Over a period of five days, thousands of concerned social justice activists converged in Detroit, Michigan for the second United States Social Forum (USSF), in the tradition of the World Social Forum (WSF) format established in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. The WSF then in 2001 and now the USSF in 2010, is where civil society gathers to create alternative political, social, cultural, and economic agendas, and these meetings continue to inspire and produce much-needed social theory and action.

Some of this inspiration came in the form of hotel lobby and bar conversations; those that after much caffeine-driven delirium and barstool shop talk, occasionally result in critical analysis that when put into practice strengthen social processes. The most impacting inspiration for me, however, was the sincere expressions of truth that offered a new lens for critical thinking. At a workshop at which I was a panelist (titled: We Are All Arizona Now: Strategies to resist racism & militarism from the border to the interior), an ice-breaking exercise in which we drew a problem facing our communities as a way of introduction, a young indigenous brother from Arizona simply stated that he was not an immigrant, and that his grandmother had just passed away at the age of 100. At her death she was older than the state of Arizona, he stated.

The young indigenous brother did not stay long, but his statement had a lasting impact on me, and I wonder how often as organizers we miss important details that could affect our way of effectively building power to sustain our movements. The hateful culture in Arizona, with the onslaught of mean-spirited laws, would have made the grandmother a target of the State. An indigenous woman older than the State of Arizona, who carried a legacy of a People on a land predating our modern conception of that land, with greater moral and historical authority to challenge what it means to belong to a land, would also have been victim to the State’s attempts to erase, invalidate, and make her People’s history illegal with the outlawing of ethnic studies. The power structures that led to the establishment of the 48th state continue to be rooted in today’s racism and exclusionary policies and these are not limited to the State of Arizona, but continue to frame the relationship between those in power and those marginalized.

Our struggle for migrants’ rights might be better framed from a position that recognizes the institutional structures that prohibit our ability to fully develop as human beings. The language we use, the strategies we develop and adopt, the struggles we uphold could be better served from a perspective that seeks out liberation. Just like another young brother who dared to reframe the USSF guiding statement with “another US is not necessary,” challenging how we conceive of our collective foundation for building social justice in the United States and within the USSF, and suggesting that “another world is possible” only if we challenge the constructs that permit the exploitation and oppression of peoples not fitting of the dominant framework.

If our struggle is for self-determination, it is clearer to me now that a politics of liberation must be intentional and strategic, but also compassionate and forgiving (of ourselves), and it has to be collective, honest, and participatory. How we express our solidarity with each other cannot be situational, but it must be dynamic and deeply rooted in the belief that liberation belongs to all of us, not in spite of our differences, but because of them. The grandmother who lived to be 100 years old, older than the state of Arizona, has a living history represented in her grandson who delivered a profound message of truth: that the memory of her and what her legacy represents is a resistance that needs to be transmitted to the rest of us. This is what Social Forums are about, and it is the theory of our living history that should help guide our present course for liberation.

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