“I grew up biculturally in Arizona. It was very common for people to cross the border five to six times a day. I’m sorry we don’t have that openness that we used to have,”* said ASU School of Transborder Studies director Irasema Coronado, during a panel at last Saturday’s Zócalo and Universidad de Guadalajara program “Are the U.S. and Mexico Becoming One Country?” The event was part of the Spanish-language LéaLA literary festival and book fair at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown Los Angeles.

Panelists included artist, curator, and cultural consultant Anita Herrera and Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León sociology professor Víctor Zúñiga. The program was moderated by Puente News Collaborative’s executive editor and correspondent Alfredo Corchado.

The conversation moved past the vitriol around immigration in contemporary political debate and looked at what unites the U.S. and Mexico. The panel spoke of the ties that bind the two countries—through migration, work, family, culture, language—and shared ways people themselves can serve as bridges for cross-border exchange.

Obvious connections bind the U.S. and Mexico to one another, the group observed. The two countries are geographic neighbors, and parts of the U.S.—like Los Angeles—were once part of Mexico. Mexico is the U.S.’s primary trading partner. Mexico also has the second largest number of citizens living abroad, after India— many of whom are in the U.S.

Despite this, there is still polarization, Corchado said. So how can culture fight back against it, and change the climate between the two countries? he asked.

“I think that culture transcends borders,” Herrera said. Born and raised in Huntington Park, California, Herrera was inspired to start her “Diaspora Dialogues” art series after she moved to Mexico City in 2018. The project consists mostly of experiential art installations. One such installation was set up at Saturday’s event and celebrated a family backyard party typical of her upbringing. It consisted of displays of old family photos, tacos, music, and the specific balloon arches and tables customary at those events. In the series, she wanted to share her specific culture, her Los Angeles, and open a space to discuss what connects, and disconnects, Mexicans and the diaspora.

“The diaspora exists because of an imaginary line,” Herrera said. Though she and her friends in Mexico City often listened to the same music and watched the same novelas, they were clearly not from the same country. Friends and family in Mexico called her “la gringa,” a name she did not like. She recalled struggles to obtain her Mexican tax identification number and her “papeles,” to learn more Spanish, and assimilate into Mexico City culture.

“I’ve learned a lot and unlearned a lot,” she said. “In the U.S., we are taught to be more selfish and individualistic. I’ve learned a new way to live.”

Zúñiga, the sociologist, offered the example of the “0.5 generation,” those who lived in the U.S. (many of them born there) and then moved to Mexico in the earlier part of this century, who are the subject of his book. This generation’s unique experiences and perspectives, as American and Mexican, inspire Zúñiga to believe a better relationship between the two countries is possible, he said.

“These children are much more than just bilingual individuals, these children are binational” and also bicultural, he said, having learned “to move between worlds, rituals, and norms that rival each other.”*

“To be bicultural,” Zúñiga further defined, “requires you to feel at home in the U.S. and equally at home in Mexico”*—something he and many migrants cannot claim. So, he asked, what impact does this 0.5 generation have on their communities? How are they adapting, and how is Mexico adapting to their presence?

Part of the reason some families move back to Mexico is because of immigration issues, like deportation. These families do not want to live separately. For Zúñiga, when families make the decision to stick together and move back to Mexico in the face of state policies they are defending themselves against separation.

Coronado offered a different perspective on those families, highlighting that many of this generation that moved back to Mexico are angry. They feel alienated and estranged in their new schools. They grew up imagining their lives on the football team or going to prom, and their lives have been changed radically. Many state a desire to return to the U.S. when they become adults.

Zúñiga said his research shows the situation appears to differ by region. At schools located closer to the border, in, for example, Zacatecas, his work has shown that 99% of students asked if the American-born students were similar to them said “yes.” The same question posed to students in Oaxaca and Puebla resulted in only 20% affirming the similarities. That “anti-Yankee” sentiment is regional, it demonstrated.

In so many ways, the border is a model for the larger countries, said Coronado, who herself grew up moving between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. People move across the border for work, for doctor visits, and for medicine, she observed. Border towns exhibit an interdependency that can serve as a model for both countries on “how to get along, respect each other, have a harmonious relationship.”*

*This quote was translated live from Spanish to English by on-site interpreters.

The post What Unites Mexico and the U.S. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I immigrated, 34 years ago, I was a toddler brought to the United States by my parents from our native El Salvador. A year ago, I immigrated again, becoming a Salvadoran American living in the State of Israel.

This is my second time learning a new culture, language, and rules. And it’s been entirely different.

As a child, I quickly integrated, took part in the school system, and made friends. Joining English-speaking society didn’t feel like work. It was my environment, my home, my life.

