Alameda Native History Project

Tag: police brutality

  • PRESS RELEASE:

    Alameda Native History Project Calls On City of Alameda To Dedicate Park In Memory of Mario Gonzalez

    12/15/2023
    Alameda, California

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

    On Thursday, December 14, 2023, the City of Alameda announced that it had reached an $11M settlement with the Estate of Mario Gonzalez, and a $350,000 settlement with Mario‘s Mother, to settle claims arising from the death of Mario Gonzalez, who was in Alameda Police custody when he died on April 19, 2021.

    While no amount of money will ever bring Mario Gonzalez back—and while this project considers $350,000 a paltry sum for the life of a son, father, brother, and care-taker—we applaud this settlement as the first step in seeking justice for Mario and his family.

    The City of Alameda, and the Alameda Police Department still have a long way to go repair the historic harms they have committed against all people of color. Even today, the City of Alameda, and especially the Alameda Police Department are still widely known for their unfair bias and treatment of non-white citizens and visitors to the island.

    As the City of Alameda, and the Alameda Police Department, reflect on what this settlement means to the status quo of their enforcement and policing, a permanent reminder should be put in place to help us all remember that every human life is precious, no matter who you are, or where you are from.

    We call on the City of Alameda to do three things now:

    1. Officially establish a Park (or “Parklet”) at Oak Street and Powell Street, where the Mario Gonzalez Memorial and ofrenda now stands;
    2. Name that park “Mario Gonzalez Memorial Park”;
    3. Affirm their commitment to protecting the people who live in, and visit, Alameda from excessive force, harm, and death at the hands of Alameda Police, or while in their custody.

    For more information about this release, or to support the effort to create the Mario Gonzalez Memorial Park, contact Gabriel Duncan, press@alamedanativehistoryproject.com, (510) 747-8423

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    About the Alameda Native History Project

    Alameda Native History Project is a Two-Spirit, Native-run Organization based in Alameda, California, committed to combating anti-indigenous bias and inaccuracies in textbooks, museums, curricula, etc., in the San Francisco Bay Area, and beyond. Find us on Instagram, or on our website: AlamedaNativeHistoryProject.com

    Alameda is Muwekma Ohlone Territory.

  • “Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics” Next-Gen Look at Representations of the Dead, Dying, Disappeared, and Wounded Body

    Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics

    Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1059d63h

    A dissertation written by Francesca A. Romeo, in 2021; and submitted for partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Digital Media, at UC Santa Cruz.

    This dissertation examines the intersections of technology, human rights, and “testimony through representations of the dead, dying, disappeared or wounded body.“

    It starts with an examination of the testimony through intimation, like Facebook Live Streams of police murders of black men.

    Includes the examples how images of the murders of Oscar Grant, Stephon Clark, Eric Garner, (and too many more) stood as an intimate testimony that galvanized a community of people who are still being brutalized, and executed, by the police. And these images also served as a counter-narrative to the lies Police, City and other Officials would have told us about why these black men died.

    The power of these images, and videos, the way that these people documented their lives: let the audience experience what it was really like to be the “other”, at the hands of injustice and inequity.

    These testimonies are powerful tools that can be used to help communities mourn, and harness the outrage, and energy behind social movements, and changes in policy.

    This dissertation has three chapters. All of which are eminently relevant today.

    1. Networked Testimony as Necroresistance: Social Media and the Shifting Spectacle of Lynching in America
    2. Digital Decolonialism: Mapping the Personal and Collective Necropolitics of MMIW
    3. Open Source Investigations as Practice: The Forensic Aesthetics of Post-Human Testimony
    Whether or not they are read in order, or even all together, this is definitely a Next-Gen Document for anyone who’s working in the Social Media BLM, MMIW, Anti-Racist, and other Social and Political Movement Spheres.

    Read the article, for free, on eScholarship.org, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1059d63h