards Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. They were affected by their ideological competition, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and the ‘indigenisation’ of Taiwanese identity. Illustrating such changes through the case of the KMT Yunnanese communities in Northern Thailand, this paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, we should understand relations through the lens of interactive dynamics between international system-level changes and domestic political transformations. Depending on different normative underpinnings of the international system, the foundations of regime legitimacy have changed. Subsequently, the nature of relations between the diaspora and the homeland(s) transformed from one that emphasises ideological differences during the Cold War, to one infused with nationalist authenticity in the post-Cold War period. Second, the bifurcated nature of the two homelands also created mutual influences on their diaspora policies during periods of intense competition

Del congreso a los suburbios: iniciativas locales para el control de la migración en Estados Unidos

Este artículo analiza las implicaciones de las iniciativas de ley y ordenanzas locales para controlar la migración que se han propuesto en numerosos estados y ciudades de Estados Unidos ante el fracaso de la reforma migratoria en el Congreso. La primera parte describe las facultades de las autoridades locales y estatales para garantizar el cumplimiento de las leyes migratorias, así como los cambios en la legislación e instrumentación de estas medidas a partir del once de septiembre. La segunda parte examina casos recientes de ordenanzas e iniciativas de ley propuestas por gobiernos estatales y asambleas locales para enfrentar el crecimiento de la población de inmigrantes indocumentados. Finalmente, propongo una reflexión sobre la relevancia de esta situación en el contexto del debate más amplio sobre la reforma migratoria en Estados Unidos, los retos que representa para el gobierno mexicano y la posibilidad de aprovechar la labor de varios actores que participan en el debate a nivel local promoviendo medidas a favor de los inmigrantes frente a esta ola anti-inmigrante

Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests