Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis

Community, Identity, and Political Struggle: Challenging Immigrant Prisons in Arizona

215 Community, Identity, and Political Struggle Challenging Immigrant Prisons in Arizona zoe hammer This chapter offers a glimpse into a campaign to fight the construction of new immigrant prisons in the state of Arizona. It highlights the strategies and tactics activists used to challenge the state’s capacity to cage, kill, and criminalize poor people of color in the United States. Stopping the expansion of prisons is one of many fronts in a larger abolitionist struggle examined throughout this volume. My analysis begins with a consideration of the relationship between identity and political struggle in building social movements. I will then analyze ways in which anti-­ prison and immigrant rights activists, working together, reimagined community identities as part of the work of opposing the construction of immigrant prisons. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad writes, “The anticolonial nationalist movement produced a series of gatherings and a language of anticolonialism that elicited an emotional loyalty among its circle and beyond. This historical struggle made the identity of the Third World comprehensible and viable. The identity gained credence through trial and error , while participation and risk in the struggle produced the trust that gave the term social legitimacy.”1 For Prashad, building the identity of the third world was part of the process of creating an expansive political agenda, a powerful ideology, and institutions that enable the powerless “to hold a dialogue with the powerful, and try to hold them accountable.”2 Contemporary mass movements fighting neoliberalism across the globe have the potential to produce “a genuine agenda for the future,”3 suggesting that such an agenda is a prerequisite for once again 216 • zoe hammer challenging regimes that derive authority from the violent social problems they claim to solve. Developing comprehensible, viable identities is of political importance because “moving beyond walls and cages” is an ambitious project that confronts problems that are as deeply entrenched as the challenges that were taken on in the global struggle against neocolonialism. Making political identities and projects legible and viable is a project that is crucial to both the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements; hopes for linking these movements in the United States and for making this combined movement part of the global social justice agenda depend on crafting political identities based in political practices that draw people in, engendering trust and legitimacy through participation in struggle. Another reason I begin this analysis with Prashad’s historical account is his clarity around the complexities of what it takes for ordinary people to challenge powerful regimes of social control in a world of vast inequalities of wealth and political power. The Third World project was able to create and wield new capacities that shaped and limited neocolonial forces on a global scale. Grounded in a critical rejection of colonialism, its development of a positive new agenda and a new ideology and, crucially, its strategic engagement with and transformation of political institutions (both national and international) were the basis of political empowerment. As an active participant in the prison abolition and border justice movements for more than a decade and as a college professor teaching student activists , I confront barriers to this historical understanding of how power is built in two related arguments. The first argument is that “demand politics,” or engaging in campaigns to change laws and policies, is always already “giving power to the state” and thus the state should be abandoned as a site of struggle. The second and, I think, related argument is that “horizontalism,” the creation of local, radically democratic forms of self-­ governance, is sufficient to challenge violent regimes of social control. While these arguments offer important insights, the juggernaut of prison growth and border militarization insists that the state is a crucial site of struggle if politics are to be transformed and alternatives made possible. A campaign conducted in 2000 to stop the construction of an immigrant-­ only prison in Arizona brought immigrant rights and anti–border militarization activists, prisoner families, ex-­ prisoners, environmentalists, and youth of color together in a struggle that would eventually also draw migrant unions, ranchers, formerly imprisoned immigrants, local chambers of commerce, university and high school students, anarchists, and anti-­ Walmart activists. It fos- Community, Identity, Political Struggle • 217 tered the conditions in which the contemporary abolition movement extended its reach into Arizona, and activists have been able to prevent the construction of at...