It’s Time to Talk About University of New Mexico
The historically significant campus has taken a stand against administrators’ continued complacency in the ongoing genocide in Gaza; the State of New Mexico and the University have doubled down on violence against students in response.
UNM Encampment in the Student Union Building following repeated violence at the hands of New Mexico State Police and University Police officials. (Photo: @danwoodswriter)
I have wanted to speak on this for a while but had, until now, not found exactly where to begin with it. I am an Alumni of UNM, I pursued my BA here in political science and social development before choosing the school once more for my MA in organizational development and design. In that time, I protested again and again, first for James Boyd and then for all manner of issues of justice and emancipation. Never, not once, did I fear that UNM police, let alone the jackboots of New Mexico State Police, would crush our voices if we were so presumptuous as to want to camp on our own lawn.
The videos coming out of UNM this week are atrocious and disgusting. Seeing a student run down by four officers and slammed into the ground, one of the cops all but skipping away as he moves on to a new target, made me physically ill. Watching another slammed down into tables and chairs, their head crashing onto the tile made me look away. Receiving a video of UNMPD utilizing chemical weapons against protestors and others outside the SUB made me write this article.
The UNM Solidarity Encampment
Over the last week or so, I have had the immense pleasure of taking part in the ongoing protests across UNM and the establishment of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the Duck Pond. I have spent as many hours as possible supporting our students and their right to expression; bringing food, documenting the actions of police, agitating with pamphlets, and listening to the impressively diverse rotation of speakers, teachers, and organizers who have come together to educate, empower, and protect the student protestors.
In this time, much has become apparent regarding the origins and contexts of the protests rising here, throughout the country, and across the world. Primarily, this movement is autonomous, a collective of like-minded groups and individuals who have consolidated along perspectives of justice. With no centralized leadership, this group has been able to gather and distribute supplies to not only students who need them, but to communities struggling elsewhere in our city. They have built a robust information network of legal observers, scholars, activists, and media professionals who, through only the motivations of their conscience, have come together by sheer instinct to offer their services and support to these students. Daily, alumni and community members drop by to give words of support or to drop off waters, oranges, chalk, or coolers; students who are curious but uninformed are welcomed in and are free to ask questions or simply listen for a while.
There are those who believe that the likes of Hamas or Iran or China or Russia are behind dissent in the United States – that the only thing which would inspire a movement of the people would be covert agitation by foreign powers. This is, of course, ridiculous, and listening to those on the ground, seeing how a movement sprung up with no central organizing tenet beyond personal perspectives of justice, makes this apparent to anyone with the wherewithal to hear them out and see with honest eyes.
Escalation by Police
New Mexico State Police push through protestors at UNM Duck Pond in a clear attempt to disrupt and intimidate peaceful, anti-war protestors gathered there. April 22nd. (Photo: @danwoodswriter)
Through collective action and the support of myriad individuals, the Solidarity Encampment has been able to withstand more than a week of police bullying and abuse, dealing with increasingly violent officers of the school who seem to take a strange satisfaction in throwing student organizers onto the ground and spraying them with chemical agents.
Indeed, following hours of peaceful occupation of the Student Union Building by anti-war protestors, UNM police and New Mexico State Police resorted to their only conceivable tactic and began to arrest these nonviolent dissenters. Videos across social media this morning show the effects; officers spraying chemical weapons in the face of protestors, throwing them against walls and into piles of tables as they attempt to retreat from the violence of the law enforcement officials.
This, it must be said, happens with the direct consent of our representatives and administrators. Governor Lujan-Grisham sent State Police to the encampment within hours of it being established on April 22nd, hoping to intimidate peaceful students and their supporters into quietude through tactics of fear rather than de-escalation. This was unsuccessful and after a few minutes attempting to bully students of the Duck Pond, they were repelled, first to Scholes Hall and then off campus entirely by chanting protestors under the protection of legal observers. This happened with the express consent of UNM administrators who, it might be assumed after the leaked texts from UT–Austin, called these violent police to attempt to quash the growing protest. Since then, the police have largely been from the University station with the oversight of the governor’s armed troopers always on the sidelines.
Last night, things changed once more as protestors, seeing the continued repression and disregard shown by administrators, chose to escalate the protest alongside their peers across US universities and colleges. In response, the State and school have joined forces once more to arrest, abuse, and intimidate not only protestors, but those who were watching or supporting from the sidelines as well.
The University’s Priorities
The history of UNM and student dissenters has never been rosy and I must admit my own naivete when I was a more youthful voice for justice. And while I learned then about the bayoneting of anti-war student protestors by National Guard troopers on May 8th, 1970, it never seemed to be something “real” or of our time; not an actual possibility with an administration so outwardly “progressive” as they seemed at the time.
Then, the student protests were in response to murderous violence used against students at Kent State and other universities/colleges, the collectives forming in anticipatory self-defense against state authorities apparently all too eager to stomp, slam, tear gas, beat, corral, and arrest those who demand that their voices be heard in good faith. Today, it is the same as protests, which existed primarily on the fringes of the University campuses, move into the center of the conversation in response to the flagrant violence being used to crush peers in California, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, New York, Arizona, and Georgia.
As happened in the late-60s, solidarity has been born of actions far away, the students and supporters instantly getting the message that these administrators thousands of miles away were sending, and to which UNM administrators have consented through their silence. And we have seen that the State of New Mexico, in the express goals of protecting a weapons industry which is daily killing hundreds indiscriminately in Gaza, will turn to brutality tactics to suppress dissenting voices rather than simply talking to the protestors and negotiating in good faith.
Final Thoughts
Now, if I had known this was the case when I first applied a decade ago, would I have continued to pursue the University of New Mexico as a place for an education? Perhaps. I was young and naïve and idealistic. If I was a parent and my child was looking to UNM, would I be comfortable with sending tens of thousands to a school which I know will use police violence as a knee-jerk response to my child’s voice? No.
University President Garnett Stokes has hoped to crush the protest so she can have a nice quiet campus for tours this week, instead she has instigated a protest which was primarily a loud picnic into a full-blown occupation of a student building during on of the most crucial weeks of her year.
And that is where the issue for the administration lies, why the continued peaceful escalation by students has been so effective: prospective students and their parents will not come to UNM after this.
History is plain to see for any willing to look; yet the institutions of learning insist on being taught once more that there is no viable way to violently suppress their students. As always – as in EVERY grassroots protest in history – the people have gathered, spoken amongst themselves, and autonomously collectivized in response to what they see as an indefensible injustice. They have become an organization of individuals who function not via orders, but via empathy and an awareness of the needs of their peers. What was a student-protest has now grown into a community effort to make change; learners, applying the voices they have been told can change the world, have been suppressed by the institutions they were told would protect them. The students have asked for help – the community has answered.
The message is clear: Disclose all investments and monetary ties to the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine. Divestment from those organizations and individuals who profit from continuing the ethnic cleansing and who have taken the liberty of buying favor within our institutions.
Thanks so much for reading! Please take a moment to like, follow, subscribe, or whatever you can!
