interviews
Reshaping The Immigration Narrative
by Lizania Cruz
July 15, 2019
This conversation with Albert Saint Jean and Lizania Cruz was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Albert: My name is Albert Saint Jean. I am the New York City organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration [BAJI].
When I heard about BAJI, this was before Trump, I had gotten interested in volunteering, in organizing with BAJI, because a lot of the stuff they were focused on were things I’d seen throughout my life. I was born here, but I was the first of my grandmother's children born here. Everyone older than me had migrated over and I saw what they had to go through with their status, their relationship with law enforcement, their relationship with the criminal justice system, their fear of deportation. I felt like BAJI was at the nexus of a lot of those things when I found out about it three years ago – and long before Trump, because they were things affecting black people. Basically I got into it because it spoke to the things that I saw in my own personal experiences.
Lizania: I'm Lizania Cruz. I'm an artist and a designer originally from the Dominican Republic. I moved here in 2004 when I was 21 to finish college. I started We The News – doing work around shifting the current narrative on migration and trying to figure out how we [people] change.
As we move into different geographic spaces what is our greater sense of belonging and home throughout that?
I was frustrated with the way the current immigration narrative was – only talking about the majority within the minority group, and how the media was taking over the narrative. I didn't feel represented. I didn't feel like our stories were pluralistic in any way. So I started wondering what if we told our own news and our own stories – what would that look like? That's how We The News as a project started. I was talking to different organizations and someone recommended BAJI. I thought it was super interesting how they were talking about migration, blackness, and at the same time talking about the correlation of that and the criminal justice system, which for me, no other organization was doing. Getting involved with BAJI has made the project what it is today. It has also politicized me in ways I wasn't thinking about.
Image via Lizania Cruz, center, with Albert Saint Jean, 3rd from the left.
What are those ways?
Lizania: Looking more at the similarities between disenfranchised communities already in the US and the immigrant movement. Again, I don't think we do that as often, and now I'm constantly thinking of ways that story could be told, and what are the lengths, and how do we organize collectively rather than organize in silos. We're organizing for LatinX folks and maybe labor workers, and we're organizing for people that have been affected by mass incarceration, why are those two things not organized in tandem while looking at the policies in the same way?
You mentioned you feel like the narrative is not pluralistic.
Lizania: Yeah.
And very mono.
Lizania: Exactly.
Does the division of groups fighting for their specific causes as separate give their stories more autonomy? If all these issues are nuanced, where do they blend and how do you deliver a message that covers, or even touches on, all of the personal?
Albert: Particularly with BAJI, they look at the nexus between the similarities between African Americans and black immigrants.
The most common thread we find, is that number one, we all look at each other through a white supremacist lens.
When we talk about the immigration issue, we shy away from the racial aspect of it. This is a racial issue. The diversity of immigrants we have now is only possible because of the rights that African Americans fought for in the early 60s. The 1965 Immigration Act was a part of that, the whole civil rights act. That allowed for the diversity of other immigrants to come here. When we shy away from that, we miss a large swath of what's going on in the immigrant community. We miss talking about what are the drivers that send people here in the first place?
US policy is responsible for a large bulk of us being here. My family wouldn't have come here if it wasn't for the United States supporting a dictator for so long. Her [Lizania’s] country wouldn't be the way it is if it wasn't for US agribusinesses and foreign policy.
Where did your family come from?
Albert: Haiti.
Another place that they [US] supported dictatorships. It's kind of like the stories we're able to show the common thread is US policy, and a lot of it is the racialized aspect of immigration in the United States.
Lizania: I'll add to that. I see specifically in the work that we've been doing with We the News, a creation of a platform where all these stories could live together. There's not as many platforms like that. Finding a place and a platform where people could come together and share their stories and have a voice. None of us are the same and we all have different experiences, but how the commonality becomes the difference, is always what I'm interested in questioning.
Even when we facilitate the story circles, we open with a prompt that is the same for everyone. But nobody responds the same way. How do these stories sit together and how do we make a space for that to happen?
The personal narrative is a driver for policy in this case. Are you guys interested in changing policy?
Albert: Exposing policy, changing policy. Those are important. But I think with my work, what's even more important is changing structural issues.
Is policy complicit in structural issues?
Albert: Well, there's policies that are a symptom of structural racism. Most people look at the Trump era as, for what it is, a terrible era, especially for immigration. But these problems have been going on long before that. The 1996 laws were implemented after Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City. A provision they made was that anybody that commits a crime that's a foreign national would be deported. Whether it’s retroactive or not, you don't even have to be convicted. A lot of people I come across aren't convicted. Yes, it's policy driven, but a lot of it is also sustainable. I'd say a majority of this is systemic. So yeah, there's policies that are pushing against it – but also these narratives show the systemic issues I see as well.