Today, as an adult, it’s taken me some time to get my bearings, and to adjust to the culture and norms in Israel. I also have a new perspective on my parent’s journey into American culture. I have started to embrace lessons from their American acculturation to help me overcome the challenges I am experiencing today.

My husband and I decided to emigrate from Los Angeles to the state of Israel, his birthplace, because we wanted to give our boys independence to roam free without typical city concerns. Despite the heavy L.A. traffic, a typical concern was getting to scheduled activities on time. We had to drive both boys everywhere. Today, our kids ride their bikes to get to activities independently. It’s a small, yet life-changing action that teaches them responsibility and accountability, two things my husband and I value. We also wanted quality time with my husband’s parents.

We moved to a kibbutz, a rural communal settlement, near the Golan Heights. At first, in the summer months, Israel felt carefree and exciting. The fall gave way to bountiful colors. This visually striking scenery encouraged fresh adventures and sparked motivation to enjoy every bit of the experience. Then winter rolled in, and the cold weather, gloomy days, and frustration robbed the happy feelings of summer and fall. Disorientation and uneasiness followed me.

At first, I didn’t understand why. Soon, I realized it was because the initial excitement of the move had faded away. Eventually, I understood that the feelings were the beginning signs of culture shock, and a typical trajectory of cultural adaptation for people subjected to an unfamiliar culture, set of attitudes, and a way of life.

For the first time in my life, I was experiencing immigration as my parents had when they journeyed to the U.S. in 1989. When they arrived, being in a new country, with a new set of rules, created an emotional rollercoaster for them. My parents faced similar emotions because of two significant challenges. First, they did not have legal documentation to work. Second, finding work took longer than they anticipated, which caused our family to go through a financial crisis. Throughout those early years, our family struggled financially. My travails weren’t exactly the same, but the challenges somehow felt familiar. It was surreal.

For example, in Israel, little things became hard for me—such as driving. Israel’s two-lane country roads take you through beautiful nature with views of farms and free-range livestock, but they require patience. Getting stuck behind one slow-moving vehicle or semi-trailer truck can quickly turn your hour-long drive into a dreadful slog. Unlike the States, where roads have passing lanes to let slow-moving vehicles give way to others, here, the only option when you’re stuck behind someone is to speed up, cross into the oncoming lane, and pass them. Locals execute this maneuver at almost unimaginable speed, putting themselves and everyone near them in danger. Israel’s cities have a lively European-like vibe, but their roads can be tight, and their aggressive drivers make even the most confident American driver feel unsafe and anxious. At times, it seems like disregarding rules is the rule.

Customer service is not a priority in Israel, or at least not in my area. There have been times when I feel like I am both a customer and an employee. For instance, if I want to purchase an item, but it doesn’t have a scan code, I need to make sure I find it, because it’s not the cashier’s responsibility to find it for a customer, and there isn’t a system yet in place to facilitate that aspect of the shopping experience. Experiencing this scenario a few times while waiting in line can easily become frustrating. Navigating the school system has been tough, too. It has its own norms that I didn’t quite understand when I tried to engage with my children’s learning. I had been an involved parent at our Los Angeles school, and I felt left out of matters at my kids’ new school in Israel. I was further agitated by a wide range of unreasonable and inconvenient rules. For example, Israel limits mail-order purchases to $75 U.S., subjecting anything more valuable to a hefty fee to cover the expense of a mandated security inspection. This inflexible measure is supposed to assure safety, as Israel prioritizes and values security above anything else. I found it too annoying to accept.

There are days when I wonder why I moved. Why did I choose to replace comfort with the uncomfortable? Then I remember that travel, new experiences, and being comfortable with the uncomfortable have always been part of my personality, my true persona. I see my boys happily integrating into a community that has accepted them and embraced them wholeheartedly. In these moments, I recall the ease I felt when I moved from El Salvador to the U.S.—and I remind myself how much effort my parents exerted, over a long period of time, to feel at home in the U.S.

My parents chose to overcome their personal frustrations. They took action. They attended an English class at the local community college, and they started to use English as they looked for work that would help them integrate into the culture of Los Angeles. They became solid English speakers and established career goals. Today, my dad works for the city of Los Angeles, and my mother is currently caring for her health.

I’ve decided to follow my parents’ example and take action. I started to practice Hebrew with locals and have committed to learning the language daily. I am joining community events to connect with others who have had to adapt and have had similar experiences. I am volunteering at the kibbutz’s cultural events, La Leche League Israel, and participated in a cool archaeological project this summer to connect with native Israelis and kibbutz members. I am choosing to drive without looking in the rear-view mirror, focusing on my driving and safety rather than the behavior of others. I choose to stay calm despite the passive-aggressive drivers surrounding me.

