As a reminder, Trump has publicly floated Loomer to be his next White House press secretary and he has reposted hundreds of her tweets on Truth Social.
Molson Coors joins Ford, Harley Davidson, Lowes, Tractor Supply, John Deere, and the maker of Jack Daniel’s in retreating from diversity and pro-LGBTQ programs.
Coors beer, once the subject of a nationwide boycott by gay bars over its founder’s anti-LGBTQ stance, has been prominent at Pride events in recent years. Last year, for example, Coors Light was the main sponsor of Denver Pride despite attacks by the cult.
In 2015, when the company was called MillerCoors, its chairman and then-US Senate candidate Pete Coors, dropped out of a speaking gig at the convention of Legatus, the ex-gay and pro-ex-gay torture Catholic group, after widespread criticism.
The company’s current brands include Coors, Coors Light, Blue Moon, Icehouse, Miller, Miller Light, Keystone, Molson, and dozens of others.
September 7, 1948 3,000 attended a rally to publicly launch the Peace Council in Melbourne, Australia.
September 7, 1957 Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s Barbara Gittings organized the first New York meeting held for the Daughters of Bilitis, a pioneer lesbian organization. The group was founded two years earlier in San Francisco. Barbara Gittings: Mother of the Gay Rights Movement (This link requires a sign-in on Medium, so I’m going to post it in another entry on its own.)
Cover from their magazine “The Ladder”, October,1968
September 7, 1990 Two British peace activists, Stephen Hancock and Mike Hutchinson known as the Upper Heyford Plowshares were sentenced to 15 months in prison for disabling an F-111 bomber in Oxford, England. A brief History of Direct Disarmament Actions
September 7, 1992 South African troops killed at least 24 people and injured 150 more at an African National Congress (ANC) rally on the border of Ciskei, in South Africa. 50,000 ANC supporters had turned out to demand Ciskei’s re-absorption into South Africa. Ciskei was one of ten black “homelands,” so designated to keep blacks from claiming citizenship in South Africa itself. They were a legal fiction, not recognized by any other country, that was part of the racially separatist apartheid regime. News at the time BBC
September 7, 1996 Two women were arrested for trespass at the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base after walking into the base with a banner reading, “Love Your Enemies.”
Telling tourists on the Great Barrier Reef about climate change doesn’t negatively affect their trip, according to a new study.
Instead, finds the research, it could be a good avenue to promote climate action for people who wouldn’t otherwise be engaged.
The study, done by a team of Queensland researchers, is published in People and Nature.
“Tourism operators are getting more engaged in learning how they can spread more awareness, given the state of the Reef and how urgent it’s getting,” says lead author Dr Yolanda Waters, an environmental social scientist at the University of Queensland.
“But they still have these concerns – what if it ruins people’s day? People pay a lot of money to go to the Reef.”
The team tested this concern by surveying 656 visitors on a variety of Reef tours that either did or didn’t mention climate change.
Waters tells Cosmos that her background working in Great Barrier Reef tourism provided the stimulus for the research.
“I used to work on the boats out of Cairns, and I went through these experiences of tourists asking questions and not really feeling equipped to answer them,” she says.
“There is this real feeling: how do we talk about this in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the industry?”
Dr Yolanda Waters (right) on the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Yolanda Waters
The researchers joined forces with 5 Reef tour operators in north Queensland to set up the experiment.
“We tried to get a range of different operators out of Cairns and Townsville, because we were also testing if it depends on the type of experience, the type of boat, if it’s 300 people or a smaller trip,” says Waters.
The researchers and tour staff developed control and experimental climate trips for each tour.
“It really depended on the boat and the type of trip,” says Waters.
“The operators let us work with their staff and design one trip that had no information about climate change specifically – they still had their regular information about marine life and regular day-to-day operations.
“And on other trips, they let us work with the staff to make sure climate change was very clearly incorporated throughout the day.”
This might include marine biologists’ presentations addressing climate change, videos, and posters.