Lizania: It's a way of popular education. I think policy is important, but I think you have to start from the bottom up and create the popular education. People vaguely understand where all these issues are coming from. And you could potentially organize to create policy – but even at BAJI, those who are organizing and those who are going to Congress to affect policy, are different.
Albert: Yeah, that's true. Sometimes I'll go to DC and help lobby for certain things or meet with city officials along local issues. But the bulk of that work is in the hands of people who specialize in policy. Not that these folks have any faith in this system, it's just that they know that this is another strategy.
They know that the system is not broken. It is inherently working the way it's supposed to work.
They feel as though we still have to use policy as a tool. So my job is to create the pressure that Lizania is talking about. Creating a space for people in the community to not only learn about themselves and their rights, but also learn to advocate for themselves. The more they start to realize that their experience is not an anecdotal experience, that this is more of a trend than a norm, they're able to do all the things she just mentioned. That's an organizer's job. To make sure that education is there. When we look at past movements, it wasn't Malcolm X or Martin Luther King who started those movements. They came out of those respective movements, to articulate the needs of the people. We have to start somewhere. I think the more we share this with people, the more likely people are going to be able to fight for liberation so to speak.
What's your dream in this?
Albert: In an ideal world?
Yeah. What do you want immigration in America to look like? To feel like?
Albert: I would say the way it was when my grandmother came in, in the 70s. You just come here – I honestly don't believe in borders, to tell you the truth. But, in my lifetime, I would like for people that are undocumented to obtain amnesty, I would like for there not to be any caps or quotas, regardless of where people come from.
Lizania: I ask this question to myself all the time. We're doing this work but what does it look like when the work is done? I think that if this system runs how it's supposed to, there wouldn’t be quotas for the people that could come here.
Albert: Diversity visas.
Lizania: There won't be diversity visas. I was just having a meeting with my lawyer, and the type of visa I’m applying for has a two year backlog, and he's like, "that's actually nothing." Plus the amount of money that goes into the process. It's just not realistic.
It’s interesting to look at the immigration argument coming from the GOP in the 80s, Bush H.W. and Reagan in 1980 are wildly different than Ted Cruz today.
Albert: What a lot of people don't realize, and this is where I hate the two party system, for the reason you pointed out, is at one point in time the Republican party was way further to the left than Democrats now, than Obama. What Reagan did, the amnesty – and don't get me wrong, all the fuckery that's happened started with Reagan in this country, it started before, but Reagan really took it off – but he gave general amnesty in the 80s. This is someone who right wing people worship, you know what I mean? When I look at Democrats and I look at how they're like, "Oh no, be realistic. This is what we can fight for."
Pit Dreamers against everyone else. Good immigrant versus bad immigrant. All of that stuff is bogus to me. It shows me how far right the pendulum has swung.
When people claim to be moderate now and think, "Oh, I'm moderate, I'm in between. I understand both sides." No, you're a conservative. When you look at the historical analysis of it and how far right this country has gotten, how this country doesn't recognize that is even scarier. The fact that it is normalized, even on the democratic side, is scary. The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can be considered extreme, it's very scary because these were all basic ideas people had.
It's interesting you brought up this thing with Reagan and Bush. I mean, Republican, Democrat, they were always messed up. But Republicans were more strategic. Coming out of the New Deal Era, they knew they had to make concessions in certain places. Especially since they had a labor shortage for certain sectors of the economy. They needed the Bracero Program and domestic workers to come over. They were like, yeah, why would I be against this? They were very practical.
Wet foot dry foot for Cubans. If they made it to the mainland of the U.S., they automatically got a green card because they were fleeing communism. The Haitians, however, were fleeing a dictator who's indiscriminately massacring whole families, women, and children on the streets. 60,000 people were massacred underneath this dictatorship, and people were fleeing. I had family members who were fleeing, but they didn't have the same privileges Cubans had. Once their foot hit land they could be apprehended and found out. I just thought that aspect of it was very interesting to me. The US link. People magically forgot that the US created the situation in El Salvador and Honduras and all these places as late as the 80s, and no one's talking about that. Why are all these people showing up here?
Like our cognitive dissonance is...that's why I like us telling our own narratives. Because we don't forget.
Do you think there’s a lack of education in America about U.S. presence in Central and South America?
Albert: I think that's true globally. Even when we talk about the Middle East we're not really clear about the roots of all those problems.
