Undocumented. Unafraid.

In 2010, the Arizona senate introduced and eventually passed a horrific anti-immigrant law, SB1070—the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which became known as the “show me your papers law” for targeting brown people. A powerful movement of organizers around the country rose up to fight it, including artists, musicians, and writers.

Chicano activist musician Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine organized Sound Strike to boycott Arizona. It inspired a handful of musicians to stop playing in Arizona because the state had become a laboratory for designing several racist policies. I traveled to Arizona as part of an artist delegation to document the impacts on women and children. At one of the marches, I photographed a young Latina girl in the crowd and developed this poster.

Around 2009, the phrase, "Undocumented and Unafraid'' emerged as a slogan for a new immigrant youth movement. No longer living in the shadows, undocumented students began organizing and advocating for change in immigration policy, building a new civil rights movement as they rejected respectability politics and owned their lived experiences as a source of power. This poster was originally commissioned by AltoArizona.com, an initiative of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON).