SPREAD KNOWLEDGE, NOT FEAR.
join the Hope Knows No Borders
book club & Webinar series
A learning community, spanning borders of geography, politics, faith traditions, and the coincidence of birth, facilitated by Dora Rodriguez, author of Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain, and Sarah Towle, author of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.
We aim to engage one and all in a collective journey of discovery as we dive into texts, documentaries, and other creative works that are like beacons of hope, lighting the way through these deeply troubling times and compelling us all to do better.
We meet (mostly) on the 4th Sunday of every month, via Zoom.
All discussions are thematically driven with suggested readings posted here in advance of each monthly meet-up. Discussions are video recorded for Book Club members, then shared with the public as audio tales on Sarah’s podcast: From The Borderlands.
Next Event:
January 25, 2026:
4-5:30 ET / 3-4:30 CT / 2-3:30 MT / 1-2:30 PT
On this historic week, when we gather to commemorate the life and work of martyred peacemaker and justice warrior Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, ICE and other Department of Homeland “Security” (DHS) goons continue their Reign of Terror in Minneapolis. They appear nakedly determined to incite peaceful protestors to violence so that the naked wanna-be emperor can invoke his version of the Insurrection Act and deploy troops against US citizens and residents.
Indeed, 1,500 members of the US armed forces are on alert, standing ready to flood Minnesota streets. All Trump & Co need is an excuse, however immoral, illegal, and flimsy.
It’s been a full year of state repression in the US now, and so far, we’ve kept it peaceful. Remarkably so.
Resisters from sea to shining sea have been showing up to protest peacefully in costumes and with guitars. Trained in de-escalation tactics and dedicated to mitigating DHS agency violence proactively through community ICE Watch Patrols and Rapid Response Networks, we are bringing whistles and drums to the frontlines against the guns, pepper spray canisters, rubber bullets, and tasers of undertrained SWAT teams and racist bounty hunters paid with our tax dollars.
They are today’s Slave Patrols, themselves the precursors to the Ku Klux Klan, which is what the Border Patrol became when it was branded in 1924. Now, the people hunters of yore, trained to “shoot first and ask questions later” are known to us as ICE. And before Minnesotans, Oregonians, North Carolinians, etc., were forced to experience the impunity of these white supremacy warriors, resisters all along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico line were doing the hard, humanitarian work, in the spirit of the late-great Dr. King, of tending to the needs of the stranger and the newcomer in the face of a US government with no morals. The same forces Dr. King stood up to in Birmingham, Selma, Memphis, Vietnam, etc.
Among the warriors of welcome were the Rio Grande Valley volunteers I met when I went to the border for the first time to bear witness to the inhumanity I then believed had been wrought by Trump & Co: Family Separation and Zero Tolerance, Kids in Cages and the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which didn’t protect anyone at all. I went to see their inhumanity for myself. I went to serve. Working alongside the ordinary people doing extraordinary work to fly the tattered flag of US-American values, I realized that the horrors we see today all across the USA had been the daily reality for borderlanders for decades, little seen by those of us north of the 100-mile Border Patrol policing zone — a zone where Fourth Amendment protections have been shredded since the 1970s.
Join me on January 25, 2026:
For a rare reunion and resistance briefing with the RGV protagonists featured in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. Hear how their lives and work were transformed in 2025, and what they anticipate their work will be in 2026.
TIME: 4-5:30 ET / 3-4:30 CT / 2-3:30 MT / 1-2:30 PT
PLACE: via ZOOM or inperson at LA POSADA PROVIDENCIA, San Benito, Texas
In preparation, reacquaint yourselves with the webinar guests:
Crossing the Line, Parts I & II, chart the development of the Dignity Village Collaborative, featuring the Angry Tias, Team Brownsville, Resource Center Matamoros, Pastor Abraham Barberi & One Mission Ministries, Sister Norma Pimentel & Catholic Charities RGV, Global Response Management (now Medicine), working in collaboration with such RGV stalwarts for justice as Jodi Goodwin, Charlene D’Cruz, Jack White and James Pace (RIP), and Carlos Navarro, as well as impacted residents of the Matamoros tent encampment, y las ingenieras of Solidarity Engineering.
