Introd uction
Democracy and Freedom
eneath the hysteria being generated around immigration,
intertwined in the neighborhoods creating draconian antiimmigration laws, reside millions of individuals of Mexican
descent who are working hard, supporting families, and supporting
community growth. The stories of these individuals, however, are
seldom represented. Rather, images of conservative talk show host
Sean Hannity on horseback, chasing "wetbacks," seem to dominate
the airways.
The scholars, activists, and organizations represented in this issue
of Reflections, however, demonstrate how to counter this dominant
narrative, showing us both the dignity of the individual and the
possibility of collective action. In the opening pages, Jesus Villicafia
Lopez, Margarita Rojas, and Salvador Garcia share their personal
experiences of crossing the border and establishing a new life in the
United States. This personal experience is then drawn into dialogue
with the work of the Minnesota Immigration Freedom Network and
University of Minnesota's Chicano Studies Program. The case of Maria
Gonzales, who is trying to complete her education, is represented
and embedded within university attempts at Fairfield University and
Emerson College to broaden a commitment to the educational rights
of all students. Octavio Pimentel and Victor Villanueva then remind us
that any sense of "education" or "success" must grow in dialogue with
the values and traditions of the communities themselves. The issue of
Reflections then ends as it began. Through the work of Mark Lyons,
whose oral history project provides a venue for immigrants to speak
about their experience in their own words, we listen to the personal
experience of individuals from different heritages and origins creating
a life in the United States.
Reflections. 1
This issue would not have been possible without the support of Erin
Buksbaum, Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Eli Goldblatt, Cristina
Kirklighter, Mark Lyons, Luisa Rodriguez, Nancy Santiago, Rachael
Shapiro and Denise Valdes.
I am very grateful to benefit from the support of such strong allies
and the ability share such important scholarship with the readers
of Reflections.
Steve Parks
Editor, Reflections
Espejos y Ventanas I Mirrors and Windows
Mark Lyons, Introduction to excerpts from Espejos y Ventanas /
Mirrors and Windows
t is time for Latino immigrants in the United States to take back their
stories-stories that have been rewritten by people in a campaign to
drive them out of the United States. The revised stories read in the
press and heard on the streets, promulgated by mayors and legislators
and citizens who have a vision of America the Way It Used to Be, go
something like this: our towns are being taken over by brown-skinned
immigrants who drive our crime rate up and overwhelm the criminal
justice system; these immigrants drain our economy, sucking our resources
for schools, healthcare and welfare programs; they take away jobs from
Americans and drive our wages down; they don't really want to be American-they stick to themselves, won't learn English, and are only here to
take advantage of our way of life while refusing to contribute to it; and
now, post 9/11, they are a terrorist threat. Citizens, we are being invaded;
take back your communities before it's too late.
I
One problem: the stories are not true. It would take many pages to refute
these claims-and that's not the purpose of this article-but the claims
are simply not true. In Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Oral
Histories ofMexican Farmworkers and Their Families, immigrants have
their chance to set the story straight. The truth is reflected more accurately
in the story of Jesus Villicafia L6pez, age 16, who picks mushrooms over
80 hours a week and lives in one room with eighteen other men to support
his family back home. Or the story of Margarita Rojas, who worked three
jobs to support her family and faces deportation in spite of being married
to an American citizen. Or Salvador Garcia, who lived separated from his
Peflcclinll<; • 2
Reflections. 3
This issue would not have been possible without the support of Erin
Buksbaum, Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Eli Goldblatt, Cristina
Kirklighter, Mark Lyons, Luisa Rodriguez, Nancy Santiago, Rachael
Shapiro and Denise Valdes.
I am very grateful to benefit from the support of such strong allies
and the ability share such important scholarship with the readers
of Reflections.
Steve Parks
Editor, Reflections
Espejos y Ventanas I Mirrors and Windows
Mark Lyons, Introduction to excerpts from Espejos y J1!ntanas /
Mirrors and Windows
t is time for Latino immigrants in the United States to take back their
stories-stories that have been rewritten by people in a campaign to
drive them out of the United States. The revised stories read in the
press and heard on the streets, promulgated by mayors and legislators
and citizens who have a vision ofAmerica the Way It Used to Be, go
something like this: our towns are being taken over by brown-skinned
immigrants who drive our crime rate up and overwhelm the criminal
justice system; these immigrants drain our economy, sucking our resources
for schools, healthcare and welfare programs; they take away jobs from
Americans and drive our wages down; they don't really want to be American-they stick to themselves, won't learn English, and are only here to
take advantage of our way of life while refusing to contribute to it; and
now, post 9/11, they are a terrorist threat. Citizens, we are being invaded;
take back your communities before it's too late.
I
One problem: the stories are not true. It would take many pages to refute
these claims-and that's not the purpose of this article-but the claims
are simply not true. In Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Oral
Histories ofMexican F armworkers and Their Families, immigrants have
their chance to set the story straight. The truth is reflected more accurately
in the story of JesUs Villicafia Lopez, age 16, who picks mushrooms over
80 hours a week and lives in one room with eighteen other men to support
his family back home. Or the story of Margarita Rojas, who worked three
jobs to support her family and faces deportation in spite of being married
to an American citizen. Or Salvador Garcia, who lived separated from his
[{efl eel i nJlS
•
2
Retlections • 3
family for over 20 years, makes no overtime even when working 70 hours
a week, and had to sing La Bamba to the judge before she would give him
his green card. Or Mayra Castillo Rangel, a recent college graduate who is
living the dream that brought her parents here.
The following stories are excerpted from Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors
and Windows, Oral Histories of Mexican F armworkers and Their
Families, New City Community Press and Syracuse University Press,
2008. The book is in English and Spanish.
Here is a difficult question: What do Americans do about the fact that
there are 11 million immigrants in the US who have no legal documents?
A simple answer is to send them home-i.e., we should not reward people
who entered the US illegally by allowing them to stay and work. If you
break the law, you should be deported: a narrowly defined, legalistic
definition of justice. I suggest we frame this discussion using a broader
definition of justice that reflects our American values: Social Justice.
When we talk of social justice, we not only ask if immigrants came
with papers, we ask if their presence contributes to our society. Do they
share our democratic values? Should people willing to work harder than
imaginable and obey our laws be given the chance that our forefathers
had? We talk about the paradox of the wealthiest country in the world
bordering on one of the poorest regions in the world-so what about
economic justice? What do we gain and lose by finding a way to share
our wealth with our neighbors?
Jesus Villicafia Lopez
How we ultimately respond to the challenge of immigration will say much
about who we are. Will "immigration reform" express our nativistic,
basically racist, cultural isolationism? Or will reform reflect our generosity
that welcomes diversity, that welcomes and rewards people who work hard
and contribute to our society and have the same dream that we all share?
As our country makes this self-defining decision, it is crucial that
immigrants have a true voice in the discussion, that we learn to listen.
May Jesus, Margarita, Salvador, Mayra and the other narrators in Espejos
y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows be heard.
Mark Lyons
Editor, Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows
Reflection" •
4
Jesus Villicana Lopez is from La Ordena,
a village near Moroleon, in the state of
Guanajuato. He was 16 years old when he
did this interview, 6 months after coming to
the United States.
I made the decision [to come North] on my
own because I wanted to find a new way of
life or a future for myself. I wanted to be selfreliant and also to help my family-my mom and my brothers. I have
four siblings, all younger than I: my sister is 8 years old and I have one
brother who is 14 and another who is 12. Because I am the oldest, I have
a great responsibility to be with them, to protect them and my mom. It's
my duty to give them the best, to create opportunities for them so that
they can get ahead. I am responsible for showing them how to live life.
In Mexico, I lived in a stone house patched with clay that had a dirt
floor-it was tiny, with only one room for the entire family. We made
our living growing com and beans to eat-this is a staple food of the
region .... My mother insisted that I go to schooL.! know that school is
very useful, but I didn't have the resources to continue my studies and
neither did my mom or my grandparents. So I decided to leave school
and come up here. I believe that by doing this work here in the US, I
can help my brothers and sister get ahead in life and provide them with
a better education, a career, so that they won't have to make the same
sacrifice that I made when I came here for them. I send my family four or
five times as much as they used to earn each month. Every three or four
weeks I send around $1000 to Mexico.
Ret1ections • 5
I left Moroleon for the North at daybreak, with great sadness. I was with
a group-my uncle and some friends of his, all older. I was the only
young person in the group. The night before I left I tried and tried to get
to sleep so that I could leave easily in the morning, but I couldn't sleep
the whole night. I stayed up all night with my mom and then it was time
for me to prepare to leave. My uncle came to the house and said that they
had come for us. I left with my suitcase and then, with the blessing of my
mother, I climbed into the car and we left. Crying, with great sadness,
we left our families and the village where we lived behind. We left
focused on our future, with the intention of finding a new way of life and
confronting new problems. But, then, at the same time, it was a risky and
very dangerous adventure.
I am one of the younger people in the camp. When I first came here the
truth is that I felt an enormous fear inside of me, since I didn't know
where I was and I knew no one except my uncle, who came with me.
At night I felt this profound loneliness because I was in such a big place
without knowing anybody.
Actually, I was very surprised at the conditions here in the camp. When
I left Mexico, I thought that I was coming to a place where we were
going to be, well, free, with a big living space. But when I got here, I
realized that it wasn't that way-it was a small place where many of us
were cramped together. At times we really have to make an effort to get
along, since there are so many of us-we are 16 now, and in the summer
there will be 20. The camp is one long room, an open dormitory, without
separate bedrooms. Each of us has our own space where we sleep, but
there is no real private space. We make sure to respect each other's
things, though. With so many people living together, there are bound to
be conflicts sometimes, but we know that we have to try to avoid them.
I get up faithfully at daybreak, at 2:00 in the morning. Before I leave
for work I eat a little. If I want to, I can rest one or two days a week, but
since I'm not that tired, I figure I should put more energy into work. So
Rcfl eel i 011.\
&
6
I work seven days a week, 12 or 13 hours a day .. .It's piecework-they
pay me by the box-so if I want to make more money, I have to force
myself to try to harvest more mushrooms. They ask you to pick an
average of six boxes an hour-they pay $1.00 a box. Each box holds ten
pounds of mushrooms. There are times when I fill eight or ten boxes an
hour- so I pick 80 to 100 pounds of mushrooms each hour.
I would like to say something to all the people who might think that
being here in the United States is easy. I want them to know it isn't
that way because you don't necessarily know what you're up against.
You think you will come here and find happiness, a new world full of
marvels-but it isn't that way. You will face tremendous loneliness with
a great many problems, large and small. And you have to be responsible
for yourself instead of expecting to rely on others.
I would advise all who are thinking of coming here to think carefully
about things. First, think about what you will do when you are here,
who might accompany you on your trip, and if you are,mentally and
physically prepared, if you are strong enough to face your personal and
social problems. Because if you are not prepared to face life, to face
new challenges, it will weigh very heavily on you over time. Often it is
misfortune that makes us unable to bear this burden and that gets us into
trouble. And everything that you hoped for when you came here can tum
out quite differently than you planned. You can succumb to temptation,
like alcohol or drug addiction, and all the desires and dreams that you
came here with can so quickly disappear into oblivion. If a person
comes with desire, with interest, and if he knows why he's coming,
what he's coming to and what he intends to accomplish here, then,
yes-it's worth it.
Afew months after this interview, Jesus 'father died Jesus was not able
to return to Mexico for his burial. In the Spring his mother, two brothers
and sister moved into their new three-room house in La Ordena-paid
for with the $10,000 that Jesus had sent home.
Ret1ections • 7
Margarita Rojas
Margarita Rojas is 32 years old She grew
up in the town of Zacapu, Michoacan, and
came to the United States when she was 18
years old This interview was completed one
week before her final deportation order was
to go into effect.
After I left high school, my dreams were
always to be a kindergarten teacher, to have
some money-which we didn't have at home .... But the economic
situation didn't make my dreams possible and, afterwards, the man
who came into my life-the father of my children-ended my plans. I
discussed with him that I was going to continue studying, but tradition
dictated otherwise. It was more like, "Women shouldn't study because
eventually they get married and never practice their profession."
1994-he beat me over and over, viciously, without feeling, without
reason. He just went crazy. I thought, "The moment will come when
God will grant me a chance to leave because today I am leaving."
Then, throughout the early dawn hours I stayed up to make sure that
he would be sleeping. I kept my children all dressed up, including their
jackets. When I heard that he was snoring-that was about 5:00 in the
moming-I took my Richie in my arms and I woke up Adriana and I
told her, "Big girl, let's get out of here." She was suddenly happy and
my daughter left quickly, like a little kangaroo, without making noise.
And we got out, thank God.
It was very difficult for me to bring myself here because I was leaving
my heart there-my land, my family-but I knew that I had to struggle
to make a better life. I thought that it was going to be better. For me,
it was very difficult to change countries, to change customs, to change
everything. I remember that when I went to say goodbye to my parents,
my house was very sad-it seemed as if somebody had died, everyone
was crying. I had to hug my parents and tell them that I was going. My
parents cried, but they didn't stop me-they always believed that we
should make our own lives. But, I tell you, I left half my heart there.
I dedicated myself to working hard to help my children get ahead so
that they would be able to have nice clothes and good shoes, and I was
succeeding. In the morning I cleaned houses 'til 12:00 or 1:00 pm.
After cleaning houses, I took a bath and went out to do demonstrations,
selling clothes, gold jewelry, beauty products and lingerie. I was the
owner of three businesses; I had a chain, an enormous network, like
you can't imagine, of people who depended on me-they were selling
and they paid a percentage of the sales to me. I was popular. I was
able to have an apartment for me and my children. It transformed me.
My life changed after I started living alone and then I was happy. 1
wanted tranquility and peace. I wanted to help my children get ahead
by myself, so that no one would tell me, "You and your children eat
because of me" or "Because of me you all have a place to sleep and to
live." That's why 1 had cried so much. I wanted to say "I can do it by
myself, I don't need anybody." 1 stopped crying then.
. All those five years [here in the United States with my first husband]
were full of abuse, violence, mistreatment and daily insults. And all
this time [my daughter] Adriana saw how we were living-she was
frightened and crying. She was six years old and was very traumatized.
She didn't love him. She would tell me that when she would see her
dad, her stomach would hurt-she was scared of him because he also
beat her, he abused her. Then, I remember it well-it was December 30,
Finally, I started a very beautiful relationship [with a man called Pablo,
who is Mexican and an American citizen] ... Pablo wasn't the typical
macho that I had known. He gave me a lot of courage to be able to be
free, to be able to make my own decisions, and he was never going to
oppose them. In September 2000 we got married officially before the
judge. I tell you, for me, all of this was very beautiful because now
1 felt protected, I felt loved, 1 felt very supported and respected. He
Rc n cctl(1IlS • 8
Ret1ections • 9
wanted a family and I gave that to him. I wanted happiness, attention
and support and he gave all that to me.
[1 applied for a work permit at INS, but] the only thing that they gave
me was a deportation order .... I feel very bad, I feel like they have me
tied up and I can't do anything-I feel like a criminal. I say it's unfair,
after so much struggle, because I am married to an American citizen,
with two children who are citizens and one who is a resident. I feel very
frustrated because I think, "What will happen to my children, with their
rights, the dreams that they have?" I feel worse for them, worse that
they will lose everything that is their life here. Right now, 1 feel like
they have me in a plastic bag and 1 can't breathe, like I am drowning.
I wish they would let me breathe, let me be free.
My dreams are for my children to be able to go to college, to fulfill
their lives as professionals, and not to have to depend on anyone the
way their mother did. I wouldn't want them to have to do the kind of
jobs that I did-l don't want my daughter cleaning houses or my son
running all over the place looking for work. As I have said to Adriana,
"1 would be so happy to see you working, helping a lot of people,
lending your hand to whomever needs it because you remember
how we were in need and how we had many people who helped us."
I feel very bad because my husband and I finally found happiness and
now a law is going to separate us. The only thing that I ask God is that
when we go to Federal Court the judge turns out to be a just person.
If I had the opportunity, I would tell the judge not to act as a judge,
but rather as a normal human being with feelings. I would say to him,
"I am not a criminal. 1 didn't murder anyone-why are you judging
me this way? Think more about the welfare and rights of the children.
Have compassion-we all have children. Don't pay so much attention
to what I did by violating this law to re-enter the United Statesmillions and millions of people do it, almost every Mexican who is here
has done it." I am a proud person and it's very hard for me to ask for
Rdl cctions ..
10
forgiveness-it's like I am stooping down and humiliating myself, but I
will do it for my children. I would tell the judge, "Maybe I don't show
it, but my heart is broken. Now, I no longer cry-for a very long time 1
did cry, but I don't want to cry anymore. The only thing I ask of you is
that you do not destroy my family."
Margarita Rojas decided to fly to Mexico with her children on January
25-the day before she was to appear before INS and face deportation.
However, at the last minute she chose to stay in the United States
and appeal her deportation order one last time so that her daughter,
Adriana, could receive the medical treatment she needed. On January
26th she said good-bye to her children and appeared before the
Immigration Service, prepared to face detention in jail pending an
appeal of her deportation order. Her deportation was postponed and
she was allowed to return home to care for her children. Her case is
still in the courts.
Salvador Garcia
Salvador Garcia Baeza is 54 years old and is
from the town of Moroleon, Mexico. He came
to work in the mushroom industry in Kennett
Square in 1979 and got his permanent
residency card in 1986. He brought his sons
to Pennsylvania in 1996 and his wife and
daughter in 2000.
I think that our family survived the
separation because above all there was communication through letters,
when they were little ten-year-oIds, twelve-year-olds, fourteen-yearolds. There were individual letters for each one, giving them advice. I
think my wife has maybe 300 letters-all those that I sent during those
22 years, she has them all. Each month 1 sent one letter. There was a lot
of communication by telephone, asking about everyone, talking with
Reflections. 11
1k
them for 10 or 15 minutes. I gave them advice. I felt happy after talking
with my wife, with the children. I felt renewed energy to begin work
another day.
Of course, it was difficult being separated from my children. I didn't
see them grow up. Now I know how they are doing because I see them.
Well, I can say that I feel proud of how they've behaved and also I'm
proud of my wife, that she knew how to take charge when I was in the
United States. There are families that aren't like that.
[In my present job] they pay me $7.20 an hour and I have worked there
for eight years. Nowhere do they pay overtime. I've been working 13
hours a day for a month and a half-70 to 80 hours a week-and they
still don't pay time-and-a-half. They say that they don't pay overtime
because it's "agricultural work." I think that after 40 hours a week,
you should be paid overtime, it doesn't matter what you call it"agriculture"-or whatever kind of work. I think the important thing is
that we do our jobs.
Where I am, it's not easy to complain and band together because people
have a horrible fear-they're very scared to defend themselves. They
fear that they would be told, "No more work for you because you're a
troublemaker." I think they're afraid because most of them don't have
papers-mcrybe 10% have papers. Of the 80 Mexican employees where
I work, 15 have work permits and proper papers and I think that 65
are illegal .... But, also, it's true that undocumented Mexicans aren't
very afraid of being deported. Let's say that one day INS comes in and
rounds up the 65 illegals. Suddenly the factory is left without people.
The 15 of us that are left will not do the work of the other 65, isn't that
right? [Laughs].
Even though the bosses are very aware that it's against the law to hire
illegals, they do it anyway-because they can pay them cheaper wages,
right? It's a type of exploitation-they increase their profits by using
Reflection" •
12
illegal workers. The US government says that the illegal is a burden
for the United States, but I don't think so. Because if the illegal makes
$300 dollars a week and they take out income tax, they take out Social
Security and local taxes, state taxes, then how is the illegal a burden?
If the government is thinking about kicking out those illegal people,
sending them back to Mexico or EI Salvador or Guatemala or to
Argentina, wherever, tell me, who will do the work? Who? Americans
will not work for $6.50 an hour. The people who work in factory
jobs or picking mushrooms or construction or who work in hotels or
restaurants like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's or Chi Chi'smost of them are Mexican. I think the US government should do what
they did with me and all of the Mexicans in 1986-give us amnesty
and residency.
I remember the day I got my green card, in '86. I went to an
Immigration office in a town called Lima. They asked me questionsif INS had caught me, if I had problems with the police. I told them no.
Then they asked me if I was a Mexican, and I said yes. They said, "If
you are a Mexican, sing us the song 'La Bamba.' How does it go? If
you sing it and we see that indeed you know it, then you are a Mexican.
If not, you are lying to us." So they had me singing "La Bamba" and
there I was, showing them that I was indeed a Mexican.
Para bailar la Bamba To dance "La Bamba"
Para bailar la Bamba To dance "La Bamba"
Se necesita una poca de gracia You need a little bit ofgrace
Una poca de gracia para ti, para ti A little bit ofgrace, for you, for you
Y arriba y arriba And get up, come on
Yo no soy marinero 1 am not a sailor
Por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere For you I will be,/or you I will be
Bamba, Bamba Bamba, Bamba
Y para subir al cielo, se necesita And to get to heaven, you need
Una poca de gracia ... A little bit ofgrace ...
Ret1ections • 13
I feel great pride for having gotten [my green card]. This green card
represents years of sacrifice-not being with my family, living and
working with men only, suffering. It's hard.
When I die, I would like to be remembered with affection. I want
people to remember what I gave them in my life-the little things.
What I am most proud of is the people that I know-friends and
neighbors, in Mexico and here. And coworkers I have lived and worked
with. I am proud to have fulfilled my obligations to my family, my
children. I always took care of my family when they were in Mexico
and sent them money so they would have enough to eat. Even though I
would drink a few beers, it was never more than six or so. And I didn't
spend all of the money that I earned on myself. I always thought of my
wife, of the children. I wanted to make sure that they had a place to
live, clothes to wear, food to eat, and an education. I tell my wife, I tell
her, "You got lucky when you married me."
Mayra Castillo Rangel
Mayra Castillo Rangel is 22 years old
and came to the United States when she
was 12. She is a graduate of Chestnut Hill
College, where she majored in French and
Communications. She now works at Arcadia
University in the offices of admissions
andfinancial aid and is also the Minority
Recruitment Coordinator. Mayra is the
teacher of the dance group Danza Tenochtli,
ofLa Mision Santa Maria de Dios, in Avondale, PA.
We arrived here on July 14th, I think, during the summer of 1993 right
after 1 graduated from 6th grade, primary school, there. When 1 entered
school here I entered an all-English school, although I had some
bilingual teachers and classes. Before 1 started 1 remember my dad
Rcfkction" .14
bought my brother and me a blackboard, chalk and an eraser and lent
us his English books to start preparing for school. He said I had to learn
all I could alone and at times he would help with what he knew, which
I now realize wasn't a lot-but even though it was little, that and the
encouragement all helped. He showed me the alphabet, the numbers
and some basics. He also took us to a Puerto Rican friend of his at the
mushroom plant where he worked so she could help us too. She read
books for us and my first English book I read was by Dr. Seuss. I think
it was something like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I felt
very proud because by the end I could read the whole book by myself,
even if it was from memory. I could recognize some of the numbers and
colors and other words and I could tell I had good pronunciation.
I think entering school was very difficult. 1 was very afraid .. .I had to
present myself at the main office to get my schedule and be advised on
how classes were going to work. .. 1 was so happy when I learned that
[the principal], Mr. Carr, spoke some Spanish. That comforted me, but
1 still couldn't help but cry in front of him ... I was very, very nervous
and afraid and couldn't help it ... [I felt] grief and shame and more fear
and then I cried even more.
I think my family continues to be very ingrained in the Mexican
traditions. I'm between the Mexican and so-called "American"
traditions myself. I like that and work it to my advantage, to understand
the two different worlds. Living in the US, I think I understand the
culture and the language, but I try not to stray too far from my Mexican
culture. I am still proud to say that I'm Mexican, but I'm happy to live
in another country where I've had to adapt myself to the new culture.
As a Mexican I love to dance the cumbia, a little quebradita and, of
course, our folkloric traditional dances. I love the food and although
I don't know how to cook the traditional dishes 1 still have my mom
and I ask her from time to time to make me un molito, or un pozolito
or maybe some enchiladas or even her own gorditas. Of course, 1 love
my language, the Spanish that we speak at home. I forget some things
Ret1ections •
15
from time to time since I don't speak it a lot. Since living in the US,
I like the liberty, my freedom. I'm no longer a submissive Mexican
woman, meant to be only a wife and a mother. That's what I've come to
conclude about myself now that I live here.
I think that in part, my mom has been my role model, perhaps without
wanting to be or without her realizing it. I have heard my mom talk and
seen how hard she has worked all her life, sometimes at two or three
jobs, plus she is also a mother and housewife, all at the same time. We
Mexicans tend to believe or always say that the man is the head of the
household, the one that contributes the money, the one that works more,
yet my mom has shown me that I can go forward and I can do what I
want because she has done it herself.
I just graduated [from Chestnut Hill College], where I studied French.
That is what I chose as a career, although I haven't figured out what I'm
going to do with it. People say I have a gift for languages, and maybe
I do, but the toughest part is figuring out what to do with this gift. At
times I have thought about being a school counselor because I had one
in high school who really helped me when I was going through a tough
time. I had two college professors who gave me a lot of support and
believed I could do a lot with my life-they said I would go far in life.
When they told me that, I believed it and little by little I got the courage
to look for and ask for more in life. If anything, that is what I would
like to do with the youth from our community and others-encourage
them, make them see that we are in the land of opportunities and more
possibilities than what our parents had in Mexico and that if they really
want something, to go ahead and grab it. It is tough at times, but it can
be done.
I wonder if my family has accomplished the American Dream-in
part, yes, and in part, no. Our dream was to have a better life than we
had in Mexico and we do have it, in a way. My parents have a home,
a job, my dad has some benefits, we have food on our table and some
RdlcctiOll\ .. 16
other amenities that have come along the way, like cars-not luxury
cars or even new cars-but what we need for transportation and to feel
accomplished in one way or another. I have an education that I know
I would never have had in Mexico. I have traveled to many places
around the world-something I don't think I would have done if I had
stayed in Mexico. I actually think I would be married with children
now; there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm just happier where I am
now, single. Yes, materially we are better off, but we have all suffered
a lot. We have lost the comfort of feeling at home when we go back to
Mexico because we have become Norteiios [Northerners] and have lost
part of our Mexican identity while gaining a new one in the US. We
have all suffered racial discrimination in one way or another and felt
inferior at times and that was definitely not part of our dream.
Pasajes de Espejos y Ventanas/ Mirrors and Windows, en espaiiol
JesusVillicaiia Lopez
Jesus Villicaiia Lopez es de La Ordeiia, un
rancho cerca de Moroleon, en el estado de
Guanajuato. Vino a Kennett Square cuando
tenia 16 afios-- 6 meses antes de hacer esta
entrevista.
Yo decidi venir [a el Norte] por mt mismo,
por querer buscar una nueva forma de vida
o un futuro para mt mismo. Por querer
realizar mi vida dependiente de mi mismo y ayudar a mi familia--a mi
mama y a mis hermanos. Tengo cuatro hermanos, todos son menores
que yo. Tengo una hermana que tiene ocho aiios y un hermano que
sigue enseguida de mt de catorce afios y el menor de doce aiios. Por ser
el hijo mayor tengo la mayor responsabilidad de estar junto de ellos,
Renections .. 17
from time to time since I don't speak it a lot. Since living in the US,
I like the liberty, my freedom. I'm no longer a submissive Mexican
woman, meant to be only a wife and a mother. That's what I've come to
conclude about myself now that I live here.
I think that in part, my mom has been my role model, perhaps without
wanting to be or without her realizing it. I have heard my mom talk and
seen how hard she has worked all her life, sometimes at two or three
jobs, plus she is also a mother and housewife, all at the same time. We
Mexicans tend to believe or always say that the man is the head of the
household, the one that contributes the money, the one that works more,
yet my mom has shown me that I can go forward and I can do what I
want because she has done it herself.
I just graduated [from Chestnut Hill College], where I studied French.
That is what I chose as a career, although I haven't figured out what I'm
going to do with it. People say I have a gift for languages, and maybe
I do, but the toughest part is figuring out what to do with this gift. At
times I have thought about being a school counselor because I had one
in high school who really helped me when I was going through a tough
time. I had two college professors who gave me a lot of support and
believed I could do a lot with my life-they said I would go far in life.
When they told me that, I believed it and little by little I got the courage
to look for and ask for more in life. If anything, that is what I would
like to do with the youth from our community and others-encourage
them, make them see that we are in the land of opportunities and more
possibilities than what our parents had in Mexico and that if they really
want something, to go ahead and grab it. It is tough at times, but it can
be done.
I wonder if my family has accomplished the American Dream-in
part, yes, and in part, no. Our dream was to have a better life than we
had in Mexico and we do have it, in a way. My parents have a home,
a job, my dad has some benefits, we have food on our table and some
Hence! ion'. .. 16
other amenities that have come along the way, like cars-not luxury
cars or even new cars-but what we need for transportation and to feel
accomplished in one way or another. I have an education that I know
I would never have had in Mexico. I have traveled to many places
around the world-something I don't think I would have done if I had
stayed in Mexico. I actually think I would be married with children
now; there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm just happier where I am
now, single. Yes, materially we are better off, but we have all suffered
a lot. We have lost the comfort of feeling at home when we go back to
Mexico because we have become Nortenos [N orthemers] and have lost
part of our Mexican identity while gaining a new one in the US. We
have all suffered racial discrimination in one way or another and felt
inferior at times and that was definitely not part of our dream.
Pasajes de Espejos y Ventanasl Mirrors and Windows, en espaiiol
JesusVillicana Lopez
Jesus Villicana Lopez es de La Ordena, un
rancho cerca de Moroleon, en el estado de
Guanajuato. Vino a Kennett Square cuando
tenia 16 aiios-- 6 meses antes de hacer esta
entrevista.
Yo decidi venir [a el Norte] por mi mismo,
por querer buscar una nueva forma de vida
o un futuro para mt mismo. Por querer
realizar mi vida dependiente de mi mismo y ayudar a mi familia--a mi
mama y a mis hermanos. Tengo cuatro hermanos, todos son menores
que yo. Tengo una hermana que tiene ocho atlos y un hermano que
sigue enseguida de mi de catorce atlos y el menor de doce atlos. Por ser
el hijo mayor tengo la mayor responsabilidad de estar junto de ellos,
Ret1ections •
17
de protegerlos a ellos y a mi mama. Tengo la obligaci6n de darles 10
mejor, de tratar de abrirles mas las posibilidades de que se superen, a
vivir la vida.
En Mexico, viviamos en una casita de piedras pegadas con tierra y
con un piso de tierra, con solo un cuarto para toda la familia. Nuestro
sustento y alimentacion era el cultivo de maiz y de frijol--e1 cual se
alimentaban la mayoria de los habitantes de mi region. [Mi madre]
insistia en que la escuela seria la forma para superarme ... Yo se que
la escuela sf es de mucha utili dad, pero como yo no contaba con los
suficientes recursos para seguir estudiando, ni mi madre ni mis abuelos.
Pues, tuve que venirme para aca y decidi dejar la escuela. Yo en mis
pensamientos creo que a traves de mi trabajo que estoy realizando
aqui en los Estados Unidos puedo sacar a mis hermanos ade1ante,
brindandoles un mejor estudio, una carrera para que no tengan que
hacer el mismo sacrifico que yo estoy haciendo aqui por ellos. Yo les
mando a mi familia cuatro 0 cinco veces de 10 que ganan en Mexico a1
meso Ya pasan tres 0 cuatro semanas yajunto mil dolares y los mando
para Mexico.
Sali de Moroleon a el Norte por la madrugada, muy triste. Estuve con
un grupo--mi tio y alguno de sus amigos, todos mayores. La noche
antes de salir yo trate y trate de dormir bien para en la manana salir
bien, pero no pude dormir toda la noche. La pase en vela junto con mi
mama y entonces se lleg6 la hora en que yo tuve que prepararme para
salir. Mi ti~ llego a la casa y dijo que ya habian llegado por nosotros.
Sali con mi maleta y, pues, con 1a bendicion de mi madre, subi al carro
y salimos. Todos tristes, llorando, dejamos las familias y nuestro rancho
atras. ibamos mirando siempre hacia adelante con el fin de encontrar
una nueva forma de vida y enfrentando distintos problemas. Pero, pues,
a la vez, era una aventura riesgosa y muy pe1igrosa.
Yo soy uno de los jovenes en el campamento. Cuando al principo venia
aqui, pues la verdad es que yo me sentia con un miedo enorme dentro
Reflection" • 18
de mi, puesto que yo no sabia donde estaba ni conoda a ninguna otra
persona, solo ami tio que me estaba acompanando. De noche ami se
me hada una profunda soledad de estar en un lugar tan grande y sin
conocer a nadie.
Pues 1a verdad, yo me sorprendi mucho las condiciones dentro del
campamento. CQando salf desde Mexico yo pense que iba a llegar a un
1ugar donde ibamos a estar, pues, libres, con un espacio grande para
vivir. Pero aillegar aqui me di cuenta de que no era asi--era un lugar
pequeno donde estabamos agrupados muchos. A veces cuesta trabajo
entendemos unos a los otros, puesto que somos muchos--somos 16
personas hasta ahorita, pero en el verano seran 20. El campamento es
un largo cuarto, un espacio abierto, sin dormitorios separados. Cada
quien tiene su propio lugar en donde descansar, pero no hay ningful
sitio privado. Pero todos los que estan alIi respetamos las cosas de los
demas. Al estar viviendo muchas personas juntos, si a veces se llega
a haber muchos confiictos, pero nosotros sabemos que debemos de
evitar esoYo constantemente me 1evanto por la madrugada, a las dos
de la manana. Antes de ir al trabajo desayuno un poquito. Si yo quiero,
puedo descansar un dia 0 dos dias a la semana, pero ahora que no estoy
cansado, pues es cuando debo de echarle mas ganas al trabajo. Asi,
trabajo siete dias a 1a semana, algunos dias trabajo 120 13 horas. Me
pagan por caja, yo ando por contrato--si quiero obtener mas dinero, yo
tengo que esforzarme mas por tratar de pizcar mas hongo. Le piden a
uno que pizque de promedio de seis cajas cada hora-Ie pagan $1.00 por
caj a. Cada caja contiene diez libras de hongos. Hay veces que lleno ocho
o diez caj as cada hora-o sea, pizco 80-100 tibras de hongos cada hora.
Me gustaria dedr algo a todas las personas que piensan que estar
aqui en los Estados Unidos es algo facil. Quiero que sepan que no
es as! porque uno no sabe a 10 que se va a enfrentar. Piensa que va
a venir aqui encontrando la felicidad, un mundo nuevo Heno de
maravillas--pero no es asi. Va a enfrentar una soledad tremenda, con
una inmensidad de problemas grandes y chicos. Se tiene que hacer
Reflections. 19
responsable para si mismo sin ayuda de los demas.
Yo Ie aconsejaria a qui en piensa en venir aca que pensara bien en las
cosas. Primero, se pusiera a pensar en que va hacer al estar aca, con
quien se va a venir en ese viaje, y si esta preparado fisicamente y
mentalmente para enfrentarse a sus problemas personales y sociales.
Porque al no estar preparado para enfrentarse a la vida, enfrentarse a
nuevos retos, es algo que con el tiempo se Ie va a hacer a uno un peso
enorme. Muchas veces puede ser por la desgracia que uno no puede
llevar ese peso, y llega a andar en malos pasos. Y todo 10 que esperaba
de venir aca va a estar en otros pasos que no deseaba. Puede recaer en
diversos vicios, en el alcohol 0 en Ia drogadiccion, y las ganas que Ies
traia aca, a trabajar y superarse, se van a quedar en el olvido. Pues, si
la persona viene con ganas, con interes, y sabe por que viene y a 10 que
viene, y que es 10 que va a realizar aca, pues si--vale la pena.
Unos pocos meses despues de esta entrevista, el padre de Jesus
fallecio. Jesus no pudo regresar a Mexico para asistir a su entierro. En
la primavera del 2004 su madre, dos hermanos y hermana se mudaron
a su nueva casa de tres cuartos en La Ordelia-pagada con los $10,000
que Jesus les habia enviado.
Margarita Rojas
Margarita Rojas tiene 32 alios. Credo en
Zacapu, Michoacim, y vino a los Estados
Unidos cuando tenia 18 alios. Esta entrevista
se completo una semana antes de que su orden
final de deportadon jitera puesta en eJecto.
Despues de que yo sall de la secundaria mis
suefios siempre eran ser maestra de Kinder,
tener alglin dinero--que no teniamos en Ia casa
Pero 10 economico no facilito mis suefios y, despues, el hombre que llego
ami vida--el padre de mis hijos--me quitoia intenci6n. Yo Ie platicaba
Rc rJ cet i on"
OJ
20
que yo iba a seguir estudiando--pero no se usaba mucho, en las tradiciones
de elIos, que la mujer estudiara. Como que era mas, "La mujer no debe de
estudiar, ya al rato se casa y nunca va a ejercer la carrera."
Era muy dificil venirme aca, porque dejaba mi corazon alIa, mi tierra,
mi familia, pero yo sabia que tenia que luchar por hacer una vida mejor.
Pense que iba a estar mejor. Para mi era bien dificil cambiar de pais,
cambiar de costumbres, cambiar de todo. Yo recuerdo que cuando yo
me fui a despedir de mis padres mi casa estaba muy triste--parecia que
alguien se habia muerto, todos estaban lIorando. Yo tuve que abrazar
a mis padres y decirles que me venia. Mis padres Uoraron, pero no me
detuvieron ellos--ellos cretan siempre que nosotros deberiamos de hacer
nuestra propia vida. Pero Ie digo, deje la mitad de mi corazon ahi.
Todos esos cinco afios[ aqui en los Estados Unidos con mi primer esposo]
fueron de abuso, violencia, de maltrato, insultos diarios. Y todo este
tiempo [mi hija] Adriana vio como viviamos--ella se asustaba y ella
lloraba. EUa tenia como seis afios, y estaba muy traumada. Ella no 10
queria. Ella me decia que cuando veia a su papa Ie dolia el estomago--le
tenia miedo, porque tambien a ella la golpeaba, la maltrataba. Entonces,
bien recuerdo--fue el30 de diciembre del 1994 cuando el me golpeo
mucho, muy feo, sin sentido, sin razon--el estaba loco. Yo pense, "Va a
llegar el momento que Dios me va a permitir salir, porque hoy me voy."
Entonces, en el transcurso de la madrugada, yo 10 estuve velando que se
durmiera. Deje a mis hijos vestidos, inclusive con la chamarra. Cuando yo
escuche que el estaba hasta roncando--eso fue como a las 5 de la mafiana-yo tome a mi Richie en brazos y desperte a Adriana y Ie dije, "Madrecita,
vamonos de aqui." Ella se puso feliz y, rapida, mi hija salio, como
cangurito sin hacer ruido. Y salimos, gracias aDios.
