From Draft NOtices, April‐June 2026
— Lauren Reyna Morales and Oren Robinson
This past January, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) continued their years-long tradition of participating in Enero Zapatista in San Diego, California.
Enero Zapatista is a month-long series of events that commemorates the January 1st, 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. For 22 years, Enero Zapatista has brought San Diego community members together to reflect on struggles against oppression in our own contexts and to organize for sustained action. The theme of this year’s Enero Zapatista was “Encounters of Resistances and Rebellions Against Fascism.”
For years, the Zapatistas have been warning of, and preparing for, the onslaught of a brewing, violent force that seeks to engulf us all. Most anyone can see that this raging tempest is now here, and it is ripping apart people and the Earth at a horrific rate.
Project YANO heard this call and hosted an event called “¡Migra No! ¡Guerra No! Refuse to Serve the Fascist Empire!” at the Centro Cultural de la Raza on Saturday, January 24th. The event invited community members to join Project YANO and other community organizations for a public conversation about the predatory recruitment of our youth by the military, ICE, Border Patrol, and other agencies of U.S. empire. Representatives from American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Union del Barrio, and Teatro Voces Unidas political theater troupe were present to engage in these critical discussions.
January 24th was a somber, gloomy day in both weather and energy. It was the day Alex Pretti of Minneapolis, a 37-year-old VA intensive care unit nurse, was killed by violent federal agents in broad daylight. Pretti’s life was taken just a couple weeks and miles away from where Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in front of horrified onlookers. Spontaneous protests in response to these killings were forming in San Diego as the Project YANO event was about to start. Organizers were unsure how the tragic events of the day would affect attendance. As people began to trickle in to the Centro, attendees would fill nearly every seat with a palpable urgency and attentiveness.
Davíd Morales of Project YANO began the event by laying out its structure and purposes. Shortly into his introduction, a disgruntled audience member arose from his seat and vocally expressed his disdain for the occasion’s purposes. The disruptive attendee was actually Guillermo “Memo” Mendez from Voces Unidas. Guillermo utilizes theatre to critically examine community and social justice issues.
The carefully crafted use of theater that followed had the audience on the edge of their seats, as Davíd and Guillermo debated the utility and morality of joining the armed forces to escape poverty and gain access to benefits and opportunities. This passionate exchange laid bare the justifications and cognitive dissonance associated with serving a fascist empire, and illustrated the most common reasons youth in our community become enraptured in these folds.
After the opening dialogue, Project YANO facilitators introduced a slideshow that presented the audience with examples of recruitment tools and ads utilized by the military and federal agencies of the past and present. Audience members sat in silence as they saw disturbing imagery and messages taken from official U.S. government agency social media accounts. The audience also watched a short video from a recent ICE recruiting fair.
When the presentation was over, Project YANO facilitators guided attendees into small breakout groups where they had conversations about predatory recruitment efforts and tools. The sounds of robust discussion soon filled the room.
These conversations concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Project YANO board member and public-school teacher Lauren Reyna Morales. Panelists included Rick Jahnkow of Project YANO, Pedro Rios of the AFSC US-Mexico Border Program, Juan Orozco of Union del Barrio’s Community Self Defense Coalition, and Memo Mendez with Teatro Voces Unidas. Each shared their experiences using critical education projects to organize San Diego communities against militarism.
Pedro grounded the conversation in the historical chapter that began to take root around 1994, the same year that the North American Free Trade Agreement increased U.S. border militarization and Zapatistas declared their autonomy in Mexico. Local San Diego communities became the front lines of an official U.S. policy of low intensity violence to control immigrant communities, and federal agencies began to declare their intentions to become a national police force.
Juan shared his own personal experience being recruited into the military as a way to avoid criminalization, and how he later joined San Diego communities organizing freedom schools, like Union del Barrio’s own Somos Raza youth program. While recruiters lie and sell a false image of enlistment, freedom schools seek to nurture the hearts and minds of youth, enabling critical analysis and creating more life choices.
Rick noted instances of past collaborations between the groups represented by panelists. He observed that educators are in a critical position to plant the seeds for student activism, while progressive community organizations can penetrate school walls to support their efforts. And Memo recounted how Teatro Voces Unidas has utilized the art of theater to communicate deeper truths, stir emotions and foster critical thinking about the status quo.
Finally, the panelists connected these various experiences to practical interventions today, ranging from neighborhood community patrols to campaigns restricting JROTC and military recruiters on campus. And as attendees mingled afterwards, their commitment to fostering youth autonomy and building communities with livable futures lightened up the cloudy afternoon.
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (https://www.comdsd.org/).