“On the trip back, I went around and surveyed as many tourists as I could,” says Waters.
Visitors were asked to complete a 5-minute paper survey asking about their experience of the trip, and their engagement with climate change.
The researchers found that trips mentioning climate didn’t have a significant effect on visitors’ experiences.
“There was no overall effect on satisfaction,” says Waters.
Credit: Yolanda Waters
People on both trips were interested in learning more about climate change.
“A lot of them wanted to have a chat about it, especially on days where there was no climate information on the boat – people noticed,” says Waters.
But people on trips with climate information weren’t any more likely to be spurred to action on climate change.
“We found that the climate information did increase people’s awareness about the threat, that information did get across to people, but we found that didn’t really translate to people’s willingness to do something when they went home,” says Waters.
This means that the information about climate change could be tweaked to be more solutions-focussed, according to the researchers.
“Our conclusion out of this, which aligns with some of the other research we’ve been doing, is that if tourism is to be this beacon of engaging people with climate change, it can’t just be talking about threats – people really want to know about solutions,” says Waters.
“Most people have no idea how they can help stop the ocean boiling. So that was the opportunity we identified.”
Credit: Yolanda Waters
The research comes shortly after the release of the 2024 Great Barrier Reef Outlook report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which is compiled every 5 years.
The report found that, while parts of the Reef had declined and parts had improved, the overall state of the Reef remained “poor” and climate change was rapidly closing the window to preserve its health.
The researchers say in their paper that the tourism industry has an opportunity to promote action on climate change, provided it uses the right strategies.
“Two million people visit the Reef every year,” points out Waters. She adds that tourists often place a high amount of trust in the information given to them by guides.
“This is the right place and time to do it, but if tourism wants to really embrace the role, they need to start tailoring those talks and those education materials around solutions and actions that people can take home with them.”
Waters says the tourism operators the team worked with were “very receptive” to the study.
“I think tourism really does want to be on board,” she says.
“Tourism has to change, no matter what happens. And I think they’re starting to really recognise that.”
Marmosets do something that only humans, dolphins and elephants have been known to do: give each other names.
Mother and daughter marmoset monkeys named Bhumi and Belle. Credit: David Omer’s Lab.
“Phee-calls” – a specific vocal call – used to identify and communicate between individual marmosets are described in new research published in the journal Science. Listen:
There are 22 species of marmoset native to South America and occasionally spotted in Central America. The generally live in small family groups of 2 to 8 individuals.
The common marmoset weighs just a few hundred grams and is about 19cm tall. They are easily recognised by their large, white ear tuffs.
Naming other individuals is a highly advanced cognitive skill in social animals. Interestingly, our closest evolutionary relatives, non-human primates, have until now appeared to lack this ability.
Researchers uncovered the phee-calls in marmosets by recording their conversations.
They found that, not only do the little monkeys use phee-calls to address specific individuals, they are also able to tell when a call was directed at them and responded more accurately when it was.
“This discovery highlights the complexity of social communication among marmosets,” explains study lead and senior author David Omer from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “These calls are not just used for self-localisation, as previously thought – marmosets use these specific calls to label and address specific individuals.”
The researchers also noticed marmosets within a family group used similar vocal labels to address different individuals. Adult marmosets were even able to learn the names of individuals they weren’t related to by blood.
Such vocalisations may help marmosets in dense rainforest habitats where visibility is limited.
Baby marmoset monkey named Bareket. Credit: David Omer’s Lab.
“Marmosets live in small monogamous family groups and take care of their young together, much like humans do,” says Omer. “These similarities suggest that they faced comparable evolutionary social challenges to our early pre-linguistic ancestors, which might have led them to develop similar communicating methods.”
Understanding how social communication developed in marmosets could help explain human language evolution.
In the Spring edition of Cosmos Magazine, Drew Rooke looks at the prospects of talking to whales, and Amalyah Hart looks at insect consciousness. Out September 26.