Me dedique a trabajar fuertemente para saCar a mis hijos adelante y
que ellos pudieran tener una buena ropa, un buen calzado. Y 10 estaba
logrando. En la manana limpiaba casas, desde las 12 hasta la I de
la tarde. Yo, despues de limpiar casas, me bafiaba y me salla a hacer
Ret1ections
OJ
21
demostraciones, a vender ropa, joyeria de oro, productos de belleza
y ropa interior de mujer. Yo era duefia de tres negocios; yo tuve una
cadena, una red enonne, como no se imagina, de gente que dependia
de mi--ellos vendian y a mi me pagaban un porcentaje por las ventas.
Tuve popularidad. Pude tener un apartamento para mi y mis hijos. Me
transformaba. Mi vida cambi6 despues de que yo me fui a vivir sola-estaba entonces feliz. Yo queria tranquilidad, queria paz. Yo queria sacar
a mis hijos adelante, yo sola, y que nadie me dijera, "Por mi comes ill y
tus hijos," 0 "Por mi tienen donde donnir, donde vivir." Por esa razon yo
habia llorado mucho. Yo queria decir, "Yo puedo, yo sola, no necesito de
nadie." Yo deje de llorar entonces.
Por fin empeze una relacion bien bonita [con un hombre que se llama
Pablo, un mexicano y ciudadano americano. ]... Pablo no era el macho
dpico que yo habia conocido. EI me estaba dando mucha confianza de
poder ser libre, de poder tomar mis decisiones; y que el nunca se iba a
oponer. En septiembre del 2000 nos casamos oficialmente ante el juez.
Le digo, todo esto para mt era lindisimo, porque ya me senda protegida,
ya me senda amada, me sentia muy respa1dada y respetada. E1 queria una
familia y yo se la di. Yo queria felicidad, atencion, apoyo, y el me la dio.
[Yo aplique por un permiso para trabajr de la Inmigracion, pero] 10 linico
que me estaban entregando era una orden de deportacion ... Yo me siento
muy mal, me siento como si me tienen amarrada, que no puedo hacer
nada, me siento como una criminal. Yo digo que es injusto despues de
tanta lucha, porque estoy casada con un ciudadano americano, con dos
hijos ciudadanos y una residente. Me siento muy frustrada porque pienso,
"l,Que va a pasar con mis hijos, con los derechos de ellos, los suefios que
tienen?" Me siento mas mal por elIos, mas mal que ellos van a perder todo
10 que es su vida aquL Ya me siento como que si me tuvieran en una bolsa
de phistico, que no puedo respirar, me siento ahogandome. Quisiera que
me dejaran respirar, me dejaran ser libre.
Mis suefios para mis hijos son que ell os puedan ir al colegio, que se
Reflection" • 22
puedan realizar como unos profesionales y que no tengan que estar
dependiendo de nadie como 10 hizo su madre. No me gustaria que ellos
tuvieran que pasar los trabajos que yo pase--no quiero que mi hija este
limpiando casas y ni que mi hijo este buscando trabajos que 10 corran de
un lado, que 10 corran de otro. Como yo Ie he dicho a Adriana, "Que feliz
fuera yo verte trabajando, ayudando a mucha gente, que extiendas tus
manos al que 10 necesita --porque recuerda como nosotros necesitamos y
tuvimos mucha gente que nos ayudo."
Me siento muy mal porque al fin mi esposo y yo encontramos la felicidad,
y una ley nos va a separar. Lo Unico que yo Ie pido aDios es que cuando
vamos a la Corte Federal, eljuez sea una persona justa. Si yo tuviera la
oportunidad, Ie diria al juez que no se pusiera como un juez, sino como
un ser normal con sentimientos. Yo Ie diria, "Yo no soy una delincuente,
yo no mate--l,por que me estas juzgando as!? Piensa mas en el bienestar y
derechos de los nmos. Tenga compasion-todos tenemos hijos. No tome
tanta atenci6n en 10 que yo hice, por haber violado esta ley y re-entrado-10 hacen millones y millones--casi cada mexicano que esta aqui 10 ha
hecho." Yo soy orgullosa, y para mt es bien dificil el pedir perdon--es
como estar doblegandome y humillandome; pero sl, por mis hijos, 10
hago. Yo Ie diria aljuez, "Yo quizas no 10 demuestro, pero mi corazon esta
partido. Yo ya no lloro--por mucmsimo tiempo 11ore, y no quiero 110rar
mas. Lo Unico que Ie pido es que no destruya mi familia."
Margarita Rojas habia decidido volar a Mexico con sus hijos el25 de
enero-el dia antes de su fecha de aparecer ante las autoridades de
Inmigracion, y enfrentar deportacion. Pero, al ultimo minuto, ella decidio
quedarse en los Estados Unidos y apelar su orden de deportacion una
vez mas, para que su hija, Adriana, pudiera recibir la atencion medica
que necesitaba. El 26 de enero ella les dijo adios a sus hijos y aparecio
ante el Servicio de Inmigracion, preparada para erifrentar detencion en
una careel, en espera de la apelacion de su orden de deportacion. Su
deportacion fue pospuesta, y a ella Ie dejaron regresar a casa para cuidar
a sus hijos. Su caso todavia esta en las cortes.
Ret1ections • 23
Salvador Garcia
Salvador Garcia Baeza tiene 54 anos de
edad, y es del pueblo de Moroleon, Mexico.
Vino para trabajar en la industria de los
hongos en Kennett Square en 1979, y obtuvo
su residencia permanente en 1986. Trajo a
sus hijos a Pensilvania en 1996, y su esposa
e hija vinieron en 2000.
Yo pienso que nuestra familia sobrevivio la
separacion porque sobre todo hubo comunicacion por cartas, cuando
eran pequeftos de 10 aftos, de 12 alios, de 14 aftos. Habia cartas
individuales, una para cada uno, dandole consejos. Creo que mi esposa
tiene unas 300 a la mejor, tiene todas las que yo Ie mande durante esos
21 0 22 aftos. Habia una carta cada meso Hubo mucha comunicacion
por te16fono, preguntaba por todos, platicaba con ellos 10 minutos, 15
minutos. Les daba consejos. Yo sentia una alegria despues de hablar
con la esposa, con los hijos. Me daba un animo muy grande para
empezar a trabajar otro dia.
Si, como no, era duro por estar separado de mis hijos. No los vi crecer.
Ahora se como son porque los yeo. Entonces digo para mi es un orgullo
por el comportamiento que tienen y tambien un orgullo con la esposa,
que los supo dirigir cuando yo estaba en los Estados Unidos. Hay
familias que no son asl.
[Ahora donde trabajo] me pagan $7.20 cada hora, y he trabajado
aHa por ocho aftos. En ninguna parte se paga tiempo y medio. Ahora
estoy yo trabajando un mes y medio trece horas diarias-70-80 horas
semanales-y no pagan tiempo y medio. Ellos dicen que no se paga
tiempo y medio porque es un trabajo que Ie nombran "agricultura".
Yo pienso que pasando de 40 horas la semana se debe pagar tiempo y
medio, no importa como se llame-"agricultura", 0 cualquier c1ase de
trabajo. Lo importante que pienso yo es que uno trabaje.
Refl txti on\ • 24
Yo pienso que donde estoy, no es facil de quejarse y formar un grupo
porque alIi Ie tienen un miedo horrible, espantoso a que uno vaya a
defenderse. Porque tienen miedo que les digan no mas trabajo para
ti por andar quejando. Yo pienso que el miedo de elIos es que la
mayoria no tienen papeles-l 0%, no mas, tienen sus papeles. De esos
80 empleados mexicanos donde trabajo, quince tenemos permiso de
trabajo y papeles buenos, y pienso que 65 son ilegales ... Pero es la
verdad tambien que los mexicanos sin documentos no tienen mucho
miedo de ser deportados. Entopces, por decir, algim dia la inmigracion
entra, y hay una redada de los 65 ilegales. Automaticamente la fabrica
se queda sin gente. Entonces, los 15 que quedaran no vamos a hacer el
trabajo de los otro 65, loverdad que no? [Se riel
Aunque los patrones saben bien que es ilegal agarrar ilegales, ellos 10
hacen-- porque pagan mas barato loSi? Es un tipo de explotacion--las
ganancias de ellos son muy buenas con el ilegal. El gobierno de los
Estados Unidos dice que el ilegal es una carga para los Estados Unidos,
pero yo pienso que no. Porque si el ilegal gana $300 a la semana y a
uno Ie rebajan tax sobre ingresos, a uno Ie rebajan Seguro Social, taxes
locales, y taxes de estado, entonces locomo es el ilegal una carga? Si
el gobierno esta pensando en echar esa gente ilegal para afuera, para
Mexico 0 para EI Salvador, 0 para Guatemala, 0 Argentina donde sea,
dime loquien va a trabajar? loQuien? Porque los americanos no van a
trabajar por las $6.50 a la hora. La gente que trabajan en las fabricas,
las hongueras, la construccion, muchos hoteles, los restaurantes,
lono? Como MacDonald's, 0 Burger King, 0 Wendy s-Ia mayoria son
mexicanos. Yo pienso que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos debe
hacer 10 que hizo conmigo y con todos los mexicanos en1986--darnos
la amnistia y la residencia.
Yo me acuerdo el dia que recibf mi green card, en el 86. Fui a una
oficina de migracion que habia en el pueblito que se llama Lima.
Me hicieron preguntas, que si migracion me habia agarrado alguna
vez, que si tenia problemas con la policia. Les dije que no. Entonces
Ref1ectiolls • 25
me dijeron que si era mexicano, les dije que sf. Me dijeron, "Si eres
mexicano cantanos la cancion de "La Bamba". "Como es que es? Si la
cantas y vemos que si tu la sabes, es que eres mexicano. Si no, es que
nos esta mintiendo." Ahi me tienen cantando "La Bamba", y yo alIi
demostrandoles que si era mexicano, sf.
Para bailar la Bamba
Para bailar la Bamba
Se necesita una poca de gracia
Una poca de gracia para ti, para ti
Y arriba y arriba
Yo no soy marinero
Por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere
Bamba, Bamba
Y para subir al cie1o, se necesita
Una poca de gracia ...
Bueno, para mi significa un gran orgullo por haber obtenido mi green
card. Este green card representa afios de sacrificio-de no estar con la
familia, de vivir y trabajar con puros hombres, de sufrir. Es duro.
Pues cuando me muera, me gustaria que me recuerden con carifio,
que me recuerden por 10 que yo les di en mi vida-cositas. El orgullo
mas grande que tengo es sobre la gente que yo conozco, de amigos, de
vecinos, en Mexico yaqui. Y compafieros de trabajo, que he vivido con
ellos y he trabajado con elIos. Tengo orgullo de estar cumpliendo con
mi familia, con mis hijos. Siempre estuve pendiendo en elIos cuando
estuvieron en Mexico, de mandarles dinero, que no les faltara para
comer. Aunque aqui luego me tomaba unas cervezas, nunca fue mas de
seis, 0 asi. No gastaba todo el dinero que ganaba solo en mi. Siempre
pensaba en la esposa, en los hijos. Que no les faltara en donde vivir, y
que vestir, y que comer, y su educacion. Yo OOle digo a la esposa mia,
Ie digo, "Tu corriste con suerte conmigo, en tu matrimonio conmigo."
Reflect i (111"
•
26
Mayra CastiUo Rangel
Mayra Castillo Rangel tiene 22 aiios de
edad, y vino a los Estados Unidos cuando
tenia 12 aiios. Ella es graduada de Chestnut
Hill College, donde se especialiazo en el
idioma frances y comunicaciones. Ahora
ella trabaja en La Universidad de Arcadia,
en las Oficinas de Ayuda Financiera y
Admisiones; y tambien es la Coordinadora
de Reclutamiento de Minorias. Mayra es la
maestra del grupo de Danza Tenochtli de la Mision de Santa Maria
Madre de Dios, en Avondale} PA.
Llegamos aqui el 14 de julio, durante el verano de 1993, justo despues de
graduanne del 6to. grado de primaria aHa. Cuando entre a la escuela aqui,
fui a una escuela donde ensefiaban solamente en ingles, aunque habia
algunos maestros y c1ases bilingiies. Antes de empezar la escuela, recuerdo
que mi papa compro un pizarron, gis y borrador para mi hermann y para
mi. Tambien nos presto sus libros de ingles para empezar a prepararnos
para la escuela. Dijo que yo tenia que aprender 10 que pudiera sola y que
en ocasiones el me ayudaria con 10 que sabia-ahora me doy cuenta que
no era mucho--pero aunque era poco, eso y el alentamos era una ayuda.
Me ensefio el alfabeto, los mimeros y cosas basicas. Tambien nos llevo con
una amiga suya puertorriquefia en la planta de los hongos donde trabajaba
para que ella nos ayudara tambien. Ella nos leia libros y el primer libro
en ingles que lei fue escrito por el Dr. Seuss. Creo que era algo como "Un
Pez, Dos Peces, Pez Azul, Pez Rojo". AI final de la lectura me senti muy
orgullosa porque pude leer todo ellibro sola, aunque fuese de memoria.
Podia reconocer algunos nfuneros y colores y otras palabras y podia danne
cuenta de que tenia buena pronunciacion.
Creo que entrar a la escuela fue muy dificiL Tenia mucho miedo ... Me
tenia que presentar yo sola en la oficina principal para obtener mi horario
Renections • 27
y para que me dijeran como funcionaban las clases. Estuve tan contenta
cuando supe que el [principal], Sr. Carr hablaba algo de espafiol. Eso
me conforto, pero alin as! no pude evitar llorar delante de el... Yo estaba
muy, muy nerviosa y asustada y no podia evitarlo. Senti tanta congoja y
vergiienza y mas miedo y entonces 110re alin mas.
Creo que mi familia continua muy apegada a las tradiciones mexicanas.
Yo estoy entre las tradiciones mexicanas y las 11amadas "americanas". Me
gusta eso y creo que es ventajoso para mi entender dos mundos diferentes.
Viviendo en los Estados Unidos, creo que entiendo la cultura y el idioma,
pero trato de no apartarme mucho de mi cultura mexicana. Todavia me
siento orgulllosa de decir que soy mexicana, pero estoy contenta de vivir
en otro pais donde he tenido que adaptaTIlle a una cultura nueva. Como
mexicana me encanta la cumbia, un poco de quebradita y, claro, las danzas
folkloricas tradicionales. Me encanta la comida y aunque no se como
cocinar los platillos tradicionales, de vez en cuando todavia Ie pido ami
mama que me haga un molito, 0 un pozolito 0 quizas algunas enchiladas
e incluso unas gorditas. Claro que me encanta mi idioma, el espafiol que
hablamos en casa. De vez en cuando se me olvidan algunas cosas ya que
no hablo espafiol todo el tiempo. Viviendo en los Estados Unidos, amo mi
libertad. Ya no soy una abnegada mujer mexicana, destinada solamente a
ser esposa y madre. Es a la conclusion que he llegado de mi misma ahora
que vivo aqul.
Creo que en parte, mi mama ha sido el ejemplo a seguir, quizas sin siquiera
querer serlo 0 darse cuenta de ello. Yo he oido a mi mama hablar y he visto
como ha trabaj ado fuertemente toda su vida, agunas veces hasta con dos
o tres trabajos, aparte de ser madre y ama de casa, todo al mismo tiempo.
Los mexicanos tendemos a creer 0 siempre decir que el hombre es el jefe
del hogar, el que contribuye con el dinero, el que mas trabaja, sin embargo
mi mama me ha mostrado que yo puedo salir adelante y hacer 10 que
qui era, porque ella misma ha hecho 10 mismo.
Me acabo de graduar de Chestnut Hill College, donde estudie frances. Eso
Reflection'. • 28
es 10 que escogi como carrera, aunque todavia no he planeado que voy
a hacer con esta carrera. La gente me dice que tengo el don de aprender
idiomas, quizas sea as!, pero la parte mas dificil es descifrar que hacer con
ese don. A veces he pensado en ser consejera escolar porque tuve una en
la escuela secundaria que realmente me ayudo cuando estaba pasando por
una etapa dificil de mi vida. Tuve dos profesores universitarios que me
apoyaron mucho y creyeron que podia hacer mucho con mi vida. Dijeron
que 10graria grandes cosas en la vida. Cuando me dijeron eso, les crei
y poco a poco me hice valor para buscar y pedir mas de la vida. Si hay
algo que quisiera hacer para la juventud de mi comunidad y de otras, es
alentarlos, hacerles ver que estamos en el pais de las oportunidades y de
mas posibilidades que las que tuvieron nuestros padres en Mexico y si
quieren hacer realmente algo, sigan adelante y alcancen sus metas. Eso es
dificil a veces, pero se puede lograr.
A veces me pregunto si mi familia ha logrado el "suefio americano", en
parte si y en parte no. Nuestro suefio era tener una mejor vida que en
Mexico y de alguna manera la tenemos. Mis padres tienen un hogar, un
trabajo, mi papa tiene algunos beneficios, tenemos comida en la mesa
y algunas otras diversiones que hemos logrado, un gran avance como
son los carros-- no carros lujosos 0 incluso carros nuevos-pero 10 que
necesitamos para transporte, y sentimos que hemos logrado algo de una
manera u otra. Tengo una educacion superior que yo se no hubiera tenido
en Mexico. He viajado a muchos lugares del mundo, algo que no creo
que hubiera podido hacer si me hubiese quedado en Mexico. En realidad
pienso que estaria ya casada y con hijos ahora; nada malo en eso, pero
simplemente estoymucho mas contenta como estoy ahora: soltera. Sf,
en el aspecto material estamos mejor, pero todos hemos sufrido mucho.
Hemos perdido el confort de sentimos en casa cuando regresamos a
Mexico porque nos hemos convertido en "Nortefios" y hemos perdido una
gran parte de nuestra identidad mexicana mientras que hemos ganado una
nueva en los Estados Unidos. Todos hemos sufrido discriminacion racial
de una manera u otra y nos hemos sentido inferiores en ocasiones y eso
definitivamente no era parte de nuestro suefio.
Ret1ections • 29
values life andfreedom . ... To that end, we pledge our efforts and
take as our credo what Jose Vasconcelos once said at a time of
crisis and hope: "At this moment we do not come to workfor the
university, but to demand that the university work for our people. "
A Dream Deferred?: Building Activists
for Educational Justice, Access, and Equity
Alondra Kiawitl Espejel, Mariano Espinoza, Louis Mendoza,
and Martha Ockenfels-Martinez
This collaboratively written essay explores and advocates
for the rich potential of community -university educationalactivist partnerships for praxis-oriented learning that enrich
the lives of all by unleashing the collective power of students,
teachers, and community members. Offering four perspectives
from such a collaboration in Minnesota, a place that has been
a magnet for national and regional anti-immigrant activity,
we reflect on the false notion of a town-gown divide, the
emotional, political, and deeply personal investments we have
in making these collaborations successful, and the critically
important and imperative nature of community-based work
for shaping a more humane and just future.
Chicanismo simply embodies an ancient truth: that a person is
never closer to his/her true self as when he/she is close to his/her
community. Chicanismo draws its faith and strength from two main
sources: from the just struggle of our people and from an objective
analysis of our community s strategic needs. We recognize that
without a strategic use ofeducation, an education that places
value on what we value, we will not realize our destiny. Chicanos
recognize the central importance of institutions of higher learning
to modern progress, in this case, to the development of our
community. But we go further: we believe that higher education
must contribute to the formation of a complete person who truly
Reflection" .. 30
-from EI Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan/or Higher
Education (1969)
Introduction: From the Outside-In and the Inside-Out
aking as its departure an ongoing collaboration between the
Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota
and the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network (MIFN) to
build a multi-ethnic movement that addresses educational access and
equity for Latinalo youth and recent immigrants, this essay presents
one example of how Chicanalo faculty and students bridge the towngown divide on behalf of the community, as espoused in EI Plan de
Santa Barbara. In sharing the viewpoints and experiences of students,
faculty, and community organizers, we hope to provide one model
of collaboration for readers of Reflections, but it is important to note
that we are less invested in showing the connections to or benefits
from this within a service-learning framework than we are in tracing
the genealogy of civic engagement that comes from Chicano Studies,
which is based on a similar but distinct set of political investments in
educational refonn. To this end, the important question posed by the
editors-"How can we work with immigrant communities in a way that
meets their needs and enhances our scholarship without interrupting
their sense of communal identity?"-needs to be problematized in its
assumption of difference between "we" and "immigrant communities."
T
This first section provides historical context for this discussion. The
second section frames the legacy of educational exclusion within
the context of labor segregation, particularly as experienced by new
immigrants, and argues that systemic change is still necessary. In this
Reflections.
31
section, the Executive Director of an advocacy group shares with us
his personal motivations and the emotional basis for his work and
asks us to think about the lessons we convey when we accept a status
quo that underdevelops our youth and limits their opportunities. The
third and fourth sections of this essay trace the personal trajectories
of two students-turned MIFN staff members, highlighting how the
personal is political and the role Chicano Studies and service-learning
courses played in empowering them to find their passions and later
lead different social justice organizing projects within the organization.
Finally, we conclude with some reflections on the nation's demographic
changes and ask university-community collaborations to strategically
engage with this historic change.
Aprender es luchar, luchar es aprender: Community Engagement
as an Integral Component of Chicano Studies
Almost 40 years following the authorship of El Plan de Santa Barbara,
Chicanalo Studies has been firmly established as an academic discipline
in hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. 2 As the
epigraph makes clear, the establishment of Chicano Studies was a
grassroots intervention into the exclusionary practices of an educational
system that was either hostile or willfully blind to the educational needs
of Chicanos and Latinos.
The students and few faculty and administrators who had gained
entry into the echelons of the university professoriate in the 1960s
made a strategic decision to link K -16 educational empowerment to
the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Despite the use of often radical
rhetoric that utilized strategies including protests, sit-ins, and cries
of "open it up, or shut it down," the ultimate goal was to expand
educational access and make education more relevant. 3 These early
struggles were premised not only on the belief that educational equity
was a fundamental civil right, but that the public had the right to hold
leaders of educational institutions accountable. Moreover, explicit
Rcflccti(1l1'i .. 32
in manifestos like El Plan were the needs of a culturally relevant
curriculum and the obligation of students to utilize their education to
empower their community.
Under pressure from Chicanalo students inspired by the twin forces
of the national movement to establish Chicano Studies and the local
successes of African American and American Indian students who
had successfully advocated for ethnic studies departments, the first
department of Chicano Studies in the Midwest was established at
University of Minnesota in 1972. As with other departments founded in
this period, the underlying conceptual framework and curriculum were
informed by El Plan and included a strong component of community
engagement and research. Despite this highly successful intervention
for amending institutional neglect, the ongoing lack of access and
educational inequity at all levels remain fundamental challenges
for the Chicano-Latino community in the twenty-first century. The
graduation rate for Latinos remains less than 50% nationally as
Latinos consistently lead the nation in high school drop-out rates. 4
In Minnesota, a state that prides itself in being amongst the national
leaders in educational achievement, the public school graduation rate
for Latinos is an abysmal 41 %. 5
Like many of its sister departments around the nation, over the years
Chicano Studies at the U ofM has included opportunities for community
collaboration on research projects, the development of partnerships with
farm worker organizations that included research, political action, and
organizational support. Until service-learning courses were formally
offered by the department in the 1990s, much of this work was ad hoc
and depended on the politics, interests, and relationships of individual
faculty and students. Though service-learning has been supported and
advocated on campus for many years, there has also been a healthy
skepticism of "traditional" service-learning models that relied too much
on the "experiential model" of learning that privileged the student's
learning experience over community need. The long and vexed history
Ret1ections • 33
of university exploitation of minority communities under the aegis
of research has made many ethnic communities justifiably wary of
university sponsored research or service-learning projects because even
under models that are designed to be mutually beneficial, the assumption
of a power or knowledge differential has often viewed communities
through a lens of deficiency and favored students, presumably outsiders
who could broaden their world view from first-hand experience with
"difference," be it class or racial. Such assumptions, unwittingly or not,
often contributed to a missionary model of service-learning, with all its
attendant colonialist baggage.
non-hegemonic principle expressed in El Plan, which states in its
introduction that:
In 2004 the Department of Chicano Studies made a strategic decision
Politicizing the Personal
to focus its service-learning courses on Latino educational achievement
in the Twin Cities. To achieve this we identified four community
partners, two schools, a Latino after school program, and a farm
worker organization. As the fastest growing population in Minnesota,
new Latina/o arrivals are a mix of internal migrants and foreign-born
with and without official status. Distinctions between documented and
undocumented make no sense as these youth are an integral part of the
workforce of the future, their civic identities have been forged here, and
an educated populace benefits all.
Louis Mendoza, Associate Professor of Chicano Studies
This focus on educational advancement was well-received by university
students and our community allies and supporters. However, because
of the severe under-representation of Latino students at the university,
we also needed to develop and support off-campus engagement
opportunities for students who wished to redefine and expand the
traditional service-learning experience. What follows in the remainder
of this essay is an explanation of our particular context and a strategy
that developed from our collaboration that did just this by yoking
our existing service-learning project with a local movement aimed
at removing institutional barriers in a manner that required a unique
level of commitment, creativity, and responsibility by student leaders
involved in the effort. In many respects, these students acted on another
!<l,tlt'ctin]1".34
For the Movement, political action essentially means influencing
the decision-making process of those institutions which affect
Chicanos, the university, community organizations, and noncommunity institutions. Political action encompasses the elements
which function in a progression: political consciousness, political
mobilization, and tactics.
As a first-generation college student from a working class barrio of
Houston, I am also a product of my Catholic upbringing and education;
despite the fact that my educational journey has included moving
away from this belief system and the region of my childhood, these
values are not so far removed from the values that undergird servicelearning: social awareness, social responsibility, the value of reflection,
and the virtues of magnanimity and reciprocation. 6 And yet, I have
also found that advocating for systemic change requires social change
and risk. Having relocated to Minnesota from Texas in 2004, I found
it necessary to think about migration and immigration in new ways.
Immigration and its consequences, the ensuing friction, fears, and
fights, is not to be escaped in states like Minnesota or other "new
destinations" of Latino migration. My position as Department Chair
carried unique expectations to be a resource for the public's awareness
of this "emerging" population. This was true in spite of the fact that a
Chicano-Latino presence in Minnesota is a century-long phenomenon,
not something new at all.
Not insignificantly, the mainstream community's concerns were
heightened by census reports announcing the emergence of Latinos
Renections • 35
as the nation's largest ethnic minority-a trend that will result in
Latinos comprising a full 25% of the population by mid-century.
Two phenomena fanned the fires of the national debate following the
December 2005 passage ofH.R. 4437, the Border Protection, AntiTerrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of2005, by the US
House of Representatives. This controversial bill raised the stakes of
the debate by requiring the construction of a border fence, modified
the status of "unlawful presence" to a felony, and, among other harsh
provisions, authorized state and local law enforcement agencies to
enforce federal immigration laws.
In light of these developments, one of the strategies we crafted
to respond to the imperative of quality education for all students,
including immigrants, was to create internships, develop grant-funded
partnerships, and offer directed studies courses that would enable
students to receive course credit for their community engagement
and service-learning efforts. And it was in this complementary effort
to our educational empowerment agenda that we forged a strong
partnership with the MIFN. Students' educational development and
civic consciousness were enhanced in their roles as coaches in the MN
Dream Act movement and through the organizing skills they learned at
the Network, where several students became temporary or permanent
staff members of this small but powerful organization.
Our strategic commitment to work on immigrant rights was not a
mere accommodation of student interests or a way for them to earn
easy course credit. Rather, community-based work enables students
to more fully understand the notion of "praxis"; that is, it gives them
an opportunity to test the relationships between theory and practice in
a real-world setting. Being in a community-based setting presents a
different set of challenges because success is defined in ways outside
of the academic criteria by which we usually measure learning. Here
students are accountable for their actions, not just their thinking, and
success is measured beyond the completion of an assignment and their
own individual well-being. Their actions are part of something larger
than themselves, and so success or failure at their work is more
complex. They also learn that change is hard work and requires a
different degree of commitment as the standards we set for involvement
are higher than most service-learning requirements at the university.
Partnering with undergraduates and community-based organizations
also benefits faculty. For one, it breaks us out of the isolation of the
ivory tower and obliges us to ponder and act upon the relevance of our
own work as teachers and scholars; working closely on communitybased projects offers faculty an opportunity to stay true to our
intellectual and our historical roots. Also, these projects productively
set the stage for a mutually beneficialleaming experience involving
the community organization, student, and instructor where the flow
of knowledge comes from the community into the university and
positively impacts the lens through which we each see our world.
I am constantly reminded that these students are what Chicanalo
Studies is all about-they are not studying or working in some abstract .
community; they are vital members of the very same community, they
are the bridge between two worlds. For our students the "division"
between the university and the community is a false one-they come
from these communities-and the division between citizen and noncitizen is also seen as false when the benefit is shared by all. To Latina!
o students, faculty, and staff, and an increasingly large number of
non-Latina/o students, undocumented immigrants aren't just statistics
or names in the news, they're family, friends, neighbors, or former
classmates. In a globalized economy, our own well-being is tied to
the well-being of others. Students who wish to make their education
relevant are a dynamic example of emerging leadership and the rich
potential of theory put into practice. Students who are advocates in
grassroots campaigns are creating history, not only studying it.
Ret1ections •
37
While the issue of higher education for immigrant and Latino youth
is a concern that is seen as marginal for those who fail to see how this
issue affects them, for a great portion of the mainstream, supporting
and advocating for educational access initiatives is a re-affirmation of
the fundamental humanistic principles of justice and fairness. Working
on the MN Dream Act presents an opportunity to learn about alliance
building. In Minnesota, and places where the population is fast-growing
but still relatively small, we know that a campaign like this cannot be
framed as "us" versus "them." While there are a great many people
who do not see access to education as a fundamental human right for all
students, there are also a great many people who understand that we are
part of one large community and that our destinies are intertwined.
Politically and economically, the future of this country depends
on having an educated workforce. The failure to educate all young
people today will have drastic consequences for this country in the
future. Working with MIFN, with students, and allied communities
is tied to one of the founding tenets of Chicano Studies, to take every
opportunity to widen the doors leading to the university. What follows
are perspectives from organizers at MIFN, whose staff includes former
students and employees from the department who embody the false
notion that a town-gown divide necessarily exists-in this case, we are
the community, the community is us.
Nuestra lucha, el Inicio y Activismo como cimientos del
Movimiento
Mariano Espinoza, Executive Director of the MIFN
While mobilizing suited one important aspect ofthe Civil Rights
movement-gathering and deploying large numbers ofpersons towards a
common- mobilizing did not ensure lasting, broad or continual change.
Ella Baker and Septima Clark focused on organizing and educating
Rc fl cct ion" • 38
persons to leave local communities empowered, and thereafter, open
to ongoing evolution after outside civil rights workers left. Baker and
Clark emphasized the reality that real change for African Americans
(for racial justice in the United States) would not result instantly from
successful (read: large) marches, rallies or demonstrations. Through
their work they asserted that change would result from ongoing racial
uplift and social responsibility practices, derivingfrom new visions, new
abilities, and new structures originating in and nurtured by local people
who are organized and educatedfor change and who themselves become
organizers and educators for change. (1)
Voy en camino a una reunion con las familias de Worthington, asi como
en el pasado, el futuro 10 estamos construyendo con nuestras acciones en
el presente. Las comunidades fuera del area metropolitana usualmente
son aisladas y marginalizadas no solo por las distancias, pero los
recursos a los inmigrantes. Muchas organizaciones sinjines de lucro se
forman en las zonas urbanas y bastantes son las personas que quieren
ayudar en las zonas metropolitanas pero pocas son las organizaciones
e individuos que reconocen y estan dispuestos a salir de sus zonas
comodas para trabajar con las comunidades rurales. Me siento cansado
y esta obscuro, al igual que en el pasado ahora hay que hacer sacrificios
personales, dejamos a nuestras familias, seres queridos y amigos. El
Organizar, construir y fondar un movimiento no es faci/, requiere de
largas horas de trabajo, noches sin dormir y dias sin comer.
Como Nacimos
Nosotros la Red de los Inmigrantes somos una organizacion que
nacimos de la gente, En el an02003 saIimos a la calle para denunciar
las injusticias, explotacion y opresion en contra de los inmigrantes,
Inspirados por el espiritu del movimiento de los derechos civiles miles
de personas participaron en acciones, rallies, marchas conferencias y
conferencias prensa para resucitar y poner de regreso el tema de una
reforma inmigratoria en la agenda politica nacional.
Reflections. 39
De Minnesota participaron cerca de 90 personas, de Worthington fuerdn
dos trabajadores miembros del sindicato ufcw, Jesus y Raymundo, ellos
son miembros de la uni6n de trabajadores que representan a los obreros
de la Swift una de las empacadoras de came que existen en esta area
del estado.
Fue muy bonito aprender de otras culturas, y aun mas bonito fue el
que nos mezclamos para hacer una uni6n y una fuerza muy grande.
Segundo a segundo, instante a in stante nos ibamos haciendo amigos,
nos ibamos conociendo mejor, ce1ebrando las riquezas culturas y
sabiduria que todos tenemos.
Jesus y Raymundo son dos inmigrantes de Mexico que ha vivido en
la comunidad por mas 20 afios, Jesus es ahora el vicepresidente de la
Uni6n y Raymundo trabaja ahora como un organizador a nivel nacional
para el mismo sindicato en Carolina del Norte.
Mi lucha, Mi Experiencia Personal
En e1 Freedom Ride hubo muchas memorias y acciones que rea1izamos,
fue un momenta que se quedo marc ado en nuestras vidas, nunca me
imaginaba que este movimiento iba hacer tan grande, nunca pense que
miles de personas iban a estar participar a 10 largo y ancho del pais para
apoyara y unirse en solidaridad a nosotros los inmigrantes.
La caravana de los trabajadores inmigrantes es un movimiento que
naci6 para pelear, luchar y para cambiar las leyes racistas y opresivas
que existen en este pais, que nos estan afectando oprimiendo y
opresando cada uno de los dias en que vivimos. Estamos 1uchando
por una reforma inmigratoria y leyes humanas y dignas.
Nuestra Escuela es N uestra Vida
Para luchar hay que conocer nuestra historia, necesitamos saber no
solo de donde venimos, Si no Pero porque venimos? y Como somos
desplazados de nuestras comunidades de Origen. A traves de nuestras
historias personales vamos adquiriendo y construyendo nuestro
conocimiento para despues conectado a un movimiento.
Durante el transcurso de estas dos semanas estuvimos escuchando y
aprendiendo de nuestras propias experiencias, el porque venimos a este
pais, aprendimos como mexicano, guatemaltecos, somali y asiaticos
fuimos desplazados de nuestros paises para buscar un futuro mejor.
Reflection,,>
to
40
Las memorias que dejamos en nuestros paises, los recuerdos de
nuestros hijos son la comida que alimenta el cuerpo para cruzar la
frontera y las barreras que se nos oponen al andar, pero entre mas
tiempo pasamos aqui, vemos que el suefio Americano se convierte en
un mito inalcanzable, irreal y jicticio.
Recuerdo el primer momento, recuerdo mi suefio de darle 10 D?-ejor a mi
hija. La noche era obscura, el fri6 del desierto era tan fuerte que rompia
mis ropas lentamente y se infiltraba a traves de mi cuerpo hasta llegar
a mis huesos, mi cuerpo temblaba de fri6. Fue ahi, en esos momentos
rodeados por los nopales donde me imaginaba como e1 amor de vida
pronto llegada de Mexico para reunimos, sone con los ojos abiertos
que Denise seria la nifia mas afortunada del mundo, me i1usionaba
como ella ere ceria rodeada de 1ibros e historias en la cama. E1 hermoso
suefio Americano era mi medicina contra el frio y e1 dolor de huesos.
Pero Denise fue mi alimento para levantarme, seguir caminando y
recorriendo e1 trayecto lleno de injusticias y abusos, el suefio que
ella ida a la universidad. El suefio de que ella sena una profesionista
inyecto mi cuerpo de energia y me levante, mis pies llenos de ampollas
empezaron a caminar nuevamente, ahi venci mi primera lucha, mis pies
sangraron pero mi espiritu se levanto para luchar y para dade 10 mejor
a mi pequefia nifia. A Denise 1a futura astronauta, la gran doctora. Deny
mi pequefiita ... Tu suefio va ser mi suefio ... tu futuro mi futuro ... tu
lucha sera mi lucha ...
-Ret1ections •
41
Al final del viaje nos sentimos todos como parte de una familia muy
grande donde no veiamos las nacionalidades ni el color de la piel como
una diferencia, si no Al contrario nos vimos como seres humanos
donde un sistema nos esta utilizando a todos. En este grupo habia gente
blanca, documentados e indocumentada Al final fuimos una familia.
Al regresar a Minnesota decidimos seguir luchando y organizando
para fundar un movimiento y una lucha como nunca se habia hecho,
teniamos el espiritu muy alto, una energia increible y maravillosa
porque habiamos vivido nuestras experiencias y junto con muchas
personas nos estabamos alimentando nuestro espiritu, pero tambien
aprendimos que las injusticias que se viven en otras partes del pais
abeces son mas grandes que las que estamos viviendo en nuestras casas.
Alimentados por la energia y la pasion nos empezamos a reunir.
No teniamos una organizacion establecida, estructura, no teniamos
nada. Lo hicimos como voluntarios. Lo hicimos por todas y todos los
inmigrantes de Minnesota y 10 hicimos porque teniamos la necesidad,
no podiamos bajar los brazos en esta lucha que habiamos empezado.
Queriamos una organizacion que no tuviera ligamientos con otras
organizaciones, una organizacion que fuera de nuestras luchas y de
nuestros esfuerzos, independiente y sin ataduras, ahi nacimos como
organizacion.
EI Inicio de un Movimiento en Base a Nuestros Principios
Nosotros los inmigrantes somos seres humanos a traves de nuestras
experiencias personales vamos formando un poder de conocimiento
colectivo y unidos creamos un movimiento masivo y educado para
crear cam bios y construir comunidades saludables y autosuficientes.
Lucharemos para remover las barreras racistas institucionales y
mentales que nos impiden vern os como hermanos y hermanas, sin
importar sexo, nacionalidad 0 creencias.
Rcfl ecti on" • 42
Nuestros hijos, los inmigrantes y las minorias somos el pasado, el
presente y el futuro, sabemos que este pais se construyo en base
a la opresion, racismo y esclavitud, A traves de nuestras propias
experiencias empezaremos el proceso de concientizacion personal y
colectivo para luchar contra las raices economicas, politicas, culturas
y racistas que nos opresan.
Sabemos que podemos movilizar a cientos y miles de personas y
tambien reconocemos que para hacer cambios hay que saber como
hacer cambios. La red de los inmigrantes esta comprometida a
capacitar, aprender y ofrecer las herramientas y los recursos para
ayudar a las personas a desarrollar su potencial humano y de
liderazgo. Reconocemos nuestras vidas como historias para lograr
procesos de cambio y tam bien tomamos en cuenta los procesos
academicos y de investigaci6n para ayudar nuestras causas.
