Puntorojo statement: Latinx must stand in solidarity with the movement for Black liberation

Puntorojo Editorial Collective
June 3rd, 2020

Puntorojo Magazine publishes the voices and viewpoints of the current generation of Mexicanx, Chicanx, Latinx, and transnational radical thinkers, workers, scholars, and activists. We stand in complete solidarity with Black communities and families across the country seeking justice for Black lives taken by state violence. Justice for George Floyd (Minneapolis), Breonna Taylor (Louisville), Tony McDade (Tallahassee), Ahmaud Arbery (Brunswick), Nina Pop (Sikeston) and for the countless number of lives lost to police violence. 

Thousands of angry people are on the streets in more than 140 cities and towns across the country demanding justice and an end to state violence. They are angry because we have all been here before and nothing has changed. For the Black community and other communities of color, state violence has gotten worse since 2014 when Ferguson and Baltimore rose up against the state. Six years of petitions, peaceful protests, and policy platforms by activists have been ignored or vilified by those in power yet a single weekend of angry protests, led by Black protesters, was enough to push the state towards swift action against George Floyd’s killer cops. 

But this won’t be enough to quell protests. The callous disregard of working people’s lives in response to a deadly virus along with ongoing racial violence has the potential to turn the protests into a mass uprising of general discontent towards the status quo. The ills are systemic so the solutions must be systemic but the mobilization of larger police forces, the national guard, and the implementation of curfews by Democratic Party politicians is paving the way for greater repression in the coming weeks.

Capitalism in the United States was founded on the enslavement of Black people, the genocide of indigenous nations, and the subjugation of nations through colonization and empire. White supremacy and racial capitalism have kept this status quo in place for over four hundred years. But not without protest. Black, Latinx and Indigenous people have a centuries long history of solidarity in their fight for freedom and justice. They fought against the expansion of slavery, the annexations of land that belonged to other nations, and through their joint struggle offered an alternative to the racial violence embedded in Manifest Destiny and settler-colonial policies of the United States. 

This history of solidarity is not widely known and does not in fact mean that divisions in our community do not continue to exist. There is a historical and ongoing invisibilization of Blackness in Latin America and within the Latinx community in the US. In this moment, we are obligated to challenge anti-Blackness in our families and larger Latinx community directly and expose the threads of white supremacy that threaten to continue to divide and conquer us. 

The Black Freedom Struggle is the spearpoint of a movement that puts people before profits, it is the first waterfall in a cascading movement of justice, equality and self-determination for all peoples. As a small magazine dedicated to Latinx radical politics, Puntorojo calls on Latinx activists and militants to further mobilize Latinx communities in support of Black liberation because all oppressed people benefit from the dismantling of racial state violence.

Our struggles are interdependent and inseparable. As we link arms with our Black siblings against police violence, we also build solidarity for our fight against ICE raids, border walls, and mass deportations. We believe any discussion on reforms should begin with platforms put forward by the Movement for Black Lives and The Red Nation.

The coming police reaction threatens to throw us deeper into the grips of white supremacy. Only through solidarity with all oppressed people, collective struggle and self-initiative will we be able to dismantle the master’s house once and for all. To simply imagine a whole new society free of such violence would be utopian. But on the streets of cities across the country and in the emerging solidarity between protesters, you can catch glimpses of this other world. 

If we don’t get no justice, they won’t get no peace.