Dance, dance, revolution! This LGBTQ+ group is putting their bodies to "werk" for social justice.
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00:00We are here, we are queer, we are trans, and we will dance.
00:11Amidst a government shutdown over Trump's obsession with building a wall to the death
00:17of an eight-year-old boy and seven-year-old Jacqueline, both Guatemalan children in U.S.
00:22custody, to a recent autopsy of Roxana Hernandez, a trans woman who also died in U.S.
00:29custody, which showed that she experienced brutal maltreatment at the hands of U.S. Customs and
00:34Border Patrol officials, we're demanding work, not walls from the Trump administration and the
00:40U.S. government. As a first-generation individual, having grown up in an environment that has
00:54demonized Arabs and specifically Muslims, it's been really important for me to show up
01:01for other people, even though they might not share our identity.
01:15The Pulse nightclub shooting happened on a dance floor, and so taking that dance floor into the
01:21streets felt like a natural movement of occupying space, asserting that we are here in all of our
01:29existence and that we expect respect for our existence. It's very important to be clear
01:36that my intentions were by no means to appropriate twerking, but rather to honor its roots as a
01:42celebratory dance, to honor its history. It came out of the New Orleans bounce scene, which is such
01:49a quintessentially queer and trans music scene. To really honor that and how it has been a
01:57celebratory movement in cultures and societies that were oppressed. To honor that and to
02:04use that as a means of celebrating our resilience and our resistance, to me, is really to appreciate
02:13its history and to utilize it as a means of creating the world that we want to see.
02:20As a part of our Work Not Walls campaign, we celebrated migrants and refugees in front of
02:35Stephen Miller's house, the pioneer of the Muslim ban, of family separation, of slashing the number
02:42of refugees allowed into the country. We will not tolerate the bigotry and hate and the xenophobia
02:50that is coming from the Trump administration and from the U.S. government as a whole.
02:55We are here to work and not create walls.