By DAVID KLEPPER Updated 11:56 AM CDT, September 3, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — When he first emerged on social media, the user known as Harlan claimed to be a New Yorker and an Army veteran who supported Donald Trump for president. Harlan said he was 29, and his profile picture showed a smiling, handsome young man.
A few months later, Harlan underwent a transformation. Now, he claimed to be 31 and from Florida.
New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence.
As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate.
The account was traced back to Spamouflage, a Chinese disinformation group, by analysts at Graphika, a New York-based firm that tracks online networks. Known to online researchers for several years, Spamouflage earned its moniker through its habit of spreading large amounts of seemingly unrelated content alongside disinformation.
“One of the world’s largest covert online influence operations — an operation run by Chinese state actors — has become more aggressive in its efforts to infiltrate and to sway U.S. political conversations ahead of the election,” Jack Stubbs, Graphika’s chief intelligence officer, told The Associated Press.
Intelligence and national security officials have said that Russia, China and Iran have all mounted online influence operations targeting U.S. voters ahead of the November election. Russia remains the top threat, intelligence officials say, even as Iran has become more aggressive in recent months, covertly supporting U.S. protests against the war in Gaza and attempting to hack into the email systems of the two presidential candidates. (snip-More)
Happy Labor Day! Let’s Talk About Some Awesome Ladies Of The Labor Movement by Rebecca SchoenkopfRead on Substack
Because it was not actually just a bunch of flannel-wearing white dudes.
A version of this article was initially published on May 1, 2019. Happy Labor Day, we’re taking the day off!
When we talk about the history of feminism, we tend to think about the causes and struggles of middle class white women. When we talk about labor history, we tend to think about the causes and struggles of white working class men.
And that is some absolute bullshit.
Working class women, very often women of color and immigrant women, were, are and always have been the backbone of the labor movement. They were working and organizing well before Second Wave Feminism “made it possible” for women to enter the workforce. They’re the ones who first fought for equal pay, and they’re the ones who were doing the bulk of feminist work and activism during the years in between getting the right to vote and The Feminine Mystique. They are still fighting today.
So, since it’s Labor Day, let’s celebrate the hell out of them, starting with the woman who started it all.
Lucy Parsons
‘Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.’
“More dangerous than a thousand rioters,” anarchist Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons was a writer, orator, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, and tireless campaigner for the rights of people of color, all women, and all workers. Her husband, Albert Parsons, was one of the Haymarket martyrs.
We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it … but we have our labor. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future, it is to organize the women.
Though Parsons and Emma Goldman were widely regarded as the most prominent female anarchists of the day, they very notably did not get along so well. Parsons believed that oppression based on gender and race was a function of capitalism and would be eliminated when capitalism was eliminated, whereas Goldman believed such oppression was inherent in all things. Parsons was all class struggle all the time, and felt that the “intellectual anarchists” like Goldman spent too much time bothering with appealing to the middle class.
One of her most important contributions to the labor movement was the concept of factory takeovers.
“My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in, and take possession of the necessary property of production.”
Parsons is best known for being the woman who really started the celebration of May Day as a day for workers’ rights — leading a parade to commemorate the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair. Soon, nearly every other country in the world followed suit and proclaimed this day International Worker’s Day. Alas, here in America, we go with the less radical and more picnic-y Labor Day that we are celebrating today, because Grover Cleveland thought a federal holiday commemorating the Haymarket Affair would encourage people to become anarchists and socialists, and no thank you, he did not want that.
Anna LoPizzo
‘Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses too’
Not much is known about Anna LoPizzo, other than that she was a 34-year-old mill worker who was murdered by police officer Oscar Benoit during the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike — also known as the Bread and Roses Strike. Initially, police tried to charge two IWW organizers who were miles away for her murder, even though literally everyone there had seen Benoit shoot her.
