Lánzate 2024

Lánzate 2024

Come to the political and cultural festival for Latinx changemakers who are building a future rooted in justice, liberation, and el Buenvivir.

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Month: December 2022

Our Time at Lánzate 2022 ⭐ Reflections from a Mijente Staffer

Posted on by Cris Batista

Hi! My name is Arianna Genis. I am the Director of Local Partnerships at Mijente. In early December, our entire team headed to Philadelphia to host Lánzate, a national political gathering and cultural festival for Latinx change makers. 

It’s la magia y sazón of Mijente was on fully display at #Lanzate2022. Hundreds of organizers, activists, community leaders, artists, content creators, and elected officials come together. We joined to deepen our understanding of what it takes to fight and win el Buenvivir for our communities and to celebrate each other through our cultura. 

Ali from the Mijente team leading a workshop about designing for movement.

Sessions y Conexiones

Only at Mijente can you lead a panel where local elected officials get real about the struggles and wins of building new pathways of community and movement participation in governance….And then walk over to the next room and be offered a limpia, along with a session on healing justice as incense burns in the background. 

Fellows who are part of Mijente’s Elected Official Fellowship. From left: NY Council Member Sandy Nurse, Boston Council Member At-Large Julia Mehia, Tucson Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz, Mijente staff – Arianna Genis, and Durham Council Member Javiera Caballero.

At Lánzate I reconnected and met amazing people who are fighting for a better world, like Leslie. I met Leslie in 2020 in a workshop where I was recruiting canvassers for our statewide Latinx voter mobilization campaign in North Carolina. She was skeptical and asked hard questions. I loved it. Over time Leslie joined the team, along with little Athena.

She hasn’t looked back since. Now, she’s leading canvass efforts that identify leaders and develop our community’s political capacity as an organizer with Siembra NC.

Leslie Arevalo, organizer with Siembra and Mijente member with her daughter Athena.

Some of My Highlights

Erika Lupita Nuñez, the Executive Director of Juntos, is turning mutual aid efforts into full blown organizing opportunities. Mijente member Salem Acuña aka DJ Cybersyn’s music is everything as is the history behind his DJ name. 

Then there’s Marco Fernandez who invented las farmacias populares in Chile and is an instrumental international leader in the growing movement of municipalismo.

Erika Guadalupe Nuñez from Juntos

I’ll stop there. All this to say, I’m renewed and ready to continue building a Latinx movement that is pro-black, pro-LGBTQ, pro-worker rights, pro-immigrants, y pro-gente. Stay tuned for everything we’ll be up to in 2023.

In the meantime, join me in building the political casita that is Mijente.

2022 Desde el Estado: Politics For & By the People

Posted on by Cris Batista

When we employ a Desde el Estado approach to our efforts, Mijente, Mijente PAC, and Mijente Support Committee (MSC) take the fight to our democracy and demand equity, fair representation, y mucho más. It’s about making interventions through the systems of government already in place, and working to influence the policies and people in power. It includes moving our gente into roles in government office and elected spaces, and keeping them accountable to our gente when they win.

Growth At All Levels

This year saw the largest expansion and development of Mijente and Mijente PAC electoral efforts including 18 candidate endorsements. We had electoral efforts and voter mobilization campaigns running in 9 states across the federal, state and local levels: in Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York, Massachusetts, and California. We also had the honor of supporting 5 Mijente members for office on all levels, and we succeeded in seating 3 pro-pueblo, Mijente endorsed candidates in Congress. We see this as just the beginning, and will continue to fight for our gente to have a seat at the table and power to make changes that will impact our everyday lives for the better. 

Fellowship for Local Elected Officials

For the last couple of years, we have successfully organized to put community leaders and organizers who share our values into government. And 2022 saw the first cohort of a Fellowship for Local Elected Officials! As part of the electoral work of MSC, we provided organizing support and educational resources to 10 Latinx sitting City Council members across the country. The fellowship is an opportunity for our compas to learn more about co-governance and how to build power with it for our communities.

To learn more about the 10 fellows, check out our post: here.

