Feature Archives

On Wednesday, April 29th, UC Berkeley Police, apparently acting on behalf of ICE and introducing themselves as ICE agents, arrested Jesús Gutiérrez, a worker at the Clark Kerr Campus Dining Commons and a union activist in AFSCME Local 3299. Gutierrez remains in Santa Rita Jail. On Wednesday, May 13th, a rally and a march was held at Sproul Plaza, UC-Berkeley, to demand the release of Jesús Gutiérrez from ICE custody.

The Project is a newspaper created by an open collective of UCSC students and allies to document and inspire strategic radical actions that are relevant to local, regional, and global socioeconomic justice. The Project collective has published their second issue since being resurrected in the Fall.

The Watsonville Brown Berets celebrated their 15th anniversary with a dinner and salsa dance on Saturday, April 25th at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Aptos. The Brown Berets have worked in their own community and built solidarity with others for the past 15 years. With a focus on youth, education, social justice, direct action and community events, thousands of people have participated in, or been affected by, their grassroots activities.

Each year on April 20th, at 4:20pm, people celebrate and smoke cannabis together. One of the biggest gathering spots in California, perhaps the biggest, is Porter Meadow at UC Santa Cruz. It's a large event for the whole community - a place where thousands of people can have a picnic, play with musical instruments, frisbees, kites and just have fun. It's in a safe and relatively secluded location and problems are rare.

Will & Darwin write: Our intention... is to generate a greater level of critical reflection and discussion concerning the dominant role of the politics of “greening”... that characterize campus-based environmental organizations.... We can think of few more timely priorities for those who would use university campuses as organizing bases [than] to challenge the system of authoritarian power that is in the process of destroying the ecological basis for the existence of life on earth.

There will be a meeting on Tuesday, April 7th at UCSC to discuss the defense of the Community Studies department. A post on the SC-IMC calendar states, "Proposed budget cuts at UCSC to come into effect July 2009 'disband the administration' at Community Studies, 'laying off' lecturers and cutting the Field Study program. This program benefits not only students, but various community organizations in Santa Cruz, all over the state, nation and the world."

Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson, professors of Geography at Kansas University, received funding from the Foreign Military Studies Office, located at the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, to map communally held indigenous land in the states of San Luis Potosi, and in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project, named the Bowman Expeditions or México Indígena, began mapping in 2005 in an indigenous region known as La Husteca, which is partially located in the state of San Luis Potosi, and then moved their operation to the state of Oaxaca amidst the statewide popular uprising of the Oaxacan Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) in 2006.