Necesitamos hacer una conexion y establecer lazos de solidaridad y
trabajo con las escue/as, universidades, iglesias y grupos comunitarios,
para crear un movimiento y una red de Solidaridad.
Aprendemos de nuestras historias para incrementar nuestros
conocimientos nos capacitamos comprometemos y nos movilizamos
para crear una comunidadjusta, de igualdad y respeto.
J
J
En el 2004 hicimos Ia primera reunion con legisladores y convocamos
una reunion con organizaciones separadamente. Nos reunimos con el
Representante Carlos Mariani y la Representante Margaret Andersen
Kelliher para proponerles la idea de introducir una propuesta legislativa
que Ie ayudara a los jovenes inmigrantes ir a la universidad.
Yahi quedo grabado en mi memoria un recuerdo que jamas olvidare:
los legisladores me dijeron que yo estaba loco porque este no era el
momento adecuado para introducir una propuesta de ley que Ie iba a
dar acceso a los estudiantes inmigrantes a las universidades publicas
del estado. Yo estaba sorprendido porque no sabia que existia un interes
Reflections. 43
politico, no entendia el porque una priori dad para nosotros tenia que
hacerse a un lado. Pero 10 importante es 10 que los estudiantes querian
hacer y asi se inicio el compromiso de apoyar a los jovenes inmigrantes
en sus esfuerzos para cambiar las leyes del estado. Cuando nos decian
que no, nosotros deciamos que si. Cuando nos decian locos, nosotros
respondiamos ustedes estan mas. Ellos no sabian 10 que era no tener
papeles, pero nosotros si sabiamos.
Tambien tuvimos otra reunion con Centro Campesino en Owatonna,
estabamos concientes de que se necesitaba trabajar con los aliados
de las areas rurales, pero nadien mas de la ciudad se presento. A
esta reunion lIe go una persona que no sabiamos quien era, con una
personalidad muy fuerte y extravertida. Hablamos acerca de 10 que
podiamos hacer para empujar por el MN Dream Act y muy rapidamente
nos dimos cuenta de que sabiamos como organizar pero no sabiamos
nada de como pasar una ley. Y en ese instante esa persona desconocida
se levanto de su asiento como un resorte, tomo el marcador, fue hacia el
frente del grupo y nos dio una catedra de como se pasan las leyes - esta
persona fue Matt Musel. E1 nos pregunto si sabiamos quien era ellider
del senado, nadie dijo nada, despues pregunto si sabiamos quien era
el speaker of the house y el cuarto se quedo en silencion por segundos
que parecian una eternidad. Aqui nos dimos cuenta que teniamos
muchas cosas que aprender y aunque al sa1ir de la reunion tuvimos
mas preguntas que respuestas, tambian sabiamos que ibamos a seguir
trabajando con los jovenes para que ellos adquirieran el conocimiento
que nosotros apenas estabamos acaparando.
el racismo y el odio racial que hay ahorita baje, que nos vean como
personas iguales que somos como ellos, que nos les venimos a quitar su
trabajo, solo queremos 10 mejor para nuestros hijos.
Nifias: Queremos mas escuelas para que haya mas doctoras y maestras
para que los nmos puedan hacer 10 que ellos quieran hacer.
Martha's Story
Martha Ockenfels-Martinez, Youth Organizer for MIFN
It took me three years to find a home within the University of
Minnesota. I finally found my niche when I stumbled upon two
classes. The first was a Chicano Studies history course. At that time I
did not identify as Chicana/o, and given that I had never taken a class
that focused on my mother's people's history, I was surprised that
the books we read told my story. It was the story of the farmworkers,
of the beet-pickers, of the earliest Mexicanos to arrive and settle in
Minneapolis, and of my family. The second course was a Spanish class
titled "Service-Learning in the ChicanolLatino Community," and I was
placed with the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR) because
I had wanted to work with an immigrant rights organization. After
watching relatives deal with the damage this country's immigration
system can unleash upon a family, I felt the need to follow in the
footsteps of my activist grandmother and my union-organizing father,
and to become more involved with the social justice issues that affected
my family and my community.
(en Worthington)
Mariano: i., Vamos a ganar las licencias? Claro que si. i., Y que mas? La
reforma inmigratoria. i.,Josefina, y usted que quiere?
Josefina: Yo quiero 1a reforma inmigratoria, quiero igualdad para
todos, sobretodo en el trabajo porque no esta pareja la cosa. Quiero que
Rctlccti0lb • 44
I began my internship at the IWFR tentatively, given that I had never
worked with a non-profit before, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.
It's funny now, thinking back to my first days as an intern, when I
would struggle to memorize every piece of information that was given
to me on a fact sheet or a brochure, so that I would know the complete
history and the work 'of the IWFR. Mariano and Quito were the only
Reflections. 45
staff members at the time, and they wanted the interns to infuse their
own creativity and passion into the work we were doing. I really
appreciated this approach to a creating non-hierarchical atmosphere,
and their manner of working with me as an intern has greatly influenced
the way that I myself now work with interns.
My first major project was organizing an educational forum on the
MN Dream Ace at the University with a team of four other interns
- it was the first time the IWFR had an event on campus. That was my
first expenence in creating a program, contacting speakers, creating a
fiyer, as well as generating a strategy for outreach so that people would
actually come to the event. I still remember feeling relieved when
people began filling the seats of the auditorium, and I will never forget
the overwhelming feeling of witnessing power as we all listened to one
of the student speakers share his story with the audience. He told us
the story of his family, of his struggle with the educational system, and
of his desire to fight for college access. The tears he shed weren't for
dramatic effect, and while some cried with him, all of us were shaken
by the story - and that's when I first realized the power that is our
voices, our stories.
The event went smoothly and many people stayed after the program to
find out how to get more involved, thrusting me into a position I didn't
quite know how to handle. I had just barely pulled off my first semester
of being an intern; how was I supposed to know how to direct others
who wanted to work with us? I had to learn by doing - I had to make
the path by walking - and I realize now that this style of acquiring
knowledge and skills is part of the beauty of the work that we do.
The next semester the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride morphed
into the MIFN, and they hired me to work parttime. My job included
assisting the Youth Organizer as well as taking care of various
administrative needs. During this time we began to convene for
weekend-long planning retreats to figure out the structure for our
Reflection..; • 46
The MlFN wasformed in the wake of the national Immigrant Worker s
Freedom Ride of 2003 and the Minnesota Freedom Ride of 2004.
Both events were held in the tradition and spirit of the Civil Rights
movement, replicating the model of the 1960s freedom rides to call
for humane and just changes to America s outdated immigration laws.
Here a student leader is pictured sharing her story with a legislator
in out-state Minnesota during the 2004 Minnesota Freedom Ride.
Yes I Can Dream! curriculum. The idea behind the curriculum was to
create a space within the schools where immigrant and allied youth
could voice their opinions, stories, and personal histories around
immigration and education. We agreed that we wanted it to be based
on the concept of Popular Education8 , and I think it's important to
note that we were also practicing this ideology as we worked together.
Although I don't believe any of us had ever written a curriculum
before, collectively we - high school students, college students,
organizers, and immigrants - held within us the knowledge and the
dreams that we needed to shape the concepts behind the curriculum.
We held informational sessions at La Raza Student Cultural Center to
recruit students to be the facilitators (or coaches) of the curriculum in
the schools. Many students showed up wanting to get involved with the
Reflections. 47
students at the University through our ties with Chicano Studies, an
academic department, and La Raza, a student cultural center.
After the service-learning class, and the Directed Studies course with
Professor Mendoza, I was hooked. Attending school full-time while
working part-time with an immigrant rights organization, I was not
motivated by other classes that had nothing to do with the world
outside the walls of the University. I thus began my life-saving habit
of seeking out classes that incorporated community-based learning
into the coursework, such as the Social Justice classes, other Chicano
Studies courses, and Independent and Directed Studies classes.
Our Yes I Can Dream! youth curriculum began by doing simple
but powerful exercises that asked students to participate and learn
organizing skills so they could be better equipped to take action and
make positive changes in their community. In this photo, founding
board member, Matt Muse! (center), and Mariano (far right) train a
group ofyouth at La Escuelita on the power people have when they
come together to support an issue.
growing movement, and from these students we formed the cohort of
coaches for the next semester. Needing a greater connection between
the community work we were doing and the bachelor degrees we
were attempting to attain, we worked out a plan with Professor Louis
Mendoza so that we could take a Directed Studies course in Chicano
Studies that was based on our work with the MIFN. We had begun
the process of creating a stronger partnership between the MIFN and
Ref} eet i on<., • 48
That first year we implemented the curriculum I was a coach at both
Northfield High School and Lakeville High School. And I absolutely
loved it. I smile to think of how frightened my co-coach Sylvia and I
were on that first day. Even though we knew the lesson, it was our first
time actually facilitating the curriculum with students. Although the
nervousness didn't end with the first lesson, the energy that the students
had while engaging with the material made us eager to continue our
discussions with them.
As we progressed with the curriculum, it became clear that some
stude-nts had never been offered an experience such as this one before.
More than once, a student would share their personal history and
migration story with the class, and afterwards one or two classmates
would burst out with "Oh, I didn't know that about you!" or "I didn't
know your story was so much like mine!" Through our conversations
we developed a community within the classroom. Almost all of the
students wanted to go to college to follow their dreams,although they
knew that it would be extremely difficult to fight the barriers that stood
between them and their school of choice. We discussed the reasons
why such barriers existed, not only for students to better understand the
history that was keeping themselves and their peers from continuing
Retlections • 49
Hundreds ofLatino, immigrant and allied youth gathered at the 2008
Student Day at the Capitol in St. Paul to voice their need for access to
an equal education, regardless of income level or immigration status.
their education, but for them to begin conceptualizing ways to change
this unequal situation.
Last year 1,000 students gathered for our fourth-annual Student Day at
the Capitol to educate legislators on the crisis that both the educational
system and the state of Minnesota is facing. Immigrant and allied
students stood together on this day to tell their stories and their dreams,
to illustrate the need for legislation that will ensure access to higher
education for all students. Each year I listen as the students develop
their voices through their work with the coaches and the curriculum,
and without fail, each and every time I hear a student speak not just for
Hcfkct i (illS. 50
A young student leader addresses the crowd at the Capitol, discussing
why it s important for legislators and decision-makers to institute
policies that open up the doors of access to education for all youth,
regardless of immigration status or income level.
the sake of practice, but to change someone's mind and heart, I am still
struck by that same feeling of being a witness to power.
After three years of working in some capacity with the MIFN (as an
intern, a volunteer, or a part-time employee), it was inevitable that my
experiences from organizing would deeply influence how I participated
in my college courses, and how I viewed the world. During my last
year of college I took a few graduate level courses, and I was shocked
by the oppressive viewpoints sometimes put forth by the older (and
supposedly more educated) students in the class. Their world view was
Reflections.
51
constructed by academic theories and statistics that were based on data
tainted with classism, racism, and sexism. F ortunateiy, I had grown
stronger through my work with the MIFN, and so I was able to use my
voice to offer a different perspective, and to create with them a deeper
understanding of the issue in question, one that expanded beyond the
walls of academia.
I am now employed full time as the Youth Organizer for the MIFN, and
in my four years of growing and working with the organization, I have
seen the real life-changing effects that our collaboration with college
and high school students has had on everyone involved in the process.
I only hope that partnerships such as these continue to thrive and grow
because I know from experience how valuable and rewarding it can be
to bridge the worlds of academia and community together.
Allies, college-level coaches and young middle-school students are
. pictured walking from a church to the Student Day at the Capitol in
2007. All came together to take action to remove the institutional
barriers standing in the way of a college education for immigrant
and Latino youth.
In January 2007 hundreds of Worthington immigrant
community members came together to share food and speak out
during the public forum against the December 12, 2006 raid in
which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deployed
into the heart of rural America to shut down the city and the
nation s number-two meatpacking plant, Swift and Co.
Rcfl cct i (lns • 52
Reflections. 53
Our Voices
Alondra Kiawitl Espejel, MIFN Communication Director
Stories are powerful. How these important stories are told, who gets
to tell them, and who owns the irtjrastructure through which they pass
are important pieces on the chessboard ofjustice.-Center for Media
Justice (Oakland, California)
It is important to be able to tell your story, especially if you are coming
from a marginalized community. Yet for some of us, it is a struggle to
find our voice and share our stories. Almost 20 years ago my family
decided to pursue a better life and opportunities in the US, so at the
age of ten I was sent to live with my cousins in rural Minnesota. Even
though I went to school, I couldn't communicate with my teacher or
classmates because I didn't know how to speak English. I didn't fully
understand what it meant to be one of two students of color in my
whole class, but I could feel the disconnection and loneliness. When I
was in high school I hid my story behind mind-numbing good grades
and exhausting runs with the cross country team. After applying to only
one college, I arrived at the University of Minnesota's business school.
One of my scholarships required me to volunteer off-campus, so I
began to tutor at after-school sites helping other poor kids like me with
their homework. The distance between my marketing classes and the
after-school programs made it painfully difficult for me to understand
what I was doing in college. I'm not referencing the long bus rides
from one location tothe other, I'm pointing to the stark differences
between the under-funded community centers filled with young English
Language Learners outfitted with clothes barely warm enough to fend
off the cold and the corporate-sponsored classrooms neatly stacked
with human bodies wearing expensive suits, or designer lip gloss, or
freshly coiffed hair.
I felt confused, frustrated and angry for having to navigate such
different, yet inextricably related worlds. How could so much privilege
Refl ections • 54
coexist alongside so much oppression? As business school academics
continued to mute the sounds of injustice tugging at my vocal chords,
I became more distant from my studies. The incongruence between my
linear school work and my off-campus commitments put everything in
question and I strained to find a foothold. Perhaps that is why, a year or
two after trying to stay afloat in business school, an email from La Raza
Student Cultural Center advertising an event for Dias {Ie los Muertos
and champurrado struck a major chord. The history La Raza students
spoke about, their well-built relationship with the Department of
Chicano Studies and their campus organizing turned my throat's muted
sounds into a steady hum of resistance. I continued to volunteer offcampus, held a job at the University's Career and Community Learning
Center, and increased my activity with La Raza as I sought more ethnic
studies courses. I was looking to make sense of what rumbled on the
inside. I could feel my voice getting stronger, my story getting clearer,
my footsteps feeling lighter.
As I became more entrenched in on-and-off campus organizing efforts
to open the doors of access to higher education for Latino and immigrant
youth, I transferred out of the business school and began to look for
ways to make my life and practical experiences count towards a new
degree. I majored in Chicano Studies and enrolled in African American
and American Studies courses; some used the service-learning language,
others didn't, but all encouraged off-campus learning opportunities.
The alienation seeping from the university realms that are drenched in
privilege threatened to take me away from the immigrant community
I knew to be home. Therefore, my personal and university survival
depended on creating and tapping into classes where the teachers and
the coursework sought to integrate my story and community work into
the goals and objectives of the class. Enrolling in Chicano Studies and
service-learning courses nurtured and validated my identity, encouraged
my academic success by challenging mainstream notions of knowledge
production and kept me connected to the community I had come from.
But even as I unearthed my voice and united with many others in chants
Ret1ections • 55
for equal access to education for all, I began to understand that our
immigrant voices would not be heard and sound public policy would
not be passed unless we changed the structure of media ownership (the
people who decide what stories get told) and the very policies media
are supposed to follow (the official and unofficial practices that dictate
how stories get told). This understanding of media justice is one of
the main reasons why, only a few days after Minnesota's Republican
Governor delivered a vicious anti-immigrant blow, the MIFN's media
and communications work was born.
On December 8,2005 Governor Pawlenty issued a so-called report
titled "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on Minnesota." According
to Quito Ziegler, then Co-Director of the MIFN, the Governor had
publicly declared war on the immigrant community. This observation is
not to be taken lightly as history has proven that discursive violence is
one step away from real-lived violence and oppression. The Governor
- with a microphone in one hand and his so-called report in the other
- delivered the mythical story that immigrants drain the state. The
media, an active player in the public's perception of our immigrant
community, eagerly covered the report's publication, thereby helping to
propagate the Goliath of a lie. Instead of expanding the frame of how
the issue of immigration got covered, the media adopted a formulaic
frame of "costs versus benefits" which sought to put a monetary value
on our lives and humanity.
Three days after the release of the report, community organizers,
funders, students, youth workers, educators, legislators and business
owners met to tell the story of the Minnesota we knew to be true - the
story of a state whose economic growth, cultural vitality, and global
survival depend on the hands of immigrant workers, on the minds of
immigrant students, and on the transnational connections of immigrant
families. 9 Although we had to cater to the limited media framework of
"additive" stories (i.e. what do immigrants add to the state?), we were
ultimately craving to hear immigration stories that breathed complexity.
l(cflcctinn:-. • 56
We talked about stories that mirrored our humble realities, rejoiced
in our laughing children and championed human rights. Yet the noninclusive frame of the media and the Governor's report kept our voices
out. Not surprisingly, a month later, the constant omission of our stories
along with the media's sensationalistic coverage of the Governor's antiimmigrant actions, served as a launching pad for him to enact 287G, a
costly and racial-profiling-based program in which state troopers and
other local officials are deputized to enforce immigration laws.
In response, as an immigrant led and primarily immigrant staffed
organization, we created the Voices of Immigrants Changing and
Educating Society (VoICES) program aimed at humanizing the face
of immigration in the media. Since 2006, we have positioned our
communications work as a participatory educational campaign to reClaim
the public discourse by targeting allies, mainstream media editorial
policies, and stylebooks to abolish the usage of the terms "illegal alien"
and "illegal immigrant" when covering the issue of immigration. At its
deepest level, this campaign works to eliminate the institutional racism
and institutional violence aimed at our immigrant community vis-a-vis
the status quo of media policies, structure and framing.
One of our biggest accomplishments since has been achieved through
a partnership with University of Minnesota service-learning students
and activists from the La Raza Student Cultural Center. After several
meetings, our organization, along with the students, was able to push
the Minnesota Daily l0 to change their editorial policies to abolish the
usage of the terms "illegals" and "illegal immigrant." Although the
work was neither easy nor formulaic, the constant and organic pressure
from several students and campus groups along with our support helped
to achieve this collective victory. We have also engaged with other
prominent news organizations such as the Star Tribune and Minnesota
Public Radio to raise awareness about this issue with their editors.
Ret1ections • 57
Additionally, college students in service-learning classes who act as
high school coaches are working in partnership with us to improve
students' proficiency in the area of media literacy and communications
(reading, writing, critical thinking skills) through the media lesson
we include in our curriculum. The media lesson, and our curriculum
as a whole, is based on a long-standing Chicano Studies tradition
of intellectual exploration and civic engagement, linking action to
analysis,ll and heeds scholar-activists' advice that "students are far
more apt to remember and be transformed by what they do" than by
what they read. 12 Thus, the high school youth analyze the content of a
set of media clips that they themselves generate when they take action
through civic engagement methods. This participatory media lesson and
overall curriculum supports students in their journey to develop their
leadership skills while encouraging them to take on the role of change
makers. In this way the youth themselves are removing the educational
barriers they face when trying to graduate from high school or gearing
up to pursue a college degree. Our curriculum is also a college access
tool that gives students information about their college-going options
and scholarships. 13 Consequently, as the youth become more informed
about their options they also become more engaged in their school
life and community. As they become more active and interested in
their educational life, they start seeing themselves as college-material
and become their own ambassadors, actively shaping their own future
through collective action, enhanced communications and increased
community building activities during the after-school hours.
These efforts are a prime example of how college and high school youth
can work alongside one another and with social change organizations to
play an important role in humanizing the ways in which society perceives
the immigrant community, thereby countering the negative effects of the
media. More importantly, as the high school youth begin to unearth their
voice and sharpen their advocacy skills, service-learning students and
university allies are given the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with the
immigrant community from a socio-cultural asset-based perspective. This
Reflection" • 58
recognizes the fact that immigrants are not "needy" individuals waiting
for someone to rescue them; instead, we are intellectually nimble people
who invite you to become an equal player in the "chessboard ofjustice"
and knowledge production.
Conclusion: Limitless Dreams, Rooted Realities
Armed with unwavering hope for a better world, we continue our work
as equal partners in this journey for justice and encourage many others
to join us. What our stories have shown is our limitless ability to dream
of a society where the systematic dehumanizing of people through
language and the denial of access to educational opportunities exist no
more. When speaking of immigration, we believe that the proliferation
of covert institutionalized racism perpetuated under the banner of the
"rule of law, fairness, and citizenship" must be challenged. After all,
as Saint Augustine once said, an unjust law is no law at all. For that
reason, our stories and service-learning collaborations are aimed at
removing institutional barriers, serving as a living testament to how we
have turned our dreams into community-rooted strategies based on our
lived realities.
As we look to the work that lies ahead, we provide no formula nor
offer fool-proof solutions. What we offer is a window into the intimate
and organic nature of our endeavor, highlighting the deep yet flexible
commitment this kind of journey entails. At the same time, we
encourage community-based organizations, college campus affiliates,
policymakers and funders to prepare for the momentous shifts just
around the bend. Soon, minorities will grow into majority status,
thereby providing all of us with an immense opportunity to turn our
commitments to educational access and social change into an inclusive
democracy enriched by everyone's fully realized potential, regardless
of immigration status. It is now, more than ever, that our schools and
communities will need more collaborative projects like ours which
energetically work to unite seemingly different worlds.
Reflections. 59
Endnotes
1
EI Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education.
Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. La Causa
Publications, Oakland, 1969. This manifesto was a collectively
authored document that articulated the philosophical foundation for
the establishment of Chicano Studies in higher education.
2
As an academic enterprise, this field of study assumes various names,
such as Raza Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Chicano-Latino
Studies, to name a few. Moreover, there are related fields such as
Borciua or Puerto Rican Studies, and Latino, Latino/Latin American,
or Hispanic Studies Programs that each have their own distinctive
history and sometimes include Chicano Studies within their domain.
3
4
5
6
See Carlos Munoz's Youth, Identity, and Power, Hector Galan's
Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement,
Part 111, Taking Back the Schools, and Moctesuma Esparza's feature
film, Walkout for sustained treatments of Chicana/o educational
activism in the late '60s and early '70s.
http://nces.ed.govlFastFacts/display.asp?id=16. Accessed online:
01/06/09.
7
The Minnesota Dream Act is a bill that would allow undocumented
students to pay in-state tuition at Minnesota universities and colleges.
Otherwise, they have to pay three times the in-state tuition rate,
even if they have spent most of their lives being active members of
Minnesota's communities. This too often makes college unattainable
for many promising students.
8
Popular Education is the world view that all of us are at the same time
learners and teachers - with an emphasis on not privileging certain
knowledges above others.
9
At the time of this meeting I was a board member of the MIFN and
worked in the Department of Chicano Studies. Some months later, I
stepped down from the MIFN board and applied to become an MIFN
staff member.
10
The Minnesota Daily is the largest university-based newspaper in
Minnesota.
11
Martinez, Elizabeth (Betita) and Max Elbaum. "Building New Roads
to Liberation." ColorLines, Fall 2005: 19.
12
Pulido, Laura. "FAQS: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions on Being
a Scholar/Activist." Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and
Methods ofActivist Scholarship.!. Ed. Charles Hale. Berkeley: UC
Press, 2008. 348.
13
This is particularly important in Minnesota as it's one of the states
with the highest student-to-counselor ratio.
Minnesota Minority Education Partnership. 2009 State ofStudents of
Color & American Indian Students Report, Executive Summary: 11.
"Disciplinary Pathways to Service-Learning: Theory and Rationale."
By Susan J. McAleavey. http://www.mc.maricopa.edulother/
engagement/pathways/rationale.shtml. Accessed online: 01/06/09.
Reflection" • 60
Ref1ections • 61
LIM BO: Marie Gonzalez & The Dream Act
Glenn Hutchinson, Johnson C. Smith University
Playwright Glenn Hutchinson discusses his play Limbo,
which is based on interviews with Marie Gonzalez, an
undocumented college student. Like many other young
people in limbo, Marie has made the United States her
home; however, because she is undocumented, she is at risk
of being deported back to a country she has not known
since she was 5 years old. Marie has become an activist
for the Dream Act, legislation that would help people in
her situation. Following an introduction, Hutchinson has
included some excerpts from his play that was performed in
Charlotte, NC last year.
riginally from Costa Rica, Marie Gonzalez came to the
United States when she was five years old. She grew up in
Missouri and her father ran a restaurant and later worked
as a courier for the Governor. When a "concerned citizen" contacted
immigration about their citizenship status, Marie's parents were
deported. With the help of Sen. Durbin of Illinois, Marie has been
given a temporary extension to study at Westminster College. She
graduated in December 2008; however, her extension will expire in
June of 2009.
Over the past several years, Marie has become a national leader in
immigration reform and has testified before Congress promoting the
Dream Act (legislation that would help other students in her situation).
Fefl eel inns. 62
Mama and Papa prepare to be deported They say goodbye to their
house with their daughter, Marie.
Based on my interviews with Marie, LIMBO explores the story of
Marie and other students like her who are in limbo. Their parents
have brought them here often when they are very young. They go to
school here. They make America their home; however, they are not
citizens. They are in limbo.
With the help of the Hispanic Cultural Center of Charlotte (HCCC),
the Arts & Science Council, and a small independent theater (Carolina
Actors Studio Theatre), LIMBO became a collaborative effort to tell
Ret1ectiollS • 63
Before she is
deported, Danielle
asks Isabel to take
care of her son.
The opening dance of Limbo
these stories of undocumented students. The HCCC helped connect
the theater to the Latino community by recruiting actors and also
helping me interview more students who had similar stories like
Marie. We received a grant from the Arts & Science Council to pay
the actors and bring Marie to Charlotte and speak with the audience
after each show opening weekend.
What resonated most in this community effort was how Marie's
story connected with many young people in our community. Many
audience members commented on how they feel like they are caught
in between two places-the place that they call home and the place
that tells them it is not home.
Brenda Giraldo
(the actress who
played Marie) and
Marie Gonzalez
Hcflccti011:- • 64
Here are some scenes from the play that was produced at CAST
Theatre and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte in 2008. In
the play, two college film students decide to make a documentary
about Marie.
Reflections. 65
MIGUEL
Scene 3: The First Interview
(Westminster College. The beginning of the interview is on film, and
then it fades out as the actors onstage recreate the interview. MIGUEL
is sitting beside his camera & microphone, and MARIE sits in front of
the camera. Nathan holds a boom mike.)
And we're finishing up school.
MARIE
MIGUEL
Oh.
Gracias por la entrevista.
MIGUEL
(Thanks for the interview.)
MARIE
Sorry if ... This is our senior project for film school. Is that cool?
We hope that this documentary will get picked up and shown a lot of
places.
Sure. So, you make a lot of movies?
MARIE
Yeah, sure ...
MIGUEL
Well, not really. We're independent, you know.
MIGUEL
I really admire what you're doing.
MARIE
Yeah?
MARIE
(Slight pause.)
Jkflccti(lil" .. 66
Thanks.
Retlections •
67
MIGUEL
I mean, you're standing up, trying to change something.
MARIE
I have this status-legal to be illegal in the U.S.
(Slight pause.)
MARIE
So I speak out. I tell my story. I want to change things.
Well, a lot of people can't tell their story.
MIGUEL
MIGUEL
What's your major?
But you can?
MARIE
Political Science/International Business.
MARIE
Yeah. They deported my parents, but they let me stay-thanks to
Senator Durbin. I have a temporary extension to stay, at least until June
30th • After that? I don't know. I hope that I can finish school.
MIGUEL
Yeah.
Kcfll'cli ons • 68
MIGUEL
Any brothers or sisters?
MARIE
I'm an only child.
Ret1ections • 69
MIGUEL
MARIE
Yes. Since I was five years old.
Me too.
MARIE
Oh, so we're both spoiled rotten.
MIGUEL
Yeah ... Tell us where you're from.
MARIE
Missouri. Jefferson City.
MIGUEL
So, when did ... when did all this ...
MARIE
I was a sophomore in high school when I found out we were, as they
say, "undocumented." My parents had filed the paperwork with un
abogado ... a lawyer, and we thought we were OK. But it turns out we
weren't. So that's why my parents were sent back to Costa Rica.
MIGUEL
MIGUEL
Do you get to talk with them much?
No, I mean, where were you born?
MARIE
MARIE
Costa Rica. I was born in Alajuela.
When I can. Sometimes on the webcam, when they're at my uncle'sin Costa Rica, he has an internet cafe. The internet is kind of expensive.
An expense they can't really afford. I got some calling cards for
Christmas. I use it once a week, 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
MIGUEL
And you grew up in Missouri?
Ref} ccti nn" • 70
Reflections. 71
MARIE
MIGUEL
How are they?
MARIE
A couple of my sorority sisters have gone down & stayed with them ...
They're very hopeful.
MIGUEL
What is your first memory?
I remember this one tree, and there were always toucans there. The
bright feathers. Those beaks.
When people ask me about Costa Rica, I don't have much to say. I
don't know much. I know where my parents live, my grandparents.
There are rain forests, gorgeous beaches, but I don't know much else.
What I remember most is leaving and coming here. Five years old.
Getting on the plane. Before that, anything is fair game if it's my
parents' memory or mine.
But what happened to my family-I don't want anyone else to go
through that.
(Lights on PAPA and MAMA fade.)
(PAPA sits at kitchen table. He places a newspaper article
into a large brown binder. MAMA clears the table of dishes.)
MARJE
I haven't been to Costa Rica since I was 5. I don't even know ifmy
memories are really mine or just things my parents told me that I've
made my own.
I haven't seen them in 2 Y2 years.
[In this other scene, Marie says goodbye to her parents. After our two
productions, many audience members commented on the different ways
animals and people are treated in America.]
Scene 14: Dogs
(MAMA and PAPA sitting in living room of their empty
house. Sound of a barking dog outside. Their luggage is near
the door, beside a kennel for MARIE's dog, Precious.)
I remember images, bits and pieces. My grandfather, my dad's dad,
took me to this park in Costa Rica. Toucan Park.
PAPA (looking out back window)
PAPA
Cahuita Park, mi amor.
R('f1('cti()n~
• 72
iCallate!
Retlections • 73
(More barking from outside.)
MAMA
Papi ... Los vecinos.
PAPA
PAPA
Si. Trying to say goodbye.
What does it matter? We're leaving anyway.
(Slight pause.)
(Barking continues. PAPA looks out back window.)
PAPA
PAPA
Perro estupido.
jSilencio!
(Slight pause. Barking stops.)
MAMA
Marvin ...
PAPA
Gracias.
PAPA
l,Qu6? I love dogs. I love Precious, but he doesn't bark like that.
MAMA
(PAPA looks inside kennel.)
Sometimes, yo quisiera ... I wish was one of those dogs.
(Slight pause.)
PAPA
Are you still alive, dog? Don't you hear your friends? They're ...
They're trying to say goodbye.
Refkcti (lns • 74
PAPA
Reflections.
75
PAPA
MAMA
Have you noticed how the Gringos take care of their dogs? l,Los
vecinos? Buy them special food. They buy special little clothes
for them. Walk the perros around. They even gift wrap their poop.
Consienten their dogs more than their niiios.
PAPA (laughing)
Nose.
MAMA
I don't think so. Pues, all of the dogs across the border should come
here. They don't know what kind of life they are missing.
PAPA
Sf.
jAmnesty para los perros!
MAMA
In Costa Rica-do you think dogs live en pura vida? l,Recuerde los
callejeros?
PAPA
Si, mi amor.
(Slight pause.)
MAMA
Papi, l,Que til crees? There are illegal people, but are there illegal dogs?
MAMA
iVivan los perros!
PAPA
jLos perros!
(Pause. They laugh. Then MAMA begins to cry.)
MAMA
We're leaving. We're going to leave behind my only baby.
(Slight pause.)
Reflectiolls.76
Ret1ections • 77
MARIE
PAPA (comforting her)
Some photographs. I want you to have these.
I know.
MAMA
MAMA
When will I see her again? Papi? Tell me, when?
PAPA
Gracias.
(MAMA looks at the pictures.)
No se. But we want her to stay and live her life.
MAMA
MAMA
Ah, mi amor. Your graduation. Que linda.
Yose.
(MARIE enters with small box.)
MARIE
Stop, mom. You're going to make me cry again.
MARIE
I think this is everything.
MAMA
And aqui. The ... iQue?
MAMA
"Que es, mi amor?
MARIE
National Honor Society.
Rcflcl't inl1s • 78
Reflections. 79
MAMA
And here, you playing volleyball. The way you hit that ball-fuerte!
Where did you get that? Not from me. I hated sports.
PAPA
From tu papa problamente.
MAMA
;.,Ay, the athlete, sf?
MARIE
I don't want you to go.
MAMA
Sf. We are so proud of you. Mi vida.
(They hug.)
PAPA
We need to go.
MARIE
Even Precious.
PAPA (going to front window)
You can say goodbye to him at the airport. We have to go. Ay, look at
the people out there.
MAMA
Yo
se. But we have to. We will come back.
PAPA
You need to stay and go to college. Tu sueiio. Become una abogada and
change the law.
Rcflccti(llh • 80
(MARIE goes to front window.)
MARIE
Dios mio, I didn't think this many people would show up.
Reflections.
81
MAMA
i, Quienes son?
MARIE
MARIE
And as we went to the airport, a caravan of 40 cars. Everything had
been switched to my name. My dog was in a kennel. Precious. It was
the last time to see my dog ... They let me go to the gate. That's the
last time I have seen them .. .
Friends. And look at that-all of those cameras.
[Marie's story is not unique. The following scene attempts to dramatize
the problems and messages about college that affect young people]:
PAPA
Let's go, Marina.
(Pause. They all take a look at the house they are leaving.)
PAPA
Scene 8: School
MARIE (interview)
I always had that dream. Most of the counselors had met with usplanning for college. I was always very studious. I loved school. There
was no question that I was going to college ... going to law school.
(Actors enter and recreate school classroom.)
Adios, mi casa.
TEACHER
MAMA
Each one of you, take an envelope and count the money inside.
Hasta luego.
(Pause. They leave.)
STUDENT #1
Money? We get money?
Refl eel inn" • 82
Ret1ections • 83
STUDENT #1
TEACHER
It's monopoly money. Fake money.
$1000
STUDENT #2 (to STUDENT #1)
Stupid!
STUDENT #4
Oh ... he is the man!
TEACHER
I want you to count the money. Each one of you has a different amount.
STUDENT #2
$400
STUDENT #1
I got more than you.
STUDENT #2
It's fake, stupid. i.,Cual es la diferencia?
STUDENT #3
$300
STUDENT #4
$20
TEACHER
STUDENT #5
Please! OK. Now I want you to put the money back in the envelope.
Put it back in the envelope ... There you go. OK. How much money
do you have?
Reflectioll:-- • 84
$1
Ret1ections • 85
TEACHER
TEACHER
College graduate.
Now read what's written on your envelope.
STUDENT #4
STUDENT #5
Oh, I get it ... Mine is GD.
HSDO.
TEACHER
TEACHER
That stands for high school drop out. Next.
STUDENT #4
Graduate degree.
STUDENT #5
HSG.
What'sPD?
TEACHER
High school graduate.
TEACHER
Professional degree. Like a doctor.
STUDENT #3
STUDENT #1
CG.
Wow. Well, this sure was a fun game.
TEACHER
What do you think that stands for?
TEACHER
Do you know what the point of this activity was?
(Pause.)
Reflectiolls
to
86
Ret1ections •
87
TEACHER
STUDENT #2
You forgot to do your lesson plan for today?
That may be true. But what about college? What about his future? That
money is only temporary.
TEACHER
STUDENT #3
The point of this lesson, young lady, is to show you the power of
education. If you drop out of high school, this is how much you are
going to make.
What isn't temporary, Miss Smith?
TEACHER
STUDENT #4
What?
That's not true. My cousin, Lorenzo, makes a lot of money. He just
bought a new car.
STUDENT #2
STUDENT #3
And Lorenzo can't go to college. He's illegal.
Oh, sl, that new red Mustang. l,No?
STUDENT #3
STUDENT #4
iCallate, estupido!
Que padre.
STUDENT #2
STUDENT #3
Es la verdad. l,Si 0 no?
Chevre.
Reflection" • 88
Reflections. 89
TEACHER
That's enough! Sit down, please.
STUDENT #3
iEstupido!
TEACHER
What I want you to think about is ... What is your dream? What do you
want to do when you leave this place? Do you want to work the same
job for years and years making just enough to get by? Or do you want
to pursue something more? Danielle, what is your dream?
DANIELLE
You don't think I have dreams? ... Suefios. And what is the dream for
mi nifio, Samuel? Money?
(Slight pause.)
DANIELLE
suefios. dios mio ...
as soon as they see me,
as soon as they hear my voice,
they ask, where are you from?
i say here & then that look:
''you aren't from here" they say
con sus ojos, their eyebrows.
as if home is una fortaleza &
i've invaded theirs,
for veinte afios, still
a stranger? or maybe
they think a spaceship has landed &
they're talking to an alien.
yes, yo soy de aqui,
i am from here
at least for now,
the same as you.
home is right now.
mafiana-we'll see.
that espacio, that space
between your eyes & mine,
the place where
we might listen
or might not.
Reflections.90
Reflections.
91
[This is the closing monologue of Marie):
i have a whole cocktail party up there,
people going back and forth, never stopping &
Scene 26: Voice
MARIE
I can't make any long-term plans.
A ton of my girlfriends are getting married ...
I can't promise anything past June 30.
That's my last and final day to be in the U.S.
(Slight pause.)
you know, sometimes when i'm reading my
history textbook, i hear the
voice of sean connery.
i'm not sure why.
it works for the war stuff,
but i have to get him out of my
head for women's suffragehe doesn't sound believable.
sometimes it's that movie announcer guy,
sometimes it's papa, mama,
sometimes it's some voice that i've
never heard before.
but what worries me is
that i 'lliose my voice.
because when i listen
for my voiceeven when i speakis that me?
each day,
changing.
mi voz ...
(Slight pause.)
limbo.
my roommate says that she hears
the voice of her professor,
which works out, because
she has this ridiculous crush on him &
so she reads it every night before she
goes to sleep.
my other roommate tells me she doesn't
hear a thing when she reads.
well, of course, she would have
to actually open a book to really know.
Reflections. 92
What will we as educators and citizens do in response to the many
students who are in limbo? Marie's story is one of many for us to
consider. If you would like to see the complete interview of Marie
following our performance, type in Marie Gonzalez and Limbo on
youtube OR visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGDZjdYqA-8.
Reflections. 93
'I was a Stranger':l Creating a Campus-wide
Commitment to Migration
Betsy A. Bowen, Fairfield University
This article examines what it means when a university makes
a multifaceted commitment to migration, taking note of both
what can be accomplished through such a commitment and
what tensions remain. At Fairfield University, engagement
with migration is expressed in the curriculum, service-learning
projects, faculty research, and in efforts to influence the
national debate on immigration through the University's
Center for Faith and Public Life. The philosophical context for
this work on migration reflects, in part, the Jesuit Catholic
tradition of the University. Service-learning courses across
the curriculum involve work with immigrants. In a course on
literacy, students assist children of immigrants at an adult
literacy center.
;;~~ rom
the path outside my office I can look over the campus to
Long Island Sound. The campus spreads out before me: 200
acres of well-kept lawns, trees, classrooms, and dorms. A small,
comprehensive university in the Jesuit Catholic tradition, Fairfield
has an undergraduate student body that is largely white and middleto upper-middle class. But if I tum a little and look to the west, I see
the smokestacks from Bridgeport Resco, the waste treatment plant,
pumping gray smoke into the sky_ Railroad tracks run past the oil
storage tanks. Just ten minutes from campus, Bridgeport is in some
ways a world away. In the past four or five years, however, the campus
has been linked to the city through a focus on migration.
Rcflccti(ll1'- • 94
With over a quarter of the population born outside the United States
(U.S. Census Bureau), Bridgeport is a fertile place to consider
immigration. Like many aging industrial centers in the Northeast,
Bridgeport suffers from a declining tax base, poor housing stock, and
high concentrations of poverty. Surrounded by one of the wealthiest
counties in the United States, Bridgeport stands apart from its affluent
neighbors in terms of race, economics, and ethnicity. The contrast
between the town of Fairfield, where Fairfield University is located,
and Bridgeport is sharp. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2007
the average household income in Fairfield was $103,352; in Bridgeport
it was less than half of that, only $39,684. Three percent of Fairfield
residents live below the poverty level; 19% of Bridgeport residents
do. Forty-five percent of residents in Bridgeport speak a language
other than English at home; in Fairfield, the number is twelve percent.
The Connecticut Department of Education reports that over 95% of
the children in Bridgeport's public schools qualify for free or reduced
price lunch; in Fairfield, the figure is less than 5%. Recent immigrants
make up a significant portion of those with greatest material needs
in Bridgeport. For that reason, and others, Fairfield University
has undertaken a range of service-learning projects, working with
community partners in Bridgeport that serve immigrants.
In this article I want to examine what happens when an institution as
a whole devotes itself to migration and the needs of immigrants. By
"institution as a whole" I do not mean that every faculty member or
office of the University is concerned with immigration or immigrants.
Rather, I mean that there is a multifaceted commitment to migration
that is revealed in the curriculum, service-learning projects,
scholarship, and in efforts to influence public policy and debate. In
this article, then, I will try to layout the philosophical foundations for
the University's involvement with migration, examine some of the
forms that work takes in service-learning courses, and consider the
problems that accompany the effort. In doing so, I will extend the work
of Sondra Cuban and Jeffrey Anderson on service learning and the
Reflection,'; • 95
Jesuit understanding of social justice. Migration is a place where the
Jesuit Catholic mission of the University intersects with the politically
progressive, but largely secular, inclination of many faculty members.
As such, it offers a promising place to link two kinds of expertise.
At the same time, working with immigrants makes even more acute
the familiar problem in service learning: how to provide service to
the community without reinforcing students' (or faculty members ')
preconceptions of those being served. A decade ago, Ellen Cushman
warned, "One limitation of service-learning courses can be students'
perceptions of themselves as imparting to the poor and uneducated
their greater knowledge and skills" (332). When some participants in
the service-learning venture have limited speaking skills in English
and uncertain immigration status, the gap between university and
community partners becomes especially pronounced. If we ignore that
gap, we risk "perpetuating the hierarchical and potentially dangerous
relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities
that service-learning implicitly seeks to remedy" (Vernon and Ward
30). Instead, as Linda Flower and Shirley Brice Heath caution, "a
sustainable relationship with learning at its core must be built on a
thoroughgoing respect for the knowledge of others-embodied in
the social and literate practices that actively seek alternative ways of
reading the world" (53). University partners who work with immigrants
(or agencies that serve immigrants) need special sensitivity to create
that kind of sustainable and mutual relationship.
Jesuit Commitments
One thing that distinguishes Fairfield University'S work on immigration
and service learning is the philosophical context in which it occurs.
In his discussion of Jesuit pedagogy, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.,
former Superior General of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), identifies
social justice as one of the primary goals of Jesuit education, saying:
"The Jesuit ideal ... seeks to establish campus communities which
RL'fL:ctiOll\ .. 96
support the intellectual growth of all of its members while providing
them with opportunities for spiritual growth and development and a
lifelong commitment to social justice" ("Jesuit Education," para. 18).
For that reason, he maintains, "Jesuit universities have stronger and
different reasons, than many other academic and research institutions,
for addressing the actual world as it unjustly exists and for helping to
reshape it in the light of the Gospel" ("Service").
Indeed, this orientation toward action is, Kolvenbach maintains,
a distinguishing characteristic of Jesuit pedagogy, an approach to
learning with its roots in the sixteenth century. That approach is
comprised of five key components: context (an understanding of the
leamer's situation), experience (direct engagement with the subject
being studied), reflection, action, and evaluation ("Jesuit Education,"
para. 10-14). The commitment to social action makes Jesuit institutions
such as Fairfield University productive sites for what Cuban and
Anderson call the "political conceptualization" of service learning.
Such an approach, they argue, "addresses both surface and underlying
societal problems" and "entails correcting power imbalances, taking the
perspective of and advocating for marginalized groups, and harnessing
resources for social change" (145). Like Cushman, Cuban and
Anderson advocate activist or action research as the means for creating
social change. In such project, Cushman claims, "public intellectuals
and community members can work together to identify and ameliorate
local-level social issues" (334).
In 2005, Fairfield University established the Center for Faith and Public
Life, a think-tank designed to explore faith and civic engagement
through research, curriculum, and public events. A primary focus of the
Center is migration, which Rick Ryscavage, S. J., Director of the Center,
explains is a priority for the Jesuit order worldwide. "Our responsibility"
he says, "is to connect that theme to the whole of the university."
Ret1ections •
97
That effort has taken a variety of forms. In 2005 the Center helped to
create the Jesuit Migration Academic Network (JMAN) that links over
20 Jesuit universities, in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America, to study
global migration. JMAN is designed to support curriculum development,
research, advocacy, and service among participants involved with
migration at these institutions. Its website is a clearinghouse, providing
news and data for researchers. The Center for Faith and Public Life
hosted a series on migration and the arts, as well as a conference on
human trafficking, which brought together faculty members and social
service agencies to examine the causes and consequences of forced,
exploitative migration. Currently the Center is working on an initiative
called "Strangers as Neighbors," funded by the Carnegie Corporation,
to reframe what Ryscavage characterizes as "the coarse and polarizing
national debate over immigration in the U.S." The project will bring
together Jewish, Islamic, and Christian clergy, scholars, and public
policy leaders for a series of workshops. The goal, Ryscavage says,
is "for the faith communities to agree on some common language
for speaking about migration, then to educate their believers in that
common language, and together to enter the public national dialogue
... with the aim of ending the impasse on changing immigration law
and policy (McCaffrey). While the grant uses the term "immigration"
because it focuses on the U.S. context, the Center generally avoids the
term "immigration" altogether because the term foregrounds the U.S.
perspective on the issue by focusing on those who enter the country.
Instead, Ryscavage says, "You have to deal with immigration in the
context of global migration.... Migration is deeply connected to
globalization. It is one of the threads moving the whole thing."
The Center's focus on migration has its roots in Catholic theology
and social teaching-something that both enriches and complicates
its work on campus, particularly with faculty. In their statement on
immigration, "Strangers No Longer," the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops situates the debate on immigration in a Biblical context, citing
Abraham, Moses, and others as prototypes of migrants. In a related
Rcflcctinn:-, • 98
statement, the Conference identifies two key duties of governments
regarding migration: "to welcome the foreigner out of charity and
respect for the dignity and rights of the human person" and "to secure
its border and enforce immigration law for the sake of the common
good, including the safety and well-being of the nation's inhabitants
and the rule of law." Both of these duties, the Conference notes, "must
be carried out and neither ... can be ignored" ("Comprehensive").
University Commitments
The University's involvement in migration is connected to the
curriculum in large part through the Office of Service Learning which
supports and coordinates service-learning efforts on campus. Migration
is a focus of many of the service-learning efforts, but certainly not
alL As the first Director of Service Learning on campus explains,
migration is "by no means a totalizing theme, but it is a coherent one
... If students are having a conversation about migration, and some
of them are having those conversations in multiple classes, it makes
sense" that students have opportunities to put that learning to use in the
community (Crabtree). Many service-learning courses at the University
have focused on immigration and immigrants, often in collaboration
with the International Institute of Connecticut, a social service agency
in Bridgeport that assists refugees and immigrants through "direct
professional services, counseling, advocacy and the advancement of
fair and humane public policy" ("International").
Courses that involved service learning and migration have come from
departments across the university and include:
• Introduction to Immigration (Sociology) which partnered with
the International Institute on research about immigration trends in
Bridgeport.
• Challenges of Global Politics (International Studies) in which
students worked with both Mercy Learning Center, a literacy center
Retlections • 99
in Bridgeport which serves a largely immigrant student body, and the
International Institute where they did research on trafficked women in
the region.
• Twentieth Century Russia (History) in which students interviewed
local Russian immigrants as part of their research on emigration in
recent Russian history.
• Financial Modeling (Finance) which also worked with the
International Institute, with upper-level business majors assisting
immigrant entrepreneurs to develop sustainable business plans.
experience, and reduce the psychic distance between students and
community members.
Two features, however, distinguish these community/university
partnerships from those at other universities. One is the deliberate,
although not exclusive, focus on migration and immigrants. The focus
on migration allows us to capitalize on intellectual resources on campus
related to migration, at the same time as we respond to some pressing
local needs. The other is an emphasis on reflection, an essential, if
sometimes neglected, element of Jesuit education.
Classroom Commitments
• Economic Regional Development (Economics) where students
worked with both Connecticut Legal Aid and the International Institute,
doing research on fair wages for immigrants and assisting day laborers
with claims against employers for mistreatment.
• Introduction to Feminist Theory (Politics and Women's Studies)
in which students helped create an awareness campaign on human
trafficking in conjunction with the International Institute.
• Health Promotion Center (School of Nursing) Located in Bridgeport
and facilitated by University's School of Nursing, the Health Promotion
Center provides health education, screening, referral, and follow-up
services to underserved populations, including a large number
of immigrant clients.
These courses vary, not only in their subject matter and the nature
of the service in which students are engaged, but also in the faculty
members' impetus for undertaking their work on migration or with
immigrants. In this respect, the projects at Fairfield are similar to those
at other universities without specific faith commitments. The projects
are designed to share intellectual resources of the campus with the
surrounding community, increase students' learning through direct
Reflection" • 100
I have been most closely involved in the university's work on migration
through one of these service-learning partnerships, which involved
"Literacy and Language," an intermediate-level English course which I
teach, and Mercy Learning Center, a literacy center serving women in
Bridgeport. Mercy Learning Center dominates a block on Park Avenue,
one of Bridgeport's main streets. At the north end of the street, three
or four miles from the Center, the houses are grand, with large porches
and mature trees. As Park Avenue runs south towards the highway, the
houses become smaller, and bodegas, bars, and storefront churches
appear in their midst. By the time Park Avenue passes under 1-95, the
neighborhood shows the unmistakable signs of poverty.
The need for literacy education in Bridgeport is acute. Thirty-five
percent of Bridgeport's 139,529 adults lack a high school diploma; five
years earlier, that figure had been 28%. While 48,825 adults lacked
high school diplomas, only 251 obtained a diploma or equivalent in
2005-2006 (CT Dept. of Ed.). In fact, according to the U.S. Census
2000, 15% of adults in Bridgeport report having less than a ninth-grade
education and 3% report not having completed any schooling at all.
For 21 years Mercy Learning Center has provided "basic literacy skills
training using a holistic approach within a compassionate, supportive
Reflections.
101
community to low-income women without regard for race, religion,
color, or creed" (MLC Annual Report, 5). When it opened in 1987,
the Center had three students. In 2007-08, the Center served over 500
students and more than 130 of their children. Today, most students at
Mercy Learning Center are immigrants. They come from 42 countries
and speak 25 different languages. In fact, 83% of students at the Center
speak a language other than English as their primary language. Most
are Hispanic-69% of the total student body (MLC Annual Report). My
involvement with Mercy Learning Center began 10 years ago. During
the past decade I have at different times taught a supplementary writing
class, tutored a GED student, led an English conversation class for ESL
students, and led a professional workshop for tutors. In those 10 years
I have seen major changes in the Center, in both the makeup of the
student body and the programs designed to meet their needs.
As the National Assessment of Adult Literacy makes clear, Hispanic
adults are particularly at risk for literacy problems. Hispanics are the
only racial or ethnic group whose literacy levels declined between
1993 and 2003, as measured by the National Adult Literacy Survey
(1992) and the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003). In fact,
prose literacy scores for Hispanic adults declined by 18% in that time
and document literacy by 14%. The changes are likely to be the result
of increased immigration from countries where access to education
was limited. Altogether, 44 % of Hispanic adults nationwide have
below basic literacy in English. That means they are able to carry
out "no more than the most simple and concrete literacy tasks" (U.S.
Dept. of Ed., NAAL 4). Mercy Learning Center offers both individual
tutoring and a full-day Intensive Study program in English as a Second
Language (ESL), Adult Basic Education (ABE) I, ABE II, and General
Educational Development (GED) preparation. Altogether, 516 women
participated in either tutoring or Intensive Study classes in 2007-08.
The Center offers an array of supplementary services--educational
childcare, a social worker, a part-time nurse-to support students in
their education.
Reflection.'- •
102
For the past two years, students in "Literacy and Language" have
assisted in the childcare program. The service is not a requirement in
the course, but it has been popular. This year 20 of the 25 students in
the course participated, spending an hour and a half each week for 12
weeks of the semester, a total of approximately 360 hours at the Center.
My contact at the Center, Sharon, and I have tried to design a project
that meets two real needs: my students' need to test what they are
learning about literacy acquisition by applying it to real children, and
the Center's need for volunteers to supplement the paid childcare staff
so as to meet state staffing regulations. For my students, working in
the early childhood education program gave them a chance to observe
children's development in literacy and apply what they had read for
class-by Clay, Heath, Morrow, Purcell-Gates, Scribner, and othersto their experiences at the Center. In the final section of the course,
devoted to adult literacy, students read material on the national context
for literacy, including reports from the National Center for Education
Statistics, and the local context of Fairfield County. As a result, when
each one sat in on an adult literacy class, they understood some of the
factors that shaped the adult learners' experiences.
Although it was tempting to ask for my students to work directly with
adult learners, both Sharon and I knew that that arrangement would
serve the university students more than the adult learners who need at
least a year-long commitment from a tutor and are likely to feel selfconscious with a tutor who is both younger and better educated. As
Vernon and Ward point out, in such an arrangement, "agencies train
students who accrue cultural capital for their resumes and move on
to the next course, leaving the community services agencies with a
labor shortage" (147). Instead, we arranged for each of my students to
sit in on one adult class, after they had been working in the childcare
program for several weeks and were familiar to the mothers whose
children were in the program. In addition, I invited Sharon and one
of the adult students from the ABE I class, whom I had taught that
summer in an ESL class at the Center, to speak to my students as we
Retlectiom; •
103
introduced the project. We wanted the college students to see one of the
adult literacy students as an expert, in this case on her children, not just
a person in need of basic literacy instruction.
Throughout the semester students worked with children at the Center,
talked about what they saw, and wrote about the intersection between
readings for the course and their experiences with literacy at the Center.
Their written reflections on the service learning showed me that they
could move easily between what they read for class and what they
observed at the Center. It seemed clear that working with children had
enriched their experience in the course. But if that had been the only
goal of this service learning project we might have accomplished it
much more easily by having students observe at the University's own
Early Learning Center, which serves the children of faculty and staff
members and is located right on campus.
The community/university partnership had additional goals, ones that
could not be met by experience on campus. One goal was to meet a
need at the Center for volunteers to staff the infant and toddler rooms.
Without volunteers, the program would not satisfy state requirements for
staffing. And, certainly, my students gained knowledge relevant to the
course, particularly about second language acquisition and adult literacy,
that they could not have learned without their time at the Center.
In addition, I wanted the course to provide students with opportunities
to be "men and women for others," as it is commonly described at
Jesuit schools. Christina, for example, noted what she gained through
her service: "Taking part in such an important program not only made
me feel important in the sense that 1 was making a difference in the
lives of others, but in my own as well. ... [This] is the first class I have
engaged in at Fairfield that allowed me to feel constant gratification as I
was able to witness my knowledge put to use instantly." 2
The students gained, too, in learning more about Bridgeport and
immigration. Several were apprehensive when they began. Before
her first visit to the Center, one student wrote, "I have never been to
Bridgeport, but from what I hear it is a poverty- stricken town that
has many hungry women and children, and a rather high violence
rate." Some of the students recognized that their own experiences with
economic or linguistic difference were limited. In the first week of the
project Kerri wrote:
After my first visit to the Center, I felt that my eyes had been opened
to something that I hadn't witnessed ever before. The majority of the
students in the classroom, about 95%, were Hispanic. They all seemed
to speak Spanish to some degree, and all three teachers working in the
classroom spoke both Spanish and English fluently. The neighborhood
was very urban, and showed many signs of being culturally diverse,
something that 1 am not used to.
At the same time, her phrase "1 felt that my eyes had been opened"
suggests a risk in service-learning ventures of this kind, the risk of the
unearned epiphany. As much as 1 hoped that my students would be
changed by the experience of service learning, 1 also worried about
their accounts of quick reversals of assumptions. Several students, for
instance, drew on their own experience studying a foreign language to
identify with the ESL students at the Center. After sitting in on the adult
ESL class, for instance, one student wrote, "I saw a similarity between
the women before me and myself. They sounded just like I had while
I was first learning my second language, Spanish. In my introductory
courses to the language I would try to conjugate verbs and many times
end up using the wrong endings." One student, however, noted the
profound difference between a college student studying a language and
an adult literacy student coping with English. She wrote:
As I sat in the class I tried to imagine what it would be like for me to
be in that situation or how I could compare it to my life. The only way
Rc f1 ceti nl1-;
•
104
Ret1ections • 105
I could slightly relate was with my German class. I sit in class and I'm
very confused, I don't know what the teacher is saying and the rest of
the kids in the class are the same way. But then I realized that I can
leave that class and function normally in society.
I have come to worry less that my students are overlooking essential
differences when they identify with adult literacy students in the way
that Kerri did. Instead, I see this as a process of development in which
a first step is empathy and identification, and a second, which Brittany
expresses, is identification with the awareness of differences.
It is not enough that my students benefit from this service-learning
experience; a community/university partnership needs to be rewarding
for participants at both sites. Now that the semester has ended, my
counterpart at the Center and I need to consider how we might change
the project to make it a more deeply reciprocal endeavor. In one
sense, the project is already reciprocal: both partners benefit; together
they accomplish things that neither could accomplish alone. As such,.
it meets the standard that Vernon and Ward propose-that servicelearning collaborations be mutually beneficial. But other scholars call
us to a more ambitious standard, such as the one Flower and Heath
suggest in their description of a community project: "The premise ...
is that the university serves the community by becoming a working
partner in a project that not only acknowledges and nurtures community
expertise but commits us to an extended, strategic effort to draw on
that expertise in the pursuit of trans formative understanding" (53). Or,
more simply, as Ellen Cushman puts it, "a central goal ... is to make
knowledge with individuals" (332, emphasis in original).
Clearly, the goal of nurturing community expertise or making
knowledge with individuals needs to be adjusted when the half the
individuals involved in the project are less than five years old. It was
satisfying, therefore, when I saw evidence that the university students
had learned from the children and adults at Mercy Learning Center,
Rcflcctinl1<" .. 106
not just about them. Throughout the semester I saw my students
recognize that they were learning from participants at the Center.
Before beginning work at the Center, Katelyn wrote: "I expect to learn
a great deal from these children that I will encounter." Christina's final
response for the semester shows evidence of something deeper, what
she calls "solidarity":
Aside from being able to relate what we learned in class to my time
volunteering at the Center, one of the most important aspects that I took
away from this experience was the importance of solidarity. "Faced
with the seriousness of the living conditions of our brothers and sisters
who are kept at a distance from modem culture, we have a duty to show
them our complete solidarity" (1995 Lenten Message, Pope John Paul
II) .... In my opinion, it was amazing how 20-year-old college students
could work side-by-side with older women who had struggled with
learning English at one point in their own lives, to better the future of
Bridgeport families through promoting and teaching literacy.
Her comments demonstrate much of what I hoped for in this
for those she worked with, the ability to link
readings to experience, and the deep satisfaction of collaborating with
others for the common good.
partnershi~respect
Conflicts and Convergences
Several questions emerge from this analysis of the University's
involvement with migration. First, is the University's work with
community partners different because of this institutional context?
More specifically, does the University's multifaceted commitment
to migration help members of the University and community
organizations work together to bring about social change? If so, what
elements of this approach might be useful to other universities and the
community organizations with which they work?
Ret1ections •
107
In many respects, no doubt, Fairfield University's partnerships with
community organizations resemble those at other universities with
a moderate to strong investment in service learning. The Office of
Service Learning provides both intellectual and practical resources,
including course development stipends, to those interested in service
learning. Its Advisory Board brings together faculty members,
student services personnel, student representatives, and community
partners to coordinate service-learning efforts, many of which involve
immigrants or migration. The Office of Service Learning also cultivates
connections with local organizations and social service organizations
to identify potential community partners. In addition, with assistance
from the Center for Faith and Public Life and academic departments,
the Office of Service Learning provides intellectual support, including
visiting speakers and readings, to help faculty and student services
personnel develop more sophisticated understandings of service
learning and social justice.
This Catholic foundation for the University's work with migration may
have an additional, and unexpectedly practical, benefit. I believe it has
helped the University overcome the resistance that is often directed
at educational institutions that engage with complex social problems
such as migration. It is hard to criticize work with day laborers or
other immigrants when the University can align that work with values
that its alumni and, to some extent, the general public share. It is
worth noting, however, that even this foundation has not eliminated
all controversy from service-learning projects involving migration.
Students who worked with the International Institute of Connecticut
to create an awareness campaign on human trafficking designed for
local Catholic churches learned that the Diocese of Bridgeport did not
want the material made available in the churches because diocesan
administrators felt that human trafficking was too controversial a
subject for many in their congregations.
Reflection., • 108
At the same time, the model that Fairfield provides also entails some
drawbacks. First, any time a college or university focuses on a themewhether is global citizenship, migration, or something else-some
faculty members will feel left out, even disenfranchised. Their research
interests, disciplines, or even family situations make them less likely
to participate in those targeted efforts and less likely to receive funding
for their projects in other areas.
Fairfield University's approach poses additional drawbacks. For
some faculty members, the Catholic frame of reference of the
Center for Faith and Public Life is irrelevant, or even alienating.
Although disposed toward social activism and social justice, they are
uncomfortable with any effort associated so closely with the Jesuit and
Catholic mission of the University. That discomfort with an explicitly
Catholic identity was evident in the controversy that accompanied
the administration's decision to locate the Office of Service Learning
in the newly-launched Center for Faith and Public Life. For many
years before this, service-learning projects had taken place on campus
with few resources and little institutional attention. Then, spurred by
the example of other Jesuit universities, Fairfield committed itself
to creating an Office of Service Learning, designed to give servicelearning efforts greater support, coherence, and recognition. Faculty
involved in the creation of the Office knew it would be disadvantageous
to have it located in either the Office of Student Services or Campus
Ministry, both entities that had, in their own ways, supported
community involvement by students. To be credible with faculty, the
Office needed to be located in the Academic Division and report to the
Academic Vice-President. That might have meant being organized as
an independent office or becoming part of the University's generally
well-respected Center for Academic Excellence. Instead, the Office of
Service Learning was placed in the Center for Faith and Public Life,
a decision that the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and first
Director of the Office for Service Learning describes as "strategic, but
not necessarily logical" (Crabtree).
Reflections. 109
The arrangement had several advantages for the Office of Service
Learning, providing financial stability, since the Center was endowed,
and institutional prominence. At the same time, it meant that service
learning was specifically associated with the University's Jesuit
Catholic mission. It would not surprise me if some faculty members or
community partners feel like outsiders when they come into the Center
where the Office of Service Learning is located. Thus, one cost of a
strong philosophical foundation for work on migration may be the risk
of deterring those who do not share its premises or its vocabulary. For
Melissa Quan, the current Director of the Office of Service Learning,
negotiating the place of service learning in the University has meant
being careful about the language used to describe the office and its
mission. In drafting a mission statement, she said, the Advisory Board
of the Office of Service Learning drew on Jesuit values and traditions
but was careful, she said, not to "ground it in that faith language too
specifically." That makes the Office of Service Learning somewhat
different from the Center for Faith and Public Life, of which it is a part,
where that "faith language" is fundamental.
Even if faculty members do become involved in community/university
partnerships involving migration that aspire towards social change,
some difficulties remain. As Cuban and Anderson note, "a social
justice approach would assume that faculty had competencies in social
analysis and activism" (147). Few faculty members have been trained
in activism. As Cushman points out, "because university representatives
tend to esteem their own brand of knowledge more than popular forms
of knowledge" (334), we may fail to understand the needs and goals
of the immigrants and agencies with whom we work, even as we try to
assist them.
its custodial services to a subcontractor. The goal, keeping costs
down so as to avoid raising tuition excessively, was desirable, but a
consequence was harmful. Because the custodial workers, a largely
immigrant workforce, were no longer university employees, they were
no longer eligible for tuition benefits that all university employees
are offered. The decision to outsource the custodial work led to
considerable controversy on campus, including a hunger strike by a
small group of faculty and students, and resulted eventually in new
guidelines to govern future subcontracting. It would be easy to see
this decision to outsource custodial work as evidence of hypocrisy,
but I think it reveals how deeply complicated it is for an institution,
no matter how well intentioned, to reach the standards of justice that it
aspires to.
It seems fitting, then, that I am completing this article on the eve of
National Migration Week 2009, sponsored by the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops. For more than twenty-five years, the USCCB has
dedicated the first week of January to publicizing the needs of migrants,
both in the U.S. and overseas. Their reflection for the week states that
our task is "to welcome migrants and refugees with joy and generosity,
while responding to their many needs"/ "A acoger a los migrantes
y refugiados con alegria y generosidad, y a la vez respondiendo a
sus muchas necesidades" (USCCB, National Migration Week). In
community/university partnerships involved with migration, that task
of understanding and responding to the community's needs is both
complex and compelling. 3
Finally, we are challenged to live out this commitment to migrants on
our own campus where the University has the dual role of educator
and employer. One story illustrates the complexity of that challenge.
Several years ago, in a cost-saving measure, the University outsourced
Reflection:- • 110
Ret1ections • 111
Endnotes
I
The phrase comes from Matthew 25: 35, "for I was hungry and you
gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I
was a stranger and you welcomed me" (The New Oxford Annotated
Bible).
2
All excerpts of students' work are used with written permission of the
students.
3
My thanks to Fairfield University which supported this research with a
summer research stipend. Additional thanks to Melissa Quan, Director
of the Office of Service Learning, for her advice and assistance, and to
Campus Ministry for lending cars to students in the project.
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Cushman, Ellen. "The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and
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l\ert ccti(ln-.; • 112
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Ret1ections • 113
Scribner, Sylvia. "Literacy in Three Metaphors." American Journal of
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Reflections. 114
Moving Out/Moving In
Mirta Tocci, Emerson College
"Moving OutlMoving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of
the Immigrant Experience" is a service-learning course created
and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts &
Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA.
Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with
community partner, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acci6n, focusing
on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects
of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by
Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in
IBA's Cacique after-school program.
I am a visual artist and I know how to be an immigrant. In the late
1970s I.fled the Dirty War of my native Buenos Aires, Argentina,
and moved to Barcelona, Spain. In 1994, I left Barcelona to exhibit
work and teach in the United States. From my own experience, I
know what it is to move to a new country, how my body responds
to living in a land that is not my own, to speak a language that is
not my mother tongue, to experience a dominant culture that has
no connection to my past. I know what it means to be invisible. And
the force that it takes to become visible. This experience has been
the subject of many artworks I have created and shown in museums
and galleries in Argentina, Europe and the United States. For these
reasons, 1 believe I am ready to explore this subject with Emerson
students and with members of the Latino immigrant community
here in Boston. (Tocci)
Reflections. 115
Scribner, Sylvia. "Literacy in Three Metaphors." American Journal of
Education, 93.1 (1984) 6-21. JSTOR.
Vernon, Andrea and Kelly Ward. "Campus and Community
Partnerships: Assessing Impacts and Strengthening Connections."
Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. (Fall 1999):
30-37.
U.S. Census Bureau, FactFinder. "Census 2000 Demographic Profile
Highlights" ''http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.
html?_lang=enhttp://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_
lang=en. Accessed 13 Dec., 2008.
U.S. Census Bureau, FactFinder. "2005-2007 American Community
Survey 3-Year Estimates''http://factfinder. census. gOY!homelsaffl
main.html?_lang=enhttp://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.
html? lang=en. Accessed 13 Dec., 2008.
U.S. Cens~s Bureau "State and County QuickFacts." http://quickfacts.
census.gov/qfd/states/09/0908000.html. Accessed 13 Dec. 2008.
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Comprehensive Immigration
Reform." http://www.usccb.org/mrs/legal.shtmIAccessed Nov 28,
2008
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Migration Week 2009.
http://www.usccb.org/mrs/nmw/prayer.shtml,Accessed 3 Jan.,
2009.
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Strangers No Longer: Together
on A Journey of Hope." Jan. 22, 2003. http://www.usccb.org/mrs/
stranger.shtml#4. Accessed 15 December 2008.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
National Assessment ofAdult Literacy (NAAL): A First Look at the
Literacy ofAmerica Adults in the 21 S1 Century. NCES 2006-470.
s
]kflcctinn, • 114
Moving Out/Moving In
Mirta Tocci, Emerson College
"Moving Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of
the Immigrant Experience" is a service-learning course created
and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts &
Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA.
Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with
community partner, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acci6n, focusing
on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects
of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by
Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in
IBA's Cacique after-school program.
I am a visual artist and I know how to be an immigrant. In the late
1970s I.fled the Dirty War of my native Buenos Aires, Argentina,
and moved to Barcelona, Spain. In 1994, I left Barcelona to exhibit
work and teach in the United States. From my own experience, I
know what it is to move to a new country, how my body responds
to living in a land that is not my own, to speak a language that is
not my mother tongue, to experience a dominant culture that has
no connection to my past. I know what it means to be invisible. And
the force that it takes to become visible. This experience has been
the subject of many artworks I have created and shown in museums
and galleries in Argentina, Europe and the United States. For these
reasons, I believe I am ready to explore this subject with Emerson
students and with members of the Latino immigrant community
here in Boston. (Tocci)
Reflections. 115
This is the course rationale that I wrote in 2003 for IN405, "Moving
Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Immigrant
Experience," the service-learning course I have been teaching each
year since Fall 2004 at Emerson College in Boston MA, where I am
Artist in Residence in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary
Studies. When I left Argentina, the Dirty War, la Guerra Sucia, was
raging, although I was not then aware of its scope and the extent of its
barbarity. I had been out of art school for just a few years when I was
advised by teachers and friends that the drawings I was making and
exhibiting could be considered "dangerous," and so I left my family,
my friends and my beautiful city to be safe-and free. In the next
several years Argentine police and death squads, engaging in what they
called a "reorganization of society" would kidnap, torture and murder
tens of thousands of suspected socialist dissidents, mostly young people
like me, many of them students. Initially they threw the bodies of many
of those killed in Rio de la Plata, but the currents of the river brought
them "home." Then the death squads dumped the bodies in the Atlantic
Ocean so that they could never be found; the dead became known as
"the disappeared ones," los desaparecidos. For me, it would be eight
years before I returned "home," eight years before I saw my parents
again and even then I returned as a citizen of Spain.
As I read my course rationale today, I remember those eight years with
emotion, but now, after having explored the immigrant experience
for five years with Latino children here in Boston, I am filled with
the emotions of many journeys beyond my own. From my Emerson
students I know, as well, something more about the experience of
those whose homelands became my new homes. From the breadth and
depth of our collective exploration, I now know the complexity of the
questions we ask about ourselves and "the other" and how vital it is
to meet face to face and to speak from the heart as a foundation for
creating empathy, understanding, connection and change.
Reflc:ction, • 116
What is identity? What does it mean to be visible? What are the real and
imaginary journeys that comprise our individual and collective maps of
experience? What is "remembered" by first, second, third generations
of immigrants as their history? Do we "remember" a world we never
lived in? How do our memories extend beyond what is personally
experienced to the memories of our ancestors passed down, and then
integrated, even if not experienced, into our consciousness? What is it to
live on the border between two countries, two cultures, two identities?
In "Moving Out/Moving In" we explore questions provoked by "moving
out" of one's own country and "moving in" to another, moving out of
and into one's self, one's culture, one's community. We engage in an
interdisciplinary study of these questions and express our discoveries
through multidisciplinary art in a very real, artistic interaction with
children of immigrants aged 5-12 enrolled in the Cacique Youth
Learning Center, an after-school program offered by IBA (Inquilinos
Boriquas en Acci6n) in Villa Victoria, a 20-acre, 435-unit housing
community of3,OOO multicultural residents in Boston's gentrified and
affluent South End neighborhood. We move out of our comfort zones,
away from what is familiar, and into connection with children whose
backgrounds, culture, class and community are new to us.
Most of the residents of Villa Victoria are low-income and either firstor second-generation Puerto Rican. Most of my Emerson students
are affluent, sixth-generation American citizens of mixed European
ancestry. "The Villa" is just a few short blocks from where I live and a
fifteen-minute walk from the Emerson campus. The social and cultural
distances, however, are far greater. Ours is a story about shortening
the distances between us, building bridges between communities and
celebrating what we can learn and create together.
We come to know each other by making art together, not just because
I am a visual artist, but also because we work with many very young
children who do not or cannot express the complexities of their
experience in words alone. Further, many of the older children we work
Ret1ections • 117
with are more capable of expressing complex thoughts in Spanish,
a language that many of their Emerson student collaborators do not
know. As Elliott Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford
University, notes in his "Ten Lessons the Arts Teach,"
The arts teach children that despite the cultural bias that assigns
to literal language and number a virtual monopoly on how
understanding is advanced, the arts make vivid the fact that
neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we
can know. Put simply, the limits of our language do not define
the limits of our cognition. As Michael Polyanyi says, 'we know
more than we can tell.' 10
We explore through art also because, as Eisner notes,
Work in the arts teaches children to pay attention to qualitative
relationships; that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer; the arts
celebrate multiple perspectives; they teach children the art, not
only of looking, but also of seeing, not only of listening, but also
of hearing; they teach students to think through and within a
material; the arts enable us to have experience we can have from
no other source and through such experience to discover the range
and variety of what we are capable of feeling. The arts are about
recreation, the emphasis on 're-creation.' What is being recreated?
Oneself. One of the great aims of education is to make it possible
for people to be engaged in the process of creating themselves. IO- 13
Further, the experience of making art together is social and collaborative.
Our work is play; while we work we talk, sing, move and dance. Finally,
I believe that our subject is inextricably linked to our process; in the
words of the German visual artist Joseph Beuys, "To make people free is
the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom." (Beuys)
Reflectil1n".118
Community Partners
Our community partner for "Moving Out/Moving In" is IBA,
Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (Puerto Rican Tenants in Action), "a
dynamic community building agency dedicated to increasing the social
and economical power of individuals through education, economic
development, technology and arts programming that builds safe, vibrant
and culturally diverse affordable housing communities." (IBA website)
In addition to managing Villa Victoria, IBA's full-time, professional
staff provides services for youth, families, adults, and the elderly
through community organizing, civic, health, peer leadership,
cultural and educational programs, among them the Cacique Youth
Learning Center, "a licensed after-school program that empowers
young people through homework assistance, technology training and
literacy development; health, safety & recreational activities, civic
involvement; and the arts:
Emphasizing project-based experiential, interdisciplinary learning
activities, the program helps youth develop their capacity to think
critically, solve problems creatively, excel in school, and become
civically engaged. Cacique empowers low-income youth, particularly
Latinos, with the necessary opportunities, skills, and supports needed by
youth to succeed in school and in their personal lives." (IBA website)
For IBA, civic engagement is both a learning objective and an essential
part of its history and identity.
In 1968, predominantly low-income Puerto Rican community
activists successfully stared down the bulldozers of urban renewal
and strategically organized to gain control over the development
of their neighborhood. These actions, which led to the formation
of the Villa Victoria community, are seminal moments in the
history of affordable housing, civil rights, community organizing
and Latinos in the City of Boston. Social historians recently have
Ret1ections • 119
stressed the importance of documenting the history of marginalized
groups in mainstream histories that have often excluded them.
Boston's history as "the cradle ofliberty" is incomplete without the
full inclusion of the history of Latinos in the city and the formation
of Villa Victoria is central to that history. (lBA website)
Civic engagement is also central to the mission of Emerson College,
to educate students to assume positions of leadership in
communication and the arts and to advance scholarship and
creative work that brings innovation, depth, and diversity to
these disciplines. This mission is informed by core liberal arts
values that seek to promote civic engagement, encourage ethical
practices, foster respect for human diversity, and inspire students
to create and communicate with clarity, integrity and conviction.
(Emerson catalogue 2)
Since Fall 2007 our partnership has been further enhanced by our joint
investment in a grant to IBA from the Linde Foundation to support the
design and execution of programs and projects that develop increased
knowledge of and skills in the visual arts and improved life-skills
(namely language skill development, academic success, self-esteem,
self-efficacy, leadership and belief in helping others; critical thinking,
communication, ability to set and meet goals and develop selfdiscipline, perception and adaptability, teamwork, risk-taking, decisionmaking and perseverance). A final goal is the development of cultural
competency, the capacity and/or knowledge to be aware of the various
ways that culture shapes our individual, family, community and societal
lives. The curriculum and pedagogy of "Moving Out/Moving In" are
designed to fulfill these objectives.
Course Description
Each year since Fall 2004 between 16 and 25 Emerson students
from a broad range of majors and disciplines (Performing Arts,
RcflcctillllS. 120
Communications, Film, Writing, Journalism) have enrolled in IN405 to
work with between 10 and 14 children, aged 5 to 12, from the Cacique
Youth Learning Center.
Students enrolled in "Moving Out/Moving In" begin their exploration
researching IBANilla Victoria, cultural identity, Latino identity, and
the immigrant experience. The three principle texts for the course are
Children ofImmigration (Carola and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco: Harvard
University Press, 2001), Latinos: A Biography of the People (Earl
Shorris: W. W. Norton, 1992) and Ethnicities: Children ofImmigrants
in America (Ruben G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, ed.: University
of California Press, 2001). We explore the subject of immigration in
interdisciplinary study, beginning first with our readings, research,
class presentations and intense discussions and then in our creative
work and play with the children, which consists of weekly meetings at
the Cacique Youth Learning Center making artistic projects together
organized around six themes we explore in our research: Identity; To
Be Visible; The Real Journey; The Imaginary Journey; The Community
of Memory; The Map of Experience. At the end of the course we host
an exhibition or a performance that invites our communities to share in
our experience. Our work together is organic-informed and inspired
by research but expressed or embodied in physical form, either in a
work of art and/or in performance; its best expression is experiential,
social, physical and immediate. The exercises we do and the art we
make change from semester to semester, but the themes, the questions
and their progression have remained basically the same.
