What's going on…

“There were no places like this when we started,” said Margie Struble, of San Jose, who has been a volunteer and guiding force at Sisterspirit for 24 of the 26 years it’s been open. “Many people met their partners here.”

But now, after a quarter of a century, Sisterspirit will be closing its doors for good, another victim of online sales and mainstream bookstores.

Founded in 1984 as a collective by four women who dreamed of a more involved women’s community in the South Bay, Sisterspirit quickly developed a core group of supporters and at one time had 40 volunteers. For the first two years, the founding mothers arranged “coffee houses” in other locations. Then, the bookstore became a physical reality when it rented a large space in the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center. Just over a year ago, the center received a grant for a youth group and Sisterspirit was asked to move upstairs to a space barely 200 square feet, a move Struble saw as the beginning of the end.

via Story continues at San Jose Mercury News.

New book forthcoming by Erika Lee and Judy Yung.  Dr. Yung is scheduled to talk about her work on the book October 5 at 6 pm at SJSU King Library. Flyer here:  www.sjsu.edu/faculty/kathryn.blackmerreyes/AngelIsland.pdf

The immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, in use from 1910 to 1940, has often been called the Ellis Island  of the West. But to what extent is the Pacific gateway a junior version of the storied immigration station that sits next to the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor?

If Ellis Island remains the iconic symbol of American immigration, Angel Island represents a more complete history of America’s diverse origins and the government’s diverse policies that welcomed some and excluded others.

That fascinating history is the subject of “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America,” by historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung, both descendants of Angel Island immigrants, and published on the occasion of the station’s 100th anniversary. Lee and Yung offer a kaleidoscope of immigrant portraits that bring history alive, and, in the process, demolish many myths and stereotypes about Angel Island and American immigration in general.
Readers who already know that Angel Island differed from Ellis Island because the former was built to process Chinese immigrants and the latter for Europeans will be surprised to learn that non-Asians comprised fully one-third of those seeking entry through Angel Island before the 1920s.

According to the authors’ research, about 1 million people passed through the Angel Island station: foreigners and citizens, arrivals and departures, immigrants and deportees. “Angel Island” tells the stories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and South Asians, as well as Mexicans, Russians, European Jews and Filipinos who were processed through the station. Their stories testify to the great diversity of American immigration.

Story continues at SFGate

As California educators wait anxiously to hear whether the state will be awarded funds from the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition today, the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have attacked the race for funds as undermining the civil rights of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged children.

So far, California has lost out in two contests for education stimulus funds, as I have noted in previous blog posts.

In a highly critical broadside [PDF] issued last month against many aspects of the Obama administration’s education agenda, seven civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, singled out the Race to the Top competition for its fiercest criticism:

If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn to learn in high quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.

Story continues here

As the proud granddaughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, nothing disheartens me more than the current wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.  I find very heartening, on the other hand, this article by economist Masao Suzuki discussing how current anti-immigrant legislation crosses racial and ethnic lines.

These anti-immigrant forces try to argue that undocumented immigrants today are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. This is the same argument that the anti-Chinese movement used 100 ago years to try to strip Wong Kim Ark of his birthright citizenship, saying that Chinese immigrants, who were banned from naturalizing by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument, pointing out that the only exceptions are children of diplomats (who are immune from U.S. law) and the children of a hostile occupation force in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark extended fundamental civil rights won by African Americans to Asian Americans. Later this case was cited in the 1982 Plyler v. Doe U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas state law that tried to exclude unauthorized Mexican immigrant children from public schools.

This move by anti-immigrant forces to target native-born Americans shows that this movement is not about the legality of immigrants. The anti-immigrant movement is a right-wing movement that is all about stripping away the right to go to public schools and to be citizens. These rights were won by African Americans through struggle – like the Civil War – and later extended to Asian Americans and Latinos.

See full article:  Anti-Immigrant Movement to Target Native Born

From “The Feministing Five: Elaine Villasper” at Feministing blog.

“When I first got involved with GABRIELA, I was in college. I was really shocked by the issue of sex trafficking and how Filipinos are affected by sex trafficking. When I first started college, I didn’t know that Filipino women were affected by so many issues. I had grown up in the US undocumented, so I didn’t have a lot of access to information or even just basic history of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, until I got to college. It was the first time I was learning a lot of these things, that there was a sex trade, and that people were making money off of it, off of the bodies of women. And it really struck me because at the time I was thinking, “that could be me.” These women, they’re me. They’re my age, they could be my cousins, my family. Any of us could easily have fallen into the sex trade or been victimized in the same way, because I lived in the same conditions that these women are living in right now. So when those realizations came to me, that was when I decided that I had to do something.