The reason for the strike in the first place was that the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, cut worker pay after the state cut the number of hours women could legally work from 56 down to 54. The Industrial Workers of the World, led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (we’ll get to her in a minute), organized more than 20,000 workers of more than 40 different nationalities to demand they get their fair wages. One of the primary tactics used in the strike was sending the starving families of the mill workers on a tour to New York City so that people there could see for themselves what these low wages were doing to children. Between that and LoPizzo’s death, sympathy was on the side of the workers. Congressional hearings into the conditions of the mills were held, and the mills themselves ended up settling the strike by giving all workers across New England a 20 percent raise.
Lillian Wald
‘Human interest and passion for human progress break down barriers centuries old.’
Susan B. Anthony isn’t the only important feminist buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in my hometown of Rochester, New York. There is another. Her name was Lillian Wald, and she was a total fucking bad ass. She wasn’t just a suffragist — she was also an early advocate for healthcare for all people regardless of economic class or citizenship, a founding member of the NAACP, lobbied against child labor, advocated for the rights of immigrants, helped to found the Women’s Trade Union League, and was an anti-war activist. Wald also founded the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City, which provides — to this day — social services, education, and health care to the impoverished. And she was active in the ACLU.
WHY THE HELL IS SHE NOT MORE FAMOUS? I am legitimately bothered by this and bring it up often.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
‘The IWW has been accused of pushing women to the front. This is not true. Rather, the women have not been kept in back, and so they have naturally moved to the front.’
Hey! You know who was super freaking awesome? Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. As previously mentioned, she was an organizer with Industrial Workers of the World who helped organize the Lawrence Textile Strike. She also organized a hell of a lot of other strikes across the country, helped found the ACLU, and was known for the creative tactics she used to elicit sympathy and support for the American worker.
Hattie Canty
’Coming from Alabama, this seemed like the civil rights struggle … the labor movement and the civil rights movement, you cannot separate the two of them.’
When Hattie Canty’s husband died in 1972, she found herself supporting eight children on her own. She found work as a maid at a Las Vegas hotel where she joined the Las Vegas Hotel and Culinary Workers Union Local 226. By 1990, she was president of that union, leading one of the longest strikes in American history — a six year strike of hospitality workers which, happily, ended in victory.
The Women of The Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike
We mean business this week or no washing!
Back in the 1880s, only two decades after the Civil War ended, the most common occupation for Black women was as laundresses — this was largely because if poor white families were going to hire anyone to do chores for them at all, they were going to hire someone to do their laundry. These women were independent workers, often working from their own homes and making their own soap, and they only made about $4 a month. (Average non-Black-woman laborers earned about $35 a month in 1880.)
One day in 1881, about 20 of them got together and decided that $4 a month was some bullshit for all the work they were doing and decided to go on strike and demand wages of $1 for every 12 pounds of washing. Three weeks later, 3,000 other women joined them. Unsurprisingly, the city freaked out. They fined any participants $25 — which was a lot of money when you only made $4 a month — and they offered tax breaks to any corporation that would come down there to start a commercial steam cleaning business. Still, the women did not back down.
Eventually, people got really sick of doing their own laundry, and the city decided to back down on the fines, and accede to their demands for fear that the unrest would spread to other industries.
Dolores Huerta
‘Every minute a chance to change the world.’
Dolores Huerta, along with Cesar Chavez, helped to organize the National Farmworkers Association, which later became United Farm Workers. She wasn’t a farmworker herself — rather, she was an elementary school teacher who was tired of seeing the children she taught living in poverty because their parents were not making enough money as farmworkers.
I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.
Together with Chavez, Huerta organized the successful Delano Grape Strike (or as your mom calls it, “that time we couldn’t eat grapes for five years” or as Rebecca’s mom calls it “serious people don’t care if a boycott ‘ends'”), which led to better wages and working conditions for farmworkers, and she has continued working as an activist and an organizer ever since.
Angela Bambace
‘We did it with fear.’
Though she’s not as well known as some of the other women on here, Angela Bambace, an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union who started unionizing her fellow shirtwaist factory workers at age 18, is a personal hero of mine, along with her sister Maria. Angela was known to punch strikebreakers in the nose, which was pretty freaking badass.
