“In this charged moment of backlash matched with movement resurgence, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

One key way we can recharge and center ourselves is precisely in the places where people have drawn a line in the sand. There are many of those places, right now.

And San Juan is one of them.”

Mervyn Marcano is a co-founder of Blackbird, a rapid-response initiative providing strategic communications, organizing and policy capacity in the Black organizing field. Mervyn has managed communications for broad public-private initiatives around housing and economic development in the San Francisco Bay Area; strengthened advocacy efforts for juvenile justice reform; and served as counsel during tough media cycles for both elected officials and labor unions. His prior work includes serving as Director of Communications for Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that helped to make healthy food access in communities of color a priority for community organizing groups. Prior to that, Mervyn was Communications Director for ColorofChange.org, the million-member Black online advocacy group founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. During his tenure, the organization was highly recognized for its work on voting rights access and prosecutorial misconduct in the South.

Jorge Díaz Ortiz is a cultural worker/popular educator, community organizer, puppeteer and DJ (Cano Cangrejo)  from Puerto Rico with over 20 years of praxis in the field. Jorge is deeply committed to working class struggles that challenge patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism in all of its forms. He is currently the artistic director of AgitArte.  He is actively engaged in struggles for liberation and a member of the Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadores. Jorge is also a founding member of Papel Machete, a collective of radical artists and street theater/puppetry workers dedicated to education, agitation and solidarity work in 21st century Puerto Rico and its Diaspora. He has been a political advisor, mentor and an editor of When We Fight, We Win!

Deymirie (Dey) Hernández is an architect, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Issues of race, identity, language, and community are fundamental to her work. She experiences first-hand the power of the creative process in the lives of youth, as a teaching artist throughout the city of Boston. She designs and directs art workshops with AgitArte, a non-profit organization dedicated to artistic and popular education projects in marginalized communities, where she is also a board member. Dey is also a puppeteer of the radical workers’ theater collective, Papel Machete, which is based in Puerto Rico. Her work and performances most recently have been exhibited at the Mills Gallery of the Boston Center for the Arts, and Loisaida Center, Lower East Side, New York City. Currently she is the art director and curator of When We Fight, We Win!.

Raquel is the Politics & Culture Editor at Latina magazine, writing at the intersection of cultura and justicia. Formerly at millennial news site Mic, her work can also be found at the New York Times, Cosmo for Latinas, the Washington Post, the Independent and more. Raquel has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Central Florida and a master’s degree from New York University’s Gallatin School, where she focused her research on race and new media. She is a proud NuyoFloRican chonga, a feminista born to Puerto Rican parents in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York and raised in Orlando, Florida. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram and/or Snapchat at @RaquelReichard.

Nelini Stamp is the Membership Director for the Working Families Party (WFP), an independent, people-driven political party fighting for real democracy. Nelini grew up in Brooklyn, NY with her family that emigrated from Puerto Rico and Belize. In 2008 Nelini joined the Working Families Party staff in NY, working on numerous electoral campaigns across New York State. Nelini’s work on the ground at Occupy Wall Street helped bridge the gap between labor, community-based organizations and Occupy. Nelini has helped launched initiatives and organizations centered around young people of color like the Dream Defenders and the Freedom Side. In 2015 Nelini won the Edna award of distinction for her social justice work. Nelini’s story is featured in the Uprising by George Packer. She is classically trained in tap dance and singing and still does both in her spare time. Nelini’s family is from Guayama and Manabo Puerto Rico.

Idelisse is a organizational consultant working with social change leaders, groups, and networks. An experienced leader and manager, Idelisse ran Tides Foundation for many years and was Vice President of the Ms. Foundation for six years. For the last ten years, Idelisse has facilitated meetings and processes with groups such as Caring Across Generations, National People’s Action, The Center for Social Inclusion, Social Transformation Project, Center for Women’s Global Leadership and NoVo Foundation.
Idelisse co-authored a bestseller, Mother Daughter Revolution and more recently, a new book, Latino Stats: American Hispanics By the Numbers, with her daughter, Esti Giordani.

Neidi Dominguez is currently the Director of Worker Centers Partnerships and Deputy Director of Community Engagement at the AFL CIO. She migrated to the United States at the age of nine with her mother and younger sister. In 2008, she graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She served as a strategic campaign coordinator for the CLEAN Carwash Campaign in Los Angeles. She has also been a key organizer in the undocumented immigrant youth movement and lead a victorious campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA in 2012.

“I know that together we are not just powerful; we are invincible. For generations our people have resisted and envisioned a better world for us all. I am ready to continue in that tradition and do it with our own twist; todo por mi gente y con MiJente.”

Stephanie Llanes is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She currently resides in New York and is a Bertha Justice Legal Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where she works on government misconduct, discriminatory policing, solitary confinement, racial injustice, immigration, and mass incarceration. In addition to her work at CCR, Stephanie is active in the Puerto Rican liberation movement, Law for Black Lives Network, and the movement fighting for the release of political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera.

Rosa Clemente, a native of the South Bronx, is one of the most raw, honest, political, social, and cultural voices in the country. From Harvard to prisons, Rosa has spent her life dedicated to scholar activism. She is currently a doctoral student in the W.E.B. Dubois department of UMASS-Amherst. Throughout her scholarly career, Rosa has been a constant on the ground presence through the many political struggles facing Black and Latinx people in the 21st century.

Jorge Gutierrez is an UndocuQueer organizer born in Nayarit, Mexico, and was raised in Santa Ana, California. His organizing bridges immigrant rights, racial justice and LGBTQ rights and works across issues and communities in order to end the systems that are killing, incarcerating and deporting people of color.  Most recently he is the founder of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, a national and local organizing, political and cultural home for the LGBTQ Latin@/Latinx/Latino community in the United States. Familia: TQLM is currently leading a national campaign #EndTransDetention to end the detention and deportation of trans undocumented women and stop all deportations.  In addition, he has co-founded various organizations focused on social justice for the LGBTQ, Latinx and immigrant communities: DeColores Queer Orange County, the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance (CIYJA), and the founder of the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP).

Karina Claudio Betancourt is a Program Officer with the Open Society Foundations and works with the Open Places Initiative, a placed-based initiative in three sites: Buffalo, Puerto Rico, and San Diego. She is a skilled community organizer with several years of management, advocacy, policy analysis, fundraising and grant writing experience. She has particular experience working/organizing to empower low wage workers, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and individuals living in the intersection of these identities.
Karina most recently hails from the New York City Council, where she served as the Senior Director of the Community Engagement Division in the Office of Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. In this capacity, she directed the implementation of a citywide Participatory Budgeting project, as well as the implementation of several pro-LGBTQ rights policies.
From 2008 to 2014, she was a staff person at Make the Road New York (MRNY), where she oversaw its LGBTQ Justice Project. She also helped open MRNY’s new office in Brentwood, Long Island, where she supervised its immigration, housing, civic engagement and leadership development programs.
Karina grew up in Puerto Rico, where she attended the University of Puerto Rico, graduating with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. She moved to NYC in 2007, where she attended New York University and received a M.A. in Performance Studies.

“I am delighted that Mijente decided to come to Puerto Rico to host this conference. This is a critical moment in Puerto Rican history—we have a fiscal control board that will decide all matters on behalf of the Puerto Rican people, but we have not elected them. They are the epitome of everything that is wrong with the colonial mandate set in place by the United States on the island 118 years ago. Now more than ever we need the solidarity of Latinx people all over the US to help Puerto Ricans achieve self-determination after hundreds of years of colonial oppression. And for Puerto Ricans to tie their struggle for self-determination, to the struggle of all Latinx people in the US.”