Emancipated

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.

In this episode Marta Valier talks to Amelia Frank-Vitale, an anthropologist that studies the migration of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico. She discusses the caravan of 2018, when strength came in numbers and more than 7,000 migrants joined forces to travel through Central America and Mexico forging a movement that reclaimed the migrants right to mobility in a region where the migration regime dictated by the U.S. forces them into clandestine, and deadly, movement. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

What are the structural impacts of the rise of corruption and fusion of politics and drug trafficking in Honduras? How do they impact local employment, land use, poverty, and hunger? What happens when the drug lords and the legally elected officials destroy the legal agriculture activity that the local rural population depends on? In this episode Marta Valier talks to Laura Gottesdiener, a correspondent for Reuters based in Mexico who wrote the special report on the links between corruption, criminality, drug trafficking, and migration in Honduras, explaining in practical terms way how these dynamics work at the local level. Here is the link to Gottesdiner's story: "A drug-trafficking mayor ravaged a local economy, fueling the flight from Honduras." Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

Guillermo Márquez and Marta Valier talk with Douglas Oviedo, an Honduran writer, musician, and performer who wrote the book Caravaneros, a dramatization about his travel with the caravan of fall 2018, when around 7.000 migrants, mostly from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, joined forces to walk together reclaiming their right to pass through Central America and Mexico to travel to the United States. This episode is in Spanish. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode, Marta Valier talks with Ada Trillo about her latest exhibition, La Caravana del Diablo 2020. Trillo is a Philadelphia-based photographer, born and raised in the bi-national border region of Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. In her work, she focuses on the violent impact of the U.S. border policy on migrants. Trillo is the most recent affiliate to the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, and in this episode, she explains how she set up to fly to Honduras to join the caravan in January 2020, where she joined the migrants fleeing violence and poor economic conditions and documented their travels through Guatemala and into Mexico. Trillo's work is in the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and several other collections. She is the recipient of the British Journal of Photography's Female In Focus 2020 Best Series Award and has been featured in The Guardian, Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine, and Mother Jones, among other publications. She has also been awarded The Me & Eve Grant from the Center of Photographic Arts in Santa Fe and received First Place in Editorial in the Tokyo International Foto Awards. Trillo has exhibited across the world in New York City, Philadelphia, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, England, France, and Germany. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode, Marta Valier talks with Todd Miller about his newest book, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, 2021. Miller has more than 20 years of reporting and writing about borders and in his latest book he exposes their fragility and debunks all of the typical justifications we hear about their legitimacy, making the case for their dismantling and abolition. #BradleyCenterCSUN #Border Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and our border studies collection. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

In this episode, Marta Valier presents segments of an oral history interview with Todd Miller, conducted by José Luis Benavides and Pilar de Haro for the Bradley Center. Miller has more than 20 years of reporting and writing about borders—from their massive expansion in the U.S. (Border Patrol Nation, 2014), to their role in preventing climate refugees to migrate (Storming the Wall, 2017), and their central role in protecting the international imperial system (Empire of Borders, 2019). In part 2, we will bring you a conversation about Miller's newest book, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, 2021. #BradleyCenterCSUN #Border Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and our border studies collection. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

Marta Valier talks to Guillermo Márquez about the visual anthropology work that photographer Richard Cross did in Colombia, where he was invited in the late 1970s by anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann to visually document life in the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque. #BradleyCenterCSUN #Palenque #SanBasilio #Colombia Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

Marta Valier talks to Keith Rice and his granddaughter Taylor Walker. Keith is the historian and archivist at the Bradley Center, and last summer he and Taylor decided to document the BLM protests in our serving area for the Center. Some of their images are now part of a digital exhibition depicting protestors occupying intersections, marching in the streets, delivering valiant and inspiring speeches, and displaying thought-provoking signs that collectively demanded equality for the lives of Black people. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and this digital exhibition. Episode hosted and produced by Marta Valier.

Panel discussion “Environmental Racism, Gender, and Black Place-Making in Mexico's Costa Chica,” with filmmaker Ebony Bailey, Historian Jayson Maurice Porter, and Anthropologist Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez. Event: February 5, 2021. California State University, Northridge. Episode produced by Marta Valier. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Q&A with filmmaker Ebony Bailey about her documentary "Jamaica and Tamarindo: Afro-Tradition in the Heart of Mexico," followed by the panel discussion, “Environmental Racism, Gender, and Black Place-Making in Mexico's Costa Chica,” with Ebony Bailey, Historian Jayson Maurice Porter, and Anthropologist Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez. Event: February 5, 2021. California State University, Northridge. Episode produced by Marta Valier. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Our podcast, Emancipated: Voices and Images from the Archive, continues with the third chapter of Toña's Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador, a series produced by our archival researcher Marta Valier and co-hosted by Rosie Rios and Marta Valier, using oral histories with people who lived in El Salvador during the Liberation War (1980–1992). This chapter centers on El Rescate human rights representative Linda Garrett's encounter with Salvadoran political prisoner Héctor Bernabé Recinos Aguirre, illegally detained for more than four years for organizing the first national strike in 1980. Recinos Aguirre co-founded the Committee of Political Prisoners of San Salvador (COPPES) while Garrett worked on the Index of Accountability, a database used by the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, linking military officers to human rights violations committed during the war. This episode discusses the significance of accountability, reparation, and the weight of impunity on both the old and younger Salvadoran generation. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

Our podcast, Emancipated: Voices and Images from the Archive, continues with the second chapter of Toña's Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador, a series produced and hosted by our archival researcher Marta Valier, using oral histories with people who lived in El Salvador during the Liberation War (1980–1992). In the second chapter, we keep following Linda Garrett on her trip to San Salvador as a human rights representative for El Rescate and we meet Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, known as Santiago, who also traveled to San Salvador from Nicaragua with the intention to establish Radio Venceremos, a radio station that operated in areas controlled by the insurgency and that he kept clandestine for 11 years (episode hosted & produced by Marta Valier). Both of them traveled to San Salvador after the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero in March 1980, a time where thousands of Salvadorans were fleeing the country. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.

In this first chapter, we hear from Linda Garrett, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy in the Americas; and Toña Rios, who migrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1981 and is now a pastor at Baldwin Park United Methodist Church in Los Angeles County. Marta Valier produced and hosted this series based on oral histories with people that lived in El Salvador during the liberation war (1980–1992). The 1970s brought to El Salvador increasing government repression, including the creation of government-organized death squads to combat opposition movements and in 1980 a series of failed military juntas took power. By 1981, leftist guerrillas and political groups joined forces, forming the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the FMLN. Then, throughout the 1980s, a civil war was waged between the FMLN and the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military forces. Visit the Bradley Center website. Also, visit our digital collections and curriculum website.