"I can’t imagine living next to a wall": Palestine and the Tohono O’odham Nation

The Tohono O’odham Nation is a 2.8-million-acre reservation in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona established in 1916 for the Tohono O’odham people. With its 62-mile boundary with Mexico, the Nation has the longest international border of any Indigenous group along the US-Mexico frontier.

For many years, O’odham activists have noticed that the fight for O’odham rights and lands parallels the struggle for Palestinian rights and land. Both the Tohono O’odham people and the Palestinians people are haunted by a recurring politics of premature death. Both live under pervasive regimes of surveillance and survive under states of siege. Both have seen their lands taken from them and justified by military necessity. And both have also had to face their worlds being hemmed in by massive, isolating border walls. This lecture explores these parallels and investigates the current fight the O’odham people are waging to secure their rights and oppose construction of the US government’s border wall on their land.

Join the Global Studies in Migration & Diaspora Workshop in learning more about and discussing Professor Bayoumi's work. RSVP for dinner.

Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning author, journalist, and educator. He is an opinion columnist for The Guardian, and author of the critically acclaimed books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was listed on the New York Public Library’s Reading America: 250 Years, 250 Books and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Bayoumi is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.