Call to Action - NoBorders Camp Mexico-U.S. border

For more than a year, collectives and individuals from across North America have been coming together to organize this mobilization. Here, in November 2007 No Borders Camp is a creative week-long action in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. We are planning to establish large campsites on both sides of the border.

We envision a wide variety of art forms, workshops and micro-forums, as well as autonomous direct action, organized by affinity groups against the border apartheid system. We call on you to help us make this a reality. We encourage folks to come together in affinity groups and mobilize against the border military-industrial-complex as it exists in the area of Calexico/Mexicali. This is more than invitation to travel to the borderlands. It is a request that you find the border as it lives and breathes in your town and home and body. We ask that you call it out where you are and bring us your stories.

Below is an offering of some details, ideas, themes and constellation markers of intergalactic resistance and emergence.

To all people currently struggling against borders, racism, assimilation, and the criminalization of entire communities. For all those who are daily crossing borders and undermining the false duality of “us” and “them” to every person working towards a world where no human being could ever be illegal. And, for everyone rising up and saying Ya basta to racist organization, from the Minutemen, to the U.S. Government. We invite you to join us in a process and a project in the tradition of no borders camps that have and continue to happen around the globe.

For more than a year, collectives and individuals from across North America have been coming together to organize this mobilization. This has involved meetings and events in multitude of areas from Chiapas to San Francisco. There have been proposals from the south to the north of Mexico beginning in December of last year with the colectividades gathering in Mexicali as well as the zapatista encuentro in Chiapas, discussions at the border social forum in Juarez and the first of regional meeting in Culiacan. On the north side of the line, gatherings and events began in San Diego and Tucson and continued on in San Francisco, New York, and many other cities.

In addition, this No Borders Camp is more than one mobilization. It is a part of a growing global movement. In August 2007, in Transcarpathia, Ukraine and in September 2007 in Gatwick, U.K. there will also be organized actions against the increased boundary militarization and inhumane detention systems attempting to overtake the globe. Here, in November 2007 No Borders Camp is a creative week-long action in the US/Mexico borderlands. We are planning to establish large campsites on both sides of the border. These campsites are actions in and of themselves and further actions will occur once people are gathered.

We envision a wide variety of art forms, workshops and micro-forums, as well as autonomous direct action, organized by affinity groups against the border apartheid system. We call on you to help us make this a reality. We have been talking with media collectives in order to create an autonomous media laboratory with a video broadcast, and both a net-based and low power fm radio station, but more resources are needed.

We ask that you engage in the ongoing process as it builds towards this camp and continues on long afterwards. We encourage folks to come together in affinity groups and mobilize against the border military-industrial-complex as it exists in the area of Calexico/Mexicali. This is more than invitation to travel to the borderlands. It is a request that you find the border as it lives and breathes in your town and home and body. We ask that you call it out where you are and bring us your stories.

This is also a call to organize solidarity actions and join us in shouting with our companeros across the world that this global system of walls and surveillance, detention and deportation will end! The borderlands are now everywhere and our struggles must be coordination and collectively developed. We want to see people all over the place organize local informational forums, solidarity events at detention centers and anything else they can think of to contribute to this process and this mobilization. This call is for more than just November, it is a request to begin the necessary conversations and organizing in your region.

A starting point is for one to be and active organizer and participant in the upcoming regional gatherings set for august 2007. During the middle of that month, many regional gatherings will occur to discuss La Otra Campana. In some areas, organizers are coinciding regional No Borders Camp meetings with these encuentros. As a part of this call, we call for these regional gatherings to happen in August around the United States to discuss, plan, brainstorm and prepare for the November camp.

This convergence is more than a series of actions thrown at what we are against. No borders camp 2007 seeks to build an engaged autonomy in the borderlands and to create a space where there is no border. It is a temporary glimpse of the world we are fighting for. To build such a space requires commitment and responsibility and to us, a further desire to break down the multitude of borders that keep us divided from each other. We have been programmed through our authoritarian and capitalist upbringings in building the walls of race, class, gender, sexuality and more. This society has told us that we all must fit in nice, neat boxes and put all those around us in the same cages. To tear down institutional borders and create autonomy means also to challenge the patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and classism that are built into our minds.

To all of these things, we invite you. But this is only one call to action. There are many planned and we hope that this will inspire many more. This process and project belongs to no one and we hope that you will feel moved to join us and call out to your community. This particular call will be posted at noborderscamp.org by midsummer 2007 and groups, individuals are welcome to sign on if they so choose.

We want to remember that this is all indigenous land, and that struggles for decolonization must be part of any movement for liberation and migrant justice.

In solidarity with the thousands of people who have died crossing the border, the thousands locked in detention cages, the thousands of separated families, lovers and friends, for these people who