She also left her husband and a traditional marriage in which she was confined to “making tomato sauce and homemade gnocchi” — and lost her parental rights in doing so, because back then, women didn’t have any — to fight for workers’ rights on the front lines. She was the first woman woman elected Vice-President of the ILGWU, which previously only had male leadership, where she worked from 1936 until 1972.
May Chen
’The Chinatown community then had more and more small garment factories and the Chinese employers thought they could play on ethnic loyalties to get the workers to turn away from the union. They were very, very badly mistaken.’
May Chen, also of the International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union, led the New York Chinatown strike of 1982 — 20,000 workers strong and one of the largest strikes in American history. As a result of the strike, employers cut back on wage cuts, gave workers time off for holidays and hired bilingual interpreters in order to accommodate the needs of immigrant workers.
Lucy Randolph Mason
‘When I came South I had no idea of the frequency of attacks on people peacefully pursuing legitimate purposes, I am appalled at the disregard of the most common civil rights and the dangers of bodily harm to which organizers often are exposed”‘
Lucy Randolph Mason was an interesting one. She was a well-off Southern lady from Virginia, related to George Mason (author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights), Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, and, uh, Robert E. Lee. So, you know, you might have an idea in your head about what her deal might be. And you would be so wrong.
So, despite being from this very fancy family, Lucy goes and gets a job as a secretary for the YWCA at 20. In 1918, she gets into the whole suffragette thing. Women get the vote, but Lucy’s not done. She starts organizing for labor rights and integration and ending white supremacy in the South. She organizes interfaith, integrated unions in the South, which you can imagine was a pretty big deal at that time. She does it through the YWCA. She writes a pamphlet telling consumers to boycott companies that don’t treat their workers well. Eventually, she becomes the CIO’s ambassador to the South and spends the next 16 years of her life going to all these small towns where bad things would happen to anyone who tried to unionize, and explaining workers’ rights and why integration is good and racism is bad to pretty much anyone with any kind of power. Neat!
Emma Goldman
‘Ask for work, if they do not give you work, ask for bread, if they will not give you bread, steal bread.’
Though not a union organizer by trade, anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman’s advocacy for workers’ rights and human dignity and freedom empowered workers and organizers throughout the country, and motivated them to stand up for their own rights. She was considered the most dangerous woman in America for a reason.
She was a feminist, an anti-racist, an atheist, an advocate of free love, an opposer of the institution of marriage and — very unusually for the time (she pretty much started right after Haymarket, which was 1886, and continued until her death in 1940) — one of the first advocates of gay rights.
“It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life.”
I could probably go on about Emma Goldman forever, but I have to get to other people and also this is not my sophomore year in college.
Rosina Tucker
‘I looked him right in the eye and banged on his desk and told him I was not employed by the Pullman company and that my husband had nothing to do with any activity I was engaged in … I said, ‘I want you to take care of this situation or I will be back.’ He must have been afraid … because a black woman didn’t speak to a white man in this manner. My husband was put back on his run.’
Rosina Tucker is best-known for helping to organize the first Black labor union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, started by A. Philip Randolph in 1925. A Brotherhood? But she was a woman, you say! Well, the Pullman porters wanted to organize, but they were afraid of losing their jobs — with good reason, because their bosses kept trying to fire them for trying to unionize. So Rosina and other wives of the porters got together and started the Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in order to raise funds to start the union.
In 1963, along with A. Philip Randolph of the BSCP, she helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continued to be active in civil rights and labor rights until she passed away in 1987, at the age of 105.
The women on this list, along with the many others who also fought for labor rights in this country and others, didn’t only fight a fight for workers. They fought a feminist fight, they fought for civil rights, they fought for human rights — they understood the interconnectedness of it all, they understood that without economic justice there is no social justice and without social justice there is no economic justice. They understood the way that the labor movement could be used as a catalyst for making social change possible at a time when they didn’t have any political support or power — and that’s a thing we could all do well to remember ourselves.