Additional chapters worthy of your review also include:
Chapter 10, with Jennifer Harbury
Chapter 17, with Larry and Keyla Cox
Chapter 23, with Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos
Chapter 25, with Madeleine Sandefur
Chapter 27, with Witness at the Border
Chapter 28, with Solidarity Engineering
SPEAD THE WORD! HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!
Stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is… Together!
RECORDING to come:
December 10, 2025, 2:30-4:00 pm ET
The Power of Bearing Witness in Poetry, Pictures, & Prose with Kate Scott and Russ McSpadden
“Russ had just stepped in front of the bulldozer when the private security goon tipped his hand,” writes Logan Phillips in the introduction to Russ McSpadden’s new poetry cycle, Borderlings (Oct 2025).
“Hey, c’mon,” shouted the person Kate Scott refers to as ‘a man of the metal monster’ in her forthcoming picture book, Yo’Oko Roars (Nov 2025). “If you keep standing there — for safety reasons, they’re not going to be able to work!”
Bingo! Kate and Russ had been gifted a strategy to stop then-Governor Doug Ducey from adding one more shipping container to his border barrier, then polluting the pristine landscape of Arizona’s San Rafael Valley and threatening to cut off the last remaining wildlife corridor connecting the North and South American continents.
For two months, through the winter of 2022/23, Kate, Russ, and other borderlings* took turns standing there, camping there, holding a steady vigil there. Day and night, they waited, through sun and rain and ice and snow, “until the profiteering contractors gave up and the governor of Arizona called them off,” states Logan.
Though they did not act alone, Russ and Kate were instrumental in bringing down Doug Ducey’s shameful wall. But as I write these words, bulldozers and steel bollards have returned to the San Rafael Valley. This time, with a bottomless pit of cash and the intent to cleave the valley in two with the feds’ full protection.
Russ’s Borderlings, as well as Kate and Virginia’s Yo’Oko Roars, join a growing canon of borderlands-based books that chronicle injustices unforetold while revealing the power of bearing witness. They offer us “essential soul testimony,” borrowing Logan’s words again, exposing crimes against both humankind and nature. They shine a bright light on strategies of resistance and resilience, and remind us of the wisdom in cultivating wonder as we simultaneously fight like hell “for the beauty still woven all around and through us.” They gift us with poems, pictures, and prose inspired by their first-hand experiences of facing down a corrupt and unaccountable government apparatus more interested in profiting from taxpayer-funded boondoggle projects than in preserving the natural world for future generations. So interested, in fact, that its contractors are committing an ecocide right before our very eyes — an ecocide that will impact humankind and the planet Kate calls “Home,” forever.
ENJOY THE RECORDINGS OF OUR previous meet-ups:
SEPTEMBER 28, 2025, 2:30-4:00 pm ET
The first section of the latest stretch of border wall now rises from the desert sands of Arizona's San Rafael Valley. It is expected to cut straight across the valley to the Coronado National Monument, a unique biological hotspot, according to Erick Meza. I can attest. I spent time there while on my book launch tour with Crossing the Line this time last year. Russ McSpadden calls it “the most important wildlife corridor left in Arizona connected to Mexico … the most important corridor for jaguars."
The monolithic steel barrier, painted black to retain the desert heat so that it might burn a human hand, is the “nail in the coffin” for biodiversity in the region. Though erected to thwart human migration through measures most cruel, the border wall blocks animal routes, destroys habitats, threatens species, disturbs wildlife, halts genetic interchange, depletes irreplaceable artesian groundwater aquifers, disrupts the integrity of borderland communities, tramples cultural protections, and shreds environment-saving legislative precedent, all as it robs budgets for schools and rural hospitals.
