VivirLatino

VL has covered several of the protests that have taken place on University of California campuses since the financial crisis in California hit the University system so hard (threatening to turn it from a public school system to a private one). The students are fighting hard to keep the school system public and affordable for the communities who are most in need of a university education but who simultaneously usually can’t afford it: communities of color, poor communities, LGBT communities, women, etc.

Today I just found about the protests that have taken place on several freeway ramps–the one I was focused on was led by the queer community:

On March 4th, students, staff, and community members attempted to overtake the onramp to the I-80 at the edge of the UC Davis campus. In a field of blooming daffodils, protestors held firm in a two-hour standoff with dozens of police officers. On the freeway behind the police line, miles of cars sat idle; behind the mass of protestors were the shimmering windows of the newest campus buildings, to the north a winter vineyard. As they approached the line of police, students were beaten with batons, tased, and shot with pepper balls. Some of these protestors held signs proclaiming their queerness — “Queers Bash Back,” “Not gay as in happy, queer as in fuck you” — and representatives of the campus LGBT Resource Center crossed police lines to advocate for students. Those representatives were the first administrative personnel to attend a protest in the last few months on behalf of students — not to negotiate with them or give them instructions or call in police forces, but to help students in confrontation with the often brutal response of the state and its representatives.

The logic behind this protest was especially intriguing to me:

The freeway is not merely a symbol of American wealth or mobility. That freeways are literally the mechanism by which bodies and goods are circulated and in which that circulation is regulated was the subject of the least romantic and most legalistic court battle over civil rights. Through freeways as the conduits of interstate commerce, the federal courts wrangled out of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause a way of enforcing the federal Civil Rights Act within individual states. The practice of using interstate transportation to regulate bigotry produced some excitingly absurd opinions, the most memorable of which found Lake Nixon Club in Little Rock, AK susceptible to regulation for having a snack bar where 3 out of the 4 foods served contained ingredients coming from outside the state. By regulating the whites-only Club thusly, the federal government was allowed to desegregate it, making federal control over the interstate system the mechanism by which laws about civil rights were implemented in places where such implementation often caused extreme violence. These opinions are delightfully queer: securing the square peg of anti-racism into the round hole of interstate capital flow, where the ability to discriminate was tied not to abstract ideas of equality but to the distance of one’s club from the freeway. To rush an onramp in protest of the privatization of education may very well be a gay riot, but not (solely) because gay people do it. It forces us to ask different questions about what people are saying when they use their bodies to protest. State violence often pits one group against another to defuse protest and expedite punishment, and this type of protest is a way to connect the discipline of the state to the privatization of the University, and vice versa. The ramp at Santa Rita is the road to the disciplinary action undertaken by the state when bodies and goods are not circulated according to their rules. To connect these two different ramps in the metaphoric valences of capitalism is to begin to understand both the struggle and the divisive tactics of power. To do so queerly means, to me, fighting the undertow of power that draws us inexorably into the denial of their connection.

I know several people who are planning to continue these types of protests in support–if you are one of the, let us know in comments!!!