A Speakers' Corner for Santa Fe

A Speakers' Corner is a publicly-known area, usually located in a public park, where any person may speak without fear of governmental punishment or reprisal. Often, a Speakers' Corner is a focal point for political organizing and collective action. Our Speakers' Corner is back up and running in 2026 starting this Spring after a first run in the Fall of 2025.

We usually meeting Saturdays at 10:00 AM at Santa Fe Railyard Park, right next to SITE Santa Fe at the corner of Paseo de Peralta and S. Guadalupe. We're hard to miss – look for the folks in Indivisible Santa Fe No Kings shirts and our "Speakers' Corner" sign! Come by and listen or, better, speak! Make your voice heard!

A note on the history of Speakers‘ Corners - and why Santa Fe needs one now

In a pluralistic constitutional democracy, certain civil rights are essential to preventing tyranny. These rights protect individual persons and nongovernmental institutions such as businesses, religious congregations, and families from excessive encroachment by the state and preserve the opportunity for democratic participation by all persons regardless of their race, sex, gender, creed, language, or ethnicity. Rights to free expression, including freedom of speech, are among these essential ones. They have a particularly significant place in American constitutional democracy. 

The founders of the original states in America and the founders of the United States intentionally enshrined freedom of speech in the original states’ constitutions and then in the federal constitution because of how the British attempted to suppress and punish colonists’ speech criticising the British royal governors and the British King. The original state constitutions and the federal constitution broke with English legal tradition by enshrining a right to speech free from government infringement. New Mexico’s state constitution follows the American model. Thus, In the United States, we have the right to express our opinions with a minimum of government regulation as to content, time, manner, and place. Truth is a complete defense to libel.  Federal and state civil rights law empowers us to use speech to disagree with one another and with our governments, thereby discouraging violence as a way to fight for our views. 

To this day, the United Kingdom’s law of free speech remains more repressive than the United States’. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British government was forced to pass legislation to permit fuller freedom of speech in at least one place, the portion of Hyde Park in London called “Speakers’ Corner.” Speakers’ Corner – Hyde Park became known for demonstrations and speech about expanding the right to vote and participate in public life in the United Kingdom. The women who fought for their right to vote in the United Kingdom insisted on their right to gather and speak in Hyde Park, where they spoke and demonstrated on behalf of women’s suffrage. Speakers at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner have also included Karl Marx and Marcus Garvey. George Orwell lauded Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park as “one of the minor wonders of the world.”

Starting with British Commonwealth countries, Speakers’ Corners have spread throughout the world. Today in the United States of America we have reached the point of needing to establish our own. State and federal constitutional protections and our speech-protective federal First Amendment jurisprudence have not been sufficient to prevent Donald Trump and his appointees from threatening speakers using media platforms to criticize or lampoon Trump, his regime, or his allies. When Disney and CBS capitulate to threats from the regime, when big-name comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are pressured to self-censor or be taken off the air, when government officials use social media to threaten people who disagree with them, we must demonstrate our unwavering commitment not just to the right of free speech but to exercising that right. Moreover, we must be seen to be exercising the right to speak freely and insisting that our local government demonstrate its commitment to supporting freedom of speech. This is how we develop and use local collective power to resist authoritarianism.