Identity: Who Am I?
We begin our exploration together with exercises focused on the subject
of identity. Children of immigrants "forge complex and multiply
determined identities that resist easy generalizations." (Suarez-Orozcosl)
They must shift among several identities, from that of their specific
country of origin to what it means to be "American," moving from the
Reflections.
121
Many aspects of the immigrant
experience have a negative impact
on identity formation in these
children: ethnic stereotyping,
bicultural stress, social
marginalization (Smirez-Orozcos
66-123, Stavans 1-30, Shorris
146-171, Portes and Rumbaut
147-191) and what the SuarezOrozcos term "social mirroring," the
(predominantly hostile and negative)
reflections mirrored back to the
children of immigrants by others in
their social spheres:
We begin our
initial session
together mindful
of these issues.
We start with
name games
followed by fiveminute "Me"
performances
presented for
the children by
the Emerson
students. We pass
out boxes full of art supplies, each with a child's name on it. We draw
nametags and then create working groups, each with a mix of children
and Emerson students; each group then chooses their own team name
and identity.
W.E.B. DuBois beautifully articulated this challenge of what he
termed 'double-consciousness' - a 'sense of always looking at
one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in ... contempt and pity ....
Philosopher Charles Taylor notes [Multiculturalism: Examining
the Politics ofRecognition (1994)]: 'A person or group of people
can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society
around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning
or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or
misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression,
imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of
being.' When the expectations are of sloth, irresponsibility, low
intelligence, and even danger, the outcome can be discouragement.
When these reflections are received in a number of mirrors
including the media, the classroom, and the street, the outcome
can be psychological devastation. (99)
We then
proceed to
photograph
and interview
each other.
The simple
act of taking
photographs
communicates
a positive
"mirror," the
sense that we
see and wish
to be seen by each other, that we value what we see to the extent that
we wish to record, preserve and display images of each other. Taped
interviews from prepared questions about our respective families, food,
gender, racial and class identifications of one culture to another, from
one language to another. (Zentella 321)
Ret1ections •
123
music, holidays, rituals and traditions further communicate the desire
to listen, the need to be heard and the value of our respective "voices"
and experiences.
In the next session we all fill out questionnaires, citing our favorite
activities, song lyrics and clothing. We then use these questionnaires to
"act out" each other; each of these performances ends with the question
"Who am I?" The whole group guesses until they guess correctly the
identity of the person who filled out the initial questionnaire. We then
draw and paint "Who Am I?"
In the third session on identity we talk about and draw pictures that
describe our social interactions in our neighborhoods, schools and on the
street. These conversations inevitably lead to depictions of the cultural
stresses and negative kinds of social mirroring the Suarez-Orozcos and
others define, which, in turn, become the subjects of our art.
To Be Visible: Do You See Me?
Many children of
immigrants feel invisible.
The fact that a vast
multiplicity of nationalities
and ethnicities, unknown
and unseen by "the other,"
is lumped together under
the headings of "Latino" or
"Hispanic," terms that are
themselves misunderstood
and misused by most
Americans, confirms this
sense of not being seen or
known. (Sanchez 45-57,
Zentella 321-334, Portes
RcnCcliOJl.,.124
=::.: ~=~:~I'
Jl-Itll. IF.II
=
.. mP R511'
Retlections • 125
and Rumbaut 1-19) The relative paucity of working class Latinos
in the media, on network television, in movies and advertisements
underscores the sensation of somehow being here but not being here.
Subtle behavior, such as a listener's moving away after hearing Spanish
or the first sounds of accented speech or the inability of "the other"
to pronounce one's name, further isolate the child and contribute to a
feeling of loneliness and invisibility. As we work, our goal is to learn
about and celebrate each other's individuality, ethnicity and culture. We
invariably learn a little Spanish from the children who wish to teach us
and we focus on seeing and listening intently to each child.
The Real Journey: Where Did I Come From? How Did I Get Here?
-
....- ....-
There are as many stories
of migration as there are
immigrants. In her premier
immigrant biography
chronicling her family's
migration from Russia
to Boston in the 1890s,
Mary Antin wrote, "I wish
I knew some other way
to render the mental life
of the immigrant child of
reasoning age .... What the child thinks and feels is a reflection of the
hopes, desires, and purposes of the parents who brought him overseas,
no matter how precocious and independent the child may be." (198) We
render this "mental life" in pictures. Many of the children we work with
were born here and have no experience or memory of their families'
journeys. We ask them to ask their parents how they got here and why,
what mode of transportation they took, what routes they traveled and
whom they met along the way. Then we "map" their trips.
RcncctiOll, • 126
'
The Imaginary Journey: I've Never Been to the Place
I Come From. What Is It Like?
"Ethnic identity is, in
part, a way of answering
the question, 'Where do I
come from?" (Portes and
Rumbaut 161) Mapping
the "Real Journey"
becomes our entree into
imagining a homeland that
most of the children have
never seen; if they have
visited the country of their
ancestors, they have done
so as small children, and
then only for the length
of a school vacation or
holiday. We travel to
their homelands in our imaginations, asking the following questions:
What country are you from? What does this country look like? What
is the landscape? What are the colors of this country? Are you in the
mountains? Near the sea? A river? In the desert? In the city? What
do you smell? What do you taste? What is the food like? What does
it sound like? What language are the people speaking? What phrases
do you hear? What animals are there? Birds? Is it hot there? Cold?
Crowded? Isolated? We then paint a picture of this place. We travel to
and from that place.
The act of imagining an unknown place is central to the immigrant
experience. Earl Shorris writes, "Before a person can become an
emigrant, he must first become expert in the study of his own condition,
for emigration is made of despair and dreams, despair over life at home
and dreams of life in another place. These dreams of emigrants are of
Ret1ections. 127
connection to their
parents' homeland,
but it is a bond
forged by my
experiences rather
than their own. For
my children Cuba is
an enduring, perhaps
an endearing,
fiction. Cuba is for
them as ethereal
as the smoke and
as persistent as
the smell from
their grandfather's
cigars." (7)
The Community of Memory; What Do We All Remember?
What Do We Carry With Us?
times and places so distant that they pass through abstraction to become
real again, as do fairy tales or visions of gold." (131) The children
of immigrants also dream of "life in another place," but that place is
often their homeland, no less imbued with magic than their parents'
and grandparents' dreams of the United States. The Cuban-American
poet Gustavo Perez-Firmat notes, "My children, who were born in this
country of Cuban parents and in whom I have tried to inculcate some sort
of cubania, are American through and through. They can be 'saved' from
their Americanness no more than my parents can be 'saved' from their
Cubanness ... Like other second-generation immigrants, they maintain a
Reflection, • 128
In Habits of the Heart the sociologist Robert Bellah defines
"community" as "a group of people who are socially interdependent
and who share certain practices that both define the community and are
nurtured by it. It always has a history and so is also a community of
memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of its past." (333)
We work with our "community of memory" when we explore where
we came from, why we emigrated and what happened to us on our
journeys. In his memoir Places Left Urifinished at the Time of Creation
the Mexican-American filmmaker and writer John Phillip Santos
recalled, "I wanted to bind Texas and Mexico together lik~ a raft strong
enough to float out onto the ocean of time, with our past trailing in the
wake behind us like a comet trail of memories." (5)
Renections • 129
The residents of Villa Victoria are themselves a community, defined in
part by the commonality of their experiences as immigrants, by shared
ethnic roots and cultural practices, by the unique history of the Villa
itself and by the present-day programs and celebrations that bring their
community together; with its five-year history, "Moving OutlMoving
In" is now a part of the Villa's community of memory.
Building on our work with "real" and "imaginary" journeys, we explore
our community of memory by making "containers of memories" from
suitcases that serve as the repositories of our experiences, desires,
hopes and dreams; they are also metaphors for what we carry with us
when we "move," what gives us the courage, strength and inspiration
to change and grow, to create our authentic selves in a new world. We
work with objects to stimulate our individual memories and then place
these objects in our group's suitcase, which takes on new meaning as an
expression of the group's "community of memory."
Exercise: The Container of Memories
• Each group chooses a suitcase to hold their memories.
• Everyone in the group chooses an object (from a bag of objects
provided by the Instructor) for which he/she has an affinity or a
connection.
• With ONE Emerson student in the group acting as "Scribe,"
ANOTHER asks each member of the group WHAT the object provokes
them to remember and WHY the object evokes this memory. Is it
the color, shape, form or significance of the object that causes you to
recall something? Or some other quality of the object? When it is the
next person's turn to describe his/her object, A DIFFERENT Emerson
student in the group takes on the role of "Scribe" and writes down what
he/she says. We continue in this fashion, passing the responsibility of
Scribe among all of the Emerson students in the group.
Reflections.
131
• After each member of the group
has talked about his/her object(s)
and memories, we work together
to place the objects in the suitcase
or fasten the objects to the suitcase
in a way that the group agrees
communicates their collective
sense of the relationship among
these objects. We then make
individual drawings and paintings,
choose and write down fragments
of text from our interviews, cut
images from magazines, etc.,
that communicate more of our
individual memories or indicate
]kflcl'ti(lIl." • 132
what we carry with us as we move. We then place or attach these
elements in/to the suitcase, making the "container" an art object.
• We then leave our suitcase and "travel" to see each of our neighbor's
suitcases. We talk with each other about what we see. Each group then
talks about what they've made.
The Map of Experience: What Do We Know From
Where We've Been?
In her astonishing memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New
Language, the Polish-American writer Eva Hoffman offers a passionate
argument against the notion of a universal reality: "There's a world out
there; there are worlds. There are shapes of sensibility incommensurate
with each other, topographies of experience one cannot guess from
within one's own limited experience." (204) Similarly, Carola and
Retlections • 133
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco ask, "What do we really know about what it is
like to be a child in a new country?" (66)
In a very real sense, our work together in "Moving Out/Moving In"
provides us with the opportunity to map what we know about the
immigrant experience using visual art as a kind of poetic cartography.
At the end of the course we share our "maps,"-the projects we've
made- with members of our collective communities in a public
exhibition/performance. Over the years we have presented exhibitions
in the Gallery at the Center for Latino Arts/ Casa de La Cultura at
Villa Victoria and performed in the Semel Theatre/Tufte Center for the
Performing Arts at Emerson College. Our experience together is further
"mapped" on the "Moving Out/Moving In" website, where Emerson
students share what they have come to understand about themselves
and "the other" through their collaboration with the Cacique children:
Rc n ccti OllS
•
134
Retlections • 135
Not only did I learn from the children and our interaction with
them, but also from the experiences and insights of my peers.
The semester proved incredibly invaluable, widening my scope
of experience, opening my eyes to the viewpoints of others, and,
primarily, forcing me to reconsider my own attitudes towards
where I came from. (Modrall)
While I was writing this research paper I came upon a definition
of the word 'Hispanic': 'Hispanic' is an English word meaning
'pertaining to ancient Spain'. This means that even I can be
considered Latino because all of my ancestors were Spaniard
colonizers that had mestizo children with native indios. You can
even hear it in my name: Maria Paz Manansala Alegre. I am the
third Maria Paz Manansala; it's a family name and the first Maria
Paz Manansala was 3/4 Spanish. I never once thought of it like
that before, and that changes everything. This is no longer a plight
of peoples that I have read about, but a plight of my people and
my heritage .... This course affected me so much. I can relate so
much to the children because I too am a first generation immigrant.
I was born in the Philippines but raised since in the United States.
In watching the kids I recognize my own personal struggle with
my identity as well .... It's a tough road these kids travel. I know,
because I'm a traveler, too. It's funny. I never thought of myself as
one, but because of my life and present, I see that I am a Latina,
too. (Alegre)
~
....
This semester in class has stretched me in such an emotional way
that I'm not even sure I can articulate what I feel about what I
learned .... Getting to know people for who they are, and not
for what they aren't is what I gathered from all of this. In leaving
this class I am leaving behind my ethnocentrism. I've learned
that part of being who I am, a part of my identity, is identifying
characteristics in others that elevate my mind, that take me to
places that I, under regular circumstances, wouldn't go ....
Rcflccti(1ll\ • 136
Retlections •
137
This is me moving out of some of my insecurities, and realizing
that I am moving into a better me who is more equipped to
recognize myself as I fit into my own niche in this changing
society called 'America.' (Saunders)
We are the creatures who pause to look, who remember to look,
who glance over the shoulder, who foresee, who gaze and peer and
stare and wink and blink, and develop various views, who have
an overall viewpoint, who behold this life in various ways--our
visionary life as it begins with a child's wandering, wondering
eyes, unfolds in a child's dreaming life, talking life, picture-making
life, and persists until the eyes close for the last time. (Coles 57)
Works Cited
Alegre, Maria. "Moving Out, Moving In.'' 10 Jan. 2009:
<http://institute.emerson.edulmovingoutmovinginly/maria_ alegre/
index.php>
Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Houghton Mifflin, 1912.
Bellah, Robert. Habits of the Heart. University of California Press, 1985.
Beuys, Joseph. Joseph Beuys Multiples. Walker Art Center. 8 Jan.
2009: <http://www. walkerart.orglarchive/O/
9E43A9C48839AFC46164.htm>
Coles, Robert. Their Eyes Meeting the World. Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
Eisner, Elliott. Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries.
Proceedings from an invitational meeting for education, arts and
youth funders held January 12-14,2000, Los Angeles, CA. 29 Dec.
2008: <http://www.artstarts.comlpdflcrossbound.pdf>
Emerson College Undergraduate Catalogue, 20 Nov. 2008:
http://www.emerson.eduiacademics/uploadl08-09_ U GCatalog. pdf
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. Penguin,
1990.
IBA Website. 20 Nov. 2008: <http://www.iba-etc.org/>
Modrall, Jessica. "Moving Out, Moving In.'' 10 Jan. 2009: <http://
institute.emerson.edulmovingoutmovinginly/jessica_mondra1l6.php>
Perez-Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-Americ:an Way.
University of Texas Press, 1994.
Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Ruben G. Legacies: The Story ofthe
Immigrant Second Generation. University of California Press, 2001.
Rumbaut, Ruben G. and Portes, Alejandro. Ethnicities: Children of
Immigrants in America. University of California Press, 2001.
Sanchez, George. "'Y tU, que?' (Y2K)." Latinos. Ed. Marcelo M.
Suarez-Orozco and Mariela M Paez. University of California
Press, 2002.
Santos, John Phillip. Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation.
Penguin, 2000.
Saunders, Shirmeika. "Moving Out, Moving In.'' 10 Jan. 2009: <http://
institute.emerson.edulmovingoutmovinginly/shirmeika_ saunders/
index.php>
Shorris, Earl. Latinos: A Biography of the People. Norton, 2001.
Small, Mario Luis. "Culture, Cohorts, and Social Organization Theory:
Understanding Local Participation in a Latino Housing Project."
American Journal of Sociology 108.1 (July 2002): 1-54.
Stavans, Ilan. The Hispanic Condition. Harper, 2001.
Suarez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo. Children ofImmigration. Harvard
University Press, 2001.
Tocci, Mirta. Moving Out/Moving In. Course Syllabus. Fall 2004
Institute for the Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson
College, Boston MA. 10 Jan. 2009: <http://institute.emerson.edul
movingoutmovinginl>
Zentella, Ana Celia. "Latin@ Languages and Identities." Latinos. Ed.
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco and Mariela M Paez. University of
California Press, 2002.
Retlections. 139
Intercultural Dialogue and the Production of
a Rhetorical Borderland: Service-Learning in a
Multicultural and Multilingual Context
.'2/
Dominic Micer, David Hitchcock, Anne Statham,
University of Southern Indiana
This paper reports the process and outcomes of a
multidisciplinary service-learning project in a major
metropolitan area in southwes~ern Indiana that focuses on
determining, then meeting, the needs of our growing Latino/a
population. We discuss three service-learning courses involved
with this project - one completed, one in progress, and one
being planned. Deploying a theoretical apparatus emerging
from sociology and intercultural rhetorical theory, we discuss
our students' interaction with this rhetorical borderland and
the processes of becoming and hybrid thinking that occurred
in the process.
I. Background and Participants
t is often pointed out by many that service-learning emerged from
past traditions of Deweyan democratic education, '60s-based
courses as happenings, Jerome Bruner's experiential learning,
and the long tradition of critical pedagogy developed from the work
of Paulo Friere and others. While this past clearly undergirds our
understanding of service-learning, and we find ourselves harmonizing
with its democratic and critical impulses, we also recognize the need
RcfL.'ctinn" • 140
to push the underlying theory to its extremes in order to open it up
to explain new combinations of experiences that emerge from our
ever-evolving pluralistic public sphere. As Linda Flower points out,
service-learning strategies have taught many to "speak up" and "speak
against," "but they do not teach us how to 'speak with' or 'speak for'
our commitments in a nonfoundationaI way" (2). Thomas Deans also
points out that these rich critical traditions take us only so far, so could
afford to be supplemented by having students "write themselves into
the world" in order to "intervene materially into contexts beyond the
academy" (8). Our goal in this paper is to dramatize our attempt to
create "a rhetorical space that can support trans formative relationships"
(Flower 2) through exploring our area's interaction with its growing
Latino/a population. We wanted to think through a process of aiding
the newly arrived Latino/a population that would ease the problems
that form around such culture clashes. In the process, we develop an
understanding of this growing relationship as a rhetorical borderland
in which fixed identities are challenged by mapping the figures, voices,
and concerns of the borderland through an intercultural dialogue
creating a sense of belonging "with." In addition, we highlight-with
varying degrees of success-a process of becoming developed from
critical reading and writing strategies along and about the rhetorical
borderland that are productive of hybrid modes of understanding
"with." While we continue to examine and reflect on the process of our
projects, it is important to recognize they are still ongoing and we are
still learning from their application.
On the way to developing these projects each of us experienced
issues within our disciplines related to such applied work. The unique
appeal to Hitchcock resided in the project's potential to network with
participants who were primarily non-academics but who shared his
belief in the need for "active citizenship." One of the challenges he has
faced over the years is formulating a coherent response to the social
imperatives inherent in being a Spanish expert in higher education. Part
of the problem lies in adapting his own set of critical skills, acquired
Ret1ections •
141
in a framework founded on the notion of theoretical distance from
one's subject matter, to the multicultural reality of the communities in
which he has lived. A specialist in the contemporary drama of Spain,
Hitchcock was trained in the early '90s primarily to analyze literary
works with a level of objectivity that occasionally seemed to render
secondary the problems of real human beings. While the lower- and
intermediate-level language courses he instructed as a teaching assistant
often centered on cultural issues, the notion of outreach through
service-learning was simply unheard of. Yet in all three regions in
which he has taught-the Southeast, New England, and the Midwestdemographic changes that translate to an increased Latino presence
have forced him to discover concrete ways to reach out and assist the
Spanish-speaking population to help them find more fulfilling lives, and
to intervene into existing community structures that display varying
degrees of acceptance to newly arrived immigrants. By necessity
evolving into a generalist in Spanish who could always expect to teach
a proportionate number of classes in language, culture, and literature at
primarily teaching-centered institutions, Hitchcock came to understand
as inevitable but also personally satisfying the acceptance of a high
level of community engagement he would never have foreseen in a
theory-oriented graduate program.
Statham also faced some pressures away from such considerations. She
had entered graduate school in Sociology in the early 1970s, having
been involved in the anti-war, civil rights, women's and environmental
movements. However, she soon became engrossed in simply surviving
in a very quantitative program, and found it difficult to "model" the
sorts of processes and issues she was truly interested in. At her first job,
she found colleagues to work with who were using a more qualitative,
critical approach, and soon began to adopt this framework, which she
brought with her to a smaller, comprehensive institution and began to
focus on more applied, local concerns - researching the closing of an
auto plant, tracking women caught in new welfare policies, exploring
reasons for dropping out of high school. Her evolution was helped
along by several leadership roles in Women's Studies programs, which
allowed her to see things from a more interdisciplinary perspective
and also to realize the power of applying one's expertise - involving
students - in addressing serious societal concerns.
For Micer, the rhetorical disciplines-Composition and Rhetoric,
Technical Writing, or Rhetorical Theory-have provided a space for
implementing service-learning, as these disciplines have begun to
advocate putting the content of courses-rhetorical and discursive
structures and styles as ways of knowing and being-into action in
service environments. In a technical writing course he taught, students
created a user-manual for a Portable Vacuum-Action Cleaning System
for a local company. While once uncommon, these writing assignments
are becoming far more common as rhetorical classrooms tum more and
more to the community to engage their students in learning that is deep,
meaningful, and real. While still suspect by many in terms of traditional
scholarship, the rhetorical disciplines have, for the most part, accepted
service-learning in ways that many other traditional disciplines have
not because theory meets practice in very clear ways.
II. Our Model for a Needs Assessment and Intercultural Dialogue
As we have come together to pursue the issue of the integration of our
growing Latino/a community, we have turned to the service-learning
literature. Our collective hope was to determine the unmet needs in
this community, and provide some solutions or encourage others to
work to meet the needs we identified. Each of us became motivated to
participate by a concern that this immigrant population be adequately
heard and understood in our commimity, and as a result, able to live
here more comfortably.
At its core, this project poses the following problems: How can a
service-learning initiative help create a public forum that invites not
only differing discourses to the table, but also distinct languages?
Retlections • 143
In the study described below, we examine the process of designing
such a forum dynamically, through a partnership that has grown and
reconfigured itself over time in response both to new opportunities and
to consistently newer and newer understandings. We are troubled by
the following material concerns: what forms would such a multi-lingual
intercultural discourse take? What does it produce in terms of students'
engagement, as well as our own? And most of all, what may it produce
in terms of concrete plans for public documents that, like the forum
itself, represent and serve a multilingual civic discourse that attempts
to be inclusive and for the use of both the mainstream and minority
groups?-in this case a growing and heterogeneous Latino/a population
relatively new to the area surrounding our university, a regional
comprehensive university in the southwestern comer of Indiana.
Part of the problematic we are exploring develops from what Elenore
Long, in Community Literacy and the Rhetoric ofLocal Publics,
refers to as "a whole set of nested alternatives" that emerge whenever
members of the university engage with the local community for
purposes of activist projects. For Long, these alternatives take the form
of the following questions:
Do community-university partners do best to prioritize an evergrowing network of relationships in the faith that they will mobilize
in response to exigencies that arise in the future? ... Or should we
... focus on circulating [a conversation] broader, more inclusive
attitudes toward literacies-what literacy means and how it is
practiced? Or should partners focus on pooling rhetorical expertise
to support community-based agencies that, in tum, sponsor local
publics? That is, is the problem of sustainability primarily an
institutional concern for material resources, institutional interests,
and social capital ... ? If this is the case, we would do well to
prioritize processes of research, methods, and outcomes. Or is the
top priority rhetorical engagement on pressing social issues? If
this is the case, what kinds of rhetorical interventions are up to the
Reflection" •
144
challenge of helping everyday people bridge the cultural differences
that otherwise threaten to keep us apart ... ? (134)
While our initial projects did not begin as a direct response to these
concerns, we have come to understand our projects as emerging from
this broad domain. The point is, for Long as well as ourselves, to
explore how we create a sustainable relationship between the emerging
local Latino/a public, our university, and the broader public at large. We
have opted for a patient, long-term approach, and as we move ahead,
we find ourselves alternatively emphasizing our own "processes of
research, methods, and outcomes" and also "rhetorical engagement
on pressing social issues" that "help ... everyday people bridge the
cultural differences that otherwise threaten to keep us apart."
We believe that one way to manage these ever-changing and somewhat
competing demands is through mapping the rhetorical borderland
in which the rhetorical and discursive practices of the university,
Latinos (both newly arrived and those previously established), and
Evansville's other ethnic and racial communities are rethought to
help the differing communities bridge their differences. At the core of
rhetorical borderland understanding, then, is an ontopolitical (Connolly
1-40) approach which recognizes that the transformative potential
of thought also has an effect on how we live (exist) in the world: to
think differently is to exist differently. This idea is also guided by the
political matrix that defines contemporary rhetoric. As Luming Mao, in
his Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American
Rhetoric, defines it, rhetoric
... represents the systematic, organized use and study of discourse
and discourse strategies in interpersonal, intercultural contexts,
reflecting and reinforcing rhetoricians own ideology, their own
norms of discourse production and discourse consumption, and
their ability to persuade, adjust, and realign. (13)
Reflections. 145
It is the very contingent and partial nature of rhetoric that requires
us to understand it from multiple perspectives, thus entering
into conversations with differing kinds of rhetoric: all rhetoric is
interpersonal and intercultural but is always already caught up in its
own discursive modes of thinking and being. To rethink rhetorical
understanding requires negotiation with differing models of rhetoric.
When Mao charts the emergence of a hybrid Chinese-American
rhetoric that develops from the interaction of contemporary EuropeanAmerican rhetoric and Chinese rhetoric, he identifies how the
encounter changes the very subjectivity of the agents involved. In this
encounter the subjects become identified not by their difference, but
by their "togetherness-in-difference" which is not to be understood as
a final state of success (a goal to be achieved), but the beginning point
of how diverse subjects can begin the process of transforming their
understandings and their interactions.
Mao further builds the notion of a rhetorical borderland from the
combined work of Gloria Anzaldua, Henry Giroux, Mary Louise Pratt
and others. For Mao, ''becoming'' and "togetherness-in-difference"
are concepts that are part of the "borderland" metaphor. A rhetorical
borderland is more than a metaphorical space, however, it is also a
physical space where, in Anzaldua's words, "two or more cultures
edge each other" and, in Giroux's words, "a space [is] 'crisscrossed
with a variety of languages experiences and voices'" (quoted in Mao
20). For our purposes, the response to the problem of engagement
derived from our concern that the local Latino/a population be
adequately heard and understood in our community and has taken
the form of documenting, mapping, and overseeing the rhetorical
borderland as it develops and changes in our corner of the Midwest.
However, it is important to note that while we see rhetorical
borderlands interact every day, they have a tendency to affect mostly
those groups outside of dominant culture. Part of any project designed
to intervene into rhetorical borderland issues is to make visible to the
dominant culture the sometime invisible borderland.
Rcf1cctinn;., • 146
This project did not begin as a service-learning project; rather it began
as a simple attempt to engage with the wider community surrounding
USI. Hitchcock, a faculty member in Spanish, had participated in a
Lilly-endowed program called Connect with Southern Indiana (CSI)
aiming "to boost Indiana's retention of intellectual capital." CSI
became the proving ground for the genesis of this project. Hitchcock,
with partners from education and the private sector, including the
co-publisher of one of the area's few Spanish-language newspapers,
sought to create a project aimed at aiding the Spanish-speaking public,
but would not do so without carefully eliciting the perspectives of that
population group. They developed a Regional Hispanic Community
Survey, presented at the formal conclusion of the CSI group's endeavor
in June, 2007, with three objectives: 1) to understand the characteristics
of the local Hispanic community, 2) to define the needs of Hispanics,
and 3) to determine the true population numbers. The team's long-term
goal was "to see the Latino community integrated into mainstream
society, actively involved in all aspects of community life" in a way
allowing it to "interact and contribute in a meaningful way while
preserving important -aspects of culture and traditions." They struggled
as a result of the need for a process in which the assessment of the
gathered survey data would reflect multiple points of view, address
the validity of prior assumptions, and rigorously go about defining
"integration," a slippery signifier if ever there has been one. They
emphasized providing connections so needs could be met, while
supporting the community in keeping its culture intact and projecting
its cultural coherence to the non-Latino community. This is one
clear way the rhetorical borderlands often remain invisible: the very
discourse the community uses to enable minority communites often
reconstitutes them as identity types.
CSI team members found it difficult to implement their plan in part
due to the constraints imposed by conflicting professional schedules,
in another due to their simple lack of experience in conducting such
research. Hitchcock's discipline of modem languages clearly afforded
Reflections.
147
him access to more advanced students of Spanish who, through their
considerable proficiency in the language, could aid him directly in
surveying heritage speakers and, as he imagined it, translate questions
and answers from the survey. Nonetheless, a coherent assessment
of the intercultural dialogue that would be taking place called for an
integrative approach that was facilitated with the addition of Statham
to the USI faculty in 2007 as Professor of Sociology and Director
of Service-Learning. Given her experience with conducting needs
assessments of Latino populations, Statham recognized the possibility
she and her field might offer in seeing the project through to fruition
by implementing it in her "Human Interaction" course. This capstone
course for 15 undergraduates and 5 master's degree students seemed an
apt vehicle for interdisciplinary cooperation. Statham suggested a focus
group as opposed to a survey approach, and applying methodology that
would allow us to hear the actual voices and perspectives of those in
the local community.
The students in this course did a qualitative, focus group study in and
around the local Latino community, using a Symbolic Interaction
approach set forth in the course text (O'Brien). The text focused on
the process of identity acquisition and maintenance through ongoing
interaction, often discussing the position of marginalized groups in
society, raising points that were then applied to the issues faced by
the Latino/a community being studied. The Symbolic Interaction
perspective under-girds much qualitative work in the field of Sociology,
in a way that often sees itself in opposition to more mainstream
quantitative work. A combination of ethnographic approaches (field
observations, structured depth interviews, key informant interviews,
focus groups) are used to produce narratives that reflect the actual
lived experiences of often marginalized groups (Strauss and Corbin,
Lincoln and Guba), providing an avenue for those voices to be heard.
The epistemological notions underlying this approach take "truth" as
perspectival and often focus on the plight of oppressed groups.
RCf1l'Ct ion;.. • 148
Using this approach with students can be a powerful experience. Once
students sort through the influx of information and learn how to analyze
the data, their confidence grows and they begin to reflect on what they
are learning. With this project, and an earlier project of depth interviews
with welfare recipients, students wrote about their prior assumptions
about the group being studied. Sometimes these beliefs were based on
previous experience; for example, one student working on this project
with the Latino community wrote that he had had a traffic accident
involving a Latino man who had no insurance. The student reported
that he came away with extremely negative feelings toward the entire
group. As the semester ended, he reflected that his impression of the
community had changed, that he now had more understanding about
the varied experiences of the entire Latino/a community.
Students analyzing the depth interviews with welfare recipients
reported a similar trajectory; they had assumed the individuals
involved were lazy and just did not want to work, but they now
understand the various ways they had come to be poor and so came
to believe that most of the poor were working very hard to improve
their situation and were often victims of things beyond their control.
These changed perspectives seem possible without direct contact
between students and the group in question, as both groups above
were analyzing qualitative data others had collected. The power of
the personal narratives the students were reading, looked at in the
detail required by the content analysis, constant comparison method
(Glaser and Strauss) both classes employed, were the central force
in this transformation. Learning may be enhanced as students are
given the space to work through their reactions and reflections. Actual
interactions do not always allow for this consideration, especially if
the interactions are tumultuous, and may actually engender resistance.
This is not to say that interpersonal interaction is irrelevant or
unnecessary in producing meaningful and lasting change, just that
this methodology of engaging students in the process of qualitative
research can be transformational. In terms of the model we are using
Ref1ections • 149
here, these kinds of narratives help students to understand how they
are existing at the juncture of a rhetorical borderland which requires
them to, at the very least, rethink: the dominant structures of meaning
and rhetorical scripts as the only versions of how to understand these
cultural interactions. Once we began to involve our students, we
began to see change as emanating from several levels: the change
in the community suggested by our work and then acted upon by
us or others, but also the change that occurred in our students, as
they began to see things in a different ways, as they gained more
information and perspective. It is our belief that many of the negative
feelings currently aimed at this population arise largely from lack of
understanding and awareness, as illustrated by some of our students'
prior attitudes and beliefs.
Within this framework, the Hispanic Needs Assessment represents
what Linda Flower would call a Community Problem-Solving
Dialogue (CPSD): "A CPSD tries to bring the voices of Academic
Discourse, along with those voices described by that discourse, to
the table" (Flower 105). The CPSD builds understanding through
collective inquiry into the issues surrounding a community. The
definition and production of community as well as awareness of
the means by which a community establishes itself and adds to its
own understanding is significant here. To communicate across these
boundaries requires intercultural and interlingual awareness. Creating
a CPSD requires the building of a kind of intercultural communicative
competence by which a discursive agent could reduce error by
increasing its knowledge about a culture and eliminating the cultural
stereotypes that frame initial understandings-precisely the kind of
development that happened to Professor Statham's students in their
analyses of personal narratives. This has long been the generative
model in intercultural communication, as represented by a host of
theorists working on what they call the dimensions of culture. For
example, Geert Hofstede has created series of indexes based on five
dimensions that impact culture: Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance,
R~nccti(1ns.
150
Power Distance, Masculinity, and Long-Tenn Orientation. For
Hofstede, the value of these indices is relational and not essential.
That is to say, if a certain culture has a High Masculinity index, which
indicates the tendency for aggressive behavior, then that behavior is
only relationally valid in interaction with other cultures. Hofstede is
not claiming these traits are essentially embodied in the being of each
individual member of that culture.
According to these cultural-dimension-based thinkers, someone can
develop communicative competence by learning these behavioral
traits and using them to seem more like an insider. However, critics
challenge models like Hofstede's because they "lack depth in
describing cultural mindsets used in daily activities, and ignore the
institutional molding of these mindsets" (Gannon 236). Thus the
dimensional approach needs broadening in order to maintain the goal
of dealing with the Latino community in tenns that respects its cultural
identity. Moreover, intercultural researchers challenge competence
as a teaching model. Michel Candelier of the European Center
for Modem Languages argues that because competence requires
idealized constructions outside of actual discursive production, its
teachability is questionable: "One can even wonder - and this speaks
in favour of the usefulness of producing a list of resources - whether
a 'competence' ... linked so closely with the diversity of situations
where it is used, can really be 'taught"'(18). Candelier goes further
and views competences mainly in the domain of social usage I needs,
while resources seem rather to belong to the domain of cognitive (and
developmental psychology). As a result, while competences come
into play when one engages with a task, resources can be defined
detenninately and worked on practically in the classroom thereby
"contributing to the development of competences via the resources that
are activated" (18). Our collective goal is to find and use the resources
that can trigger the kind of rethinking necessary for our students to
develop competences within themselves and their communities.
Reflections.
151
III. The Courses and Projects
The outcomes of our course projects demonstrate the ways that servicelearning can ensure that immigrants' political concerns are considered
in the classroom, especially highlighting their need for access to
resources and issues pertaining to stereotyping that often create a "fear
of the other." But the needs assessment conducted by the first course
(Statham's) is also the beginning point for the understanding of the
relationships between communities as a rhetorical b~rderland not just
as a site for multicultural interaction, but also for the mapping and
development of an understanding of rhetorical resources for negotiation
of meaning in communities.
Statham's class organized and conducted 11 focus groups during
February and March of 2008, intending that the information would
be used by organizations attempting to meet the needs of our growing
Latino/a population. The focus groups included Latinos with a range
of educational levels and 'occupational experiences, as well as Anglos
who could shed light on the larger community's perceptions. Six of the
groups were conducted by Statham, her students, and other community
volunteers in English, five in Spanish by Hitchcock, a student, and a
heritage speaker on the faculty of another area university. Sites for the
groups included four English as Second Language classes for adults,
two groups of primarily professional people (Latino/a and Anglo)
attempting to assist this population, one Latino/a professional society,
one group of Spanish-speaking employees for a local company (white
and blue collar workers), and three groups of Anglos (one a student
group, another a group of adults in a small neighboring town, and
a third group of professionals offering health services to the local
community). Because the groups themselves were fairly homogeneous
(often the strategy with focus groups), we did not witness much of the
code-switching ,or intercultural interplay that is often encountered in
bilingual groups. All of these conversations were carefully transcribed
by a professional transcriber or a Spanish-speaking student. The
J<cllcctinn:-; •
152
absence of linguistic shifts may be attributed to two factors: the
presence of a facilitator completely fluent in Spanish at all of the
Spanish-language sessions and the careful transmission in Spanish of
the ground rules for the sessions. Following human subjects protocol,
participants were promised confidentiality, instructed not to use their
full names and asked to give consent orally on tape, rather than signing
consent forms. The settings where the groups met included a public
library, churches, and a factory-"natural" contexts, in other words,
in which the respondents regularly worked and met for a variety of
purposes, ranging from social to educational to spiritual. In many
cases, the focus group was held at a regularly scheduled gathering
time. In others, the conductors traveled to places of employment for
special meetings. While the quotes from the focus groups given below
represent points that most in our sample seemed to agree with, we
identify the type of group for further clarification.
The students in the class were trained to analyze qualitative data using a
content analysis approach (Glaser and Strauss). Themes which emerged
from repeated readings by several individuals were then further examined
for finer details. Several themes emerged that seemed to account for the
data as a whole. First, the data suggest that the city's Latino/a population
perceives this community in Southern Indiana to be friendly, accessible
and peaceful, that it is, overall, a good place to raise a family. The
transcribed comments below from varied groups illustrate this point:
The people have acted very well, nice businesses; there is no
racism like in other regions of the United States. (3, English as a
second language group)
Raising a family ... it's a good place, even though when you hear a
lot about meth labs and problems with the students ... there's not
too much like that. I think it's a good place to raise a family. It's a
family place.... It's not like Atlanta ... here it's more ... calm.
