Santa Cruz in Color, a community-based movement archive, housed under the Center for Racial Justice, has unveiled a 32-page news-magazine that showcases their coming collections & digital archive exhibits. The accompanying essays, written by CRJ interns, expose a darker side of the sunny Central Coast.
The first—and last—essays expose the shadowy margins of Santa Cruz’s political economy and the role of the university and local industries in fostering local labor precarity and imperialist violence around the world. Reaching back over half a century, the second delves into the long history of Palestine solidarity in our area, prompting us to grapple with the ways in which Palestine has been and remains a local issue. The third sheds light on the linked sanctuary movement and immigrant rights struggle circa the late Cold War period when Santa Cruz locals organized in the belly of the beast against U.S. wars and genocide in Central America. Against a backdrop of contemporary pitched grassroots battles for ethnic studies in both the state and our local area, the fourth essay extends back to the mid-1990s when Watsonville youth helped to lead the local charge against Proposition 187, a racist anti-immigrant law, and organized in visionary ways for Chicano studies at Aptos High School.