Biologists have studied an extreme gymnast of the animal kingdom, watching as it moves so quickly it appears to all but vanish.
The globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) is a small but mighty bug that can backflip more than 60 times higher and 100 times longer than its own body length.
This tiny bug grows to only a couple of millimetres and can’t sting, bite, or fly its way out of danger. Instead, its preferred method of avoiding predators is to flip out so forcefully it seems to disappear! (snip-More on the page, with photos)
A study has found promising antibiotic candidates inside bacteria harvested from the deep Arctic Sea.
The research, by Finnish and Norwegian researchers, is published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
Antibiotic discovery has slowed in recent decades, which has exacerbated the risks of antibiotic resistance.
Most licensed antibiotics – about 70% – have been derived from a type of soil-dwelling bacteria called actinobacteria.
“For example, members of the Streptomyces genus produce several secondary metabolites, including clinically useful antibiotics such as tetracyclines, aminoglycocides and macrolides,” says corresponding author Dr Päivi Tammela, a professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
But soil isn’t the only place these bacteria can be found.
“Marine actinobacteria found in the sea, on the seafloor, or within the microbiome of marine organisms, have received far less attention as possible sources of antibiotics,” says Tammela. (snip-More on the page)
Countries in the Asia-Pacific region account for 76% of the world’s thermal coal power generation, and many of these plants will need to retire early to meet global emissions targets.
But according to a new analysis, it’s possible to phase these coal plants out and transition to renewable energy while investors still make money.
The study, done by Australian, Singaporean and Chinese researchers, is published in Energy Policy.
“There is a drive and interest from a number of different investors like the Asian Development Bank, but also private sector investors, to finance the early retirement coal fired power plants,” lead author Professor Christoph Nedopil Wang, director of Griffith University’s Asia Institute, tells Cosmos.
Nedopil and colleagues looked specifically at 6 Chinese-sponsored coal-fired power plants in Vietnam and Pakistan.
“With investors wanting to invest in, and ideally also providing lower cost financing for, green projects, refinancing of these coal fired power plants becomes possible at a lower cost,” says Nedopil.
The researchers modelled the future performance of these stations under a variety of financing and geoeconomic scenarios.
“That brought us to the conclusion that, depending on the age of the coal-fired power plant, we can retire these plants earlier than currently envisaged, while reducing the financing cost and therefore increasing enterprise value,” says Nedopil. (snip-More on the page)
I think this fits in as information relating to marginalized people. It is from a magazine that is religious, but it’s not pushy; I think everyone can read this article without feeling proselytized. It struck me as important, and overlooked. -A
That danger is amplified for the thousands of girls living in makeshift camps and tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border without protection or accompanying support. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Kids In Need of Defense, “[u]naccompanied children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and exploitation by cartels and other criminal groups.”
Over the last few years, a group of Muslim women has stepped in to meet their needs in unique ways. Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), the first Muslim shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in operation since June 2022 under the leadership of Sonia Tinoco García, founder and president of the Latina Muslim Foundation. According to staff, the shelter served nearly 3,000 migrants in its first two years of operation. Many of those migrants have been women, attracted to the shelter because of its separate men’s and women’s facilities and the fact that Albergue Assabil is a female-led shelter.
And it’s not only Muslim women finding sanctuary under the shade of the shelter’s blue dome; there have also been other female immigrants looking to García and her team for assistance as they make the perilous journey north.
“A group of Muslim ladies”
When García first headed to the U.S.-Mexico border to help others in 2014, her goal was simple: to help women, especially mothers and unaccompanied children, in their attempts to claim asylum or start a new life in the United States. Having immigrated to the U.S. herself in the 1990s, García knew what it was like.
She also knew the statistics.
Though the share has fluctuated in recent decades, immigrant women and girls make up at least half of all migrants and asylum seekers, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute. Women and girls made up a total of 53 percent of the immigrant population in 1980, 51 percent in 1990, 50 percent in 2000, and 51 percent in 2010 and 2022.