(5, Latino/a Professional Association)
Ret1ections • 153
· . .it was very important for us to get any of the jobs that we got
here, so ... that was ... one of the things that I find very attractive
here, and of course along with that is ... the ... access to all the
resources and everything that we can have. (8, professional group,
Anglos and Latinos)
However, our respondents also reported that Latinos have encountered
significant problems with language barriers, stereotypes, and access to
services and medical treatment. Both Latinos and Anglos said there was
a problem with lack of cultural diversity:
The music lacks something here .... When I got here ... almost
no one listened to the music ... I missed the fresh fruit ... the huge
papayas ... (11, Spanish-speaking employees, white and blue collar)
There is quite a big gap and we, as Americans need to be educated
as to what their culture is. Once we are able to learn more about
the Hispanic, the further we can progress with our society. (6,
Anglo student group)
Focus group participants also reported problems gaining access to
basic services:
... Doctors, services, garages ... everything you need ... What is lacking
is for people to be aware ... lfI didn't come to mass, as I do ... We
should be able to find information, like you see sometimes available
in restaurants ... It's not reaching people, the information is not
getting out there ... (2, professional group, Anglos and Latino/as)
It was my monthly time to be examined and I was going to
hospitals and ... all the other hospitals ... were closed because of...
the weather. We went to three separate hospitals and they were all
closed. We went to one and they wouldn't attend to me. They asked
me if it was urgent ... (4, English as a second language group)
Refl ccti OilS. 154
Also there is no map, even though a great effort was made to get
one in Spanish, the little book with bus routes, but there is no map
that tells you everything about the regular routes, so that if I live in
this place ... 1 can take this one here and here I change ... there isn't
any that will tell you, this line covers such and such parts of the
city, I can use transportation from here, and then change, there just
isn't any. (1, English as a second language group)
A complaint about the lack of access to community information was
also consistently registered, insomuch as news items are always
delivered in English:
Latinos are seeking radio stations to have school closings in
Spanish and also on local news stations ... How many times do
people go out exposed to a danger because there isn't any way to
find out in Spanish what is happening, then you hear alarms on
television, but the majority of Hispanics don't know any English,
they don't have channels in Spanish, it's all in English, so they
don't find out about what is going on. If the local station doesn't. ..
start a Spanish language channel, well, maybe this isn't the
moment for an all-Spanish station, but now when there is a weather
alert or something, above all. (2, professional group, Anglos and
Latino/as)
However, the problem discussed more frequently involved
assumptions, stereotypes and harassment:
They were harassing in class and speaking very demeaning and
there were some Mexican students, legal and their parents work at
[SPECIFIC COMPANY]. They started getting phone calls at the
house in the middle of the night, th~y starting getting [harassed] by
other kids that were in the class and the teacher said ... "All those
little Mexicans." So that's happening here already. (8, professional
group, Anglos and Latino/as)
Ret1ections •
155
... some boys knew that I was the only Hispanic in that building ...
kids from the university ... they were always doing something,
putting stuff on my car, and they knew 1 was Hispanic ... l don't
knew if they are really racist or if they simply didn't like Hispanics.
(11, Spanish-speaking employees, white and blue collar)
... right now the Hispanic population does not trust anyone, because
they're trying to feed their families, trying to not get caught ... not
get thrown in jaiL (2 ,professional group, Anglos and Latino/as)
... We who have to do the worst jobs, take up the worst stuff... often
they order us around rudely, and we don't think that is right,
because there is a lot of racism ...... on the part of the supervisors,
and it's rare to find a supervisor who's not that way at [SPECIFIC
COMPANY]. There are one or two that aren't racist like the rest ...
All the Americans are ... (11, Spanish-speaking employees, white
and blue collar)
My husband's from Bolivia and we found that a lot of people
just assume that he's from Mexico because he has an accent...
We've even had people say my sister-in-law speaks Mexican. (2,
professional group, Anglos and Latino/as)
1 have an accent, and as soon as I open my mouth, I'm asked,
'Where are you fromT And when I say Mexico, they don't seem
impressed, and I'm like, "Did you know that I have a master's
degree and probably more education than you do?" (2, professional
group, Anglos and Latino/as)
I have a coworker who stared at me and asked me, "How much
you charge me for mowing my lawn?" 1 told him, "1 charge about
$100." He said, "Oh, that's too much," I said, "How much do you
charge?" He said, "$50." "Okay, mow my lawn." He looked at me
and turned around and went away and after talking..,he realized
that 1 was an engineer and he was an electrician, then he apologizes
Ken ccti rills.
156
and I said, "Well, don't use the people for how they look." (5,
Latino/a professional association)
From our transcripts, the class derived this list of needs that were
emphasized in the focus groups:
1. Start a Spanish radio and television station, and do announcements
in Spanish;
2. Hire bilingual staff for schools, hospitals, clinics, etc.;
3. Offer easily accessible classes in English on a consistent basis;
4. Create Spanish-speaking or bilingual day care;
5. Offer education about different cultural groups to the community
at large;
6. Offer more help for parents trying to help their children with
homework;
7. Create a Latino Welcome Center for newcomers, include
temporary housing;
8. Create a total picture of METS routes in Spanish that shows the
entire city;
9. Offer small business training to members of this community;
10. Improve access to drivers' licenses and insurance;
11. Create a visa category for those with less education;
12. Establish a process for granting visas and extending stays
through consensus;
13. Put local resources into efforts to improve the situation. Do not
depend on volunteers.
Reflections. 157
As you will see, other service-learning classes have been able to pick
up on some of these issues, and other community groups are attending
to others. Statham and Hitchcock spent a good deal of time visiting
with groups to discuss how these needs could be met. The local paper
is now publishing a Spanish/English newspaper every other month.
A local bank is spearheading efforts to fund business training for the
small business owners in this group. Several community organizations
are looking into establishing bilingual day care situations. Several
groups are talking about collaborating to increase access to English
classes. The class produced a power point for presentation, and a
narrated version is now on our service-learning website, for anyone
in the community to access.
While some of the sentiments contained in the quotes were more or
less common among some of our subgroups - for example, the more
educated Latino/as were more likely to emphasize accessibility issues,
problems with being mistaken for lower status workers and knew more
about the resources in the community while less educated Latino/as
more often talked about difficulties finding English classes or jobs or
getting to work and stressed more often their image as hard workers,
and Anglos were less aware than Latino/as of all of these issues-there
was remarkable agreement across these groups on many of the issues
raised and the way the community was characterized. The comments
can be summarized as representing a candid, constructive, and
occasionally pointed critique of the community in which Latino/as
live and work.
These common threads of marginalization tying together the various
discourses encountered in the eleven focus groups indicates that
variations in socioeconomic background and English language
proficiency do not diminish the shared sense among Latino/a respondents
of the pervasiveneness of the simplistic Anglo reduction of the "other."
It also reveals a widespread perception among Latinos of the absence
of existing communicative vehicles capable of facilitating both the
Refl ceti (Ill:';
•
158
recognition and appreciation of the integrity and diversity within the
Latino/a community by many of those outside this group. Some of these
views appear to be shared by some Anglo groups, as well. Nevertheless,
the general attractiveness of the region, in offering Latino/as the
opportunity to build a new life in a historically safe and wholesome
environment, can be seen as instilling within the respondents the belief
that mobilization of the community and a coherent action plan merit a
significant effort to alter the cultural landscape. Such a conclusion is
certainly evident in the constructive suggestions for improvement that the
needs assessment document summarized. Hence, service-learning has the
potential to identify/uncover serious issues and, based on the response to
our presentations, motivate community players (including other servicelearning instructors) to respond to these needs. And the expression of
issues in narrative form has the potential to change the views of the
students doing the work, as well as those receiving the information.
Micer's class bu~lt upon this work. When he heard about the Hispanic
Needs Assessment developed by Professors Statham and Hitchcock,
it occurred to him that this might be a powerful way to engage his
students in thinking through an intercultural rhetorical problem. What
we found in the needs assessment was an opportunity to do a series
of projects that would benefit the Latino/a community on two levels:
reducing their burdens in belonging to a new community and increasing
the new community's understanding of their new neighbors. His
Intercultural Technical Writing (ITW) class began with the premise
that when a person writes and designs texts they are doing so for global
audiences which often have different rhetoric (s) for communicating.
On the one hand, a rhetoric-based technical writing course which starts
from this premise will take the understanding of diversity to be of
primary interest, and not an additional construct, thereby transforming
the study of diversity within business, scientific, and technical writing
fields. On the other hand, in its most practical terms, a course in the
rhetoric( s) of intercultural technical writing will prepare students
from a host of disciplines with the ability to discern, understand, and
Reflections. 159
use the codes, conventions, and stnictures of discourse of differing
cultures as resources for the development of strategies designed to
improve relations across rhetorical borderlands. Starting with the Needs
Assessment as a CPSD, the ITW class decided on three inquiry-based
projects: a translation of the Metropolitan Evansville Transit System's
(METS) bus route maps; a pamphlet that explains cultural differences
within as well as between Hispanic populations in the area; and a
brochure that outlines the types of identification needed to attain access
to necessary services of survival (school enrollment, driver's license,
health, rental, auto, homeowner's insurance, and so forth). In this way,
our project did begin with the political concerns of immigrants, and
continues to do so. For the purposes of space, we will present only the
METS map project.
The Hispanic Needs Assessment, as a CPSD, establishes more than
needs, providing for intercultural communicators the resources
by which competencies can be developed to construct rhetorical
hybrids-a Latin-American rhetoric of sorts. The job of the members
of each community is to identify these resources so they can see
how to translate them into rhetorical hybrids. Again, it is necessary
to see this as a kind of transformation of the self, what Mao calls
"becoming," in which a performative identity is constituted for the
performance of a competency. Without the direct material production
of a rhetorical borderland, such performative competencies are often
left undistinguished. The goal ofITW-while taking into account its
listed course outcomes-also developed the necessity of drawing the
attention to the very idea of an existing rhetorical borderland without
which any changes to the community's already existing practices would
seem to be wasteful expenditures of both and time and money.
The first objective of the class was to do the required research that
would allow us to generate a list of resources from which we could base
competence on specificity and not generalized cultural sensitivity, a
model that requires working through stereotypes and the gradual erasure
Ref! cet i 0]1\
•
160
of the stereotypes. Instead, for the class to focus on creating discursive
practices that would not interrupt the community's sense of culture, we
needed to understand specific discursive practices in their otherness as
members enact or perform them. The Needs Assessment functions in
high regard here, as do the narratives Statham's students analyzed. They
become an archive of "speech acts" in which members of the Latino/a
community, not particularly fearful of reprisal so perhaps more culturebound than other kinds of communication, complain, promise, construct,
explain, and question their world with words.
Using the work of intercultural technical communicators Thatcher,
Conoway and Wardrope, and Wardrope, the class identified the
following resources as rhetorical resources we should try to implement
in our documents: paianca, or leveraging-using someone with
power to communicate for you; simpatia, "agreeability in the face
of disagreeability" (Wardrope); respeto, an expectation that people
should be treated with dignity, reflected through appropriate nonverbal behavior; conjianza. or trustworthiness-preferring the trust
and confidence of established relationships and cultural insight over
credentials and outsiders; and personalismo, reference to the degree of
warmth ofa personal relationship. The value of these Latino/a concepts
as resources is determined to the extent that they construct a hybrid
rhetoric that is useful in our discursive dealings. At the beginning
of their project, the METS group hypothesized using respeto and
conjianza to create a bus riding experience that provides an immigrant
with a sense of belonging.
Immediately, however, the students ran into problems. The first
problem was based on a perceived weakness in the existing
informational infrastructure ofMETS itself. The students were unable
to find a specific way to "map" the rhetorical resources on to the new
map. The felt they didn't have enough information about what it might
mean to be Latino. Interestingly, their initial failures began to emulate
the "rhetoric of complaint and blame" that underscores the speechRet1ections • 161
acts of the Needs Assessment. According to Flower, the rhetoric of
complaint and blame "takes the form of a vigorous rehearsal of the
wrongs by others in a context they [the speakers] do not control"
("Intercultural Knowledge Building" 250). The students blamed the
Transit System itself for the problems involved with making the map
which arose out of a developing sympathy with local immigrantsbecause if students could not figure out how to deal with the existing
documents for the METS routes, how could non-native immigrants
be able to navigate it. While reading through the narratives triggered
an effective and productive response in Statham's students, for Micer
the reactions created a problematic that needed more community
interaction to resolve. Flower suggests the development of rival
hypotheses as a way to break out of the rhetoric of complaint and
blame. We now realize that a critical part of the process is to provide
students with the interpretive tools that will enable them to differentiate
their own values from the values of the community they are entering
into. This is an important prelude to preparing students for productive
rhetorical work in the community.
While the research is still ongoing, the METS group ultimately created
a feasibility study that challenged its initial mission. The group found
the very idea of a map-particularly of the kind we were thinking about
(an individualized map that could be folded and placed in pockets) to
be problematic because it is a particularly Western culture-bound idea
(cf. Ihde 73-102). In addition, they felt the rhetorical forms were not
emerging from the everyday experience of bus riding. While a concept
like confianza makes perfect sense in a document providing directions
on how to perform a particular attention-demanding task, riding a
bus should be a more comfortable experience. The students reasoned
that a map was overkill because consistent bus riders would only ever
need it once or twice before they figured out the route. They also cited
evidence from Thatcher and Wardrope about Latin American respect
for spoken word instructions over written instructions.
Micer tried a new strategy asking the students to think through
rhetorical style as a kind of bodily comportment in relation to the busriding environment (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 19-28). The students
responded with a working theory about how the bus itself could become
humanized-the bus should itself become the bearer of confianza,
respeto, and personalismo. The students created the following list of
transformations: first, a map of the entire METS system should be
created and placed on the inside of each bus, as with many metro transit
systems across the country; second, the bus routes should replace local
Evansville place name routes with routes identified by colors (colors
should include "typical" Latin American colors in dialogue with
''typical'' American colors) and letters or numbers (creating confianza);
third, all METS maps should show these changes and offer a translation
of all English directions in Spanish-to be constructed in the same font
type and size (offering respeto); fourth, METS buses should list in the
front window, beside or below the route color, number and letter, all
of the stops and transfer points the bus crosses instead of only the first
and last stop (this is common in many Latin American countries, again
creating confianza and personalismo ).
For the students, the lesson they learned, and what they taught Micer,
is that it is precisely the immersive context of the service-learning
enterprise with its contingencies and rhetorical borderland strife that
creates a successful rhetorical performance. While the response by
the students did not take the particular discursive hybrid form Micer
was hoping for (it's a lot easier to put a map in a Faculty Annual
Report than it is a bus), they constructed a new model of awareness,
of togetherness-in-difference, and rhetorically engaged an issue to
bridge cultural differences. As Mao puts it, it is extremely unlikely
some form of "rhetorical creole" (149) emerges from these types of
interaction. Because of this, we will likely have to keep re-visiting
these kinds of inquiry seeking resources to recognize and celebrate
the absolute otherness of these forms of acting in the world. These
resources, combined with the insights learned over the course of the
Reflections. 163
semester, not only helped to build competencies to understand how to
exist together in difference, but also become the ground on which to
build other courses and continue work on some of these projects.
Hitchcock's Spanish for Business class, still in the planning stage,
attempts to build on the ground that Statham's and Micer's classes
helped to create. In most college programs such courses have been
devoted historically to instructing students in the lexicon of forms and
documents typically encountered in international trade. These types
of courses do not however necessarily afford students opportunities
for direct contact with companies engaged in such commerce.
The traditional course's potential for experiential learning might
have been constrained by mere geography (i.e., the absence within
nearby communities of Hispanic firms or even an identifiable Latino
population) but also by the faculty's inexperience with service-learning.
Hitchcock's great lesson-and, for a seeker of academic innovation
and social justice, a fortuitous one as well-from his initial encounter
with service-learning is that one outreach project can be anticipated to
generate another, in that each project contains the potential of raising
the standard of how an instructor understands personal and community
transformations as necessary outcomes of academic work. In offering
(for the first time in his four years at USI) a professions-oriented course
about which several Spanish majors had inquired, Hitchcock now
perceives as both viable and necessary the incorporation of a servicelearning component into the course as a means for making such an
experience transformative. The customary heavy doses of translation
exercises, preparation of legal documents in Spanish, and memorization
of long lists of vocabulary lists-all arguably necessary tasks but
too often taught in isolation from the communities supposedly being
"learned" about-can be balanced by students' direct engagement with
many of the Latino and Anglo shareholders Hitchcock encountered in
the needs assessment project. Those shareholders represent a sizeable
group and one able to speak more directly than the instructor to many
of the issues that these students can be expected to confront in the
Reflections. 164
increasingly likely event that their professional direction draws them
toward situations involving producers and consumers from different
ethnicities than their own. These issues, in all likelihood, will replicate
those that emerged as significant for the Latinos surveyed in the needs
assessment. Among those participating directly as respondents in
that earlier project were several officers of an outreach group called
Hospitality and Outreach for Latin Americans (HOLA), comprised of
members of the growing Southern Indiana Latino business community.
Hence, HOLA was clearly an obvious partner needed to move the
town-gown connection forward in a constructive way in the business
course, enriching its content by inviting students to attend business
meetings, assigning them practical tasks to be completed, advising
them on the behavioral norms of Latin01a commerce.
Hitchcock's Business Spanish students will produce two principal
products: an individually generated portfolio of the imaginary company
and a group-produced white paper profiling area Latino/a business.
These projects will function as resources to develop greater empathy
with the community being researched and to increase understanding
of the practical application of the linguistic tools students will acquire.
Also, not insignificantly, the products will stimulate students to
continue to master the language. Again, however, an understanding of
transformation of the undergraduate can be extended to the potential
each holds of altering the communities in which the graduate may
choose to reside. Like Micer's students, it can be surmised that
those enrolled in Spanish for Business will be more likely as young
professionals to adopt a more proactive approach to resolving conflict
and facilitating engagement in the intercultural situations that inevitably
await them.
The same rhetorical forces recognized as constructive in reimagining
a city bus map can be doubly employed when the. architects of new
models of commercial relationships are also empowered by their
linguistic mastery-the historically identified, primary outcome of
Ret1ections •
165
language programs-and have been aided in pursuing their objectives
by the service-learning partner already possessing the heritage tool
of the Spanish language. The partnerships developed in the academic
course become self-perpetuating and self-multiplying in the postgraduate's "rear' business environment, to the extent to which a
scenario can be imagined in which a rich network of ethnically diverse
players possess a level of mutual awareness and respect that increases
the potential for a level business playing field. Certainly, particular
conclusions drawn from the needs assessment project about the absence
of community media and health services aimed at the Latino population
have served as catalysts for faculty reassessment of the entire slate of
Spanish offerings offered in the university, highlighting the potential
for integrating service-learning components in some courses, such
as advanced conversation, and the need for creating others, such as
Spanish for the medical and legal professions, respectively. Hitchcock
can imagine, for example, a service-learning endeavor involving
advanced conversation students creating and participating in a Spanishlanguage community affairs program, partnering with a local radio
station, or another classroom situation in which future health care
professionals, working with a local hospital, produce a DVD about
basic first aid. Above all, Hitchcock recognizes now that concrete
service-learning can result in increasing faculty and student sensitivity
to the meaningfulness of interdisciplinary work and its potential for
effecting genuine social change-an immeasurably important lesson for
all members of a growing university.
IV. Conclusions
Our interdisciplinary effort shows the strengths - and issues - that
can arise by working across academic borders. None of these projects
would have been possible without input from the other disciplines
represented here. Hitchcock's earlier community work, within his
disciplinary framework, looking at Spanish culture, set the stage for
Statham's Sociology class project. Also, the students in Statham's
Rcfkcti(llh • 166
class benefited greatly from the insights Hitchcock could offer them
about Latino/a culture and experience, as they were conducting the
focus groups and analyzing the data. His students benefited a good
deal from their involvement in this project, as transcribers, facilitators
and translators. Micer might have also found it useful if Hitchcock had
interacted with his class.
Micer's project took off from the needs assessment accomplished by
Statham's students. While the project began as an attempt to bridge
cultural difference through the analysis and production of hybrid
discourses for the sake of easing the local Latino community's restriction
on movement-it developed its own transformative potentiality. The
students, while looking for resources to hybridize cultural forms pushed
past the conceptual to deal with the average Spanish-speaking person on
the ground in their capacity for everyday movement. While the professor
was trying to get them to recognize all semester the material force of
rhetorical affects, the students turned it around to show how the rhetorical
force emerged from the embodied interaction. It is arguable-and we
do argue here-that only service-learning enterprises have the capacity
to create the immersive and immanent environment for students to be
able to work with the contingencies of everyday life to better understand
the everyday and also the transformative potential of thought and action
within the everyday.
Hitchcock's anticipated projects were influenced by the Hispanic
Needs Assessment in the first place, and then also by the opportunity
to observe the project as it moved across courses and disciplines. In
tum, Hitchcock's connections in the Latino/a community facilitated
important partnerships for the Micer's and Statham's projects.
We hope we have provided models for others about how to manage
the tension between our own research processes, our students'
engagement with difference, and everyday people's efforts to bridge
cultural differences. Through a reexamination of competencies through
Reflections.
167
differing resources, we have learned how to listen to the input of other
cultures and languages, and how to reconcile diverse voices for the
purpose of proposed community change. In the end, the strong bonds
between the southwestern Indiana region and the university have
reflected the belief that we educate leaders for a specific place and
a specific historical moment. The greatest possible outcome of the
service-learning experience is the liberation of its learners from the
racial and ethnic stereotyping that, while not always overt, constitutes
an obstacle to "doing business" in ways that forward all community
interests without diminishing the uniqueness of the various cultures
within the general community.
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13ABCOS.pdf>
Disrupting Discourse: Introducing Mexicano Immigrant
Success Stories
Octavio Pimentel, Texas State University-San Marcos
The goal of this article is to disrupt and challenge the negative
discourses often associated with Mexican immigrants by
introducing Mexicano concepts of success, including buena
gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado. These concepts
emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community in
California that I have been a part of for more than ten years.
In collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative
study, using ethnographic methods, over a two-year period.
This article focuses on two individuals: luis and Armando.
Caught between the Indio-Mexicano rural uncles
who stacked hundred pound sacks ofpinto beans
on boxcars all day, and worked the railroad tracks
behind the Sturgis sheds, who sang Apache songs
with accordions, and Chavez uncles and aunts
who vacationed and followed the Hollywood model
of My Three Sonsfor their ownfamilies,
sweeping the kitchen before everyone came to visit,
looking at photo albums in the parlor.
(Jimmy Santiago Baca, 17)
ho am I? Definitely not Mexican American. Not really
Chicano. Yo soy Mexicano. Growing up in a migrant
community where most of us were first generation
Mexicano I always identified myself as one. Much different than
W
J
Rcfl eet i (Ill"
• 170
Ret1ections • 171
---. Writing Politices and Procedures in a U.S./SouthAmerican Context.
Technical Communication Quarterly 9.4 (2000): 365-399.
Wardrope, William. "Beyond Hofstede: Cultural Applications for
Communicating with
Latin American Businesses." Proceedings of the 2005 Business
Communication Annual Convention. Online. November 25, 2008.
Association of Business Communication, 2005. <http://www.
businesscommunication.org/conventions/ Proceedingsl2005lPDFs/
13ABC05. pdf>
Disrupting Discourse: Introducing Mexicano Immigrant
Success Stories
Octavio Pimentel, Texas State University-San Marcos
The goal of this article is to disrupt and challenge the negative
discourses often associated with Mexican immigrants by
introducing Mexicano concepts of success, including buena
gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado. These concepts
emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community in
California that I have been a part of for more than ten years.
In collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative
study, using ethnographic methods, over a two-year period.
This article focuses on two individuals: Luis and Armando.
Caught between the Indio-Mexicano rural uncles
who stacked hundred pound sacks ofpinto beans
on boxcars all day, and worked the railroad tracks
behind the Sturgis sheds, who sang Apache songs
with accordions, and Chavez uncles and aunts
who vacationed andfollowed the Hollywood model
of My Three Sons for their own families,
sweeping the kitchen before everyone came to visit,
looking at photo albums in the parlor.
(Jimmy Santiago Baca, 17)
W
ho am I? Definitely not Mexican American. Not really
Chicano. Yo soy Mexicano. Growing up in a migrant
community where most of us were first generation
Mexicano, I always identified myself as one. Much different than
Reflection, .. 170
Ret1ections • 171
other hybrids of Mexicans, a Mexicano self-identifies with Mexicanos
from Mexico, or newly arrived immigrants, and feels lost when
Mexican Americans or Chicanos talk about the power in being a
cross-breed between a Mexicano and an American. As a Mexicano, I
do not have a strong connection to White European American (WEA)
ways of being, but instead I am much more familiar with Mexicano
ways of being. Ironically, I am not from Mexico, but instead I was
born and raised in California.
Having lived in a migrant community for many years, I have seen
many success stories within Mexicano communities. These stories
ranged from single mothers taking care of their children to small
business owners doing everything they could to survive. Ironically,
these community members, who I thought were successful, were often
considered unsuccessful by WEA discourse. It was not until many
years later that this picture got clearer and I realized that my Mexicano
community members were being identified as unsuccessful because
they were being framed by a WEA perspective of success.
In grappling with these ideas, this article focuses on Mexicano concepts
of success, including buena genIe, buen Irabajador, and bien educado.
These concepts emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community
in California that I have been a part of for more than ten years. In
collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative study, using
ethnographic methods, over a two-year period. This article focuses on
two individuals: Luis and Armando. The following section provides
a framework for understanding Mexicano notions of success in a
transnational context. Within this framework I highlight transnational
theorists' conceptions of oppression, as well as point to several
Mexicano ethnographies that provide a foundation for understanding
the key constructs of buena gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado.
Framework
Appadurai's work claims that we are all part of a transnational world
and therefore the United States should not control how people across
the world think, write, evaluate, etc. Rather, people need to encompass
the different perspectives that appear globally, especially as they relate
to world system images. He writes, "The crucial point, however, is
that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of
images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of
imaginary landscapes. The world we live in today is characterized by
a new role of the imagination in social life" (29). Appadurai's concept
of globalization is key to understanding how the US has had a major
influence on the world system images. Even within the US, there is
a similar practice, which simultaneously centralizes WEA ways of
being, while marginalizing all others that are produced in the US. In
recognizing this, the same puppeteer (described by Appadurai) that
controls world system images also exists within the US, but in this case
the subordinate status is given to people of color. Appadurai's work has
influenced my ways of thinking because it has made me realize that
the global oppression of practices-what is being defined as good or
bad-also appears within the US borders.
Similar to Appadurai's work, Mignolo's work focuses on the history of
the colonial world. Mignolo's work claims that there is a long history
of normalcy of oppressive practices that has kept certain groups on the
margins. He elaborates that this oppression has not been solely attributed
to race, but has encompassed different forms. For example, he writes,
"In the sixteenth century, race did not have the meaning it acquired in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the racial classifications
from the eighteenth century are based on skin color rather than on blood
purity, which cannot be understood without the former" (934).
Understanding this history of oppression is crucial when grappling
with the accepted/expected discursive practices in the US. In other
Reflection, • 172
Ret1ections • 173
words, race has not been a sole contributor in constructing and
determining people's oppression. As Mignolo writes, there have been
other factors, which have influenced the identification of a dominant
group and an oppressed group. In most cases, the dominant group's
ways of being are what influence the entire group (whoever that may
be). For example, since WEAs have been viewed as the dominant
culture in the US, then their cultural practices, ideas, and ways of
being have been classified as idealistic, and thus all other cultures
are expected to follow these practices. Acknowledging this, it is not
surprising that a wide variety of "success stories" produced in the US
have been evaluated by WEA standards.
In a similar fashion, Enrique Dussell writes about how Europe has
guided the interpretation of the world's history over the last 200 years,
and how this practice has marginalized different cultures and their
perspectives of the world. He writes, "Although Western culture is
globalizing-on a certain technical, economic, political, and military
level-this does not efface other moments of enormous creativity on
these same levels, moments that affirm from their 'exteriority' other
cultures that are alive, resistant, and growing" (224). In his work,
Dussell encapsulates the notion that marginalized groups produce
culturally specific practices-in this study, culturally specific success
stories-despite western domination. Drawing from Mignolo's work
I am identifying Mexicano concepts of success that reflect Mexicano
perspectives/ideas/ways of being in the US. By identifying alternative
views of success, I am hopeful that dominant US society can
reconfigure how Mexicano practices, and more specificallysuccess stories-are evaluated.
The practice of using dominant criteria to measure Others' worth is
examined in Chandra Mohanty's work, wherein she confronts the
influence in "Western feminist work on women in the third world"
and its negative effects. In her work, she writes about the unfairness
of being evaluated by criteria that is unknown to the participant. She
Reflect iOll\
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174
writes, "As a matter of fact, my argument holds for any discourse
that sets up its own authorial subject as the implicit referent, i.e., the
yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others. It is in this
move that power is exercised in discourse" (55). By acknowledging
her claim, it is important for people to understand the powers behind
the evaluation perspective that guides different activities. In a sense,
her work speaks directly to Appadurai, Mignolo, and Dussell and their
critiques of how US discourses influence the world by creating unfair
and unfamiliar criteria to which all are being judged.
Appadurai, Mignolo, Dussell, and Chantry have greatly influenced my
work, and in particular this article. That is, their work demonstrates
how WEA discourses, often identified as US discourse, influence others
in the world. More specifically, their work makes evident that global
oppression is practiced in the US by targeting people of color. More
specifically, their work has made me realize the negative impact that
marginalized groups, like Mexicanos, have faced and currently face (in
the US), because they are being evaluated by, to use Chantry'S words,
"a yardstick" that is not their own.
One way in which Mexicanos are commonly misevaluated by
WEA standards is by sizing up their sense of success. I argue that
Mexicano conceptions of success may contrast with WEA notions of
success. Whereas WEAs may define success around concepts such as
independence, wealth, and formal education, Mexicanos may define
success within constructs such as buena gente, buen trabajador and
bien educado. Let me briefly describe these concepts. Buena gente
refers to a sense of interdependence and the desire to put the needs of
"others" before oneself. A buen trabajador is defined as a hard worker.
The type of work the individual does is not important, but it is the
simple act of "working hard" that is valued. Lastly, bien educado is an
individual who is well mannered and respectful of all others, despite
their age or social status.
Reflections. 175
Even though researchers have not directly identified buena gente,
buen trabajador and bien educado in their work, they generally speak
to these terms in their qualitative data on Mexicanos. For example,
Angela Valenzuela writes about students who have strong cultural
resources and she alludes to the constructs of buena gente, buenos
trabajadores, and bien educado as she discusses her participants.
Importantly, the schools she studied are organized in such a way that
Mexicano students must either follow WEA views of school success
or maintain and further develop their cultural resources (including
buena gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado). In most cases, it
is difficult to accomplish both without being criticized; such was the
case with her participant Frank, who chose not to excel academically.
Understanding that individuals like Frank are successful despite not
obtaining WEA standards of success is important in conceptualizing
alternative notions of success.
Carger's OfBorders and Dreams: A Mexican-American Experience
of Urban Education is another ethnography that describes data that
can easily fit the concepts of buena gente, buen trabajador and bien
educado. This study tells the story of the Juarez family and focuses on
the education of Alejandro Juarez, the eldest of the Juarez children.
In one instance, Carger describes Mr. and Mrs. Juarez in terms that
resemble the notion of buenos trabajadores. She discusses how Mr.
Juarez has had an extremely difficult time financially supporting
his family. During his life, Mr. Juarez has tended pigs, worked in
construction, painted, washed dishes, dug ditches, made ice cream, and
sold tacos in order to survive. No job is too menial. Alejandro's father
certainly bears out that observation. For him, there is dignity in work,
any work. This mentality clearly emphasizes the need for Alejandro's
father to be identified as a buen trabajador.
As Alejandro's graduation nears, Carger's discussion on the Juarez
family highlights aspects of the construct of buena gente. To the
Ref1ccti(ll1\ • 176
displeasure of the Jmirez family, they are given only two tickets to
attend Alejandro's graduation. When Mr. and Mrs. Juarez learn this,
they insist that Mr. Juarez give his ticket to Carger so that she can
attend. Mrs. Juarez says, "My husband says he wants you there,
no matter what we have to do" (103). Luckily for everyone, other
arrangements are made and everyone attends the graduation. However,
the willingness of Mr. and Mrs. Juarez to give up their ticket is an
excellent example of buena gente. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Juarez
valued Carger's friendship; as a result, they put her needs first.
Carger's work was important to my work because it provides examples
of Mexicanos being buen trabajadores and buena gente. Carger's
example of the Juarez family being buen trabajadores and buena
gente provided me a lens to understand concepts embedded within
Mexicano ways of being that have been traditionally ignored by WEAs.
Additionally, this work helped me further understand the concept of
buena gente by providing ample examples.
Guerra's Close to Home: Oral/ and Literate Practices in a
Transnational Mexicano Community also describes data that can be
applied to the concept of buena gente. His research, which focuses on
Jaime and Rocio Duran's social networks, is a four-year ethnography
of a Mexicano community in Chicago. In his work, he demonstrates
how his participants make sacrifices at their own expense so that their
community can benefit. A prime example is a married couple named
Jaime and R0c10 Duran. This family's living environment clearly
represents the communal living practices most common in small
ranchos in Mexico. The concept of buena gente applies to participants
such as Olga and her husband, who commonly allow people to live in
their house. These data demonstrate that some Mexicano households
are willing to make many sacrifices to help people in need. This idea
of communal success is difficult to compare to the WEA standards of
success that often emphasize self-sufficiency and independence.
Reflections. 177
Vasquez et al. in Pushing Boundaries also focuses on Mexicano
constructs of success. This work looks at language learning and
socialization in Mexicano communities. Vasquez et al. 's participants
often resemble the qualities of buena gente, buen trabajador, and
bien educado. In particular, they describe Dona Maria, who is given
the prestigious title of fa sobadora in her community. Una sobadora
is often considered to have the status and positionality of a medical
doctor and chiropractor combined. This work was especially important
to me because in discussing fa sobadora the authors describe data
that encompass all the notions of success that I highlight in this article
(buena gente, buen trabajador and bien educado). As a researcher,
this work fueled my interest to further explore terms like buena gente,
buen trabajador, and bien educado because it is apparent that these
constructs are clearly valued in some Mexicano cultures; therefore, I
thought it was important to introduce these concepts into academics.
Voces Mexicanas
Most of the conversations used in this study were conducted informally
over a two-year period during 2004-2006. In addition to interviews, I
spent many hours socializing with Luis and Armando, which allowed
me to learn valuable information. These social activities ranged from
simply visiting them at their homes in Migration Town, to attending
weddings with them, and in Armando's case, attending others' family
functions such as graduations, baptisms, and confirmations.
Methodology
I collected data for this research project over a two-year period. Data
was collected using qualitative research methods, including participant
observations and interviews. Each of the participants was observed
a minimum of ten times in various environments (e.g., work, home,
family events). Additionally, each participant was also interviewed
a minimum of ten times. The interviews were both unstructured and
Rcfkct ion" •
178
structured and each lasted at least an hour. Unstructured interviews
gave my participants the freedom to speak freely on different subjects
as long as they stayed within the context of the interview. Structured
interviews gave me the ability to ask direct questions concerning
comments or concerns raised during previous data collection sessions.
My analysis of these stories was closely guided by Strauss' idea of the
comparative method, wherein I continually looked for specific themes
that arose from within the data. Having identified the themes that
arose from conversations, I triangulated the data with observations at
social gatherings, observations at home, and interviews of participants
and their friends. Finally, to make sure that I fairly represented an
observation, and/or fairly transcribed an interview, I allowed my
participants to carefully review my analyses. In both cases, Luis and
Armando read over my analyses, or in some cases I read the material
to them, and they added certain information they felt I had missed,
and in other cases deleted some information which they felt I had
misunderstood. Overall, both participants were happy with my analysis.
Data
While the more recent ethnographic work on Mexicano communities
often frames Mexicanos as successful, this is not the researchers'
primary focus in their works. In this study, my focal point is on
Mexicano success stories. In particular, I am interested in eliciting
self-identified success stories and showing the variability of success
stories within Mexicano communities. My own research is conducted
in a small Mexican immigrant community named Migration Town (a
pseudonym), which is located on the outskirts of the Sacramento Valley
with easy access to Sacramento, the Bay Area, Lake TahoelReno and
a wide variety of recreational areas. The county population is 43,851,
twelve percent of which are Hispanic. Out of that twelve percent,
eighty-three percent identify as Mexican (Census, 2000; Yuba/Sutter
Statistics, 2000).
Ret1ections • 179
Migration Town is predominantly working-class/poor. The largest
employers are agricultural. Approximately 100 different farms
(ranging from 112 an acre to 150 acres) grow various fruits year round,
including peaches, prunes, kiwis, strawberries, cherries, and walnuts.
The majority of the farm owners (about forty percent) are East Indian,
followed by white farm owners (about thirty percent). The remaining
thirty percent are owned by other ethnicities (Mexicans, Italians,
Hmongs, Chinese, etc.). In contrast, about ninety-five percent of the
farm laborers are Mexicanos, and five percent are other ethnicities (East
Indian, Hmong, Chinese, White, etc.) (Interview, Chito, 1-29-03). Like
most towns, Migration Town has four very distinct neighborhoods:
South West; North West; South East; and North East.
Mexicano Constructs of Success
I first met Luis in 1999 while visiting my parents. My father
introduced me to Luis and described him as a hard-working man (buen
trabajador). According to several rumors in the barrio (neighborhood),
no one could outwork Luis. He was stubborn and competitive, and
was especially proud of his hard-working ethic. On many occasions
Luis challenged his friends to working contests, often defined as the
individual who filled the most bins with fruit or pruned the most trees.
Luis convincingly beat many other buenos trabajadores from the
barrio (like Valdes, Miguelito, and El Padrino), and so most other
workers did not accept his challenge.
I established a strong relationship with Luis because he was a kind
and hard- working individual. Although he carried himself as a tough
man, he also had a soft side, which he liked to hide. For some reason,
Luis always had an interest in me. For example, he found my size to
be appealing. Since I am 6'6" and weigh 320 lbs., he envied my size
because he felt that my presence demanded respect Additionally, since
he knew me well, he knew 1 was a buen trabajador as well. Admiring
;~('f1
ect i (111-"
..
180
my size, he thought it was surprising that I chose a profession that
depended on my cerebral strength and not my physical strength.
I also took an interest in Luis because of his survivor instinct, his hardworking ethic, as well as his desire to always stay busy. Additionally,
I admired how he feared nothing. I remember one time as we were
casually having a conversation and he reached over, nonchalantly,
without interrupting the conversation, and smashed a wasp against the
table with his index finger. The idea of simply killing a wasp with his
bare hand was not what impressed me, but it was the demeanor with
which he did it.
On several occasions 1 helped Luis work on small, but time-consuming,
projects. For example, every summer I always helped him clean out his
swamp cooler, re-tar it, and change the pads. Although it was not a big
deal, he really appreciated it. He often mentioned that he thought it was
admirable that 1 helped him (and others) with these small projects. He
told me on several occasions, "1 am so glad that you do not think you
are better than us. With all your college degrees and stuff, you really
don't have to be doing this, but you do."
I met my other participant, Armando, in 1999 through my sister.
As soon as I met Armando, we became good friends. Armando is
a confident individual who loves to have a good time. When I first
met him, I invited him to play basketball, and to my surprise he was
actually really good. Although he never played high school or college
basketball, he could playas well, if not better, than all my other friends
who had played in organized basketball leagues.
Shortly after I met Armando we were at a Cinco de Mayo celebration,
enjoying the music, when my sister asked him to sing a song with the
band. Although at first he refused, he soon agreed. When he got up on
stage, 1 applauded happily because 1 thought he was simply doing it
to please my sister. As he started singing, I realized that he was not a
Ret1ectiol1s .. 181
novice and instead was an excellent singer. With the crowd cheering
him, he continued singing for about half an hour more. Once he got
off the stage, I was flabbergasted because I did not know what to tell
him. Finally, I said, "Where did you learn to sing like that? He simply
laughed it off and said he had been singing since he was a little kid.
Lastly, my participants claim that a buen trabajador does not work for
wealth, but instead he or she works for self-respect and to better the
lives of those who depend upon him or her.