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2022 Contra el Estado: Demands of The People

Posted on by Cris Batista

When we use the Contra El Estado strategy, we create openings within the current system to challenge power. We expose the systems of oppression that are buried deep into the fabrics of our society and demand “No more”. We put our bodies, time, energy on the frontlines to speak up against injustices, from deportations to abuses of power.  

Futuro y Esperanza: Latinx Perspectives on Policing and Safety

This is the first study to collect official data capturing the specific and varying experiences of Latinx people with police violence. Together, we can use this collected evidence to target opportunities that will mobilize our gente on policing issues and inform our organizing, messaging and policy strategies.

#NRAGoAway

After the mass school shooting in Uvalde, TX, we collaborated on a campaign and protest action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention that was being hosted in Houston – just 3 days after the massacre. While our compas from Unemployed Workers United and FIEL Houston held the in-person action, Mijente spearheaded the digital protest efforts online. 

#NoTechForICE

Tech companies are building the tools used to surveil, incarcerate, and deport our communities. But our communities, together with students, librarians, tech workers, and allies, are fighting back. Since 2016, we’ve been calling on every tech company that works with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to immediately halt its support and contracts – which could result in a massive blow to the caging and deportation machine that is ICE.  

In 2022, we released Sabotaging Sanctuary: Exposing ICE Surveillance in Colorado, Tracked and Trapped: Experiences from ICE Digital Prisons, and hosted the Databroker Dragnet Webinar on librarian organizing. We joined in multiple protest actions across the country to demand no tech for ICE. To learn more about these efforts in detail, check out our post here: 2022 #NoTechForICE wrapped.

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2022 Sin el Estado: Power to & by The People

Posted on by Cris Batista

Much of our lives are controlled by the relationship between the state and the market, but through autogestión we take control by building alternatives that better support our communities. The sin el estado strategy is about our ability to create alternatives to what the state and the market provide, and if/when it works, we get the state to fund our project over their systems (that already don’t work for the benefit of most of us). To work sin el estado is to create systems without the state, outside of state control and market logic.

Here are some of the 2022 Sin el Estado Projects, possible through Mijente Support Committee (MSC): 

El Instituto de Formación Política 

Our gente need space and support to expand our range of how we participate in making change in our communities and beyond. MSC is doing this through el Instituto, an online platform that provides online and offline courses that provide popular, cultural, and political education. This project is part of our work of remembering and unlearning, always acknowledging the history we carry with us. It’s a space where we can intentionally grapple with the examples history provides us, as well as looking at global, present-day examples to shape our learning.

Tech Wars 

This 5-part course is for anyone interested in learning about the dark side to the expansions of big tech in our society and how we can expose tech’s outsized role in policing and immigration enforcement. The series covers data economy, digital policing, weaponized technologies, and so much more. 

Un Verano Sin El Estado

It’s important to stay curious about what kind of cooperativas, comunes, y comunidades we can build and sustain when we look to the power of our gente y historias. These trainings provide resources to learn the ins and outs so our gente can make tangible progress on mutual aid efforts.

Erotic is Power

This is a 101 workshop that weaves together concepts found in Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” with basic tantric practices. Through the course, participants with understand better how to connect with their body, and how to tap into the erotic as a source of power and strategy. 

Tejiendo El Futuro: Organizing Trainings 

How we come together to create change is an ongoing practice. These trainings aim to build a shared analysis of the organizing landscape and train our Latinx communities on the fundamental skills needed to organize. These are efforts towards long-term base building in order to build people and political power to make change happen. 

La Vida Local

La Vida Local is an initiative to resource and support groups that are building power without the state through small grants. We also see it as an opportunity to map out the different places where this work is happening — within and beyond the Mijente eco-system so that we can better support our gente. 

In 2022, MSC provided 9 grants to grassroots organizations and collectives doing sin el estado work in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico that are working to build community autonomy for our gente.

