By Emily P. Achtenberg Bolivia’s vice minister for housing, Ramiro Rivera, had been on the job only two weeks last March when his office was occupied by 100 angry members of Ponchos Rojos (Red Ponchos), a militant Aymara peasant group. Three weeks later, wheelbarrow porters from the Abastos market in Santa Cruz staged a similar protest. Both […]

By Ernesto Castañeda On 3 October 2007, a piece of street theater was unfolding on the sidewalks of Rue de la Banque, a street in downtown Paris close to the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange. Protestors, mostly legal immigrants, were camping out and demonstrating in front of Le Ministère de la Crise du Logement (Ministry for the Housing […]

By Jennifer Ridgley and Justin Steil In July of 2006, the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, became a focus of national media attention when its city council approved the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance (IIRA) proposed by Mayor Lou Barletta. Allegedly targeting “illegal” immigration, the ordinance established a $1,000 a day fine on landlords who rented […]

By María-Teresa Vázquez-Castillo This is our land. This is our street. Get the hell out of here. –Joseph Turner, founder of Save our State (SOS) In the early twenty-first century, a new stage of the anti-immigrant city is in the making, targeting immigrant communities of Latino origin, specifically of Mexican origin. Between 2005 and 2007, […]

By Tom Angotti East Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine Part One in a series on urban apartheids.  It takes two hours every day for Palestinians to cross the military checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem so they can get to work. Bethlehem is in the West Bank and Jerusalem, though divided, is part of Israel. The checkpoint is […]