Patricia Kullberg hosts this episode of the Old Mole, which includes the following segments on immigration:
Growing up Undocumented: Patricia Kullberg speaks with Luisa Martinez about growing up undocumented in Florida and the deprivation and shame entailed in living as an impoverished Latina without papers. She relates how encountering the ideas of socialism offered her a new perspective on how imperial US interventions in Latin America drives immigration to the north. Martinez writes about her experiences in an essay entitled “How Socialism Brought Me Dignity as an Undocumented Person,” published online in Democratic Left on February 5, 2025.
El Norte: Movie Moles Laurie Mercier and Frann Michel discuss the 1983 film El Norte. Directed and co-written by Gregory Nava, El Norte is an award winning, independent epic US film, notable for centering the experiences of two indigenous Mayan migrants from Guatemala as they move through Mexico and come to work in Los Angeles.
El Norte has been included in the US National Film Registry for its historical, cultural, and aesthetic contributions, and the Criterion Collection produced a DVD version with director's commentary and other special features.
For background information on US foreign and national security policy, Laurie recommends the Digital National Security Archive.
You can find El Norte streaming online to rent, for free but without subtitles on the Internet Archive, and on DVD at the Multnomah County Library.
Not a Nation of Immigrants: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that migrants to the US, largely from the global south, are Americanized in ways that obscure the settler-colonialism that this country was founded on and that we have yet to reckon with. Our Well Read Red, Patricia Kullberg reads excerpts from the essay “The United States is not a nation of Immigrants,” published in the Boston Review on August 16, 2021. That essay itself was taken from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s latest book Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.
Image licensed for public use: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Immigration.png
- KBOO