Immigrant rights activist Ana Maria Archila and survivors rights activist Maria Gallagher joined forces recently in an elevator to ensure positive change. Shown here expressing their sorrow and rage after a powerful confrontation with Senator Flake, of Snowflake, Utah, a devout Mormon, who then in turn made a “tiny gesture” based on their peaceful demands. Archila suggested the Senator consider the security of his children and grandchildren for the next fifty years. Maria Gallagher, a sex abuse survivor, demanded he “look her in the eyes and tell her that the pain of millions of sexual assault survivors did not matter”.
Ana Maria Archila, Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), put everything on the line and risked deportation from the United States by cornering and encouraging Sen. Flake into making that “tiny gesture” in order to protect our most basic political institutions.
Flake, as you will no doubt remember, voted to advance the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who was known at that time to be an accused serial gang rapist, out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Archila lives in New York’s embattled 14th Congressional District, along with rising Democratic Party star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez recently lauded Archila’s activism as an example of how undocumented workers, like Archila, can speak truth directly to power.
In a landmark campaign speech, Ocasio-Cortez tells the story of how different marginalized groups are forming coalitions in order to encourage U.S. Senators to make these types of “tiny gestures” and stop the runaway power of unchecked privilege and entitlement.
Ocasio-Cortez encourages other immigrant rights organizations, like the CPD (Ana Maria Archila’s organization), to create coalitions of people, like Archila, who are facing deportation, to confront U.S. Senators wherever they are and to create crowds of supporters.
“We can’t allow women and survivors to be fighting this by themselves,” Ocasio-Cortez calls on the roughly 200 men in the room (mostly college students) to seize their moment, check their privilege, and sacrifice themselves, in the way that Ana Maria Archila did in that elevator, with a U.S. Senator on his way to the United States Senate Chambers.
Men, according to Ocasio-Cortez, hold the keys to amplifying women’s voices.
By creating similar coalitions between women, immigrant activists in the country illegally, and college aged men, Archila and Ocasio-Cortez hope to dismantle our existing power structures and pave the way for this new type of popular democracy in the United States.
This plan for a new type of direct democracy is not without its detractors. Far right media groups, like Breitbart, smeared Ana Maria Archila and her organization, the CPD, because billionaire boogeyman George Soros was their #3 funder way back in 2014. The National Review, long known for it’s right wing slant, claims that Flake was “set up” by Soros funded groups.
Meanwhile, Fox refers to all caravan migrants as criminals targeting women and children, as if the Red Church somehow suddenly cares about women and children.
Disgusting.