2022 La Vida Local Grantees: 

  • Traditional Music Talleres (Lynn, MA): Building community power around youth, music, and education.  
  • Proyecto Gaia (Puerto Rico): Building community power around food/farming, education, and food security and access.  
  • FUGA (Tucson, AZ): Building community power around transportation/accessibility, sustainability
  • CRECEN (Houston, TX): Building community power around women, education, training, and technical support, political advocacy, and pushing back against patriarchal violence.  
  • The Buford Highway People’s Hub (Georgia): Building community power around youth, political education, community resources, and learning pods.  
  • Divest/Invest RGV (McAllen, TX): Building community power around police accountability, combating anti-Blackness, and exposing police violence/oppression, education. 
  • Mirror Trans Beauty Collective (New York, NY): Building community power by empowering and resourcing transgender and transgender-nonconforming people and  offering cosmetology education and training. 
  • Barrio Restoration (Tucson, AZ): Building community power around neighborhood clean ups and community gardening and planting.
  • Huerto Escaleras (Puerto Rico): Building community power around experiential education, agriculture and farming, youth workshops, and food conservation.

#NoTechForICE Wrapped: Using the Force in 2022

Posted on by Cris Batista

We started the year on a mission to build the force against surveillance and policing in the digital war. Tech Wars is a virtual course featuring organizers, professors, and movement leaders from all over the country and available on El Instituto, our online movement education center. From February to April, people tuned in to Tech Wars to discuss and learn more about data, technology, and enforcement and what it means for our gente.

Our Efforts

From URL to IRL, this year, we continued to raise the alarm about the cozy relationship between data broker companies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A wave of organizing, lawsuits, and investor actions now face Thomson Reuters and RELX because of their complicity with ICE and CBP:

  • In April, Thomson Reuters agreed to a review of its contracts with ICE for possible human rights violations following two years of investor action, supported by Mijente.
  • That same month, we released a research report showing how ICE explicitly contracted with RELX for its data broker services to skirt sanctuary protections that were increasingly limited data sharing between local governments, law enforcement agencies, and ICE. In jurisdictions where police are prevented from cooperating with ICE, like Denver, where we first showed this was happening, ICE was instead getting jail booking and other data straight from RELX, going around sanctuary laws.
  • At the beginning of the summer, alongside our partner Just Futures Law, we released documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request showing that ICE agents had searched LexisNexis (the main tool provided to ICE by RELX) more than 1.2 million times in just a seven month period—a massive dragnet that targeted people across the country. It was the first time we could show how often ICE was using data brokers to target people.
  • In June and July, librarians and advocates targeted RELX at two major library conferences in Washington, D.C., and Denver, calling on RELX to cut its contracts with ICE and gathering hundreds of signatures for a petition targeting the company. More than 2,500 librarians, law students, and legal professionals are now calling on RELX to cut its ICE contract.
  • At the end of July, we published an op-ed in Truthout speaking directly to fellow organizers. It detailed how ICE agents use LexisNexis to pick people up outside jails and courthouses, going step-by-step to show how ICE agents can know when people are being released from jail even if sanctuary policies prohibit that kind of data sharing.
  • In August, we joined our partners Just Futures Law and Organized Communities Against Deportation to sue RELX in Illinois. They violated state privacy laws and the civil rights of citizens across the state by creating massive databases and selling them to ICE — without any consent from residents.
  • This November, Mijente joined The Center On Race And Digital Justice, Just Futures Law, Media Justice, and The Immigrant Defense Project in demanding that the Federal Trade Commission hold data broker and data analytic companies accountable with new regulations to protect Black, brown, and immigrant communities from abusive surveillance practices. 

We wrapped up 2022 by taking Tech Wars and all our lessons learned this year to #Lánzate2022, Mijente’s political and cultural festival for Latinx change makers. We hosted Tech Wars in-person for the first time in Philadelphia where we brought all five classes to life together.

Community members, investors, academics, and organizers across the country now know that big data and technology companies play a critical role in supporting ICE’s deportation regime, whether under a Democratic president or a Republican one. These companies have only one option: they must cut their ICE contracts and stop facilitating a surveillance dragnet against immigrant communities. And we’ll keep organizing until they do.

#NoTechForICE #ChingaLaMigra