Lizania: I did a poster that was also part of We the News looking at all of the different interventions in Latin America specifically by the US.
While you're critical of American actions abroad, are you also hopeful for the "promise" of America?
Albert: No, well, I'll say this. I'm hopeful if we can tear down the structures that we have now.
If the will of the people is truly reflected, if this can become an actual democracy in which politics takes a backseat to justice.
The majority of Americans want the same things. Majority of Americans do not care about if Lizania has access to citizenship or not. But politics makes us pit each other against each other. Politics is what uplifts white privilege and makes white folks say, "hey look, you know what? These immigrants and these black folks and these other folks are threatening my security." Politics does that. In reality, most Americans want the same thing and I think that the system we have now does not allow the will of the people to really be represented.
Lizania: If we aren't hopeful, why would we do it? With my work, I'm just trying to find ways that our reality could actually be a more inclusive, a better reality for all of us. I think the reason I do the work I do is because I believe that there could be a better way and that we have to construct that way for ourselves. Hopeful is not the right word. Let’s see how America could work for our communities in a better way. Or maybe it's not only America – how can we as people of the world, live better?
interviews
Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic
by Max Liboiron
January 9, 2019
This interview with Dr. Max Liboiron was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place December 4, 2018.
I'm Dr. Max Liboiron. I often introduce myself in Michif. So, I say, Taanishi. Max Liboiron dishinihkaashoon. Lac la biche, Treaty 6, d’oshchiin. Mtis naasyoon, niiya ni. Which means my name is Max Liboiron. I'm from Northern Alberta, treaty six territory, where I'm part of Mtis Nation, and I now live and work in Newfoundland and Labrador in Northeastern Canada.
I'm an environmental scientist and we do anti-colonial, feminist science – which means we draw a lot from the insights of the social sciences and also different traditional teachings and law, to inform our scientific practices. So that they are anti-colonial. So they are feminist. So that they do deal with questions of equity, questions of justice, questions of humility, and do work in a good way, as opposed to just an efficient way or a fact-y way.
Science, and research in general, has long played a role in colonial entitlement to land, both in proving that people deserve to be dispossessed in being the reason for research – we need to research tropical diseases so we can better settle in this tropical place, not our environment. Or, how do we patent different botanies? A lot of those legacies have stayed in science and aren't usually noticed anymore.
They used to be fairly contested, especially when science was trying to move into new places or when race was being scientized. But now people seem to have forgotten about that legacy. So our task at CLEAR, my lab, is to first of all recognize how science is already colonial, and then number two, work very hard to do the practices of science in ways that do not reproduce entitlement to land or universalism, which is actually just self portraiture of Europeans usually. The idea of mastery over nature, or that nature is a resource for use.
Courtesy of: Bojan Furst.
Every moment of science has these sort of legacies. There's lots and lots and lots of room for doing anti-colonial science and feminist science. Those are different things, but they're related in that they both find that science isn't neutral. It is deeply political.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron. Plastics wrapped around a squid beak found in a Northern Fulmar. 2015
The presentation of your research, visually, is patient, subtle, pretty – completely different from the majority of images I see related to plastics research. Can you talk about the work you’re doing right now?
I'll start with the premise of that, which is that we, I think, look at plastic very differently than a lot of the dominant discourses. Like you said, a lot of the dominant discourse about plastic is that plastic is inherently bad, and it's a bastard child of industrialization, and it needs to be eradicated, and illegalized, and banned, and exorcized.
But also plastic is our kin, it's our relation. It's from ancestors – organic ancestors from a long time ago. And if you neglect your relations to that, then you're bad kin. Even when plastic is misbehaving, which means it's being bad kin, you can still do good kinship with bad kin. And you know this. You have an asshole uncle somewhere. He might be bad kin but you still call him on his birthday, or bail him out of jail depending on what kind of bad kin he is. The same thing is true of plastics. I spend a lot of time with plastics. I do a lot of care work for plastics. I make sure that they are cleaned properly and I look at them a long time, and when I look at them, and I look at them in aggregate, I learn things about where they've been, and how they might have got there, and what their journeys might have been like, and where they might be going, because they're going to go for a long time.
We hang out together a lot, and they have a lot to teach us. Trying to ostracize them as the only sort of relation you can get, misses a lot of teachings that they have for us and also a lot of the respect. Because they are made of the earth. They've been pulverized in various ways so that they're not very earthy anymore, but you still have to respect that.
