File under: climate justice, environmental racism, the Big Freeze in Texas, labor organizing
Theme song by Often. Listen to “By Summer” and other tracks by Often here.
Here’s an uncut interview from my personal archives with Briauna Barrera, a climate justice and labor organizer in San Antonio, Texas. This interview took place in July of this year, and we are joined by Brahmmi Balajaran, who was interning at Mainline at the time.
In this talk, we discuss the Big Freeze that took place in Texas earlier this year, what environmental racism looks like, and how we can connect the dots between labor organizing and climate change. While I met Briauna as I was investigating leads for another outlet on a completely different story, which ultimately went another direction in terms of geography, I marked this for my archives in the hopes it will make it into my book, Land of the Let Go.
This is hands down one of the most impactful interviews I’ve participated in this year and I’m looking forward to sharing many more like this—talks with organizers across the U.S. to learn how they’re grappling with not only surviving persistent crises, but building collective resilience and empowerment during them. I view Texas as almost a sister state, in that both Georgia and Texas face similar issues with similar types of governance (and by that, I mean authoritarian as hell; Texas could argue their form of fascism is bigger, but I digress).
My next “stop” in Texas will be to learn more about how their communities are coping and organizing following the passage of the six-week abortion ban and paramount decision from the Supreme Court. Word is that Georgia legislators are eyeing another six-week ban as we near our next state legislative session in January.
You can find our previous writings on Georgia’s last Heartbeat Bill from 2019, which was later struck down in a higher court, on The Mainline’s site in the news section; search “abortion” and “Brian Kemp sucks” for easy finding.
<3 Aja
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INDIGENOUS LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This post was written and produced on unceded ancestral lands of the Duwamish Tribe in what is now called Seattle, Wash.
This interview was recorded in three locations: on the unceded ancestral lands of the Tonkawa, Lipan Apache, and later the Comanches tribes in what is now called San Antonio, Texas; the unceded ancestral lands of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) tribe in what is now called Granville, Tenn.; and the unceded ancestral lands of the Muscogee Creek Tribe in what is now called Atlanta, Ga.
The accompanying photograph was taken on the ancestral lands of indigenous tribes we now know as Sioux, or Cherokee, or Iroquois in what is now known as Marfa, Texas.