The emotions of cultural adaptation are intense. My parents managed it reasonably well. I aspire to do the same. Overcoming challenges to become part of a new culture is a choice, every day.

In the end, Israel is a melting pot, a multicultural country, just like the United States—and becoming aware of similarities between the two places is helping me move in the right direction.

I’ve been asked about safety in Israel, especially considering all the bad news about internal struggles and violence here. I lived in Watts, Compton, East Los Angeles, and Lincoln Heights for most of my Southern California childhood and teenage years. To afford rent, we moved a lot—and we didn’t have much choice but to live in areas with shootings, domestic violence, and gang-related activity. At night, I often felt scared and unsafe. However, during the day I was carefree, out and about with friends riding bikes or rollerblading. As I grew up, I started noticing the dangers around me, realized my neighborhood was not a place to thrive, and found motivation to get ahead and not look back. This chapter in my American life came with its own obstacles to overcome to move toward a sense of safety.

Living in Israel, there is always the potential for a neighboring country or internal conflict to wreak havoc. The difference is that here, a common threat brings unity and a shared goal: to keep Israel alive and thriving. This purpose has led to years of security planning and disaster preparedness. There is always a plan, and we all know about it. We all have a Mamad, a protected space in our homes, if the time calls for its usage. This brings me a feeling of safety I have never felt before. I’m not naïve—I know the potential risks that come with living here at the kibbutz—but still feel safer than I ever did growing up. The current political situation in Israel may concern many people, but I choose not to take either side and generally don’t participate in political matters. Regardless of the problems that surround me, I still feel safe.

Repeat experiences of moving between cultures and absorbing the surroundings—my own, and my parents’—have prepared me to find home wherever I am. Making a happy life here as a Salvadoran-American-turned-Israeli is a balancing act between cultures, but it’s possible. This summer, I celebrate a year of full immersion into a culture that is showing me how to be a better citizen of the world, no matter where I go.

The post Three Generations, Two Immigrations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

American media covers only two types of the 7 million-plus immigrants who have left Venezuela in the past decade.

The first consists of the refugees and asylum seekers who walked across the border after perilous journeys through South and Central America, pressing their luck in a country with ever-increasing immigration restrictions. Last fall, Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott turned the plight of nearly 50 of these Venezuelan immigrants into a cruel political theater when they loaded them in buses and planes to move them outside of their states. Neither worried about the political cost of using Venezuelan migrants as political props—and that’s in part because of the second group of immigrants from my country.

These Venezuelans got to America because they had the money and resources to hire a lawyer to cut through the red tape, validate their college degrees, and find a good enough job after some hardships and effort. In the U.S., many of them have quickly become part of a bloc of older, wealthier, more established, voting Venezuelans. This group seems to find the desperation of the first group to be alien and hard to empathize with.

Why has such a chasm opened up in the Venezuelan diaspora? And what does it mean for the country they left behind, and the country where they are building new lives? On one hand, it’s tempting to argue that class, privilege, and assimilation play bigger factors in defining migration than we have traditionally been led to believe. On the other hand, there’s the risk of jumping from one false dichotomy to another, falling into generalizations, and robbing different diasporas all over the world of their own individual stories and realities.

I can only speak from my own experience as a Venezuelan.

How, rather than empathizing with the masses fleeing from the same social, financial, and political crises that forced them to also leave their native home, many of the generally wealthier, more established Venezuelans are applauding and supporting punitive actions against their fellow countrymen.

How more than a few obsess over what private university you went to, or which gated community you lived in back in Caracas. In many cases, they would rather see similarities with those in power—perhaps as they once were or aspired to be back home—than with other immigrants trying to rebuild their lives in a new, foreign land. Indeed, the experience of being forced to move to a new country reinforced the mindset of mourning a lost country instead of encouraging reflection on past mistakes.

I’ve heard U.S.-based colleagues describe how there’s a subset of Venezuelans abroad that find support and justification for their views in right-wing populism and almost seem to take glee when bad things happen to average Venezuelans back home. They talk as if living under Chavismo—with rampant inflation, crumbling infrastructure, and authoritarian government—was divine punishment. They share, too, a generalized hopelessness about Venezuela’s future, blaming the bipartisan liberal democracy that ruled the country from 1958 to 1999 for populism, clientelism, and the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution. Taken together, it all begs the question: What do they miss about Venezuela, exactly? The country that was, or who they were back home?

Many of these Venezuelans push a sort of personal mythology that seems to be common in many assimilated minority groups: I’m here because I earned it, because I worked hard, I studied, and nobody helped me. Those coming behind me? They want a shortcut, or even to walk the same path I walked? They don’t deserve it.

Never mind that in many situations there was help, privilege, and luck involved. Burning bridges seems the preferred choice over building them.