Given the scale, García gathered what she called “a group of Muslim ladies” from her mosque community in San Diego. Each had a profound understanding of the situation female immigrants were facing.
Angie Gely, who works in the office at Albergue Assabil, said being an immigrant who was deported back to Mexico and is now living in Tijuana, helps her understand what women in the shelter are going through — and what they face once they arrive in the U.S.
“Our families crossed the border to the U.S. too,” Gely said. “We can relate.”
Driven by their own past experiences and a deep desire to help female immigrants, García said she and other Muslim women started volunteering in Tijuana shelters, bringing food and clothing for people regardless of their religious, social, and cultural background.
Along the way, García and her “Muslim ladies” started noticing how many Muslims were mixed in with the larger population of immigrants and deportees. “It got my attention when I saw some women standing at the border with hijab,” García said. “I talked to them and discovered they were from Somalia, trying to go to the U.S. or Canada.”
The more time she spent in Tijuana, the more Muslims she saw arriving. At shelter after shelter, meanwhile, she witnessed staff too overwhelmed to cater to Muslim migrants’ unique needs.
“There were Muslims who didn’t feel safe in the shelters, because they were being discriminated against or questioned because of their faith,” Gely said. As a result, some would avoid the shelters altogether, struggling to find their own way on the streets or seeking help from Muslims at Centro Islámico de Baja — Tijuana’s only mosque at the time.
“The shelters didn’t have the time or money,” García said, “to provide halal food, to provide adequate space for prayer, or even understand their situations are different from those of migrants from Central America or elsewhere.”
Sonia Tinoco García, pictured, founded Albergue Assabil in 2022, with help of other Muslim women from San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico. Ken Chitwood/Sojourners.
García and the others did what they could to serve the immigrants sent their way — covering the cost of hotel rooms, providing home-cooked halal meals, or connecting them to the legal aid they so desperately needed, in a language they could communicate in. Overwhelmed, they turned to their mosque communities in San Diego and Orange counties to raise funds and procure translators who could speak Arabic or Urdu, Farsi or French, and many dialects in between.
But the need continued to increase. More and more Muslim immigrants were making their way to Tijuana, and the “ladies” could only do so much. Shelters were overwhelmed, and García said she was scrambling to field the many calls.
That’s why, in 2017, they decided to do more. Founding a nonprofit organization — the Latina Muslim Foundation — they raised more than $200,000 (USD) to construct a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Situated in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer area, halal food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants.
The hope, García said, was to provide a humane and helpful place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana. They are there to help transform the border from a topography of inhumanity into a place of dignity and opportunity, García said.
A growing number of Mexican Muslim women
García said that as a child, she always dreamed of helping people. “I wanted to become a surgeon, but do surgery for free, because people need it to save their lives,” García said. “Or an attorney who did pro bono work, to help families who don’t have justice.”
García grew up in a large family in a village of 200 people near La Paz, in the very south of the Baja California peninsula. She did not know whether such dreams would — or could — come true. “We had a simple lifestyle. We were not rich people,” she said. “Because we were 11 siblings, not everyone got education.”
García was one of the lucky ones able to finish high school. She moved to Ensenada — an hour and a half south of Tijuana — and started working with a local orthodontist serving medical tourists from the U.S. When she was 21, she met a man named Abu Hamza, a medical tourist from Lebanon living in Los Angeles. Abu Hamza spoke no Spanish at the time, and she did not speak English, but they communicated with books and through other people. Twenty days after meeting, they were married.
García had grown up Catholic and knew little of Islam. But when she saw Abu Hamza, she said, “I saw Islam in him.” After moving to the Los Angeles area with Abu Hamza, she learned English and Islam at the same time.
