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 (July 2025), and me, author of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands (June 2024). We aim to engage one and all in a collective journey of discovery as we strive to be beacons of hope, lighting the way through these deeply troubling times.
We meet on the 4th Sunday of every month, 2:30-4:00 pm ET, 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: click the image to register
ENJOY THE RECORDINGS OF OUR previous meet-ups:
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.
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?
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.