Venezuela’s mass exodus has been going on for almost a decade now with virtually no sign that things will improve. Nations across Central and North America are enacting new policies that attempt to slow down the influx of migrants from my country, which means those with fewer resources are facing even more closed doors than ever before. It’s only exacerbating the gap between the refugees on foot, and those with money and resources.

I wish I could offer solutions or alternatives to this current situation, but I don’t have any. Like many of my fellow citizens, I’m tired and trying to make a semblance of a life in a foreign country (in my case, Spain), hopelessly feeling like I’m lagging behind locals of my age while trying to do my best to take care of my loved ones back home.

A few months ago, I went to a screening of a recent documentary on Rómulo Betancourt, the two-time Venezuelan president who some regard as “the father of Venezuelan democracy.” He spearheaded Venezuela’s first free elections in the 1940s, fought a military dictatorship in the 1950s, attempted an agrarian reform in the 1960s, and was part of the party that nationalized oil in the 1970s. However, he was also a sectarian with a spotty human rights record. The collapse of the inflexible two-party system he established brought about the rise of Hugo Chávez.

My maternal grandparents credit Betancourt for helping them leave behind the impoverished countryside for a life of middle-class comfort and opportunity in Maracay, Venezuela’s fifth largest city, and my hometown. To me, the question of whether Betancourt was a deeply principled reformer forced to make concessions or a pragmatic opportunist consolidating his power is key to understanding today’s Venezuela. So I had high hopes for the documentary.

But to my dismay, its scant analysis felt superficial. Instead, the documentary spent what felt like a disproportionate amount of time focused on the filmmaker’s childhood. I saw the movie here in Madrid, which has become a hub of Venezuelans abroad, along with Miami and Lima. What resonated most for my fellow audience members seemed to be references to some preppy private Catholic school I’d never heard of. To add insult to injury, one of the speakers after the screening praised the documentary for reflecting a childhood anyone in Venezuela could relate to. I felt so lonely in the middle of a crowd that day.

As the Venezuelan diaspora grows around the globe, the gaps among us—of geography, time, class—will deepen. I can’t help but wonder if the meanings of what our country is, was, or could be will continue to move further away from one another as well, until one day we’ll no longer recognize ourselves as coming from the same land.

The post A Tale of Two Venezuelan Diasporas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At long last, we reached the wall. Its glinting metal and sharp wire stood in stark contrast to the greens and golds of the Polish forest in autumn. And its towering presence transported me to another wall: the tall steel pillars that stretch into the Pacific Ocean dividing San Ysidro and Tijuana. As a long-time immigrants’ rights lawyer in the United States, I traveled 6,000 miles to Poland’s contested border with Belarus only to be struck by how familiar it all felt: the walls, the violence, the humanitarian resistance.

Walls and other ways of turning away asylum seekers are long entrenched at the U.S.-Mexico border, but are relatively new in eastern Poland. In May 2021, Belarus’ authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko began encouraging migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere to come to Minsk, his country’s capital, to facilitate their crossing into Poland. His policy was politically calculated to provoke the European Union, which had imposed sanctions on Belarus following Lukashenko’s corrupt reelection in 2020. And it worked.

The Polish government initiated violent “pushbacks,” forcibly returning migrants to the Belarusian side without assessing claims to humanitarian protection and in violation of international law. That practice has deep echoes of Title 42, the United States’ version of a pushback policy cloaked as a public health order, which has slammed the door to migrants seeking asylum at our own border for nearly three years. The similarities don’t end at the border wall and pushbacks, either. Like the U.S., the Polish government reserves its aggressive treatment primarily for Black and brown migrants. Indeed, while a wall was erected to the north, Poland welcomed millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war just to the south.

On a sunny morning in October 2022, I set out for the Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site renowned for its ecological beauty, and the heart of the Poland-Belarus borderland. My professional and personal interests in the region intertwined; my own family’s forced migration began at Poland’s eastern border at the dawn of World War II. In these dense forests, where Jews once hid and were massacred by the Nazis, I wanted to see and understand the plight of today’s migrants for myself.

Colleagues from the University of Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research picked me up at the tiny train station in the eastern town of Hajnówka. They had packed their car with homemade jars of soup, which we delivered to a base operated by Grupa Granica (“Border Group”), an activist association formed last summer in response to the crisis. The base felt eerily familiar, like the shelter for people seeking asylum I had visited just months before in San Diego, with rooms full of boxes of clothing neatly sorted by size, sleeping bags rolled up in piles, and bins of packaged food.

Word arrived shortly that two men from Sudan, one with a cut on his belly, needed food and medical care; two volunteers packed rucksacks and headed out to help. They hoped to find the migrants before dark. They do not use flashlights for fear of alerting law enforcement—Border Guard, Polish Army, Police, and Territorial Defense Forces—which now patrols for migrants to push back and humanitarian aid workers to prosecute.