What I admire most about Armando is his kindness (buena gente) and
hard-working ethic (buen trabajador). Over the last eight years I have
seen him make many different sacrifices to help others. His optimistic
view of life is especially humbling. Although he often faces many
difficult obstacles, he has completed many difficult goals. Recently, he
has obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Work and Spanish, and
more importantly, has obtained his legal citizenship in the United States.
The last construct of success that my participants claimed appeared in
their community was that of a bien educado. They felt a bien educado
did not follow the literal translation in English, that is, to be welleducated through formal schooling; nor did it mean to be well-versed
in a certain subject area. According to my participants, a bien educado
refers to a way of life wherein the utmost respect is always provided to
all people, regardless of the situation. Finally, my participants believed
a bien educado is well-mannered and possesses a keen sense of
situational and interpersonal awareness.
Through the many conversations and interviews that I have had with
Luis and Armando, there were three distinct and powerful constructs
of Mexicano success that often came up, including buena gente, buen
trabajador, and bien educado. Luis and Armando defined the term
buena gente as most often associated with the practices of a particular
individual or group of individuals who put the needs of others before
their own. More specifically, they defined the term buena gente as an
individual willing to sacrifice their individual goals for the benefit of
the community. According to my participants, there is no one definition
of buena gente, but it could best be described as "the willingness to
help others."
It is important to mention that I am in no way attempting to essentialize
Mexicanos as only utilizing the constructs of buena gente, buen
trabajador, and bien educado to define success. By no means am I
attempting to claim that Mexicanos do not value traditional WEA
notions of success (commonly defined as wealth, independence, and
academic success). I understand that the diversity in Mexicano culture
is great and that there are many different interpretations of success.
Instead, what this ~tudy is attempting to show are some alternative
views of success-success stories that are constructed in Mexicano
communities-and are not necessarily viewed in the same way by
WEAs or even all Mexicanos.
The second construct of success that often emerged in their community
was that of a buen trabajador, which they defined as an incredibly hard
worker. They claimed that being a buen trabajador did not mean that
an individual necessarily worked hard at a particular task, but instead it
refers to a particular lifestyle in which work itself is valued as a quality
of goodness. My participants further explained that the product of work
is not necessarily evaluated, but instead it is the act of working hard
or being disciplined that matters for the quality of a buen trabajador.
Luis Tovar and South East Migration Town
I have known Luis for about ten years. He is a soft-spoken, serious
man and is commonly described as moody because at times he does
not want to deal with you. "Q-vole Luis? Como estas?" ("How are
you Luis? How are you doing?") I have asked him on more than one
occasion, and he simply ignores me. Later on, he'll excuse himself
and explain that he has a lot on his mind. While Luis is not an
Renections •
183
extraordinarily large person, he has a powerful presence. He is 5' 10,"
weighs about 230 lbs, and is 41 years old. He has worked his entire
life as a manual laborer, so he is in great shape. Having picked fruit
most of his life, his face shows light scratches from fruit trees. Luis
left Mexico shortly after the death of his father. Originally he arrived
in Los Angeles, but left after two weeks because he felt that there were
too many border patrol agents. Through his friendships, he had heard of
Migration Town, which his friends claimed had plenty of work and few
border patrol agents.
Migration Town's South East neighborhood, where Luis lives, is by far
the ugliest part of town. Often the streets are dirty and the streetlights
rarely work. The windows are broken in the old, abandoned buildings.
Most of the homes in this neighborhood are about I 00 years old and are
completely rundown. There are no gas stations or fast food restaurants,
but there is a small community grocery store. Interestingly, the people
of this neighborhood feel safe, while those outside the neighborhood
don't feel it is a safe place.
The triplex where Luis lives is over 100 years old and is painted in
various colors, ranging from dark and light green to brown and most of
the paint is chipping off. A one-foot-high chicken-wire fence guards the
backyard. The owner of the triplex is "EI Padrinolthe Godfather" (the
actual godfather to most of the children in the neighborhood). On the
west side of Luis's triplex are railroad tracks. All day the screeching of
the trains remind residents of the neighborhood's pain.
EI Volcan, where Luis works as a bartender (as a second job), is a
Mexicano bar located in the Peach Town neighborhood. A II2-mile
bridge separates the rest of Migration Town from Peach Town. El Volcan
is located in ~ section of Peach Town where nothing else exists besides
a few bars and some old car lots. The front of the bar is a bright yellow
color with black stripes. On Saturday, the only night the bar is open,
"EI Guero," works as the head of security. As an ex-convict and Marine
Rcf1,xtion\ .. 184
standing 6' 6" and weighing 360 lbs, he easily towers over the migrant
workers. Guero uniform consists of black boots, pants, and a shirt.
Around his 50" waist, which he claims is 42", is his black belt, where
he hangs his pepper spray, handcuffs, and trusty .357. From any part of
the parking lot that lies just in front of El Volcan, you can hear EI Guero
grumbling in his broken Spanish, "Dame tu carta" ("show me your
ID"), which is then quickly followed by "Cinco dolares" ("five dollars,"
the entrance fee). When patrons sometimes complain about not having
an ID or not having $5.00, he just looks them straight in the eye and
continues to say, "Dame tu carta" followed by "Cinco dolares." What
most customers do not realize about EI Guero is that he does not speak
any Spanish except for "Dame tu carta" and "Cinco dolares."
s
The bar is the most eye-catching section of EI Volcan, which is 25 feet
long and runs north to south. Behind the bar stands Chito, a 25-yearold-man who stands 6' and weighs 370 Ibs. He is an avid weightlifter,
so his physique is huge. His back, chest, and shoulders are twice
the size of any customer's. On his forehead he has a 114" scar he
received as a baby from a broken bottle. Although nice, Chito can be a
dangerous man. Underneath the bar he keeps a black AO caliber Taurus
with walnut grips.
Armando and the North West Side
I have known Armando for about nine years now. He is twentynine years old, stands 5' 4", and weighs about 140 lbs. Armando
has a strong, confident presence. HOe is loud, enjoys being the center
of attention, and has many talents, including being an exceptional
basketball I?layer and singer. On numerous occasions he has sung in
front of large audiences. In one situation, at a mutual friend's college
graduation reception, he asked the Mariachi if he could sing with them,
so he could dedicate a song to a special friend. Although hesitant at
first, the Mariachi accepted. Armando sang "EI Rey" ("The King").
With his impressive, loud voice, ("Yo se bien que estoy afuera, pero
Reflections. 185
ef dia que yo me muera, vas a tener que llorar ... llorar y llorar ..
." I "I know well that I am outside, but the day I die, you will cry and
cry ... "), the audience went crazy, and started giving gritos (yells).
Afterward, the Mariachis were so impressed that they asked him to
continue singing, which he kindly refused.
Armando's family arrived in the US fifteen years ago and immediately
enrolled him in school. Although it took Armando a few years to learn
English, he quickly adapted and excelled in high schooL After high
school graduation, he attended the local university, where he graduated
in May 2004 with a double major in Social Work and Spanish. Since
then, he has been accepted to graduate school, but is unsure if he will
attend. His family and himself have been in the US illegally. Only in
the last year, 2008, has Armando received his citizenship.
One year prior to this study, Armando lived with his parents in a small
Mexicano working class town named Red Oaks (located about 10 miles
northwest of Migration Town). Since then, he has moved into a twobedroom (1100 square feet) house in Migration Town's North West,
a neighborhood that is old, but safe. Although most of the houses are
about 60 to 70 years old, and are about 1100 square feet, they look
very nice. This neighborhood has one of Migration Town's two major
supermarkets. There are also three small gas stations and two fast food
places. Lastly, there is a park, which is mostly visited by homeless.
The house Armando resides in is painted a light peach color; its uneven
surface gives it an authentic southwestern look. The yard is nicely
trimmed and shaded. The inside of the house looks modem, with
a charcoal gray carpet complementing the black, tubular furniture.
The kitchen, measuring 12" x 20', is painted a brick color with white
drawers and shelves. The house has two rooms measuring 15" x 10"
each, which have two large windows with a white, old-fashioned border
and white ceiling fans. Overall, the house is clean and well-kept.
i<cflL'Ctiol1s. 186
Buenos Trabajadores
Luis: Luis's favorite spot for many of our conversations was his porch.
He always sat on the same old oak bench, wearing a worn, but clean pair
of denim shorts and a black cobra tank top. He often carried cigarettes,
which he only smoked on occasion. On those evenings we sat for hours
as we ate peaches and talked about his life. Every hour or so we were
silenced by the roaring of the train. Four minutes later we were talking
again. A very confident man, Luis was eager to share his stories with
me. When I asked him why he came to the US he replied, "Depues de fa
muerte de mi padre, mi madre no tenia mucho dinero para damos. Por
que yo era el mas viejo yo me fui para ver que me encontraba HI "After
the death of my father, my mother had limited money to give us. Since I
was the eldest I decided to leave to see what I could find."
Since the American English word "success" cannot be literally translated
into Spanish, I reworded my question and asked him, "Que hace una
persona admirable en su cumunidad' / "What makes someone admirable
in your community?" He responded: "Una persona admirable, 0 sea, una
persona que se considera buena gente en mi comunidad es una persona
que no sea creida. 0 sea una persona que siempre quiere ayudar a todos.
o simplemente, una pesona que siempre considera a otra gente enfrente
de los deseos de ef'/ "An admirable person or a person who is considered
buena gente, in my community is someone who does not consider
himself better than others. Or, simply put, a person who always considers
other people's desires before his or her own."
According to Luis, a successful person is someone who is considered
buena gente, which became apparent when he shared the following story:
Cuando yo primero /lege a California yo no tenia ningUn centavo.
Pero unos amigos que ya vivian aqui me dieron la oportunidad para
vivir con ellos. Durante esos tiempos, estos compas me consiquier6n
un trabajo tambien. Que buenas gentes. Por ellos aqui estoy ahorita.l
Reflections.
187
When I first arrived in California I did not have a penny to my name.
But some friends that had lived here for a short time gave me the
opportunity to live with them. During this time these "very special
friends" also found me ajob. These men are such good people.
Because of them I am where I am today.
Like most recent Mexican immigrants in this community, Luis is a farm
laborer. Although he lives in Migration Town about nine months a year,
while picking peaches, prunes, or working in the cannery, he also visits
Mexico approximately three months out of the year.
According to Luis, he enjoys Mexico because it keeps him grounded in
his Mexicano roots. Since Luis enjoys a traditional Mexican lifestyle,
including the products commonly used in Mexico, he has surrounded
himself with a community that encompasses all of these desires.
Clifford writes about incidents like these and describes them as an
imaginary world that many diasporic cultures live in, which is clearly
the case for Luis. In Migration Town, Luis created an imaginary world
that resembles Mexico. For instance, he lives in a neighborhood that
is about ninety percent Mexican, and ten percent Hmong immigrants.
Additionally, "El Centro," the store where he shops, is a Mexican store
where he can find plenty of Mexican products such as colitas de puerco
(pig tails), Roma detergente (laundry detergent), and Pan Tostado de
Bimbo (pre-toasted bread). On Saturdays, Luis works as a bartender at
EI Volcan, which features a live Mexican band. Although Luis makes a
strong effort to create a transnational community, he still dreams about
his homeland, "La Pieda, Mexico": "Ya despues que ahorre un poco
de dinero yo me quiero ir para tras para comprar una casita y una
tierra HI "Once I save a little bit of money I want to return to Mexico
to buy a small house and some land."
Luis's recent immigration status greatly affects his positionality in
the US. His consumerism, which is minimal considering he is making
minimum wage, is concentrated in Mexican businesses. Additionally,
RcFlcctiOll<" .. 188
the traditional Mexican male role also influences his ideas of success,
which is embedded in being a buena gente.
Luis holds the status of a buena gente in Migration Town because he is
always helping people. For example, although Luis does not earn a lot
of money (making less than minimum wage) Luis is always willing to
share his money, especially in expensive celebrations such as bodas,
quienceaneras, babtismos, etc., to help his friends. Additionally, Luis
also helps his friends in other ways, including mowing their lawns,
collecting aluminum cans for them, babysitting, etc., which helps him
obtain a buena gente status.
Homi Bhabha's concept ofhybridity is also prevalent in Luis' life. In
his work Bhabha writes about the interdependence of colonizer and
colonized or what he calls the "Third Space of Enunciation" (206). In
professing the notion of an international culture, Bhabha states, "not
based on exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures,
but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity" (207). In
Luis's case, his third space is clearly a coalition of his Mexicano and
American ways of being. For example, Luis lives in a predominately
Spanish-speaking community but still manages to speak English when
he pleases: "El otro dia no podia encontrar el transmission fluid for
the carro, y tuve que ir al 7-Eleven para comprar otro"l "The other
day I could not find the transmission fluid so I went to 7-Eleven to buy
another one." Other small examples ofhybridityappear within Luis's
life: He commonly talks about establishing his credit to get a car soon,
"Tengo que agarar credito para comprarme un carro. Te enmajinas ..
. con un carro todo estuviera mas Jacif'1 "I need to get credit, so I can
buy a car. Can you imagine ... with a car everything would be much
simpler." Luis's goal of buying a car may be seen as a WEA view of
success because it could be linked with achieving greater independence.
With little doubt, Luis's ideas of life slowly changed as he lived longer
in the US. Although Luis makes an effort to maintain traditional
Reflections.
189
Mexicano ways of being, WEA ideologies and perceptions of success
slowly influence his lifestyle.
a lot of money, while to others it might mean to have an education. There
are many different ways to describe a successful person.
Armando: For a two-year period I have had many conversations with
Annando concerning his definition of success. For example, during a
Fourth of July family party he publicly announced he was graduating
from college. After his announcement, we talked on an old broken bench
to discuss his future goals. Armando told me, "Tu sabes .. .I want to attend
graduate school, which means I would have to commute again. That is
hard. I need to have extra money for gas, leave early, and then spend all
day on campus. I am not sure if I am ready to continue doing it."
OP: OK. I agree with that. But specifically, how do you describe a
successful person?
Armando has been in the US as an undocumented worker/student for
the last fifteen years. In 2008 he received his legal citizenship to the
US. In one of our conversations Armando shared that his parents came
to the US because they were extremely poor in Mexico and thus were
looking for a better life: "No, en Mexico no teniamos nada de dinero.
Habia dias que no teniamos dinero para comer. Par esa razon nosotros
nos venimos para aca. "/ "No, in Mexico we did not have any money.
There were days we did not have money to eat, so my family moved
to the United States." In Mexico, all his family members worked to
make ends meet. Through their collective effort, most months his
family made enough money to survive. In some months, especially
when a family member lost a job, his family barely had money to eat.
Frustrated with this situation, Armando's family moved to Migration
Town. The following is a conversation between Armando and me about
his concept of success.
OP: So, Armando, platicame que es una persona successful! tell me
what is a successful person?
AB: That is a hard question. There are so many different ways to describe
successful. Tu sabes? / You know? To some people it might mean to have
Ren cd i Cl]1S
•
190
AB: To me a successful person is someone who is smart. Do you
know what I mean? Like for instance, I am successful because I have
graduated from college and it was very hard for me. The only bad thing
about this is that because I do not have a Social Security card I am not
able to work right now at a good paying job. Soon I will, though, and I
will be able to buy many things that I have always wanted.
OP: That is a good point. How did you graduate from college? It is not
easy for anyone, and I recognize that it is especially hard for someone
in your situation.
AB: One main reason that I graduated was because of the support of my
parents. Without my parents I would have not been able to accomplish
nothing. My parents are very poor, but almost every day my father and
mother would give me any extra money they had. Another very helpful
experience that I had was that I had a lot of people who emotionally
helped me. Most of my neighbors knew that I was attending college
so any time I would run into them, they always reminded me to keep
on working hard in school because otherwise I was going to have a
very tough life working in the fields with them. They also, especially a
couple of them, always reminded me to stay very proud of my culture.
Because of them, I think, Spanish was my major along with my Social
Work major.
OP: So what does your family in Mexico think of you? Do they think
you are a gringado?
AB: Me? Agringado? No way! My family from Mexico still thinks
that I am the same. I still have traditional Mexicano values and that
Ret1ections •
191
is something they feel is important. They do tell me, though, that my
Spanish is beginning to sound funny. They also tell me that I am very
lucky. They always remind me that it was great that I worked hard
and was able to accomplish so much. I still am not legal here [in
the US], though.
Gupta and Ferguson, and Clifford elaborate on the idea of culture
and, more specifically, on people who occupy multiple borderlands
and thus are considered "border crossers." The border crosser is
relevant to Mexicano immigrants because, as in the case of Armando,
Mexicanos are often asked to straddle two worlds while rarely
belonging to either, which often makes it frustrating because each
culture contradicts the other and thus the active agent, the individual,
feels lost.
In Armando's traditional Mexicano community, common Mexicano
practices such as bailes, quinceaneras, and menudo on Sundays are
common. Because he is familiar with these cultural practices, it is
easy for Armando to participate. However, he is forced to operate in
WEA ways of being that often do not accept his Mexicano ways of
being. For example, at various times in his college environment he
was made uncomfortable because of his skin color and accent. This
was often the case in his classrooms where his Mexicano ways of
being were often put at a deficit. In hopes to avoid these incidents,
Armando created and used a "memory of place" (Gupta & Ferguson;
Clifford) to construct a new world imaginatively. Armando lived in a
Mexicano neighborhood where his Mexicano traditions are alive and
well, which gave him the power to survive. As he puts it, "Without
my Mexicano friends and traditions I would be nobody." Living in a
Mexicano community also gave Armando the strength to recognize
that although his Mexicano culture is often criticized, its benefits
clearly outweigh its sacrifices.
Rcficcli(lll'-. • 192
Arguably, Armando views success as obtaining a higher education,
which may be considered a WEA concept of success, but his poverty,
darker features, Spanish language, and immigrant status marginalize
him and keep him from becoming "successful" according to WEA
standards. Noting Armando's hard-working ethics, it is clear he is
an excellent example of a buen trabajador. Although Armando is an
extremely busy man, due in part to his status as a full-time student, he
still found the ganas (drive, desire) to be an active community member
in his neighborhood and a buena gente. For example, through our
conversations I learned that Armando often helped people build and/or
fix their homes, drove neighbors to doctors' appointments, read letters,
and basically fulfilled many requests from his community members.
As a result of his active participation at school and in his community,
Armando is recognized as a buen trabajador. He is admired by
many and has achieved many different goals that make him a wellrespected community member. Although Armando may have achieved
a common WEA view of success (receiving his Bachelor of Arts) he
has maintained his commitment to service and accessibility to the
Mexicano community.
A Transnational View of Success
Luis and Armando have found ways to reconcile Mexicano and WEA
social values for their own benefit as well as the benefit of their
community. Nevertheless, both recognize the racial and linguistic
divisions that divide Mexicano and Anglo worlds. Luis perceives the
divisions as ones he can broach through hard work, whereas Armando
considers the chasm of race (and the privilege of whiteness) that
separates his people from WEA to be impassable.
Since Luis is a new immigrant he views the US as the land of
opportunity and blames his inability to get a better job (other than as
Ref1ections.
193
a fieldworker and a bartender) on himself: "En unos ailos cuando ya
puedo hablar ing!es yo voy a poder encontrar un trabajo mejor.!."/
"In a few years, when I can speak English I will be able to find a
better job." Luis does not view the US negatively. On the contrary,
he believes that the current laws, which many would regard as antiimmigrant, work to his benefit. He claims his ideas of success are
embedded within the qualities of buena gente, buen trabajador, and
bien educado. He says, "Lo mas importante de una persona es que sea
una buena gente. Si no tiene eso no tiene nada."I"The most important
thing for·a person is to be a good person. If he does not have this
then he does not have anything." He believes that because respect is
highly valued, it is important for everyone to represent that through the
persona of a buena gente.
In contrast, Annando believes that a successful person is someone who
has attained a college education, "Una persona que tiene un titulo Ie
tiene hecho."/ "A person who has a college education has it made."
For this reason, Armando attained a college education at all costs,
which he completed despite, at that point, his undocumented status. On
the other hand, Annando despises people who completely attempt to
assimilate into WEA culture. Armando is an expert "border crosser."
Living in his transnational world while also functioning in mainstream
US society allows him a space to operate in. According to Armando,
there is no middle ground regarding issues of identity and solidarity,
which he primary identifies with his Mexicano community. Having
this belief is perhaps the biggest difference between himself and most
WEAs pursuing a college education. Annando always used a critical
lens while obtaining his education, so he was able to be an active
critical agent in his formal education process, which always made him
critically aware of his Mexicano positionality.
Reflections. 194
The bridge to success and social esteem connects to both sides of the
border. We as educators fail Mexicano students when we narrowly
define social success in terms of extrinsic rewards as embodied in
the symbols of wealth and the benefits of elite culture. The intrinsic
rewards of belonging and being useful to one's people are far more
powerful incentives for learning and forgoing one's place in the world.
As mentioned early in this manuscript, my intent is not to stereotype
Mexicanos andlor WEAs. Instead, I hope to establish a space where a
conversation about different notions of success may appear.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Ajun. "Disjunture and Difference in the Global Culture
Economy." Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Key Works in Cultural
Studies), Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Boston, MA:
Blackwell, 2003.
Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Martin and Mediations of the South West. NY:
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987.
Bhabha, Homi K. "Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences." The
Post Colonial Studies Reader, Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths
and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.
Carger, Chris L. OfBorders and Dreams: A Mexican-American
Experience of Urban Education. NY: Teachers College Press,
1996.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century. Boston: Harvard UP, 1997.
Dussell, Enrique. "World-System and Trans Modernity." Nepantla:
Viewsfrom the South 3.2. (2002): pp. 221-244.
Reflections. 195
Guerra, Juan C. Close to Home: Oral and Literate Practices in a
Transnational Mexicano Community. NY: Teachers College Press,
1998.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity,
and the Politics of Difference." Culture Power Place: Explorations
in Critical Anthropology, Eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
Mignolo, Walter. "The Enduring Enchantment (or the Epistemic
Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here." SAQ 101.4
(2002-2003): 927-954.
Mohanty, Chandry T. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses." Third World Women and the Politics
ofFeminism, Eds. Chandry Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and
Lourdes Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.
U.S. Census Bureau (2000A). State and County Quick Facts:
Yuba County, California. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfdl
states/06/06115.html
Valenzuela, A. Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican· Youth and the
Politics of Caring. NY: SUNY Press, 1999.
Vasquez, Olga A., Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, and Shiela M. Shannon.
Pushing Boundaries: Language and Culture in a Mexicano
Community. Cambridge: UP, 1994.
Yuba/Sutter Statistics (2000). http://www.syix.com/yubacity/
statspage.html
Rcf1ectiClns. 196
Reflections on Racism and Immigration: An Interview
with Victor Villanueva
Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Rachael Shapiro, Syracuse University
Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and
racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 eece Exemplar Award,
which honors scholars whose work represents the best
our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NOE's David H.
Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching
of English and CEE's Richard Meade Award for Research in
English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American
Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the
problems with literacy education in America based on his
own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York.
Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about
immigration, his work illuminates the connection between
rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in
the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress
those not of the dominant culture.
n January 22 of this year, we huddled around a computer in
our dingy office on the Syracuse University campus and held a
wide-ranging, ninety-minute interview with Victor Villanueva
via Skype. A portion of that interview is captured here. In this interview
we were hoping to get a sense of the way in which a scholar of color
and the son of Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican parents sees the issues
of race and immigration coming together to form a powerful discourse
concerning xenophobia, linguistic diversity, and social power. We started
by first discussing Villanueva's own experience as a colonized individual
and then moved on to larger issues related to race and immigration.
Ret1ections •
197
Guerra, Juan C. Close to Home: Oral and Literate Practices in a
Transnational Mexicano Community. NY: Teachers College Press,
1998.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity,
and the Politics of Difference." Culture Power Place: Explorations
in Critical Anthropology, Eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
Mignolo, Walter. "The Enduring Enchantment (or the Epistemic
Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here." SAQ lOlA
(2002-2003): 927-954.
Mohanty, Chandry T. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses." Third World Women and the Politics
0/ Feminism, Eds. Chandry Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and
Lourdes Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.
U.S. Census Bureau (2000A). State and County Quick Facts:
Yuba County, California. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfdl
states/06/06115.html
Valenzuela, A. Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the
Politics a/Caring. NY: SUNY Press, 1999.
Vasquez, Olga A., Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, and Shiela M. Shannon.
Pushing Boundaries: Language and Culture in a Mexicano
Community. Cambridge: UP, 1994.
Yuba/Sutter Statistics (2000). http://www.syix.com/yubacity/
statspage.html
Reflections. 196
Reflections on Racism and Immigration: An Interview
with Victor Villanueva
Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Rachael Shapiro, Syracuse University
Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and
racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award,
which honors scholars whose work represents the best
our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NGE's David H.
Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching
of English and CEE's Richard Meade Award for Research in
English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American
Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the
problems with literacy education in America based on his
own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York.
Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about
immigration, his work illuminates the connection between
rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in
the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress
those not of the dominant culture.
n January 22 of this year, we huddled around a computer in
our dingy office on the Syracuse University campus and held a
wide-ranging, ninety-minute interview with Victor Villanueva
via Skype. A portion of that interview is captured here. In this interview
we were hoping to get a sense of the way in which a scholar of color
and the son of Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican parents sees the issues
of race and immigration coming together to fonn a powerful discourse
concerning xenophobia, linguistic diversity, and social power. We started
by first discussing Villanueva's own experience as a colonized individual
and then moved on to larger issues related to race and immigration.
O
Ret1ections • 197
C. Caton: I want to talk about the concept of home, which is often a
loaded concept. Can you describe for us what you think home to mean
and what you would identify your homes to be? That is, to what extent
do you feel that you occupy a borderland and how does being mistaken
for an immigrant help to influence your concept of home?
V. Villanueva: Home is a funny thing. It's not borderlands that become
the issue, certainly for a Puerto Rican, surrounded by the sea, encased
by the U.S. It has to do really with colonialism in my case, and the
degrees to which long term colonialism like that which Puerto Rico has
experienced for close to 600 years, so that there's almost no escaping
it-even the assertion of one colonized language over another.
What I find is that having been born in the United States, during a
different era when bilingualism wasn't even an issue-assimilation into
English was simply a given in the '50s, to the extent that even in school,
the children's names were translated into English. So Carlos Bermudez
became Charles Bur-mew-dezz, and we all pronounced it that way;
that's how we were taught to do it. I had a friend whose last name was
Jimenez, but he was Jimmin-ezz, and nobody corrected it. And I was
Villain-new-eva until my father heard about it and got pissed off and
insisted that I insist on Via-nueva, which I've done ever since ... and
even that is not quite right. Even that is a link to another colonization,
because the Puerto Rican pronunciation would be Bee-ja-nueva, but I
was not to do it that way; I was to do it in the "finer" Spanish.
In the Albizu Compos essay, the one that will show up in College
English in July, I write at the end of that article that I feel a kind
of fear, a kind of shame, in going to Puerto Rico. There is a kind
of estrangement. African Americans know this one, too. African
Americans can't go back to Africa; it's not theirs. Eldridge Cleaver
tried, and after living in Africa for a time, he came back and became
an ultra, ultra-conservative, a religious fundamentalist, because he
would say anything, do anything, to come back into this country. And
Rc n L'Ct i (l11~
• 198
so all that Black Panther stuff got repudiated in that process. So in my
case, I find that I'm likely never going to face that demon, which is my
estrangement from Puerto Rico. This is my parent's home, but because
Puerto Ricans have been racialized-it is a racialized distinction, I have
to own it. And it's a part of my cultural upbringing, after all. I was
raised Puerto Rican. I am Puerto Rican. But the place, Puerto Rico, is
not mine at all, completely foreign.
So concepts of home are complicated when it comes to people of
color because the people of color in the United States have been
the colonized. And the colonized is very much different from the
immigrant of another time, who gave up home to create a new home.
For the people of color it's always imposed; it's always imposed. And
perhaps there is a complication, there's a kind of alienation that I've
had to experience. I'm not sure what that kind of alienation would be
like for those who maintained contact with home.
The ICE-Immigration and Customs Enforcement-they tried to send
Chicanos down to Mexico, to be like spies. Everybody knew who they
were, though. They were obviously not Mexicans to the Mexicans. So
there is, I think, always in the process of racism and in the process of
colonialism, there is always an estrangement, a kind of belonging to
another world, a part of the colonizer, and apart from. Belonging to no
home, in some sense, and no home to come to.
At the same time, what am I if not an American? I am an American.
And even when the state does things that are appalling to me,
America at its worst, I'm okay about being an American. I'm never
not okay with it, really. I just wish that racism wouldn't be so damned
entrenched in this society.
B. Bailie: How does the specter of immigration affect your credibility
in the Academy, and your work, or the types of things that you're asked
to speak on?
Reflections.
199
V. Villanueva: It's kind of funny because my knee-jerk reaction is to
say that it doesn't, but that's not true. Immigration is one thing, but
what happens is, it's the racism that affects my presence in a lot of
ways, and it's a particular kind of presence. There is a way in which
all Latinos become one thing, which is Mexican, and if Mexican then
we're tied to questions of immigration past and present.
And so much of my work did look at the ways in which racism
presented itself with things like what's going on again, which is the
expatriation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. And I say it's going
on again because the governor of Washington State, Christine Gregoire,
has said that perhaps what they should do is deport all illegal Mexican
immigrants who are in the jails right now. And you know, we've
seen this before: it happened in the 1930s, it happened in the 1950s,
here we go again. Anytime that the conditions are hard, there is this
scapegoating, and racism is always a part of that scapegoating.
Now, my presence in this business ... for many years it seemed that
my presence had less to do with what I said than how I said it. Which
was, on the one hand, flattering, on the other, very aggravating. So that
folks would want to talk about why I write the way I do as opposed to
what it is I was saying in what I wrote. So you know, that's kind of a
quirky thing. I think that's dying down now, that the focus is more on
what I am saying.
R. Shapiro: How does being a scholar and educator of color affect the
way you teach rhetoric and writing, and what pedagogical choices do
you consciously make?
V. Villanueva: First of all, being a scholar of color forces me to address
questions of color. There's just no way to avoid it if one is conscious of
the degree to which this is an institutional constraint. That's one of the
conscious decisions that I have made, is that somehow not only should
my writing mesh various discourses, but my teaching, my pedagogy
{\Cfll'ctl(,ll" • 200
itself should do that. That makes it necessary for me to stay tied as
much as possible to the cultures our students bring in, which are not
just racialized cultures, but all the pop culture stuff. I have to learn a
new vocabulary weekly. Anyhow, so there is a consciousness of being
attuned to the degree to the culture of the youth that walk in without
becoming part of youth culture, because I still need to maintain my own
sense of dignity and the like.
The short answer is this: I'm always playing with language. With
everything from foul language, though always with a caveat (I always
tell my students that if they really dislike it let me know in private and
I do have a vocabulary that could exclude that). So that includes that,
and yet even with vulgarities and the colloquial, there is maintaining
the seriousness of the subject matter under discussion, and the subject
matter for me is always language, whether it's racism in language~
xenophobia in language, class in language, gender, sexuality ... it
always has to be tied to language. And I mean it's always been my
complaint about Composition Studies, that it continues to act as if it
doesn't have a subject matter of its own, and so Comp is always doing
this topic and that topic and the other topic, when the topic is always
language and language use!
You know I just had to write a chapter for a retrospective on Stephen
North's The Making ofKnowledge and Composition, which used to be
required reading back in the day. I had just gotten my first Assistant
Professorship when that book came out. Well, that book is all about
research and composition. Why are we worried about that? Why are we
doing cognitive research, ethnography, this, that, and the other thing
when we should be doing rhetoric? Our business is language; let's
do language! Let somebody else ... let the scientists do the science!
Look at how poorly they do language. We've got stuff we could teach
them! So anyhow, the answer is: always being conscious of language,
language and its multiplicity. I've had to learn that and it seems to be a
good skill to teach as well.
Reflections. 201
lli
B. Bailie: Can you describe your travels through the States? And to
what extent and in what ways and places do you relate to the struggles
of immigration?
V. Villanueva: The thing is, I travel a lot, but as I travel what I'm doing
is going from one university campus to another. So I get to see an
airport, a hotel, and a university, and maybe a fine restaurant here and
there. And what that means is all I'm ever really seeing is the degree to
which immigration doesn ~ filter in to the universities;
Then again, I was in Salt Lake City a couple years ago to talk about
the new racism, which is what I think about a lot these days. I gave
my talk, took part in a town-meeting thing, did a TV interview and
a phone-in radio interview, and then I was supposed to do a public
reading from Bootstraps at the city library. That afternoon, somebody
blew a bomb at the city library. It likely had nothing to do with me.
There's no way I'll ever know. But I do know that the night before, the
entire conversation in a large town-hall type meeting I was asked to be
a part of had to do with immigration, and my argument at that time was
that immigration itself is a scapegoat, and I'm thinking about Kenneth
Burke's ways of talking about scapegoats in Permanence and Change
especially, a diversionary tactic for other grander concerns that were
going on. So it was a very political kind of setup conversation.
There are also the ways in which immigration doesn't affect me and
my family personally, since we have the wonderful status of being
colonized. [laughter]. Anyway, the short and long of this is that in my
travels around the country immigration just isn't something that I'm
confronted with regularly. Yet it's there. I did see that while I was
in Chapel Hill, and I have the same kinds of stereotypes of the deep
South as everybody else, but the schools, if I remember correctly,
were entertaining bilingual ed. So of all of the places I've been, the
only places I've had heard anyone thinking about not just bilingual
but cross-directional bilingual ed-where the white kids had to learn
Rcn C'C1H)J1"
•
202
Spanish as well as the Spanish kids having to learn English-was in
North Carolina.
R. Shapiro: Can you talk about the state of the English-only movement
versus the language diversity movement?
V. Villanueva: At the governmental level it's been English-only
versus English-plus. Geneva Smitherman is one of the folks behind
English-plus. You know the sad part is this really is an immigrant
question, because to me it is one of the most backward things that
we've got going. There were even students here, at WSU, arguing for
English-only, to which I could say you could be ignorant for free. You
know? Why pay all this tuition if what you're demanding is ignorance
[laughter] which is very low cost? I mean, it's amazing to me! No, I
think this one is really ... I can't think of the word ... well, probably
the best word I can come up with is "retro." But you know, retro can be
cool-this is not cool.
I think at this point there are 28 states. In maybe 1990, 1991,
somewhere around that time, Florida started this English-only thing,
but it was California that picked it right up. So at that time, 12 years
ago, 15 years ago, there was one state-California-with Englishonly legislation or official English. They always argue that no one
is telling folks what they can speak at home but only what they can
speak in governmental situations. Well, the problem with that of course
is that that goes against free speech, and it surely goes after the 14th
amendment, which is equal representation under the law. If you can't
speak the language and you are forbidden from speaking the only
language that you can learn then you're not getting representation.
And no law can change cognitive processes. It takes time to learn a
language. Just because it's been mandated, as if anybody doesn't want
to learn English in America! That's absolutely crazy, this idea that
somehow putting in a law is going to change all of that.
Ref1ections • 203
So I think it is hysterical, and not funny, that it really is hysteria and
xenophobia. There's somehow this phenomenal fear that the strangers
are going to change the country. And what's interesting about that is
I) industry sees a market and knows how to deal with it-the banks
are bilingual, the commercials are bilingual, you know, everything ...
they know how to deal; and 2) those who wield the power will be the
ones who will wield the power of language as well as everything else.
So English is never in any real risk, and certainly not at risk from all of
these Latin American and Mexican immigrants. They want to talk about
the risk? My grandson's learning Chinese. Where's the next hegemone?
China maybe, United Arab Emirates maybe, I don't know. But we
know that all empires fall and this one is no longer what it was. But its
fall is not likely to come from folks much more interested in eking out
a living than in tumbling empires.
To me, there is a greater understanding of bilingual education, a
realization that that is necessary, but most of the bilingual programs
out there right now are transitions into English. So, no, I think that one
is not in good shape, and I think that folks who choose not to learn a
language insist that those who don't speak English learn a language.
It's a funny hypocrisy because the only reason it's a problem is because
so many monolinguals in English aren't willing to learn Spanish. That
one just annoys the hell outta me! [laughter] And in my own case, when
I went to school, we had to learn English; we weren't allowed to speak
Spanish, and then I got into college and they say you need a foreign
language. I said "What? If you'd have left me alone when I was 6 years
old I'd have had it!"
C. Caton: So how does the idea or the myth of literacy construct
immigrants as deficient, and how does one's submission to the myth of
literacy further internalize racism in US education?
V. Villanueva: Dh, that's a big one, isn't it? I think I addressed that 20
years ago, when the orality/literacy debates were a very big deal in
Reflection, .. 204
our business, in Rhetoric and Comp, and actually in education also. To
my way of thinking, the problem that I was addressing when I spoke
about the orality/literacy business was the idea, first of all, that orality
and literacy had different cognitive capabilities. And that to me was so
wrongheaded, to have this stupid cognitive argument attached to people
who are parts of oral cultures. And it was a kind of a flip on something
that black folks in particular took pride in, that they were tied to the
oral, to the griot. And every society has had its heroes as oral tellers.
The bard is an oral teller by definition, not Shakespeare. So the problem
with cognitive dysfunction was a problem with the way that orality and
literacy were being discussed prior.
The problem with orality/literacy now, more directly tied to your
question, is that what's not being said is literacy in English. And not
only literacy in English, but a certain genre of literacy in English.
Not only a certain genre, but a certain register, and a certain dialect
of English literacy. So it becomes racialized because of the degree
of narrowness that's implicit and rarely discussed. And that's what's
particularly interesting to me about John Trimbur and Bruce Horner's
work: that they're making the case that there are all kinds ofliteracies
and the question is how do we do cross-transference, how do we learn
from the literacies of others as well as teach the literacies that we
have out there ourselves? So I think that the minute that we confine
it to standardized English or to Edited American English, and Edited
American English is code word the prestige dialect, for standardized
English, without the personal, then we are reinforcing old racist and
xenophobic ideas. I mean, the only way to take care of the fear of the
other is to force the other to be us.
C. Caton: In a post-9/l1 era, US citizens who are visually marked as
"other" frequently face the same racism as immigrants. To what extent
is racism being conflated with xenophobia?
Reflections. 205
V. Villanueva: Yeah, well that's an interesting one. I think they've
always been. The only ways in which black folks could survive
for about 150 years was by being mild, reducing the fear of the
other. Because you know xenophobia is not just fear of foreigners,
xenophobia is just fear of the other. Folks get marked phenotypically
and linguistically, because there is a way in which if you are European,
Western European, and a particular brand of Westem European, and you
speak with an accent, you're charming. Any other accent is an outsider.
And let me do one thing more. It is true that in the literature
"institutional racism" and "structural racism" are interchangeable as
terms. I prefer the term "structural racism," because this is a country
that was founded at the time of the need to have a rationalization for
racism. I mean, it was economically necessary with the institution of
this country to create this second- and third- tier citizenry: women, and
black folks, the slaves. And that's after they killed off the Indians. So,
it's at the point that it's built into the structure.
