Justin Akers Chacon – författare

“An urgent, important must-read.”—Jeff Chang, author Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

In Nadie es ilegal, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacon expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a human face on the immigrants who daily risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. Countering the mounting chorus of anti-immigrant voices, Nadie es ilegal debunks the leading ideas behind the often-violent right wing backlash against immigrants, revealing their deep roots in US history, and documents the new civil rights movement that has mounted protests around the country to demand justice and dignity for immigrants.

Nadie es ilegal features moving, evocative photos from award-winning photographer Julian Cardona.

Justin Akers Chacon is a professor of US history and Chicano studies in San Diego, California. He has contributed to the International Socialist Review and the book Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints.

Mike Davis is a historian, activist, and author of many acclaimed books, including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California at Irvine. He received a 2007 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Radicals in the Barrio uncovers a long and rich history of political radicalism within the Mexican and Chicano working class in the United States. Chacón clearly and sympathetically documents the ways that migratory workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and shared class experience, as they crossed the border into southwestern barrios during the first three decades of the twentieth-century.

Justin Akers Chacón previous work includes No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis).

The aggressive exploitation of labor on both sides of the US-Mexico border has become a prominent feature of capitalism in North America. Kids in cages, violent ICE raids, and anti-immigrant racist rhetoric characterize our political reality and are everyday shaping how people intersect at the US-Mexico border. As activist-scholar Justin Akers Chacón carefully demonstrates, however, this vicious model of capitalist transnationalization has also created its own grave-diggers. Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished. Transborder people face walls, armed agents, detention camps, and a growing regime of repressive laws that criminalize them. Despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations—the migra-state—migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.