Minnesota Series: Minnesota and Beyond

Minnesota Series webinar, part 2. No RSVP required. Click here to join the Zoom meeting: https://yale.zoom.us/s/99419257067

Darakshan Raja is the founding executive director of Muslims for Just Futures, a grassroots organization that builds power in Muslim communities.

Sergio M. González is a historian of U.S. immigration, labor, and religion. He teaches at Marquette University and is the author of Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press) and Mexicans in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press). González’s current research examines the contentious battles over sanctuary movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, exploring the pivotal role people of faith have played in developing contemporary social movements for immigrant and refugee justice as well as the opposing political movements that have risen to criminalize these forms of solidarity.

Maxamed Abu-maye, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of the book Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence (University of California Press, 2025). This multisited project, the first of its kind, exposes the links between US military violence abroad and police brutality at home through a profound exploration of Somali refugee lives.

Stephen Pitti, Stephen Pitti is a Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. He is also the Founding Director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Associate Head of Ezra Stiles College. He is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2003), American Latinos and the Making of the United States (2012), and articles on Latinx history and historiography. He has provided expert reports on the history of racial animus for federal civil rights cases, and he is currently writing a book entitled The World of César Chávez. Appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he has delivered the Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture at the University of Texas and keynoted the Latinos/as in Historic Preservation National Conference. He co-edits the “Politics and Culture in Modern America” series for the University of Pennsylvania Press and serves on the editorial board for the journal California History. At Yale he has organized or co-organized conferences and academic gatherings focusing on Mexican Music and Social Justice; Racism and the Radical Right in Europe and the United States; Japanese American Wartime Incarceration; and New Directions in Ethnic Studies.