ANGELA DAVIS CHAMPIONS ABOLITIONIST AND ANTI-RACIST FEMINISM AT UNAM, MEXICO

The presence on August 26, 2026, of the legendary and unwavering activist, author, educator, and revolutionary thinker Angela Davis at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) was major news in Mexico. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Berkeley in the 1960s, leader of the Black Panthers, and world-renowned ex-political prisoner, she addressed an overflowing audience of thousands, filling the main auditorium to capacity and requiring live broadcasts to multiple other venues on campus.

It was also broadcast live on TV UNAM. You can watch her keynote address and the dialogue with her feminist colleagues Gina Dent and Amneris Chaparro Martínez here (unfortunately, only in the translated Spanish version). The best summary I've seen (also in Spanish) is this report by journalist Eirinet Gómez in La Jornada. 

Here I'll add just two observations: (1) For me, having lived and fought within the belly of the empire for almost as long as Davis has been fighting it uninterruptedly, it's moving to see that in Mexico today, at least among university students, there exists the same thirst and willingness to understand and fundamentally change the world that I myself witnessed in Mexico in the 1960s and later in the U.S. in the 1970s. This is a good sign that we're on the right track, that the generational thread of the rebellious spirit hasn't been broken, neither there nor here, as so many have tried to sell us in these times of neoliberalism, which has spilled over into this period of Trumpian neofascism.

What is needed now is an intense cross-fertilization of ideas and coordination of revolutionary practices across the continent—and especially among the American countries of the Northern Hemisphere and their peoples, including all their migrant diasporas wherever they may be.

Davis and Dent already planted the seed of the revolutionary idea that liberation from all forms of violence and oppression based on gender, race, and dissident sexualities cannot come about by erecting a prison society—what has been called for decades here in the U.S. the Prison-Industrial Complex, or the New Jim Crow.

That is a message directed to all Mexicans, but especially to the Trump supporters, Bukele supporters, and “Whitexicans” who would like to turn Mexico into a giant El Salvador. I think the majority of the Mexican people are clear that this is not the way forward, much less to invite imperial violence and US military intervention. This Mexican people’s anti-imperialism remains strong even though for many years now they have been fed up with high levels of citizen insecurity, extorsions, kidnappings, murders and disappearances, and particularly femicides, the product of the machista culture, while criminal organizations operate with complete impunity.

The urgent question, then, is how to address this severe crisis of insecurity and unacceptably high levels of social violence, if not with state violence and prison gulags. This raises the unavoidable and pressing question: are we going to continue with the same structures of capitalist political economy that produced such extreme levels of domestic social inequality and economic subservience to Mexico’s menacing neighboring imperial power, the very structural situation that has allowed—even engendered—the cracking and collapse of social peace at such a high cost?

The solution, Davis insists, isn't through pursuing heavy-handed state tactics and proliferating prisons—AMLO himself said so, after the horrific bloodbath he witnessed under his predecessor Felipe Calderón's rein, with the U.S.’s blessings, which led AMLO to launch his campaign slogan "hugs, not bullets" and later on proclaim his government’s ideology to be "Mexican humanism." But even then, once in power, he didn't touch the criminal organizations and femicide perpetrators, much less the military; nor did he challenge the empire under Trump 1.0 or affect its Mexican partners, the arrogant and rapacious Mexican oligarchies, willingly signing  the still predatory USMCA agreement replacing the neoliberal NAFTA accord, both of which benefit the economic elites of North America while sideline the interest of its tri-national working classes - including, most glaringly, the huge Mexican diaspora in the region (~ 40 million in the U.S. and 155,000 in Canada).

The result today, eight years after Morena triumphed nationwide and at all levels of governance, is that large regions remain mired in a crisis of violence and citizen insecurity, and rampant impunity persists for powerful criminal organizations and the politicians and businesspeople they collude with. The imperialist regime in Washington, far from clamping down on drug trafficking (including Big Pharma), enormous arms contraband, and untold billions of illicit money laundering in its territory, uses the unresolved insecurities in Mexico to threaten, further advance, and justify its plan to exert total economic and geopolitical control over Mexico, as it is aggressively pursuing in all other countries of the continent. Where to go under such pressing conditions? And how, and with whom? These questions remain urgent and call for a much deeper transformation of Mexican society and its relations to the U.S. and the rest of the American continent.

One possible blueprint in these dangerous times of the resumption of imperialist interventions in the Americas under the so-called Donroe Doctrine may be found in the just released comprehensive report by the premier U.N. agency for Latin American development, the CEPAL (Comisión Económica para América Latina) entitled Ruptures and Opportunities. Proposals for Latin America and the Caribbean to thrive in the new geopolitical era, available here. Highly recommended. An informative video of its August 4th launching from Santiago de Chile can be seen here.

I'll end this first point clarifying that I didn't mention the social and political hyper-polarization and state violence implosion occurring in the United States because I wanted to focus on Angela Davis's message to Mexico, on how we can and must apply it to Mexico’s circumstances. However, you can read my essays on what's happening in the U.S. here on my website. Her message to abolish prisons and migrant gulags is even more relevant and urgent in the U.S. than ever.

(2) From my perspective, given my location within the large Mexican diaspora (40 million) in the United States, the message and the seed that Angela Davis planted in her visit to UNAM resonated immediately with the way I view the issue of immigration—something that inexplicably wasn't mentioned in any of the analyses or reports about Davis’s talk. I say inexplicably, because if there is currently an epidemic of state violence and mass, institutionalized imprisonment in North America, it is precisely the one viciously directed by the Trump 2.0 administration against migrants, the vast majority of whom are Mexican and Latin American. But still, and most unfortunately, neither the event nor the reports mentioned the urgent need to abolish… ICE!

But I'm doing it here.

The dialogue with Davis at UNAM was based on her co-authored book, "Abolition, Feminism, Now!," which proposes the end of the prison system and criminal punishment as responses to gender violence.

"We mean," said her fellow abolitionist feminist, Dent, "that we cannot use prisons to solve existing gender problems. Abolitionist feminism is a project of construction and development. It is a project to rebuild the world."

We can easily substitute the words and apply it to the plight of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers: "Transnational abolitionist humanism proposes the end of the for-profit prison system, indefinite detentions, and mass deportations to solve the problems of irregular migration and refugee flows. It is a social, economic, and political project of integration based on constructing a just, equitable, and balanced mode of development at the continental level, alongside an equally just, equitable, and balanced economic integration within each of the countries of the American hemisphere."

Obviously, diasporas and migrant flows are not the problem, but rather the human solution, whether documented or undocumented, to predatory capitalist processes designed by global capital and its allied oligarchies to perpetuate underdevelopment and the imposition of artificial barriers to human mobility and labor rights.

"Abolitionist socialism," to coin a phrase, an indispensable corollary of abolitionist feminism, would be the revolutionary transnational version that maintains that we cannot erect and use fortified borders, migrant detention camps, and effect mass deportations for the national liberation of the peoples of the Americas—not even for their so-called "national security," which is already compromised by the appalling contradictions of late capitalism in terminal crisis. Abolitionist socialism therefore advocates both the abolition of prison systems, migrant gulags and penal punishments, and the abolition of rigid borders between the nation-states of the continent—especially between the so-called centers and peripheries of the modern world-system.

Our America — all of America, including Latin American & the Caribbean, Canada and the United States itself — will be truly free, and gender, racial, and class violence will finally be abolished if and when it is transformed, through the relentless and uncompromising revolutionary struggles of its peoples until victory, into a universal, transnational, post-capitalist, humanist system, one that will no longer require prisons and borders, nor generate any form of social and state violence to sustain itself.

Imagine.