Ideas & Action Building a Human Rights Agenda

Two people who occupy that important overlapping space between organizing and the academy will be speaking to the conferences' main themes. Distinguished scholar and early student of social movements, Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author, with Richard Cloward, of Regulating the Poor (Vintage), The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press) and Why Americans Still Don't Vote (Beacon). Most recently, she is author of the tour de force Challenging Authority. For a review, see Stephen Lendman blog.

Gabriel Camacho will speak to the immigrant experience in the United States and in Boston.

He was born and raised in the South Bronx. His parents emigrated from Latin America during turbulent political times.

Gabriel worked in union shops from his teenage years through college. He majored in anthropology and in 1979 where he conducted his archeological field work in El Ki'che, Guatemala where he witnessed the Guatemalan Army's occupation of the Maya highlands. Gabriel also witnessed the presence Israeli military advisors in El Ki'che.

Gabriel was both a union and student activists during his years at State
University of NY at Albany. It was at this time that he began his political
solidarity work with the Palestinian struggle for self determination and
national liberation.

In the 1990s Gabriel worked for SEIU as a business agent, and later for HERE as an organizer. In 1999 he founded the Massachusetts Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (an AFL-CIO constituency group).

Gabriel is currently the Chair of Massachusetts Jobs With Justice. He is
also on the Board of Directors of U.S. Labor Education on the Americas
Project.

Gabriel works as Regional Organizer of Project Voice, an immigrant rights
program, for the New England office of the AFSC where he is also an active member of UNITE HERE Local 66L. Complementing Gabriel's work, he serves as the President of the Junta Directiva of Centro Presente, a Central American immigrant community organization.

At the outbreak of the second Intifada, Gabriel joined the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights, and the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

In 2004 the Third World Coalition of the AFSC held its annual meeting in San Diego partly to protest the 10th anniversary of Operation Gatekeeper with border communities in resistance to the Apartheid wall and militarization of the U.S./Mexico border. This experience inspired Gabriel to develop an analysis and presentation entitled "Two Walls, One Struggle", which draws parallels between the walls on the Mexican border and that within the West Bank. This particular project seeks to bridge the struggles of Latino Immigrants and the Arab / Muslim communities in the U.S.