17th Annual Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference

Who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression? That is the question students confront in this trial role play. Participants will learn about a time, from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, when men, women, and children — immigrant and U.S.-born, citizen and noncitizen, longtime residents and temporary workers — all became the targets of a massive campaign of forced relocation, based solely on their perceived status as “Mexican.” Participants will also see how the pedagogical strategy of a trial can be used to uncover the complex causes of large-scale historical injustices. 

The Alaska cannery workers’ lawsuits of the 1970s and ’80s powerfully demonstrate workers of color solidarity, the strategy of legal mobilization and the limits of the justice system. In this workshop we’ll examine the cannery industry as vestige of “plantation” segregation, the cannery workers’ organizing and their road to the Supreme Court and the World Conference on Racism and Racial Discrimination. We’ll discuss ways that the cannery worker legacies can be incorporated into class activities.