By Eunice Hyunhye Cho, Francisco Arguelles Paz y Puente, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, and Sasha Khokha
BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy is a tool for all organizers, community groups, educators, activists, advocates, and leaders—anyone committed to supporting the rights of immigrants, refugees, and the communities where we all live.
Who and what does this “bridge” connect? This workbook contains tools for immigrant communities to build alliances and find common ground for action with others fighting for economic, social, and racial justice, and to envision alternatives and resistance in these times of global exclusion, racism, and human rights abuses. BRIDGE strives to place the current work of the immigrant and refugee rights movement in larger historic and global contexts, and to promote the human rights of all migrants and refugees.
The BRIDGE Project workbook is a “toolbox” of training materials, tips, and resources based on a popular education framework. We see this collection as part of a wider strategy of investigating power and relationships—including power dynamics of teaching and education—in the learning experience. We believe that a popular education curriculum is not merely a pile of issues, techniques and information to be repeated in a classroom, but that it is part of an organizational commitment to a process of dialogue, learning, and building community.
BRIDGE is also a set of tools to more closely examine the dynamics of privilege and oppression, inclusion and exclusion in our own lives and work, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance within our own communities. These discussions can only help us to more closely investigate power, and to develop better tactics, strategies and organizing models for change.