[ Millennial and Gen Z activists are connecting their struggles at
home to the workings of US empire in Palestine, Haiti, Colombia, and
other countries.] [[link removed]]

THE KIDS ARE REIMAGINING INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY  
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Roberto Lovato
June 9, 2021
The Nation
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_ Millennial and Gen Z activists are connecting their struggles at
home to the workings of US empire in Palestine, Haiti, Colombia, and
other countries. _

Hundreds of people are gathered in front of the general consulate of
Israel to demonstrate in support of Palestinians in San Francisco,
Calif., on May 18, 2021., Burak Arik / Anadolu Agency // The Nation

 

_SAN FRANCISCO_—I’m standing in a sea of Palestinian flags and
people gathered at the BART plaza at 16th and Mission. Hip-hop-infused
English and Arabic chants of “From Palestine to Mexico, the border
walls have got to go!” blare out of big, black speakers, as the
keffiyeh-wearing crowd of young Palestinians and supporters bob their
heads in sync. Mexican street vendors fill the morning air of Mission
street with the smell of grilled, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, while
Afro-Cuban street vendors lower the volume of their syncopated Bakosó
beats out of respect for the youthful crowd and their
cause: _solidaridad_.

What the migrant vendors recognize is how millennial and Gen Z
activists—many of whom are migrants themselves or the children of
immigrants and refugees—are refining the rhythm of resistance and
solidarity, aligning their struggles at home with the fights against
US empire in the streets of Palestine, Haiti, Colombia, and other
countries.

“Solidarity means we’re all together in this,” says Nour
Bouhassoun, 23, a youth leader with the Arab Resource and Organizing
Center. “The colonial violence of Israel and the US is a threat to
all of us as Palestinians, as Arabs, as women, as queer people and as
people of color.”

She connects the fight against global militarism with the Stop Urban
Shield and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against US policing
she’s participated in since she attended the once-heavily-policed
school just six blocks from here, Mission High, my alma mater. I’m
stricken by her political clarity.

“We lead our own movements now,” she adds while marching to City
Hall. “Not just our solidarity, but our being in community with
others is a threat to them because our joy is power, life is power.
Taking ownership of our lives, of our movements. That’s power.”

Bouhassoun’s refreshing approach to politics previews the end of the
model of monophonic, single-issue, white-led solidarity movements of
my era. It also previews something more momentous: the marvelous rise
of the millennial and Gen-Z left.

At the heart of this young politic are members of the millennial
generation and Gen Z, “majority minority” generations of people
born after the early 1980s. Demographers affiliated with the
Democratic Party first predicted that the catastrophic realities of
their era—economic recessions, US decline, climate change—would
make these generations ever more “liberal” than its predecessors.
Left out of the convenient calculations of Democrat-leaning
demographers was the inconvenient fact that this generation would also
give rise to a sizable—and formidable—internationalist left flank.

This new solidarity is more politically polyphonic, connecting layers
of global, anti-imperialist politics while also creating space for the
voices, stories and melodies of local and national struggles. Many of
those leading the movement are either migrants themselves or the
children of migrants. Their politic fuses classic left notions of
solidarity (as in the “_fraternité_” and “_solidarité_”
enshrined in the French Revolution) and adds a sensibility rooted in
nonwhite cultures, as in the case of Ubuntu philosophy in South Africa
or the Palestinian concept of  Tadamun  تضامن, which is rooted
in Koranic philosophy that admonishes believers to _“help one
another in righteousness and piety, but do not help one another in sin
and transgression.”_

In addition to the advent of WhatsApp, Telegram, and other digital
technologies used to organize across borders, this solidarity is being
shaped by more recent developments, most notably demographic shifts
and immigration, militarized policing, the rise of neofascism, and
BLM.

Unlike many millennials, Gilbert San Jean, a Miami-born and -raised
Haitian, sees BLM as a continuation, rather than a start of the
movement to value Black life. “Haiti is the personification of
BLM,” says San Jean, a PhD who’s a member of Avanse Ansanm
(“moving forward together” in Creole), a Haitian-American
millennial organization. “The republic was founded in 1804 as the
first slave-free state and the first Black republic in the hemisphere.
BLM is a continuation of what began in 1804.”

