Emancipated Tom & Ethel Bradley Center

In this episode, Ángela Aurora, a Salvadoran journalism professor and visiting scholar at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, interviews Julia Gavarrete, a Salvadoran journalist working for the digital newspaper El Faro. They discuss, in Spanish, the growing criminalization of journalism in El Salvador, the use by the administration of the current Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele of spyware to monitor journalists' phones and computers, and more broadly about the present state of emergency that, in the name of the war on gangs, has justified the repeal of basic rights. Since April the state of emergency has allowed authorities to intercept communications, suspend constitutional rights, including freedom of assembly and due process, and has granted broad powers to arrest hundreds of people without evidence. In the last eight weeks, authorities claim to have made over 31,000 arrests. Aurora and Gavarrete explain how this lack of accountability and unchecked executive power is having particularly grim consequences for those living in the most impoverished communities.

This episode was produced by Marta Valier.

You can take a look at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s photos on El Salvador by Richard Cross here and you can watch two video clips of the Center’s oral history interview with Óscar Martínez, one of the founders of El Faro on our YouTube channel. One clip is about his experience covering politics for La Prensa Gráfica and why he abandoned the newspaper, and in the second clip, he explains how the Zetas operate in Mexico.

In this episode, Marta Valier discusses deportations of immigrants from the U.S., more specifically about the deportation of veterans, with Héctor Barajas, director and founder of the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana, Mexico, ACLU immigration attorney Andrés Kwon, and photographer Joseph Silva, author of the photographic exhibition Deported Veterans at the Museum of Social Justice of Los Angeles, which will stay open until July 17. 

Visit our webpage, CSUN Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, explore our Border Studies archive, and see some of the digitized images of the Julián Cardona Collection.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode we present a slightly edited version of a conversation with artist Alice Leora Briggs, as interviewed by professor José Luis Benavides and Marta Valier. In her newest book, Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon, she and Mexican journalist Julián Cardona, bring to the forefront life in the Mexican border city of Juárez during the Six Years of Death, from 2006 to 2012, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the so-called war on organized crime sending federal forces into the city and violence exploded. This book decodes and visually represents the new language that rose from a city at war, using Cardona's interviews, definitions, and Briggs's drawings, leaving a strong mark on a much disregarded war.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode Marta Valier talks to Giovanni Batz, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, about his upcoming book, titled The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Megaprojects and Ixil Resistance in Guatemala. He discusses the Ixil resistance, and the struggle against megaprojects in Guatemala analyzing topics like state-sponsored violence, the persecution of human rights defenders and activists, the negative impact of megaprojects on the indigenous communities, and the historical land inequality in Guatemala.

Visit the Bradley Center. You can also browse Richard Cross's photos of the Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, 1983, escaping genocide.

Visit the Center's digital collections and our curriculum website.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode, Marta Valier talks to Brandon Lien, a Cal State University Northridge (CSUN) student that has been working for the last year at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center on The Black Power Archive Oral History Project, a collection of oral histories documenting the African American experience in Los Angeles.  We wanted to hear from a student's perspective what it’s like for younger generations to work with oral histories archived at the Bradley Center. Lien, a film student in his third year at CSUN, shared with us three of his favorite audio clips he discovered working at the archive. One clip is from Kumasi, a member of the Slauson street organization The Slausons and author of the 1970 "Folsom Prison Strike and Bill of Rights Manifesto." A second clip is from an oral history with Watani Stiner, a member of the Black nationalist group US Organization. And the last clip is from Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of Juanita and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, leaders in the civil rights movement and close friends to Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and our Black Power Oral History Project.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

En este episodio, Marta Valier habla con Aída Silva Hernández, una académica de Tijuana que ha estudiado y trabajado con migrantes durante los últimos veinte años. Ella habla de cómo la ciudad fronteriza mexicana al sur de San Diego ha cambiado en el último siglo, de una ciudad donde los migrantes iban y venían cuando entraban y salían de los EE. UU. para encontrar trabajo, a una ciudad en la que se quedaban atrapados durante años, esperando. mientras trataba de solicitar asilo en los EE. UU. La espera, diseñada específicamente por las políticas de inmigración de EE. UU. para disuadir a los migrantes de ingresar legalmente al país, explica, es demasiado agotadora tanto para los migrantes como para la sociedad civil local que se compromete apoyarlos.

In this episode, Marta Valier speaks to Aída Silva Hernández, a scholar from Tijuana that studied and worked with migrants for the last twenty years. She talks about how the Mexican border town south of San Diego has changed in the last century, from a city where migrants would come and go as they entered and exited the U.S. to find work, to a city where they get stuck for years, waiting while trying to apply for asylum in the U.S. The wait, specifically designed by the U.S. immigration policies to deter migrants from entering legally into the country is, she explains, way too grueling for both the migrants and the local civil society that is committed to supporting them. En español.  

Visit the Bradley Center website.

Also, visit our digital collections and our border studies collection.

Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.