Click the image below to view a video that's being circulated for the upcoming No Borders Camp 2007, to which I'm heading off to in the next few days.

No Borders Camps have taken place previously in Europe and Australia, confronting borders as both unjust physical boundaries and brutal systems of violence and control that pervade our societies. They generally take the form of radical encampments at the invisible line separating two countries, or outside detention camps where black-and-brown folks are imprisoned. This is the first No Borders Camp in North America, and the first to take place on two sides of an international border (see the FAQ on www.noborderscamp.org)

Anti-authoritarian convergences like these aren't organized by a central group or nonprofit--instead, volunteer organizers and preexisting collectives take on coordinating the basic framework for the event, and a plethora of groups and individuals plug in at various stages and levels. One group volunteers to bring art supplies, another to coordinate meals, and a third to set up online communications between collectives. A lot of lengthy (and radically democratic) consensus-building, communication and decision-making between disparate groups is involved.

This process has been doubly complicated at No Borders Camp 2007, where an entire parallel process has taken place on the far side of the low-intensity war zone we call the U.S.-Mexico border. In a few days, groups will converge on both sides of the wall separating Calexico, California from Mexicali, Baja, forming a single encampment of anti-authoritarians from Mexico and the U.S. The cross-border, bilingual organizing required for this kind of event is rarely attempted--and never on this scale.

No Borders Camp 2007 comes at a critical time for movement in Fortress North America. Radicals in the states are looking for ways to support immigrant movement in a way that embodies the anti-authoritarian ethos of direct action and direct democracy; mass rebellion in Mexico is at a high boil, with the political structure facing challenges from a plethora of social movements on a scale that hasn't been seen in decades; and in the U.S, the No Borders Camp marks one of the most direct confrontations yet between the anarchist inheritors of the counter-globalization era and newly-invented government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

All this takes place in the shadow of past struggles. When Mexican and U.S. anarchists converge in a few days, they will revive a legacy of borderlands solidarity reaching back to the short-lived Baja Commune, when the Industrial Workers of the World joined with Magonista revolutionaries on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. In short, I'm pumped.

Check back at Lines of Flight over the next two weeks, where I'll be syndicating the indymedia feed from the No Borders Camp, and adding posts of my own as I'm able.

Crossposted from Lines of Flight.