After the activists headed out, we did too, in search of the border wall. We hiked for several miles along Browka Road, a muddy way that until last year was limited to environmental preservation vehicles. A large Polish army truck pulled alongside. Officers questioned us and let us go, then drove back and forth several times, keeping watch, as we crisscrossed gray ponds—the width of tires carved by army tanks—where dead frogs floated.

The border wall’s “glinting metal and sharp wire” in the distance. Courtesy of author.

We finally reached our destination, and I was transported to that other wall stretching into the beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike the weathered red-brown barrier that divides California from Mexico, which was erected 30 years ago, the Polish wall’s silver shines. Still, both are man-made borders, glaringly artificial in contrast to the natural world flowing continuously around and beneath them.

While the border wall felt artificial, its grave human consequences did not. I spent the night at an eco-lodge rented out at a discounted price to Badaczki i Badacze na Granicy (“Researchers at the Border”). There, I talked late into the night with Natalia Judzińska, a Holocaust scholar who uses visual methodologies to document migrants’ journeys. Judzińska photographs places where migrants have built hideouts, had violent run-ins with law enforcement, or (if they are lucky) left their warm clothing behind to travel onward by car, often to Germany. These photographs—of piles of discarded clothes, personal objects left behind—create a visual connection between Poland’s past and present; one that she argues informs how Polish scholars and activists are responding to the current crisis.

That day, Judzińska had discovered a pile of documents from a Syrian man—identity card, vaccination records, a medical diploma, family photographs, two stamps—strewn on the ground. She photographed and carefully collected the documents, with hopes of returning them to their owner. Having worked with countless people seeking refuge, I knew just how precious such belongings are—not only as personal mementos, but as evidence in support of an asylum claim. The likelihood that this man could find safety without his documents was next to nothing.

The things I saw at the Poland-Belarus border made clear that the Polish government and our own are drawing from the same playbook—erecting physical barriers and enacting policies that block access to asylum. Activists, scholars, and migrants in both hemispheres, too, follow similar paths, countering these harsh measures by providing life-saving aid, fighting for legal protections, and documenting human rights violations. That spirit of resistance made me feel right at home in this far-off borderland, which my grandparents and so many others since have traversed in search of safety.

The post A New Border Wall Draws from an Old American Playbook appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since 2003, Zócalo Public Square has been on a mission to connect people to ideas and to each other. Whether you visited us in person, streamed our programming live online, or watched on YouTube or Soundcloud later on, thank you for being part of our ongoing experiment to promote public curiosity and dialogue.

Join us as we take a trip down memory lane to relive five events (and one special musical performance) that our staff felt best encapsulated the spirit of 2022. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to learn about our very special, upcoming 20th anniversary lineup.

What Can We Laugh About?

Comedy has always been society’s release valve. Which is why we invited political satirist Bassem Youssef, and playwright, actor, and performance artist Kristina Wong to speak about the political and psychological power of humor. In partnership with ASU Gammage, this Zócalo event, moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, explored comedy’s great potential, and made the case for why the joke can be mightier than the sword.

Will Americans Ever Be in This Together?

The economist and social policy advocate Heather McGhee offered us a new story of American solidarity during her 2022 Zócalo Book Prize lecture. McGhee was our 12th annual winner for her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. In prepared remarks and a Q&A with LA84 Foundation president and CEO Renata Simril, she reminded us that everyone loses when we see prosperity and success as a zero-sum game.

How Do Homelands Cross Borders?

Can you leave your homeland while keeping your cultural and ethnic identity alive? At this Zócalo/Soraya event, presented in conjunction with a performance of Ragamala Dance Company’s Fires of Varanasi, we asked Ragamala Dance Company’s Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, Science Fiction Poetry Association president and poet Bryan Thao Worra, and deputy director of USC’s Institute of Armenian Studies Shushan Karapetian to reflect on the pain and promise of being a member of a diaspora in America.

What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns? with Keri Blakinger

Susanville, California, is one of many rural communities whose economic survival is currently tethered to incarceration. Which is why the city sued the state this year to avoid having its prison shut down. To understand the link between prisons and rural economies, we assembled Lassen Community College president Trevor Albertson, Parlier mayor and retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, and University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, to speak at this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event in Susanville. Moderated by journalist Keri Blakinger, the discussion explored how prison towns came to be, and how they might imagine new futures.

How Can Women and Girls Win in Iran?