The long history of Haitian solidarity has yielded fruit. San Jean and
Avanse Ansanm are among the Haitian organizations in the United States
that successfully organized—through petitions, lobbying, marches,
protests, educational campaigns—to push the Biden administration to
reinstate the 18-month stay of deportation known as Temporary
Protected Status. Over 100,000 Haitian migrants fleeing the critical
situation on the island will benefit.

 

San Jean and young Haitians are not resting on their laurels. They
continue to monitor the situation in Haiti, where the authoritarian
rule of President Jovenel Moïse has had him leading the country
without a legislative body since January 2020. Following Nou Pap
Dòmi_ (_“We are not sleeping”), a millennial-led movement in
Haiti that grew out of a corruption scandal, San Jean and others are
concerned about the massacres and other violence the security forces
of the Moïse administration have unleashed. Though critical of the
Moïse government, the Biden administration continues military and
other aid to Haiti, a pattern seen throughout the hemisphere,
especially in Colombia.

Lala Peñaranda, a 28-year-old  Colombian immigrant who identifies as
a “socialist feminist,” sees the same noxious workings of
empire—neoliberal economics backed by militarism (and increasingly
militarized policing)—not just in Haiti or Bogotá or Puerto
Resistencia in Cali, Colombia, but in her increasingly
Latinamericanized home in the empire itself: Jackson Heights, in New
York City.

“Our Fuck the Police rallies here connect us back to home and vice
versa,” said Peñaranda, one of many young Colombians organizing
recent solidarity marches of thousands in NYC. These marches, she
says, build on the work of previous generations
of _paisanos_ (fellow Colombians) while also connecting politically
and strategically to the motherland.

 “When people here were talking about burning NYPD precincts during
Black Lives Matters protests, we saw people in Colombia burning 16
precincts,” she said from her Jackson Heights apartment. “We’re
seeing one another, copying tactics and sharing knowledge. The main
point is, wherever you are you have to resist. You need to be
strategic to wherever you are—and whoever you are.”

Three thousand miles away, in LA’s Echo Park neighborhood, Samantha
Pineda echoes Peñaranda’s admonitions about strategy and identity.
Pineda, the 31-year-old program director of the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), represents a major
shift from the white-led organization I knew at the tail end of the
industrial age.

 “We’ve made a conscious shift in leadership over the past
fifteen years,” she says. “CISPES recognized that the future of
solidarity are young Salvadorans.”

“The better-known history is that CISPES was founded by white folks
engaging in solidarity in the late ’70s,” Pineda continues. “But
that history invisiblizes the Salvadorans who helped found it from
behind the scenes because of their undocumented status and
revolutionary politics. Some of those Salvadoran revolutionaries
brought strategies to build an unparalleled campaign to get people in
the US to support Salvadoran political movements. They learned these
and other strategies from the example of the Vietnamese.”

My mind goes back to some of the FMLN guerrilla commanders I knew,
some of whom were sent to Czechoslovakia, Cuba, the Middle East, and,
especially, Vietnam during the war. The Frente sent them to these
countries so that they could tap into the circuitry of global
revolution and learn politico-military strategy and tactics, along
with one of the most definitive parts of their political education:
solidarity. Some of them brought this knowledge to the United States
where the “refugees” exercised power from behind the scenes of
CISPES.

CISPES’s new approach to solidarity culls and conjures—but is not
limited by— the institutional silence of the legendary Salvadoran
past, as it faces the old curse.

 

“Our main campaign is about ending all US military and police aid
and training to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador” she tells me.
“All three countries have the problems of authoritarianism,
violations of human rights and continued military aid and training of
police and military used to suppress activists opposed to
extractivism, labor rights and other issues.” 

Back at the San Francisco rally, 19-year-old Angel Romero and her
sister, Jackie, listen to the chants of “From Palestine to Mexico,
the border walls have got to go!” from a very unique
perspective.  

“These chants speak to both sides of our culture,” says Angel, a
freshman at San Francisco State University whose parents are of
Palestinian and Mexican descent. “I want to make a difference for
the different sides of me, the side that’s from here and the side
that’s from there.”

_[ROBERTO LOVATO is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family,
Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins),
a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” which the paper hailed as
a “groundbreaking memoir.” Lovato is also an educator, journalist,
and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco.]_

_Copyright c 2021 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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