García joined the growing ranks of Latina converts to Islam. The first Latina and Latino converts can be identified as far back as the 1920s; others converted in the 1960s and ’70s as part of Black Muslim movements such as the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation. In 2011, 6 percent of Muslim Americans identified as Hispanic, according to the Pew Research Center; by 2017, it was 8 percent. The vast majority of this cohort of Hispanic American Muslims are women, many of them from Mexico or having Mexican heritage.
Muslims remain a small minority in Mexico, said Arely Medina, a professor at the University of Guadalajara. There are multiple small groups and communities made up of both migrants and individuals native to Mexico in the country’s interior, all of which have a relatively recent history, Medina said. “Thus, one cannot speak of a ‘Mexican Islam’ per se,” she said, “even though Muslims have a history here stretching back to the conquest of the Americas and continuing with a series of Arab immigrations in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Migrants from numerous nations gather for Friday prayers inside the Albergue Assabil’s musallah, or prayer room. Ken Chitwood/Sojourners
According to Medina and other experts, most Mexican converts to Islam are women. Among them are sizable numbers of female Muslim immigrants from places such as Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Pakistan, Ghana, and Turkey who have made Mexico home. “Some hope to reach the United States and are concentrated along the northern border,” Medina said. “Others concentrate in places like Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Monterrey.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize these women’s motivations, plans, or situations, Medina said. As is true of those staying at Albergue Assabil, “There is not a single story,” she said. “Each one carries a narrative.”
Because these women face a variety of challenges — such as wearing the veil in a cultural context where Islam is not a prominent reference point or searching for a sense of freedom and security in the face of domestic violence and harassment — Medina said they find in each other a sense of solidarity. “They are in search of a better life,” she said. As Europe, the United Kingdom, and even the U.S. are experienced as less welcoming, Medina said, “Latin America is now seen as a place of possible openness.”
Empowered to help others
Whether local converts or newcomers from elsewhere, Muslim women have carved out their own spaces in Mexico, including the Albergue Assabil shelter and the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi order in Mexico City, which is headed by a woman — Shaykha Amina Teslima.
García often reminds donors, partners, volunteers, journalists, and authorities that Albergue Assabil is a shelter run by women. And not just any women, but Muslim women.
That, she said, makes a difference.
“We found that Islam gives women rights; it gave us empowerment,” she said of her and the other women running the show at Albergue Assabil. “I could do whatever I wanted to do — more than what I could do with my own culture or my own religion before,” she said. “Islam says that women can go study; men cannot tell you no. Men know this. My husband knows he doesn’t own me. He is my support.”
Indeed, her husband, Abu Hamza, is supportive of García’s work. He is often seen around the shelter too, pulling up on a motorcycle with García, bringing in donations, making phone calls, and generally doing whatever needs to be done. When asked about the shelter, he insistently points to his wife. “She knows better than me,” he said.
García said part of the shelter’s work is passing their own empowerment on to women who arrive at their gates. “In the shelter, when women come, we give them tools to be able to continue their education: English, Spanish, computers, cooking,” she said. “We want to give them the basics so that they are not reliant on men. In the time they stay in the shelter, we teach them as much as we can so that they can live for themselves.”
Increasingly, said Gely, that means more and more women are finding their way to Albergue Assabil — Muslim and non-Muslim. “Just yesterday, three ladies from Russia came here looking for shelter,” Gely said. “They’re not Muslim, no. But they hear how nice it is and want to come. Of course we take them in.”
One of them is Amie. Amie has struggled getting an appointment through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app CBP One. She has spent three months in Mexico so far, arriving at Albergue Assabil six weeks after bouncing from shelter to shelter in Tijuana. Sojourners is withholding Amie’s last name, at her request, to protect her immigration status.
“They’ve been so kind to me,” she said, “out on the street, in other shelters, I feared for my life, worried I would be tortured, abused, or killed. This shelter is the only place I feel I could survive.”
As we talk, two more young Russian women walk through the front doors. They too are looking for shelter. Amie tells them to take a seat. Gely or García will be here soon, she says.
“They’ll take care of you,” Amie said. “They always do.”
Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s
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