Ongoing unrest in Iran, incited by the death of a young Kurdish woman detained by Iranian authorities for supposedly violating state dress laws, has become one of the top stories of 2022. For this Zócalo event, co-presented with the Goldhirsh Foundation with support by Pedram Salimpour, and moderated by author Porochista Khakpour, we invited Iran analyst Holly Dagres, artist Sahar Ghorishi, and anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi to discuss how months of mass protests have created a new movement—and what the world can learn from it.

A Special Zócalo Music Presentation: How Immigrants Composed L.A.

A first for Zócalo: A string quartet from the Los Angeles Opera visited the Public Square. In the historic lobby of the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner building, musicians Evgeny Tonkha, Roberto Cani, Ana Landauer, and Erik Rynearson performed to a packed house, bringing the music of L.A.’s immigrant composers to life during this special Zócalo/Artistic Soirées event, presented in partnership with ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The post Our Favorite Public Programs of 2022 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes for over a dozen years now. Whether it’s a public health emergency or a political crisis, current events continue to make our mission feel increasingly urgent.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many disciplines of investigation. The 12 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They are historians and journalists, economists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, where they will deliver a lecture based on their work, and participate in an interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2023. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 28, 2022 at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Explorations of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We are on the lookout for that rare combination of creativity and clarity, excellence and evocation. The prize interprets “place” in many ways: A location may possess historical, cultural, political, or personal importance, and may be literal, imaginary, or metaphorical.

Our 12th annual winner will be selected by the Zócalo staff, working in conjunction with a poetry prize selection committee. The winner will receive $1,000 and will have the opportunity to deliver their poem at the Zócalo Book Prize event in the spring. Zócalo will also publish the poem on our site alongside an interview with the poet. In addition, we plan to recognize our honorable mention submissions.

Screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney returns to sponsor Zócalo’s literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Please read and enjoy the poems from our 11 past winners, which travel to San Diego, Ohio, and Mexico, to a kitchen, a beach, and a gas station parking lot, and to the landscapes of these writers’ imaginations, memories, and dreams.

• Chelsea Rathburn, “8 a.m., Ocean Drive” (2022)
• Angelica Esquivel, “La Mujer” (2021)
• Jai Hamid Bashir, “Little Bones” (2020)
• Erica Goss, “The State of Jefferson” (2019)
• Charles Jensen, “Tucson” (2018)
• Matt Sumpter, “No World” (2017)
• Matt Phillips, “Crossing Coronado Bridge” (2016)
• Gillian Wegener, “The Old Mill Café” (2015)
• Amy Glynn, “Shoreline” (2014)
• Jia-Rui Chong Cook, “Fault” (2013)
• Jody Zorgdrager, “Coming Back, It Comes Back” (2012)

Submission Guidelines

For consideration, please send up to three poems to poetry@zocalopublicsquare.org.

Please attach your poem(s) as a single Word document to your email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address on each poem. Personal identification will be removed prior to review by the judges. We will accept online submissions only, and receipt will be acknowledged at the time of submission.

Eligibility

Poems must be original and previously unpublished work. We accept up to three poems from each writer as well as simultaneous submissions; let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Judging

Entries will be judged based on originality of ideas, theme, and style. Judging is at the sole discretion of Zócalo Public Square and our poetry prize committee. The winner will be announced in spring 2023, and the winning poet will receive $1,000, a published interview, and an opportunity for a public reading hosted by Zócalo. The winning poem will be published on zocalopublicsquare.org. We will also be celebrating our honorable mention submissions.

Conditions

The winning poem and honorable mentions become the property of Zócalo Public Square, but the writers may republish their poems at a later date with Zócalo’s permission. By entering the contest, the entrants grant Zócalo the right to publish and distribute their poems for media and publicity purposes, along with the poets’ name and photograph. Poets will be contacted by Zócalo before we publish any submission.

The post The 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize Celebrates Poems of Place appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In July, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus plexippus, to its Red List of Threatened Species, a recognition that the insect’s ongoing decline could lead to extinction. Though monarch numbers increased 35% from December 2020 to December 2021, their numbers overall have been in steep decline for the last three decades. As the IUCN listing indicates, now is a crucial time to reassess monarch conservation policies across North America.

As a woman born in Mexico and now living and teaching in Canada, I know that nothing is ever simple for anyone who makes their home across borders. I have conducted research throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada, following the struggles of humans and insects migrating across North America. Both have been shaped in harmful ways by the erasure of Indigenous knowledge that supported populations of many species for millennia, and by the globalization policies, border security, and toxic agribusinesses that have transformed the landscapes of North America. Ecological justice for humans, monarchs, and other species will only come when we prioritize community livelihoods and ecological decision-making beyond borders.

