November 24, 2025
We, the 2025-26 board members of the AAG Latinx Geographies (LxG) Specialty Group, are writing to express our unequivocal solidarity with Geographers for Justice in Palestine (GJP) and their call for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) to hold a membership-wide vote on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
This is not the first time we have expressed our solidarity with the Palestinian people (Footnote 1). In May 2021, following the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah, members of our specialty group wrote and published a Statement of Solidarity with Palestine. Then, as now, we, as Latinx scholars in the United States, recognize the linkages between our condemnation of ongoing settler colonialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism in the United States and the Americas, more broadly, with Palestinian struggles for liberation. Similarly, we recognize that social movements fighting for migrant justice within the U.S. and for Palestinian liberation are invariably linked. When we declare “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” we are not simply identifying the creation of the U.S.-Mexico border following the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848). Nor are we simply discussing how this socially-constructed border has impacted Latinx and American Indian communities in the many decades following this imperial war. More than this, we are identifying how imperial settler colonial states like the United States and Israel have created and maintained borders to ethnically cleanse and exclude peoples from their ancestral homelands or lands to which they hold historical claims (Footnote 2). Indeed, in 1948, one hundred years after the U.S.-Mexico War, Israel forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in Palestine in what Palestinians call the “Nakba” or catastrophe. The Palestinian people did not cross Israel’s newly-enacted 1948 borders, those borders crossed them. Likewise, when we declare “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have to go!”, we are comparing the militarization of border walls along the U.S.-Mexico and Israel-Palestine borders (among others) to critique bordering as a transnational, settler colonial project. We also see direct geographic connections (i.e.,land theft, ethnic cleansing, place-annihilation, and ecological destruction) between Latinx Geographies and what is happening in Palestine. We recognize these shared experiences across distinct contexts, and insist that these experiences—and coalitional social movements against settler colonialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism—cannot be understood in isolation.
The Latinx Geographies Speciality Group was founded in 2018. Since then, we have grown as a speciality group and as a subfield of study in measurable and meaningful ways. In addition to our founders, who are each long-standing members of the AAG, our current board and membership remain active, dues-paying members of the AAG. As ongoing AAG members, we are deeply committed to the discipline of Geography and its application in the real world. We have a clear opportunity to apply our training and insights as geographers—as well as our commitment to a more just world—to the genocide in Gaza and the persistent violations of international law in Palestine. In short, we strongly believe we cannot separate our professional association from what is happening in Palestine.
Therefore, and in solidarity with GJP, we are calling on the AAG to hold a membership-wide vote on BDS. If approved, a vote in favor of BDS would not only divest from institutions that have profited off the genocide of the Palestinian people, but it would ensure AAG divests from companies like Lockheed Martin Corp, RTX Corp, Boeing Co, and L3Harris Technnologies Inc, which manufacture weapons and technology used against Palestinian civilians and to police the U.S.-Mexico border. We strongly agree with our GJP colegas that holding this vote is morally imperative, aligns with our responsibility as geographers and civically engaged individuals, and moves us toward building a more democratic and just professional association.
There is precedent for holding a vote on divesting from and/or condemning the state of Israel within academic professional associations in the United States. In 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) became one of the first major US academic associations to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, with 66.05% of members voting in favor. In 2016, after a prior vote failed among the American Anthropological Association (AAA) membership, in 2023 the AAA endorsed a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, with 71% of member voters in favor. In 2024, the American Association of Sociologists (AAS) passed a resolution for justice in Palestine, including divesting from weapons manufacturing companies. And in early 2025, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the American Historical Association (AHA) overwhelmingly passed resolutions condemning Israel’s “scholasticide” (the destruction of the educational system) in Gaza.
As long-standing and active members of the AAG, we urge our professional association to similarly facilitate a membership-wide vote on BDS and the condemnation of the horrors taking place in Palestine. We thank our GJP colegas for leading this call and for the work they have done, alongside Palestinians, to bring attention to this issue and our responsibility as justice-oriented geographers to speak truth to power and hold power accountable.
In solidarity,
The Latinx Geographies Specialty Group Board, 2025-26
Footnotes:
- Pulido, L., & Lloyd, D. 2010. “From La Frontera to Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian Connections.” American Quarterly, 62(4), 791-794.
- Antipode Editorial Collective. 2025. “Palestine as Prism in Turbulent Times.” Antipode, 57(4), 1176-1180.
