On Labor Day weekend 2022, organizers for labor, immigrant and gender justice gathered at the Friends Meeting House of Austin for an event produced by Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera.  The well attended workshop event was titled Border Talk, Community Action, and included a luncheon followed by three breakout groups where participants could deepen their conversations with the visitors from Mexico and local immigrant rights’ activists.

The group of panelists included activists from the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO) and organizers for Austin Sanctuary Network.  Women on the Border director Elvia Arriola served as moderator and spoke briefly at the outset about the background for this gathering.  Arriola reflected first on the importance of honoring workers on both sides of the border on the national holiday celebrating the worker.  Providing some context for the speakers she stressed how their stories enliven the effects of two bodies of two intersecting bodies of law relevant to border talk and action: the pro-business NAFTA/USMCA and immigration law. The former has an established history of promising so much to workers yet delivering a model of industrialization known for its exploitation of mostly female workers, for creating toxic work conditions, paying nonliving wages for brutally long workdays and harassment of workers who dare to organize for reform.  And while the borderless spirit for business investment is celebrated by investors, to migrants and laborers the border, with its heavily militarized nature, is closed and serves as a symbol of an immigration system that is anti-worker, anti-immigrant and anti-families.

Speakers from Mexico included Julia Quiñonezlong time coordinator for the organization dedicated to empowering through education of their rights women who work in the maquiladoras.  Also speaking for the CFO’s work was Tanya Aparicio, a labor lawyer who has been helping implement with other staff in several cities the 2019 Mexican labor law reforms, triggered by the USMCA to enhance collective bargaining rights for workers on both sides of the border.  Julia Q. delivered powerful remarks about the August 31 amazing vote to install a democratic, transparent workers’ union at a factory where the principal organizers benefitted from training by the CFO.

Carmen Zuvieta, an organizer for immigrants’ rights with Austin Sanctuary Network, and Hilda Ramirez with her teenage son Ivan, asylum seekers residing for several years now in an Austin church, delivered remarks on the linkages between exploitation of workers in the globalized economy and increased levels of migration that have in turn criminalized the identity of the immigrant. Carmen passionately invoked the need for a movement that includes immigrants and their much desired labor into the rhetoric of labor, border and gender justice.

Following the speakers’ remarks those gathered enjoyed tamales then broke out into small discussion groups where they could explore more of the issues with the speakers.  Issues like – what are the similarities and differences between organizing for workers in the U.S. and Mexico, how can we best engage in solidarity with labor communities on both side of the border, why are immigrants viewed as “illegal” when their labor is so much desired and used in the U.S.?

The event was recorded by KOOP radio.