From Ferguson to Salinas: Intersections Against State-Sanctioned Violence

March 6 at the Oakes Learning Center, University of California, Santa Cruz

March 7 at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, Santa Cruz

As folks across the country demand justice for Mike Brown and Eric Garner, community members in Salinas, CA are fighting the police murders of Angel Ruiz, 42 (d. March 20, 2014); Osman Hernandez, 26 (d May 9, 2014); Carlos Mejia-Gomez, 44 (d. May 20, 2014); Frank Alvarado, Jr., 39 (d. July 10, 2014); and Jaime Garcia, 35 (d. October 31, 2014). “From Ferguson to Salinas: Intersections Against State-Sanctioned Violence” brings together community members, political organizers, scholars, and artists/poets from across California to discuss the ongoing historical crisis of state-sanctioned violence against people of color and the movement to oppose white supremacist policing in the U.S. We hope to build upon the momentum we’ve witnessed over the last six months as people have taken to the streets to demand justice and offer visions of a world in which black and brown lives matter. We seek an analysis of the historical relationship between anti-black and anti-brown violence in the U.S. in the hopes of strengthening cross-racial solidarities. We seek to raise awareness about the intersections between racialization and economic violence, between police brutality and mass incarceration, and between intimate and state-based gender violence. We are interested in building connections between those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones, those who fight to stay alive despite the injustices of the U.S. justice system, and those who mobilize poetic imaginaries to build the world anew.

March 7, 10-4 // Resource Center for Nonviolence

Ofrenda y altares Workshop, 10-11:30 am

Led by Emma Garcia from the Santa Cruz Arts Council, this workshop will teach participants how to create altars to commemorate people who have been harmed by the state. We will make four altars in total — one for the indigenous communities who lived, struggled, and died at Mission Santa Cruz in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; one for the people persecuted by the anti-Chinese movement in Santa Cruz throughout the nineteenth century; one for Jose Chamales and Francisco Arias, who were lynched by a mob and hanged from the Water Street Bridge in 1877; and one for the people of Salinas who are being targeted and murdered by police today. Participants will later deliver these altars to sites we visit during the anti-colonial walking tour.

Lunch served by Food Not Bombs

Poetic Imaginaries Against Violence, 12-1:30 pm

Readings and Discussion with Ronaldo Wilson (Assistant Professor, Literature and Creative Writing, UCSC, and author of Poems of the Black Object and Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man) and Tisa Bryant (Critical Studies Faculty, California Institute of the Arts, and author of Unexplained Presence, [the curator], and Tzimmes).

Anti-Colonial Walking Tour, 2-5 pm

We will leave the RCNV at 2 pm to visit sites of white supremacist violence in Santa Cruz, including Mission Santa Cruz, the Front St. Post Office (one of four former Chinatowns), the alley beside the El Palomar Restaurant (where Eduardo Carrillo’s mural was destroyed by the city), the Water Street Bridge, and the Beach Flats. Each site will be narrated by a different storyteller, as well as activated by the altars we leave behind.