Monarch habitat decline began during the 19th century, as settlers transformed the open prairies in what is now the Corn Belt of the U.S. and Canada. Monarch caterpillars eat only one thing: milkweed, which once grew in abundance in those landscapes. But settlers evicted Indigenous people, whose agricultural practices embraced biodiversity, and brought monoculture agriculture, planting single crops over vast areas and uprooting the milkweed.

In the modern era, one of the main culprits of the monarch’s decline was the agrochemical giant Monsanto, now part of the German corporation Bayer. The company’s Roundup herbicide decimated the butterfly by killing monarchs’ host plant. Its pesticides damaged caterpillar growth.

Monsanto was also a major producer of genetically modified (GM) corn seed, which has not only had devastating effects on monarchs, but also on Mexican rural livelihoods. Strains of corn traditionally grown in Mexico cannot compete genetically or economically with GM corn, which is more resistant to disease. Imports of GM corn from the U.S. made corn farming in Mexico less profitable, thus forcing workers to seek other crops or to migrate north—often risking their lives to cross a border that has become hostile political terrain.

Insect and human migrations are also both affected by the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, updated as the USMCA). Though the agreement opened doors for trade in manufactured goods and produce, it closed them for human migrants and butterflies alike. The U.S.–Mexico border, once an interconnected habitat with lots of monarch food, became industrialized and fragmented, while traditional agricultural and land management practices across the continent declined. Despite these negative effects, NAFTA leaders appropriated the monarch as a symbol of tri-national trade relations.

The construction of the U.S.–Mexico border wall has further exacerbated these effects. Most directly, when the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas objected to a Trump administration attempt to extend its border wall through the conservation area, fringe groups baselessly accused the center of facilitating illegal immigration and human trafficking. The center shut down for several weeks after QAnon threats. It has since reopened, but with heightened security (the New York Times reported that the executive director now wears a sidearm), and it remains embroiled in lawsuits over the plans.

Ironically, conservation efforts can also have negative effects on monarch habitat, because they often disregard traditional agroforestry knowledge. Conservationists sometimes label small Mexican farmers as “loggers,” to cast them as villains stealing from protected forest areas. But the truth is more complicated. These forest farming communities care deeply for the butterfly. Their traditions hold that the monarchs return just in time for the Day of the Dead, carrying the souls of their ancestors. In these areas, the monarch’s winter home, people long practiced sustainable agroforestry. They grew mixed crops including corn at lower altitudes, while collecting other foods and hunting in mountain forests. As monarchs gained conservationists’ attention, however, vast areas were designated as “people-free cores” in an effort to protect the butterflies. These actions harmed human and insect alike by shutting down a system of coexistence—and pushed people to engage in logging, often to create space for avocado fields, which have become a tempting enterprise because of growing demand for the fruits in the U.S. since NAFTA. New conservation demarcations have diminished humans’ relationship to the forest and their ability to protect the butterflies.

It does not have to be this way. Long before Mexico, the U.S., and Canada existed, monarchs made their annual migratory circuit, nourished by ample milkweed with help from Indigenous agroforestry practices. Similarly, our own species has been in motion throughout its history, and this has contributed to our survival.

How do we reimagine North America as an abundant home for all? In the U.S. and Canada, “butterfly amateurs”—lay enthusiasts who create habitats to support monarchs—allowed me into their world. They fill their yards with milkweed and construct elaborate hatcheries in their homes. Some call themselves “crusaders.” Yet these backyard ecosystems are not enough.

Creating islands where monarchs have what they need is only a partial solution. Because a web of economic and political barriers has made it difficult for monarchs and humans, both species will need fundamental, structural change to thrive. The monarch is a metaphor for a right to live across “two homes,” as many migration activists assert. But this shouldn’t just be a metaphor—it should be our reality. If we want to keep monarchs around, we need to redesign North America as a safe place for migrant humans and migrant butterflies alike.

The post Why Migrant Butterflies Are Dying appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles is just the second U.S. city to host the Summit of the Americas, which brings together political leaders, civil society organizations, and business executives from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean to promote inter-hemispheric cooperation, economic growth, and regional security.

The very first summit in 1994 was held in Miami, often considered the hub of Latin America in the U.S. But this time around the Biden administration gave Los Angeles the nod, pointing to its “deep and robust ties throughout our hemisphere.”

This relationship is over a century in the making: Los Angeles owes its status as the second-largest city in the U.S. today to the wealth and capital that crossed over the border throughout the last 130 years.