Elaine Villasper is the Vice Chair of Education for GABRIELA USA, the North American chapter of the Filipino women’s rights organization. …Villasper helps to teach basic organizing skills, trains young leaders and helps to educate the local community about issues that affect Filipino and Filipino-American women. GABRIELA USA runs a number of cultural and artistic programs here in the US, as well as the Back to the Motherland program, which enables Filipino-Americans to travel to the Philippines to gain a better grasp of the pressing political, socioeconomic and human rights issues on the ground there. Here in the US, the organization works on issues like domestic violence, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights and political representation for the Filipino-American population.

Read the interview with Villasper here

I thought this was a wonderful exercise in dreaming out loud for civil rights and equality….this court would actually look  like our students!   See the full article here, with details about “the court” and those who nominated them.

Dale Minami, civil rights attorney;  Lani Guinier, Harvard law prof/activist; Goodwin Liu, Berkeley law prof; Patricia Williams, Columbia law prof; Harold Koh, lawyer/scholar; Marsha Berzon, 9th Circuit federal appeals judge; Jackie Berrien, EEOC chair; Gerald Lopez, UCLA law prof; and Jed Rakoff, federal district judge.

And be sure to check out the newly re-launched ColorLines webmagazine, now a fully digital publication.

From Ms. Magazine’s blog, June 25

The Akanksha Infertility Clinic is a small pastel building inside a walled compound. Located in Anand, India, the clinic is one of hundreds in the country offering the local women as commercial surrogates. For a fraction of what it can cost in the United States, infertile couples or single parents can hire a woman to stay in the hostel for nine months and bear their child.

Potential surrogates recruited by the Akanksha Clinic are healthy married Indian women who have children of their own.  Once a party to the agreement, they can no longer live at home, have sexual contact with their husband and must leave older children behind to live at the hostel. They sleep nine to a room, are administered daily iron shots and follow a closely monitored diet.

The increasing popularity of outsourcing pregnancy to countries like India, Thailand and Cambodia poses urgent questions about the connections between global inequality and the commodification of the female body. Currently, commercial surrogacy is legal in India because no law exists to prohibit the practice. This means that there are also few safeguards protecting the rights of surrogate mothers.

In its next legislative session, the Indian Parliament is set to debate a bill entitled “The Assisted Reproductive Technology Act,” which will regulate the growing industry. One problematic part of the bill says that a surrogate must waive all her rights during the pregnancy. Even the option of “fetal reduction,” abortion, is a decision that can only be made by her doctor or the genetic parents.

Story continues here

From Ms. Magazine blog, July 2, 2010:

On Thursday, the New York State Senate passed a landmark bill granting overtime pay, paid vacation days, a day off each week, and protections against sexual harassment to domestic workers. David Paterson has promised he will sign it into law, giving thanks to the many workers who lobbied for its passage:

They provide all of us with an example of how individuals can, through struggle and dedication, bring about positive change in the face of skepticism and doubt. This achievement belongs to them, and I will be pleased to sign it into law on their behalf.

The bill’s passage concludes a six-year battle in the state legislature, and is a significant step toward protecting domestic workers. But some of its benefits were qualified: Advocates agreed to compromise on the proposed requirement for six paid holidays and six days of paid vacation, and instead mandate three paid vacation days annually–but only after a worker has been with an employer for a year.

In the New York metro area, 93 percent of domestic workers are women. The passage of the bill was due in large part to Domestic Workers United, a thriving New York City union of Caribbean, Latina and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers.

More at “Newsflash: New York Passes Nation’s First Domestic Workers Bill of Rights”  Ms Magazine Blog.

Here is a wonderful talk by Chimamanda Adichie of Nigeria about the power and danger of stories. (Found it in my end-of-semester cleanup…..) The video and a full transcript are also here. Highly recommended!

Enjoy your summer!

Students at Cal State East Bay designed and carried out a “limpia” ritual (cleansing) of Warren Hall on May 4th of this year.  In this student-directed film of the event, you’ll see the students walk through Warren Hall with eggs “collecting the negative energies” of the building, then convening downstairs on the plaza for discussion, dance, venting, and finally, the destruction of the eggs.  The event merges the curanderismo practice of natural healing with student protest and self-preservation in the face of the budget situation.  It’s a powerful film, about ten minutes.