Description:

"No estan solos, you are not alone: Resisting U.S. Immigration Detention from the Inside-Out"

The U.S. detention system is built upon an illiberal edifice that routinely denies due process and legal protections to Latinx immigrants. How can community organizations effectively challenge such an apparatus? Using two years of ethnographic observation, this paper focuses on Washington state's La Resistencia, a community organization dedicated to protesting the human rights violations committed at Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). Using a combination of institutional (e.g., lobbying) and extra-institutional (e.g., protests and hunger strikes on the inside) means, La Resistencia has worked with NWDC detainees to raise the issue of the detention center’s brutality to statewide prominence, successfully pushing legislative measures to close the prison. The key to their success has laid on politically organizing collaterally impacted women - namely, the romantic partners and family members of those men behind bars. In seizing these women's positionality, La Resistencia has effectively created a "hybrid" movement community bridging the inside and the outside, transforming experiences of subjugation into fodder for empowerment. The case of La Resistencia yields significant insight into the study of anti-carceral movements, immigrant organizing, and Latina/x Politics.

About the Speaker:

Ramón Garibaldo Valdéz studies social movements, U.S. Latinx politics, and immigration. His current book project is entitled, “La lucha de cada día: Immigrant Justice Organizing and the Political Remaking of Illegality in the U.S.” Based on three years of ethnographic research, it centers immigrant justice organizations, led by and representing undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, as key actors in American democracy. It chronicles and analyzes immigrant-led community organizing, exploring the strategies employed by these communities to advance welcoming social policies, create long-lasting political infrastructures, and even organize inside detention centers.

Ramón earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil degrees from Yale University’s Political Science Department, and a B.A. in political science from Johnson C. Smith University, a Historically Black College in North Carolina. Ramón is a passionate advocate of activist research, ethnographic methods, and grounded theorizing in the study of politics.