This is a history deeply rooted in American empire. Rather than pursuing formal territorial control and annexation, American government and business leaders, including those in Los Angeles, advocated for economic domination in regions such as Latin America and the construction of an “informal” commercial empire beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

L.A. boosters and investors, in turn, set about establishing a borderlands economy that reached deep into Mexico and beyond to make their city boom. They created a built environment to facilitate this growth: In the 1920s, members of the Los Angeles-based Automobile Club of Southern California, the nation’s leading motoring association, for instance, initiated construction of the International Pacific Highway, a 12,000-mile road which, in California, overlay the Pacific Coast Highway. When complete, the highway—which began in Anchorage, Alaska, and headed south along the Pacific Ocean—linked every country along the west coasts of North, Central, and South America. The Los Angeles businessmen and Mexican state governors who championed the project believed it would increase the movement of tourists and trade goods within the Americas, with particular benefits for L.A. And, true to form, when the road was completed in 1957, it traversed 13 nations and epitomized a new type of “informal” commercial American empire in Latin America—one that promoted free-market capitalism and globalization.

Over the decades, trade and commercial publications highlighted and reflected Los Angeles’ growing position as a center of U.S. trade and diplomatic relations with Latin America. Business and civic leaders launched Pan Pacific Progress in Los Angeles in 1926 to track trade between Los Angeles, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific world. Regular columns in the magazine monitored metrics such as annual Pacific ports tonnage to gauge the number of goods moving between Latin American and U.S. Pacific ports. Others outlined trade and commercial possibilities with Latin America, ranging from the export of citrus to mining for zinc to building shipping infrastructure; and introduced American readers to presidents of Latin American republics including Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Anglo Angelenos were committed to furthering these hemispheric relationships. David Hamburger, a contributor to Pan Pacific Progress and successful department store proprietor who’d lived in Los Angeles for nearly half a century, reflected in 1929 that Los Angeles went “from a desert town to a metropolis that is bound to become the largest and greatest city in the world, economically and geographically.” In the piece, he advised American readers to take their capital to South America and approach business partners there with a cooperative spirit. “If we, with our experience, will lend our advice and assistance to our [South American] neighbors there is no limit to the profit to be derived,” he wrote, promising a “gigantic success will be assured.”

In the 20th century, Los Angeles boosters further tied their city’s fate to the exploitation of natural resources in Latin America, particularly Mexico, believing they needed to reach beyond the U.S. to grow. The city’s Chamber of Commerce organized investment excursions across the border. Oilmen such as Edward Doheny drilled wells in Mexico’s petroleum regions; the interlocked Chandler and Otis families, owners of the Los Angeles Times and successful real estate developers and corporate ranchers, developed a million-acre cotton and cattle ranch in northern Mexico. These ventures proved wildly profitable. Mexican resources helped transform the small town of Los Angeles into a large, successful, and prosperous city.

But this prosperity and success has not flowed both ways. While facilitating trade and investment, 19th- and early 20th-century Los Angeles boosters carefully controlled labor flows for the benefit of U.S. agricultural and industrial employers. Fruit growers with headquarters in Los Angeles, for example, actively recruited agricultural workers from Mexico whom they identified as an inexpensive, “compliant,” and reliable labor source to work in California’s Imperial Valley and citrus belt. As noncitizens, these workers had little recourse to challenge or improve poor wages and harsh working conditions.

Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, federal economic policies have deepened this inequality. The U.S. government’s push to lift regulations, free up trade, open markets, and promote private investment in Latin America led to collapses in industries such as agriculture, forcing millions of workers to flee Mexico and other countries. It is America’s “new imperialism”—nothing short of the “third conquest of Latin America,” as historian Greg Grandin observes in Empire’s Workshop, following Spanish colonization and American corporate and military interventions in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This forced mass migration from Latin America has continued to benefit Los Angeles, providing an influx of creative and economic talent that has remade and revitalized parts of the city, creating community and businesses, and invigorating neighborhoods such as MacArthur Park—once abandoned due to white flight, and now a residential and commercial center for Central American immigrants. Meanwhile, Latin Americans seeking refuge in the United States continuously find their economic opportunities limited to the agricultural and service sectors and the underground economy, and face below-minimum wage pay, dangerous working conditions, and scarce enforcement of labor laws. Complicating matters further is the shadow of the Immigration Act of 1965, which placed limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere just as U.S. dependence on Latin American labor intensified. This curtailment of legal entry led to mass undocumented immigration, compounding workers’ vulnerability.

At the summit in Los Angeles, we can expect leaders from across the hemisphere to lay out a strategy to maintain and stimulate U.S.-Latin American trade, and to promote regional “economic growth and prosperity based on [a] shared respect for democracy, fundamental freedoms, the dignity of labor, and free enterprise,” as the State Department puts it. But any honest movement in this direction must reckon with the U.S.’s long history of disruptive economic and political policies in Latin America, as well as its restrictive immigration policies and simultaneous reliance on immigrant labor. Because Latin America made Los Angeles—and Los Angeles, through the ties of commerce and migration, is part of Latin America.

The post How Latin America Built L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.