The border wall, like much of the US immigration system, aids only the demagogues and profiteers that feed on government contracts. In this case, the sole winner of this debacle is Colorado-based Fisher Sand & Gravel, awarded $334 million after Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem waived dozens of environmental laws to make it happen. Sadly, she wasn’t the first government official to run roughshod over both laws and the natural world. Learn more in this Hope Knows No Borders Webinar.
August 3, 2025: On Global Apartheid & the New Jim Code
As I write in Chapter 25 of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, what began in 1980 as an “Emergency Influx Shelter” set up in Krome, Florida, has metastasized into a living, breathing many-headed Hydra that decides who gets to move, and who doesn’t, as it deters, detects, divides, detains, deports, destroys, and disappears human beings for profit. The same bipartisan logic that brought us Angel and Ellis Island detention camps remains with us to this day in large part because there’s HUGE money to be made.
Who makes bank at the intersection of migration and so-called “security”? Discover the answer in this discussion, which gives new meaning to the phrase, “The border crossed us.”
June 22, 2025: On Writing to Change the World
In this engaging conversation facilitated by Abbey, we dig into the craft of writing to inspire movements. Taking Mary Pipher’s book Writing the Change the World as her point of inspiration, Abbey leads Dora and me in a discussion of the transformative power of storytelling to touch hearts, change minds, and turn outrage into action.
I’d like to think that this workshop speaks to the power of the art and the creative process to aid the resistance against the rise of fascism in the US and elsewhere today.
May 25, 2025: We ask the question: Is there an invasion at the US-Mexico border? and we determine that…
In light of recent events in LA and their continuing aftermath, this webinar playback could not be more timely. Though our discussion centered on the militarization of the borderlands as a prelude to invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law, we also reminded participants that the militarization is taking place all over the country and in particular in the 100-mile constitution-free zone policed by Homeland "Security" forces.
LA is now poised to be occupied by not just "security" forces in collaboration with LAPD, but federalized National Guard and possibly the Marines. I put to you that this was intentional — Trump & Co want their violence to lead to violence so they can declare war on their own citizens in time for Trump's North Korea-style military parade. Are we looking at a new Tiananmen Square massacre? We'll see in just a few days.
April 27, 2025: On Shifting the Paradigm By FINDING THE WORDS TO TOUCH HEARTS & CHANGE MINDS
“I'm Not an Alien. I Don't Bleed Green." I Bleed Red Just Like You.”
Sarah and Dora together in Organ Pipe National Monument paying respects at Dora’s “sacred spot” where the Sanctuary Movement was born, now immortalized by Alvaro Enciso’s commemorative crosses.
In this workshop, Dora and I take as our starting point that language matters (it’s not “just semantics”) because words and phrases influence thought. And the dehumanizing, anti-immigrant rhetoric of our politicians, parroted by the media — both right-wing and mainstream — has enabled the fascist takeover of US democracy. Meeting this historic moment head-on, we call for a language revolution that reclaims the narrative and tugs the nation back to its senses. To accomplish this, we provide tools and resources for touching the hearts and changing the minds of folks we meet at the dinner party, in the grocery store line, on the bus, etc., who are brainwashed… and don’t even know it.
It is a regime, for example, not an administration. They are abducting our friends and neighbors, not arresting them. They are imprisoning them, not detaining them; trafficking and disappearing them, not deporting them, to concentration camps and torture chambers. This makes Trump & Co and their Gestapo — ICE and Customs and Border Protection — the true terrorists in this tale. And who wants to be complicit in that level of cruelty?
March 30, 2025: On Offering Sanctuary & Building Railroads
”We’re Not the Statue of Liberty Country.”
As the ICE Gestapo fills its 200+ prison Gulag with our neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends abducted off the streets and forcibly disappeared by US federal agents, featured speaker Reverend John Fife, co-padre of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, and sanctuary providers Reverends Babs Miller and Jim Rigby, share with us when the movement began and why and how to revive it to meet the demands of today.
The time is NOW, they urge us, to call this country to its conscience, or melt down Lady Liberty.