There's a tension with that in that the research that I do is mostly ingestion studies. Animals that have eaten plastics. Mostly what we focus on are animals that people, especially in Newfoundland & Labrador, use for food, depend on for food. For cultural sustenance, for nutritional sustenance, for economic sustenance. So the contamination of that food web is a form of colonialism. It's based on the idea that land is pollutable in the first place, that it is an okay place to put wastes. And magically, not magically, it's through different power structures, those tend to accumulate in rural, Indigenous, northern communities, which are never the places that benefit from plastic production. Almost never, but pretty much never.
At the moment, we’re doing some ducks, cod, seal, some geese. We get them mostly from hunters and fishers. We have a rule in the lab, all of our samples have to be eaten because what we test is food. We don't test oceans or some abstract fish, we work on food sovereignty. That means we sample food.
Are you consuming it?
Often.
Is that difficulte after seeing what's inside of it?
No. It's delicious. In the area we're researching, we do find plastic, but we also find them in smaller numbers than we find them in other places. Up in the north, we're fluent in things like the breast milk debate. In the 90's there were these big debates where scientists found really high PCBs in breast milk, and there was this huge protracted debate as to whether or not mothers could be considered abusive for feeding their kids that breast milk. A lot of stigmatization, ostracization, really screwed up relations within science. It turns out after multiple years, scientists decided, and medical practitioners decided, that actually, it's better to feed your kids contaminated breast milk than it is to feed them formula for their entire lives.
That being said, we have some of the least contaminated food in the world at this moment. Maybe not going to stay that way, but we consistently find lower ingestion rates in say, cod or ducks, than in other places. Part of that is the water that surrounds the province that I work in comes from the Arctic. There are certainly plastics in the Arctic, and that number is increasing, but it's not like the Gulf Stream which is filthy, where a lot of people get their fish.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron
What state is the plastic in when you find it in animals?
The vast majority of what we find are microplastics, smaller than five millimeters, that are fragmented from larger things. You can't usually tell what they're from. Most people don't eat the guts of animals, so we don't usually ingest those plastics. There are some exceptions. People here eat seal intestine, and if you eat the fish called capelin or sardines, you eat the entire animal.
The concern that we have is that we know plastics absorb oily chemicals. Like when you have your tupperware that's stained orange from your chile or your curry, that's because plastics is really good at sucking in oily chemicals. If you want to wash that orange color out, which is really hard, you would put it in hot, abrasic, acidic conditions, like a stomach.
My dogs eat plastic everyday and there's no crisis of the dog species. Most dogs eat plastic.
The albatross on Midway Island, Chris Jordan's photographs, drive me crazy because those birds did not die of plastics. In fact, albatross are one of the only marine bird species in the world that is increasing in population and range. They are the healthiest bird species literally in the world. Albatross die a lot because they're what's called an R-species. They live a really long time and have a baby every year, and the vast majority of those babies die. While those babies are dying and starving, they eat a lot of things that aren't food, including plastics. When you find an albatross that's dead with plastics in its belly, the incorrect assumption is that it died because of plastics, not because it was dying and thus ate plastics.
That’s a revelation & also cause for pause about what we’re panicking about.
I think we need to be concerned, but differently than we're currently concerned.
Right.
We're really concerned about objects that are plastics, and that is a concern. But more concerning are all the chemicals that originate in plastics and get absorbed by plastics, many of whom are built by the same industry. The petrochemical industry makes plastics, makes gas, makes plasticizers, makes fragrances, makes flame retardants. Those are the same companies. Those are the same set of products. And the plastic parts are like the vehicles or the vectors, and that's not great, especially because it assumes disposability and therefore access to land, which is a form of colonialism, to dispose of. But the health concern is really these chemicals.
Are you optimistic about the future of plastics? In our ability to innovate, or participate in change?
No, because I don't believe in end of pipe solutions. At all. And that's because I fully understand the scale of plastics. It's like trying to bail out a boat, but you haven't plugged the hole that's sinking the boat.
How about if we stop top of pipe? How about if we stop the production of disposable and ubiquitous plastics? People like GAIA, or Break Free From Plastics, which are these large coalitions that not coincidentally are global coalitions with a lot of people from the global south in them, those are the groups that are like, screw your end of pipe, because they're the end of the pipe. They're where American corporations are building their incinerators. They’re where the people are shipping their recycling to. And they're like no, these solutions clearly don't work. They just defer and shuffle the problem.
What you need to do is stop the pipe. That's what I believe in. This isn't a technological problem, this is a problem rooted in colonialism that assumes you get access to other people's land for your solutions, whether it's storing your pollution or your recycling or whatever. I'm really interested in things like China's recycling ban, which ripped a hole in the world's recycling program because the entire world's recycling programs depended on the idea that things went away, and away was China.
