Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey--New Brunswick/Piscataway
|
Local
Struggles A conference for activists, students, scholars and public officials Friday, November 9, 2007, 10-4 PM Busch Campus, Rutgers University—New Brunswick Organized by the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies Directions to Fiber Optic Building, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ Conference Poster: PDF The Local Struggles conference will bring together activists, legal practitioners, politicians, scholars, policy experts, immigrants and students to discuss the increasing ‘localization’ of struggles over the rights of both legal and undocumented Latin American and Caribbean immigrant workers in the Tri-State area. During the last two decades, but especially in past few years, cities, towns, and suburbs throughout the Tri-state area have become the new front line for policy and legal battles involving and affecting not only immigrants, but also the US Latino population at large. Many localities have experienced divisive battles that reproduce national-level debates over immigration and rights, which unveil unresolved tensions and contradictions between local governments and the federal level. Some towns have recurred to repressive, racializing, and discriminatory policies unabashedly aimed at restricting the rights of immigrant workers and residents or in the most extreme cases encouraging their removal from US public space altogether. Other towns have offered constructive solutions to the challenges posed by the presence of immigrant workers and tried to meet the needs of these new communities regardless of their legal status. Access to housing, education, work, and community life has become crucial in local negotiations over citizenship, race and rights that affect not only the new immigrant population, but also non-immigrant “native” Latino communities such as Puerto Ricans. This conference will examine these issues on the basis of the following cases of localized struggles:
The formal and informal policies involved in these and other cases have been presented as strategies to curb the presence of unauthorized immigrants and control ‘undesirable’ practices in housing markets, street corners, sidewalks and places of social gathering. They have also drawn battle lines that have reverberated at the state and federal level but that often are replicated in ever more localities as Latino communities and Latin American immigration patterns expand to cities, towns, and suburbs, which until the past few decades have not been recent immigrant-receiving localities. The goal of this conference is to help students, neighbors, faculty, workers, activists, and others confront the issues raised by these local conflicts, privileging the perspectives of those who are most dramatically affected by these events, but least often heard from. The conference comprises a plenary session in the morning (10-12am) focusing on local cases from different perspectives (activist, scholarly, legal, etc.) and two sets of smaller, thematic break-out sessions in the afternoon (1:00-2.15pm and 2:30-4pm) which will focus on legal issues, race relations and constructions of race, economic issues, social policy issues, and immigrant youth and access to college education. The breakout sessions, in turn, will allow participants to discuss and share experiences, ask questions of the guest speakers and session facilitators, and find ways of getting involved and become more educated about the conflicts and issues at stake. We will end the event with a reception at 4pm. Approximately two dozen presenters and workshop facilitators will be invited and we are hoping we will have about one hundred participants. Concurrent poster, hallway information displays, video presenters and other resources will present materials from participant organizations and relevant audiovisual materials. Translation to/from Spanish will be provided as necessary. Coordinated by Aldo Lauria Santiago and Ulla Berg, Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University/New Brunswick-Piscataway Contact person: Alexandra Laguna, Graduate Program Assistant, alexanla@eden.rutgers.edu; 732-445-3820. Further details: http://latcar.rutgers.edu |