People are looking for other ways. They're like oh, let’s ship our recycling to other places in Southeast Asia. Oh, Vietnam. And you're like, no, no. China taught us something, folks. What it taught you was you're going to run out of aways, and your aways are going to get tired of you, and folks in Malaysia right now are fighting, fighting, fighting not to be the next away. That's colonialism. That's just waste colonialism. That's just the newest frontier in waste colonialism.
If I'm going to put my optimism somewhere and my change making somewhere, it's in that. It's in people being like no, I'm not going to be your away. Go find your own god damn away. Once we run out of that, or once we take ownership of that – when I say we, I mean industrialized nations mostly. I don't believe in most narratives of “we” because they make it sound like consumers can do something. If you live in Newfoundland, even if you live in other places, there's one fucking store. There's no such thing as consumerism or consumer choice. Reuse is already to the nines because there aren't a lot of resources. So all of the...banning straws? There are no straws.
The straw thing put me over the edge!
A lot of the common discourses make zero sense in the north. It's a handy barometer when someone's like, this is a solution! And you just sort of look around and you say no, not possible. Moving on. Really helps you scale and prioritize the types of things that might work.
What is the alternative to our dependency on mass produced plastics?
The alternatives would mostly come from industry. The number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 50's. That's living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than totally packaged in plastic. Yeah. They circulate differently. They don't circulate as far. It just means you have different distribution systems. The problem is that oil has just reinvested in plastics big time. Eight months ago they invested more money than they put in the last few years into new plastic production. So that's their call, right?
Why are they re-upping their investment?
I don't know. There was no discussion of why this, like why plastics? I do know, and I have studied historically the reason that plastics and plastic packaging in particular is so attractive to industry is because it is so cheap and it is so easy to turn a profit off of. Part of that is disposability. The fact that you don't have to be responsible for the end of life of your product. Some other country, someone else's land takes care of that for you. It's a huge cost savings compared to other things that are possible.
That's deeply upsetting.
It is. That's why any conversation about plastic, if it also doesn't talk about power, it's missed the boat. If it talks about individual agency and consumers, and it talks about empowerment but not power, it's actually missed the entire structure of plastic production and pollution.
Do you think large government policy can be effective in altering our use of plastic?
Yeah. If government stops subsidizing oil. I look for these things that are not the expected things, like China saying no. Or someone being like, no more corn. No more subsidizing corn for alternative plastic stocks, which makes plastic just like plastic. These unexpected things, because plastic is so dependent on these really extensive networks. Transportation, extraction, production, disposability.
Are more people understanding the relationship and connectedness between plastic and industry?
I don't know about more people, but I do think that key people do. Some of these international global coalitions, get it. A few key scientists get it. The Story of Stuff pretty much gets it. GAIA gets it. Teen Vogue gets it! These folks who have moved away from the end of pipeline story and the recycling story and the five small steps story, and have considered or deeply know power structures. That's increasing, a lot.
I've been working on plastic pollution since before it was cool, and the story has shifted significantly. The recycling and five small things continues to proliferate on its little treadmill, but there's now a lot more variety than there ever has before, especially as people are like holy shit, car tires. Holy shit, clothes. Holy shit. Those are things where you can’t just make a little shift because of their massive infrastructural ubiquity. People are starting to understand scale. Key people are starting to understand scale. Yeah. So that's nice.
How do you work to eliminate plastics but also acknowledge those who will likely become more disenfranchised by a rising cost of plastic, primarily medical items, that are dependent on plastics?
I work with folks who are at the periphery who aren't getting benefits. People who hunt and fish and need that food for all sorts of reasons. The thing is, if you think about anyone who needs plastic medical equipment – medical waste is different than packaging waste. I don't want a pacemaker that's not plastic. First of all, it's not possible. Second of all, I want my fucking pacemaker. But the thing is, there's ways to do that that is not about mass production, that is not about releasing and patenting and circulating chemicals that haven't been tested properly.
The problem isn't plastics. There are natural plastics. There are polymers that decay.
That's the problem. This idea that you either have to ban it all or take it all, you're like no. Those are not the only two things available. And I know this because I live in the fucking north. Concepts of ubiquity don't really work here. The all or nothing doesn't work in a lot of places, and that's obvious.
What would a local plastic economy look like? Huh. No one’s ever asked that question really. If you had to own the plastics, own the extraction of those plastics, own the chemicals that go in the plastics and the extraction of those chemicals, I bet your plastics would look a lot different. I bet you wouldn't have packaging. I bet you wouldn't have BPA. I bet you'd just move to something else half the time. And I bet you'd have plastic pacemakers.