I just think that the answer is "yes." The way I think of the construction
of racism, and I'm reading about that right now, is tied to needing
to make the other subservient. It's tied to notions of colonialism.
Xenophobia is this fear that the other will not be subservient. Post-91l1
in particular becomes the case in point, and the rising fear of black men
in the post-Civil Rights era. So, very similar kinds of things. People
of color or people who have been colored are supposed to be in a
subservient position but no longer act subserviently, if there is such a
word. Xenophobia kicks in; racism amps up.
That's how we have this inequitable distribution of labor, this
inequitable division of incomes. If we no longer talk about racism and
point to the man who made it to the top [President Obama], then we
don't look at all those who can't even make it halfway up. And it's
always disproportionate, the numbers of people of color who ~re at the
lower ranks than white folk. So it's built into the entire structure. The
institution would have to be the institution of the United States.
C. Caton: Okay, so let's take this issue of racism into the institution and
what we can do as teachers. How can community outreach help teachers
in our discipline undo institutional racism towards immigrants?
V. Villanueva: Okay, well, toward immigrants, towards anyone,
because you know this immigration question's a funny one. What
I'm thinking of, for instance, is Katrina. Or let's talk about Texas.
When folks talk about immigration, it's always a racialized notion
of immigration, and it's a funny racialized notion of racism, too,
because it's always anti-Latino; it's focused almost exclusively on
Mexicans, even when the Latino is not a Mexican. He or she becomes
mexicanized. Yet we have a phenomenal number of African immigrants
in the country. And we make a distinction between African-Americans
and Africans that we don't make among Latinos. We all become this
undifferentiated other that is Mexican, so it's a funny thing.
Rc n ('ct i 011"
•
206
In terms of teaching, I think that students are more willing to listen,
even though they come in with sets of beliefs that are passed on to
them. If you have never been exposed to the ghetto, it's easy to believe
that things are getting better. If you see more middle class folks of
color, it's easy to believe that things are getting better. And maybe in
some sense they are, but better is never good enough. I mean, there's
that quote from Malcolm X that goes something like "You can't drive
a knife nine inches into a person, pull it out three inches, and call it
progress." [laughter] That's Malcolm's. But that's where we're at-the
blade'is still in there, but we've pulled a little bit of it out and think
everything's cool. But I think that students, once they're exposed to
it, exposed to the very idea of going out and finding the instances in
the news media, they have to grapple with the idea that just because it
doesn't look like it did 30 years ago or 40 years ago doesn't mean it's
gone away. And the ways in which racism is built into the language is
so damned interesting, and students will receive that.
Reflections. 207
C. Caton: So can community outreach, or service-learning, or teachers
going out and working with those who don't have access to the higher
educational institutions, to remove some of that class barrier ... can
that help? What do you see as the role of the academic?
V. Villanueva: Yes it does. It depends on the kind of work it is, though.
I mean, part of the problem with service-learning, back in '98 when
I was chair of CCCC, that was the beginning of service-learning
presenting itself in our business. And what I asked of the servicelearning folks was for them to theorize what they were doing, and to
begin to look at its downsides as well as its upsides. The downside I
see is that it can be too easily converted into social work. And I don't
mean that there's anything necessarily wrong with social work, but I do
mean that there's a perception by those of color and in poverty about
bureaucrats, about do-gooders, and you don't want to fall into that
because all that you're going to get then is bullshit back. And so you
will be taken advantage of, the service-learners will be taken advantage
of, at the same time that the real learning isn't allowed to happen. Paula
Mathieu, she's got a book on service-learning that shows the ways in
that service-learning can really work. It's really great stuff, and Ann
Feldman and her work in Chicago is also really interesting work. So
yeah, I think there's alot that can be done on that end.
I'm in a program now where we're not just preparing students to go
on, you know, it's not this little incestuous thing, where you prepare
students only to go into universities and do what we do. But among
the students here are students who want to go into NGOs and work in
the neighborhoods and the like, and I think that it would be good for
us to change-and "us" means English-types, or in your case, Writing
Program-types-to include that in how we talk about our business.
That our business isn't solely to produce little clones who will go into
universities and write diatribes that will be read by our clones again, but
that we can-and should-get things happening in the neighborhoods.
Rc n ('('I i 1111"
..
208
Our Southern 'Roots' in New Orleans: Early latino/a
Immigration and Its Relevance to a Post-Katrina World
Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South
is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial
dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich
Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers
Latino/a immigration from the 17005 to the mid- 1900s. This
paper will trace the early history of Latino/a immigration in
New Orleans to help foster deep Southern Latino/a "roots" for
this growing immigrant population. The paper will also focus
on the largest New Orleans Latino/a community, Hondurans,
tracing their early history and current immigrant experiences
after Hurricane Katrina.
The presence of Hispanics in Louisiana is too important to be
passed over unnoticed. Unfortunately, the information is scattered
and inadequate. The Latin American Apostolate wishes to assemble
this information and hopes that this publication will contribute to
an awakening of interest and commitment
(Foreword to The Hispanics in Louisiana (1982) by Luis Emilio
Henao)
It was then the year 1980 that I started to look for documentary
sources, any source of information related to Hispanics in the past
and the present, studies which have been conducted by Tulane
University, Loyola University, and LSU in Baton Rouge. I went
to the libraries, to the archives to look for any investigation
Retlections • 209
C. Caton: So can community outreach, or service-learning, or teachers
going out and working with those who don't have access to the higher
educational institutions, to remove some of that class barrier ... can
that help? What do you see as the role of the academic?
V. Villanueva: Yes it does. It depends on the kind of work it is, though.
I mean, part of the problem with service-learning, back in '98 when
I was chair of CCCC, that was the beginning of service-learning
presenting itself in our business. And what I asked of the servicelearning folks was for them to theorize what they were doing, and to
begin to look at its downsides as well as its upsides. The downside I
see is that it can be too easily converted into social work. And I don't
mean that there's anything necessarily wrong with social work, but I do
mean that there's a perception by those of color and in poverty about
bureaucrats, about do-gooders, and you don't want to fall into that
because all that you're going to get then is bullshit back. And so you
will be taken advantage of, the service-learners will be taken advantage
of, at the same time that the real learning isn't allowed to happen. Paula
Mathieu, she's got a book on service-learning that shows the ways in
that service-learning can really work. It's really great stuff, and Ann
Feldman and her work in Chicago is also really interesting work. So
yeah, I think there's a lot that can be done on that end.
I'm in a program now where we're not just preparing students to go
on, you know, it's not this little incestuous thing, where you prepare
students only to go into universities and do what we do. But among
the students here are students who want to go into NGOs and work in
the neighborhoods and the like, and I think that it would be good for
us to change-and "us" means English-types, or in your case, Writing
Program-types-to include that in how we talk about our business.
That our business isn't solely to produce little clones who will go into
universities and write diatribes that will be read by our clones again, but
that we can-and should-get things happening in the neighborhoods.
'<c fL:ct i Ull '.
..
208
Our Southern IRoots· in New Orleans: Early Latino/a
Immigration and Its Relevance to a Post-Katrina World
Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South
is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial
dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich
Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers
Latino/a immigration from the 1700s to the mid- 1900s. This
paper will trace the early history of Latino/a immigration in
New Orleans to help foster deep Southern Latino/a "roots" for
this growing immigrant population. The paper will also focus
on the largest New Orleans Latino/a community, Hondurans,
tracing their early history and current immigrant experiences
after Hurricane Katrina.
The presence of Hispanics in Louisiana is too important to be
passed over unnoticed. Unfortunately, the information is scattered
and inadequate. The Latin American Apostolate wishes to assemble
this information and hopes that this publication will contribute to
an awakening of interest and commitment
(Foreword to The Hispanics in Louisiana (1982) by Luis Emilio
Henao)
It was then the year 1980 that I started to look for documentary
sources, any source of information related to Hispanics in the past
and the present, studies which have been conducted by Tulane
University, Loyola University, and LSU in Baton Rouge. I went
to the libraries, to the archives to look for any investigation
Reflections. 209
which had been made concerning Hispanics. I tried to compile
these investigations and present a general panorama of who the
Hispanic is in Louisiana given a historical antecedent which was
also unknown and which continues to be unknown as is a general
history of the Hispanic in the United States.
(Excerpt from an interview conducted by Beatrice Rodriguez
Owsley with Father Luis Henao in 1987)
fter writing "When Students Care: The Katrina Awakening"
in the Writing the Blues issue of Reflections, I knew another
story needed to be told about Katrina that would take readers
to an earlier time in New Orleans, where Latinos/as were "rooted" in
its history. "Roots" provide validation, and recent Southern Latino/a
communities struggle with invisibility and oppression. When I was
a teenager in the early 70s, my Tia told my mother "hay bastante
Hondurefios en New Orleans" or "there are many Hondurans in New
Orleans." Another Tia used to talk about her cousins in New Orleans
and how successful they had become as doctors, lawyers, gas station
owners, and journalists. My Honduran relatives, like many Latinos/
as, immigrated or grew up in New Orleans long before Hurricane
Katrina hit. Latino/a immigrant "roots" in New Orleans is not a recent
phenomena but goes back for hundreds of years.
In the last two decades, the South has seen a dramatic increase in
the number of Latinos/as who are migrating and immigrating to
this region. As stated in an article written for the Pew Hispanic
Center, "The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the
South than anywhere else in the United States" (Kochar, Suro and
Tafoya). Some .states, such as North Carolina, Arkansas, and Georgia,
have seen an increase of over 300% from 1990-2000. This recent
change creates an interesting shift in the Black and White racial
binary that has pervaded Southern racial mentality for hundreds of
years. Unfortunately, this historical Black and White racial binary
Renee-lion" • 210
in the South can make the Latino/a immigrant population virtually
invisible with repercussions that impact academic and nonacademic
knowledge-making communities.
One example of this invisibility occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina within a Black and White city, New Orleans. Since Katrina,
numerous books have been published on this disaster: poignant
survivor stories and novels, outstanding edited collections focused on
race relations, amazing photography collections, heart-wrenching books
that show the health, environmental, poverty, and education problems
facing this city. In what I've read so far, the Black and White issues
are pervasive, and I found very few articles, books, and documentaries
that focused on Latinos/as in Hurricane Katrina. This is quite surprising
since Latinos/as make up around 15% of the population in New Orleans
and its surrounding communities, according to some surveys. Ernesto
Schweikert, a prominent Latino radio announcer of the first Spanishlanguage station in New Orleans, KLGA Tropical, expressed in an
interview with New America Media, how "The Hispanic population
is always overlooked in New Orleans." KGLA was one of the few
Spanish-language communication sources in New Orleans during
Hurricane Katrina. The only national media stories that predominantly
covered Latinos/as in New Orleans centered on the rebuilding efforts
and the influx of immigrants who came looking for work. However,
Latino/a immigrants came to New Orleans long before Hurricane
Katrina. Univision was one of the few national stations that consistently
covered Latino/a survivor stories.
The aftermath of a devastating hurricane in one of the most
internationally recognized Southern cities is an event that demonstrates
the repercussions to a Southern Latino/a immigrant community when
the Black and White Southern racial binary subsumes almost all
coverage and research. Outside some cities in the South, such as Miami
and Tampa, which already have a good body of scholarship on their
Latino/a communities given Florida's known "Hispanic" influences,
Ret1ectiollS • 211
Southern cities such as New Orleans have, for the most part, evaded the
national Latino/a immigrant research conversations. This is especially
true with the early Spanish colonial and Latin American immigrant
history that can explain why many twentieth- and twenty-first-century
Latino/a immigrants would be drawn in large numbers to this city. A
number of Latino/a immigration scholars (including those who study
New Orleans and Louisiana) are rather dismissive of studying Latino/a
immigrants before the 1960s and would rather focus on the large waves
of immigration. However, to take this approach with New Orleans
creates a shallow understanding of this city's Latinized historical
presence. Lengthy studies on Latinos/as in New Orleans or Louisiana
consist mainly of either print or microfilm SociologylAnthropology
theses, dissertations, interviews housed in Special Collections, and a
few locally books published by the Archdiocese and Latin American
Apostolate of New Orleans. The research, for the most part, is located
on some dusty shelves in a few libraries. I propose in this paper to
share the rich Latino/a immigrant history of a Southern community.
The South is long overdue in recognizing the contributions of its
Spanish, Mexican, Latin American, and Latino/a inhabitants throughout
its history. I hope this paper will encourage readers of Reflections
who are interested in studying, researching, andlor working with
Latinos/as in the South to celebrate this rich Latino/a immigrant history
of New Orleans and work to break the Black and White Southern
historically racial dichotomy. Although New Orleans does not represent
every Southern city, lessons can be learned from studying its Latinbased immigrant population and historical roots. Southern Latino/a
immigrants and those who work with them through studies, community
engagement, or other interactions must know that the deep South does
have a history (outside of Florida) with Spanish, Mexican, and Latin
American immigrants who arrived well before the last few decades
and significantly influenced certain Southern communities. Groups
and leading figures who have helped Latino/a immigrants throughout
the early history of New Orleans may not fit within the conventional
Ref! t,ctinn, • 212
perceptions of community activists or groups, but then again, Southern
cities and their immigrant populations have their own characteristics.
Southern Latino/a immigrants will be empowered to know their "roots"
in Southern history as they find ways to form their Southern identities
as Latinos/as. As a Southern Latina who has a father from Tennessee,
a Honduran immigrant mother, and Latino/a immigrant relatives from
New Orleans, this research journey was transformative and makes me
proud to identify myself as a Latina from the South.
Scholars who research Louisiana's history usually focus on the French,
Creole, and Cajun influences of this region. Little research exists on
the Spanish influences except for studies on settlers in Louisiana from
the Canary Islands. In fact, according to Father Luis Emilio Henao,
Louisiana was a place of contention between the French, Spanish, and
British (7). Under French colonization (1699-1764), the immigrants
to Louisiana were limited to French deportees, French and German
colonizers, and Black slaves. Minimal mixing of these groups occurred
during this period (8). However, a dramatic population change took
place during the Spanish colonization period of 1765-1803 under
the influence of nine Spanish Louisiana Governors (Encyclopedia
of Louisiana). Under Spanish governance, many "immigrants,
independent of their origin or language, were offered a house, land,
a set of tools for working and monetary assistance for a period of
time until they became self-sufficient" (9). The Spanish significantly
increased Louisiana's population and took in the following groups:
Acadians, Canary island colonists, settlers from Kentucky and other
Union states, French political refugees from Haiti, Mexican soldiers,
and free Blacks from Haiti (9). The majority of immigrants sought
refuge and freedom from oppressed conditions. Spaniards and Creoles
frequently intermarried during this time, so the Spanish influences had
a significant impact on the Creole population (Painter 20).
In the early years of Spanish colonization, Gen. Alejandro O'Reilly, a
Spanish Irishman, proceeded to bring "stability and economic reform"
Reflections. 213
to the 13,000 inhabitants of New Orleans, and brought Catholicism to
"civic affairs" (Laviastida and Rodriguez Owsley 77). Under Spanish
rule, new residents paid homage to "the Spanish Crown and to the
Catholic religion" (9). Governor Esteban Rodriguez Mira threw out
a Spanish Capuchin friar who wanted to implement the inquisition
in New Orleans (Lea 459). To ensure their adherence to Roman
Catholicism, many Spanish clergy came to Louisiana along with the
first Bishop, Santiago Jose Echevarria, who closely monitored the
missions in this colony (Laviastida and Rodriguez Owsley 78). They
also brought in Irish priests to reach out to their English-speaking
communities (Henao 17). New Orleans missionaries and church
leaders became significant community leaders that reached out to new
inhabitants as they still do today with the Apostolate of New Orleans.
New Orleans Catholics today still practice rituals that are of Spanish
origin, and Latin American immigrants often noted the similarity in
rituals practiced in their countries of origin. Today, New Orleans has
the largest Catholic population of any city in the South, which makes it
an attractive place for many Latino/a immigrants. Governor Bernardo
De Galvez (1776-1785) was largely responsible for bringing the
impoverished Canary Islander immigrants to Louisiana, where many
descendants still live today and celebrate their Spanish heritage. As a
highly admired governor, he played a major role in defeating the British
in Louisiana and securing West Florida for Spain. Governor de Galvez
defeated the British with 700 troops largely comprised of a "militia of
all colors" shortly after a devastating hurricane (Woodward Jr., 104).
Despite this hurricane's wrath, which sunk many ships and destroyed
many houses in New Orleans, de Galvez rallied his troops and
iminigrants of Louisiana. He was beloved by Mexicans, Spaniards, and
Louisiana immigrants. Manuel Antonio Valdes of the Mexican Gazette
wrote an eloquent epic ballad dedicated to Governor de Galvez shortly
after his early death at 38. Parts of this ballad are haunting, especially
given our knowledge of how neglectful political leaders have been to
immigrants and the poor long-time residents of New Orleans:
Reflection" • 214
He decreed to provide succor without giving alms,
As with works [projects] where a daily wage
Could be earned by the daily labor of many vagrant men
Who had become only habitual beggars.
He decreed by these measures that the Poor
In the future might be recognized
So that those not having a just claim
Would not defraud those who did.
He decreed that Pauperism be reduced
For many not wishing to be confined to shelters
Against their will, deserted,
And in their work they were happier. (127)
De Galvez sought to open up the New Orleans port to Europe and the
Americas through trade in order to bring prosperity to New Orleans'
inhabitants, but th.e Spanish ministry thought this was too liberal;
however, trade with Latin America increased. He became the Captain
General to both Cuban and Louisiana and was later appointed as the
Viceroy of Mexico. He died shortly afterwards.
Upon the U.S. Louisiana Purchase in 1803, many Spaniards left
New Orleans, but the Mediterranean cultural presence flourished
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Trade with Latin
American and the Caribbean increased significantly because of the
New Orleans port expansion. Large numbers of Cuban and Mexican
exiles immigrated to New Orleans, which created a strong Spanishspeaking political climate (Lavastida and Rodriguez Owsley). The
first U.S. Spanish language newspaper, EI Misisipi, originated in New
Orleans with its first publication in 1808. It paved the way for more
Spanish-speaking publications.that would soon develop in the U.S.
The Latino/a immigrant and resident population used the newspaper
to voice their views on Caribbean politics and show their support of
Reflections. 215
Southern slaveholders. Hundreds of New Orleans Cuban residents
and immigrants, who had leanings toward Caribbean slaveholding
interests, joined the Confederacy (Sanchez Korrol). New Orleans also
became known as a place where secretive plots developed to overthrow
various Latin American governments, such as the one instigated by
William Walker to overthrow the Nicaraguan regime (Lavastida and
Rodriguez Owsley). These plots were the early beginnings of New
Orleans' longstanding connections with the Banana Republics, which
lasted well into the twentieth century (Braken 17). Although some of the
Latino/a immigrant and resident population of New Orleans engaged in
activities this writer strongly opposes, they did demonstrate to other U.S.
Latino/a communities the vital roles Spanish-language newspapers and
eventually other forms of media would play in giving voice to Latino/a
immigrant communities. A little known but interesting development
during the 1850s was that hundreds of Louisiana Creoles immigrated to
Mexico so they could escape the threat to their free status. According to
Mary Gehman, many Creoles went to Vera Cruz or Tampico, Mexico.
These Mexican Creoles significantly influenced these regions and New
Orleans' influences are evident in their food, architecture, and names.
Many of their descendants have French and Spanish surnames and
celebrate their Mexican Creole identities. This may be one reason some
recent Mexican immigrants are attracted to working or living in New
Orleans. This U.S. city on the Gulf of Mexico may remind them of their
cities or familiar places on the Mexican Gulf coast. Some Mexican
immigrants to New Orleans could be distantly related to Creoles from
New Orleans. Ironically, Mayor Nagin, who is of Creole descent and
who has publicly expressed his fear of Mexican immigrants in postKatrina New Orleans, may be related to Mexican Creoles and/or
Mexican immigrants wishing to seek a better life in his city.
The 1920s saw another wave of Latin American and Mexican
immigration to New Orleans. In the early 1900s, Archbishop Placide
Chapelle of Louisiana appointed a Dominican Friar, Thomas Lorente,
to be his secretary in New Orleans. He attempted to bring the Latino/a
Rcfl C'cti on" •
216
immigrant community to his church by offering services in Spanish to
serve this growing Mexican and Latin American community. However,
Latinos/as were all over the city and tended to want to go to church
in their neighboring communities (Lavastida and Rodriguez Owsley).
A number of Latin American social clubs developed during this time
with many women serving on the Board of the Directors. Some Latino
men blamed women for these social clubs' disintegration because "they
want[ ed] their way," but a more realistic reason stemmed from the
tensions between the various Latin American nationalities within these
clubs (Painter 41). As the "gateway to Latin America," New Orleans
brought immigrants from numerous ports throughout Latin America
who held strong loyalties to their former countries.
In the 1940s, many immigrants who arrived in New Orleans were
educated, spoke English, attended New Orleans universities, and
assimilated into the New Orleans-community (Painter). They
contributed in many ways to this community and surrounding
communities.· However, many individuals outside of long-time
residents of New Orleans are unaware that New Orleans' port was once
the gateway to Latin America, where immigrants arrived, and, as is
the case with many first entries, remained in New Orleans. During the
first half of the twentieth century, many New Orleans storeowners had
signs in their downtown windows that said "Aqui Se Habla Espanol."
Wealthy Latin Americans frequented their stores, and the New Orleans
business owners catered to them with their bilingual staff (Painter
71). New Orleans was mostly a U.S. Southern haven for white Latin
American and Mexican immigrants, students, and visitors.
If it were not for Norman Wellington Painter's Master's Thesis in
Sociology (1949) entitled The Assimilation ofLatin Americans in New
Orleans, we might know little about the emerging Latino/a community
in New Orleans during the first half of the twentieth century. Painter
was a graduate student at Tulane University, a university which is
deeply committed to its Latin American students and which, since its
Ref1ections • 217
inception in 1834, "has pursued a mission of advancing progressive
and cutting-edge study and research in Latin America" (Stone Center
for Latin American Studies). Indeed, Tulane was and still is a U.S.
higher education gateway for Latin American students and professors.
It serves as one of only a few U.S. institutions of higher learning
that has a long history of promoting research on the Americas and
fostering extensive research ties with Latin American professors. The
University of Louisiana, Louisiana State University, Loyola University,
and Delgado Community College are other institutions with a long
history of admitting and educating Latino/a immigrants, especially
immigrants who could not afford Tulane (Garcia Ponce). Painter, who
was an undergraduate member of the Hispanic honor society at Baylor
University and grew up in a small town in Texas during the 1920s, must
have witnessed differences in the way Latin American and Mexican
immigrants were treated in New Orleans, which perhaps created a
strong incentive to study the New Orleans' Latino/a community. A
clue about his Texas roots emerges when he says "Again the personal
attributes of the researcher may have unconsciously influenced the
various analyses. But objectivity was striven for at all times" (164).
One quote from a case study participant who used to live in Texas
demonstrates the differences between Dallas and New Orleans:
In Dallas, Texas I went to get a shave; the barber would not shave
me. The people all over Dallas are ignorant; there is widespread
prejudice. They class all Latins together and judge them by the
worst examples. I asked the barber where the Mexican quarter was;
I wanted to get some Mexican food.
The barber said, "See that n_r over there? Ask him, he can tell
you. (55)
This quote haunts me almost 60 years later, as a South Texas professor
who knows the history of Mexican lynchings, the Texas Rangers'
tyranny, segregated Mexican-American and white schools, children
Reflection" • 218
being beaten for speaking Spanish in their classrooms, and the myriad
of other discriminatory measures that still linger in the parents' and
grandparents' cuentos (stories) from my Latino/a students. Painter must
have been challenged to be "objective" during the '40s when New
Orleans appeared to be significantly less oppressive for Latin American
and Mexican immigrants than cities and towns in Texas and California.
He studied 67 case histories of "Latin American people" in New Orleans.
Case histories represented 4% of the Latin American population in New
Orleans who were born outside this country, and Latin Americans in
New Orleans represented 113 of one percent of the total population. This
percentage was probably lower since the Latino/a population in New
Orleans has always been undercounted, even after Hurricane Katrina.
Painter's study on Latino/a immigrant assimilation was relatively
groundbreaking for his time since most research focused on European
groups and concentrated on "northern industrial cities." A few studies
were conducted on Mexicans immigrants and migrants in Texas and
California, but Painter's study was unique in that he captured immigrants
from all over the Americas that settled in New Orleans. Painter notes
that American Sociology emerged as its own academic department in
universities because of multiple studies of immigration (2).
His groundbreaking study of Latino/a immigration is fascinating
in that it occurs in the South and portrays Latino/a immigrants as
significantly less oppressed in New Orleans than in almost any other
city. He acknowledges, like many other researchers, that the focus
in New Orleans centers on a Black and White conflict. He sees this
as a benefit to Latin American immigrants who he claims can easily
assimilate given their small population (141). However, he creates
a more complex picture of New Orleans and its history with Latin
America that explains why these immigrants from a variety of
Latin American and Caribbean countries might not experience the
hardships other Latino/a immigrants faced elsewhere. From his case
studies, he found that many New Orleans Latino/a immigrants came
Ret1ections.219
from good educational and middle class backgrounds, knew some
New Orleans' schools and universities would welcome their children,
familiarized themselves with New Orleans' cultural ties to Spanish
history and Catholicism prior to immigrating, spoke some English,
and successfully secured employment in a city with strong economic
ties to Latin America. Latino/a immigrants lived in neighborhoods
throughout New Orleans, and it was quite common for them to
intermarry with U.S. citizens. Many of them had just as many friends
that were Latinos/as as they had with Anglos/as. Thirty- one percent
of Latinos/as he interviewed said that they belonged to mainstream
organizations, such as the American Medical Association, AAUP
Young Men's Business Club, Masonic Lodge, and the Association of
Commerce. Some of the interviewees said that they were barred from
joining mainstream organizations like these in other states like Texas
and California (42).
A significant flaw in Painter's study is that he failed to interview
Black Latino/a immigrants and, according to Mary Karen Bracken,
they were in New Orleans at this time (41). According to an interview
she had with Ismael Cacho Nunez, a Black Honduran retired U.S.
Merchant Marine, many Black Latino immigrants were seamen
or port workers who easily eluded documentation checks because
they could pass for Black Americans (53). Black seamen have long
been respected in Black culture given their worldly experiences
and their ability to bring port communities news from other parts
of the country. They frequently intermarried with Black Americans
and quickly assimilated into Black American culture (53). Xavier
University in New Orleans (established in 1925) was the only Black
and Catholic university in the nation and did recruit Black Latino/a
college students (see Evelio Grillo's Black Cuban, Black American).
However, Southern Black Latinos/as were often seen as only Black
and not Latino/a. Black Latino/a immigrants quickly assimilated
into Black American culture in New Orleans and elsewhere in the
South because of the harsh Jim Crow laws at that time. They needed
Rc fl cd ion, • 220
to survive in a Black and White Southern city. However, given the
strong Black Catholic population in New Orleans, Black Latino/a
immigrants found assimilation easier given the religious affinity
to Black Americans that was almost nonexistent (and sometimes
oppressed) in many parts of the South. They hoped that their children
could attend Black Catholic schools and a Black Catholic university.
They also found affiliation with the Black Caribbean influences that
were part of the Black American culture of New Orleans.
Little has been written on the Latino/a population in New Orleans
during the 1950s and early 1960s except for when Cubans arrived
in New Orleans to escape Fidel Castro. However, according to the
census data that Elmer Lamar Ross collected in 1973, the Latin
American Foreign Born population increased dramatically from
2,728 (1950) to 8,331 (1960) to 15,388 (1970) in Orleans Parish
(5). The census data may be understated given the number of illegal
immigrants in New Orleans. Something happened during these
decades to attract a Latino/a immigrant group to New Orleans, one
that is seldom written about in this country, Hondurans. Often, when I
mention that my mother is from Honduras, I receive perplexed looks
from folks, especially in the South, who I know are not sure where
this country might be.
However, this is not the case in New Orleans, a city that has the
largest population of Hondurans outside of Honduras at around
140,000-160,000 out of approximately 300,000 Latinos/as in New
Orleans. They are a significant population in New Orleans who
received little attention as a primary focus of study. Only one U.S.
lengthy work (a thesis) has been written on the Honduran presence
in New Orleans (see Samantha Euraque's 2004 thesis entitled
"Honduran Memories: Identity, Race, Place, and Memory in New
Orleans, Louisiana"). Hondurans have had a long and sometimes
tumultuous relationship with New Orleans dating back to at least
the late 1860s. Interestingly, the Honduran presence in New Orleans
Ret1ections • 221
became much more prominent when three Italian immigrants in New
Orleans, Joseph, Luca, and Felix Vacarrol, decided to import bananas
from Honduras. These poor Italian immigrants worked on Magnolia
Plantation hauling produce before opening up a store with Salvador
D' Antoni. Their store was lost to a Mississippi levee break and a
few years later they lost their orange crop due to a harsh Southern
winter. With a small battered ship, they began a successful business
of importing bananas to New Orleans from La Ceiba, Honduras. They
quickly acquired more ships and formed the Standard Fruit Company.
Unlike the United Fruit Company that cared little about their Latin
American communities, the Vacarro brothers built hospitals, schools,
and infrastructures along with a railroad that helped the people of
Honduras (Sanchez). They gained prominence in New Orleans as
well, although the people of New Orleans stereotypically claimed
that these Italian immigrants had ties to the mob (Kames 32).
They also had a fleet of 35 ships that not only carried bananas but
also passengers from Mexico and throughout the Caribbean area,
including Central America, starting around 1924. These Italian
immigrants brought the Latin American, Mexican, and especially
Honduran immigrants to New Orleans.
According to Trujillo-Pagan, the number of Central Americans in New
Orleans increased from 100 in 1890 to 1,023 in 1930. The Standard
Fruit Company and the United Fruit Company employed many
Hondurans who immigrated to New Orleans and were responsible for
forming early Latino communities in the Mid-City region (99-100).
These early Honduran immigrants arriving mostly from the coastal
regions of La Ceiba, Trujillo, Tela, Porto Cortez and San Pedro Sula
played a role in attracting immigrants from other Latin American
countries. With the Standard Fruit Company cruise ships, between
1927 and 1951, the Vacarro brothers also offered residents of New
Orleans many excursions to Havana, Cuba, La Ceiba, Honduras,
Nicaragua, Vera Cruz and Tampico, Mexico, the Mexican cities that
have Creole influences (Maritime Timetable Images). Today, the
cruise ships from New Orleans predominantly go to the Caribbean
islands. With the Vacarro brothers centralizing their Latin American
ties in La Ceiba, it soon became a place that attracted immigrants
from the continent and beyond. The most frequent cruise ship stops
from New Orleans were in La Ceiba. New Orleans and La Ceiba
residents found a particular familiarity in their respective cities
since both cities have the largest Carnivals (Mardi Gras) in their
country and regions. La Ceiba has week-long festivities in the third
week of May to commemorate San Isidro and is known to be the
largest Carnival in Central America. This city also has a significant
Black population (Garifunas) who are descendents of African slaves
and a local Indian tribe. Zora Neale Hurston conducted extensive
anthropological studies of Garifunas (see Tell My Horse: voo doo and
life in Haiti and Jamaica}. Starting in the late 1980s, the Honduran
community sponsored well-attended Honduran festivals in New
Orleans, where New Orleans experienced Honduran music, food, and
culture. The Latino/a community also had Carnaval Latino, another
festival that started around the same time (Treadway). In recent years,
they were also instrumental in bringing Fiesta Latina, a Latin music
festival presented by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.
These similar communities would explain why many Hondurans in
Painter's case studies and later immigrants to New Orleans expressed
a familiarity with this city that reminded them of home. This may
explain why some from New Orleans in the first half of the twentieth
century were quite comfortable with their Honduran immigrants.
After WWII, Honduran soldiers immigrated to New Orleans, where
they attained American citizenship (Henao 22). The 1950s brought
several strikes, a large Honduran hurricane, and several political
upheavals that propelled some Hondurans to leave their country for
economic reasons. The natural place for many Honduran workers was
New Orleans, especially for La Ceiba residents more familiar with
this U.S. city. A wave of migration began in the late 1950s (Euraque).
Earlier in the decade, a more affluent class of Standard Fruit
Reflections.
223
Company Honduran employees often sent their children to boarding
schools in New Orleans after their children finished attending the
Standard Fruit Company-sponsored elementary bilingual school in
La Ceiba. Many of the New Orleans boarding schools were receptive
to Honduran children who later attended U. S. universities. Elmar
Ross's study of the educational level for the Latino/a population in
1970 shows that Latinos/as ranked highest out of Blacks and Whites
in educational attainment for the state (99). He also found that
Latinos/as had higher percentages in attendance of nursery schools,
kindergartens, and college (97). With the acquisition ofTransportes
Aereas Centro-Americanos (TACA airlines) by Waterman Steamship
Company in 1949, TACA airlines becomes chartered in New Orleans.
Central American immigrants (especially Honduran immigrants) now
have easy access to New Orleans via planes and ships (Grupo TACA).
In 1959, Dr. Raul G. Reyes "founded the Asociacion Hondurefia
de Nueva Orleans with the goal of preserving Honduran cultural
traditions through the sponsorship of folkloric and social events" (qtd.
in Bracken, 57). He later ran for the Presidency of Honduras, but lost
the election (Garcia Ponce). Reyes still practices in New Orleans. The
association he fonned coincided with the first Latino/a concentrated
community, "El Barrio Lempira" that was located in the lower Garden
District (Euraque). Honduran restaurants, bars, supermarkets, and
other small businesses began cropping up in the area and in Elyssian
fields. Other Honduran groups developed in subsequent years, such
as the Honduran American Emergency Fund, Asociacion Hondurefia
Unificada de Louisiana, and Hondurenos Unidos de Louisiana.
The groups have had problems that hindered the leadership, but
they worked to help Hondurans and their Louisiana Honduran
communities, especially in Post Mitch and Katrina.
Early Honduran and other Central American communities developing
around the city paved the way for other Latino/a immigrants to
come to this city and find hope in fulfilling their American dreams.
The Honduran immigrant population and its relative early success
Rcflectioll:-- • 224
in New Orleans may have seemed attractive for other immigrant
groups. Cubans arrived in the early 1960s seeking refuge from the
Castro government. Two decades later this established community
of Cubans, New Orleans sea captains, various priests, and journalists
were instrumental in bringing Cubans to New Orleans in 1980
during the Mariel boatlift (Owsley-Rodriguez interview with Joan
Treadway). Hondurans and Cubans made up the largest Latino/a
population from particular countries making New Orleans different
in its Central American/Cuban dominance compared to other areas
of the country. Post-Katrina has brought in another large immigrant
population, Mexicans. The last few decades of the twentieth and the
beginning of the twenty-first century have seen a dramatic increase
in the number of New Orleans Latino/a immigrants and more
researchers focus on this time period. However, the early period of
Latino/a immigration and Spanish influences are rarely touched upon
to any great length.
To extensively focus on the early period and contrast it to the PostKatrina Latinos/as would serve as a reminder of a historical past of
immigration that should not be forgotten. It may remind the New
Orleans population and educate others outside of New Orleans
that the Latino/a presence is deeply grounded in the cultures of
this Southern community and that the new Latino/a immigrants
have a place in this cultural history. Decades later, after Hurricane
Katrina, I find it difficult to read articles in 2005 that focus on what
Honduran immigrants endured in New Orleans. Many Hondurans
fled to New Orleans after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which devastated
Honduras and sent the country into economic turmoil. They endured
two devastating hurricanes in seven years and now face hardships
reaching the U.S. In 2005, it was reported that 505 Hondurans died
on their way to the U.S., many from train injuries in Mexico as they
tried to board or disembark. The once easy access to New Orleans
from Honduras is no more. U.S. Honduran immigrants were sending
approximately $1.2 billion dollars to their families prior to Hurricane
Reflections. 225
Katrina, so the negative impact for Honduras was profound ("Region
Tallies Toll of Katrina: Honduras Hardest Hit"). The money sent to
Honduras from families in New Orleans was approximately 20%-30%
of all family money that came from immigrants.
In one interview with a Honduran immigrant, Mirta Flores, who
endured both Hurricane Mitch and Hurricane Katrina, was asked
what it was like to experience another hurricane in such a small
time period:
[Translated by Melissa Gutierrez] She says really only God really
knows, but that I would really like, sometimes I have the feeling to
just get up and leave and go back to my country, but when I think
about my five children, I think that really, there I have-they have
no future, because of the poverty that we live in there. And so I just
feel and I believe in God that he's going to help us get through this,
and eventually, we'll be able to get a job in the future. (Honduran
Immigrants in New Orleans)
Mirta, like many Honduran immigrants, feared deportation and
fled to the shelters once she heard Immigration was searching for
undocumented immigrants. Many immigrants fled to Houston and
flooded a Honduran restaurant, El Coquito, asking for "food, shelter,
medicine, and information" (Hondurans Helping Hondurans After
Katrina). They distrusted shelters and more conventional sources of
information, so Cristina Berrio, the restaurant owner, became "the
informal consulate." The Honduran Consulate provided little help. A
local Latino/a newspaper, Jambalaya News, covered the corruption
and incompetence of the Honduran Consulate General Office in New
Orleans that ultimately harmed Honduran immigrants seeking help
(Murphy 12).
immigrants and their descendents have a large community in New
York City with many relatives residing in New Orleans. Various
Garifuna organizations banded together to raise money for relief efforts
("Garifuna in New York Rally for Hurricane Katrina Victims in the
South"). Some Garifuna immigrants reportedly stayed at the Super
Dome and eluded Immigration authorities because they could pass for
African Americans in this Southern Black and White city.
Another Honduran population who fled New Orleans and then came
back to rebuild their homes and businesses are professional immigrants
and their children who either resided in this city for a long time or
were born here. They are professionals who returned to rebuild, left
the city for other jobs, or retired to Honduras or other places. They
often employed Latino/a immigrants or serviced them through their
respective professional occupations. Throughout the years, many of
these successful Honduran professionals helped newly arrived Latino/a
immigrants with their American dreams and established a welcoming
Latino/a environment through cultural events, fundraisers, and other
community endeavors.
Honduran Americans like me have respect for this resilient
community in New Orleans which perseveres despite insurmountable
obstacles. Some are now new immigrants rebuilding New Orleans
or established immigrants returning to rebuild their familiar
communities in physical, cultural, and/or social ways. Others are
sons, daughters, grandsons, or granddaughters of immigrants who
know no other home and have heard the early stories of immigration
that "root" them in a Southern Latino/a New Orleans. It is a
community that cannot and will not be ignored.
Hundreds of Garifunas from the North Coastal Honduran region
were also reportedly in New Orleans when the storm hit. Garifuna
Reflections. 227
Works Cited
Berchak, Katie Judith. "Nueva Orleans: Hispanics in New Orleans, The
Catholic Church, and Imagining the New Hispanic Community."
Thesis. Louisiana State University, 2007.
Bracken, Mary Karen. "Restructuring the Boundaries: Hispanics in
New Orleans, 1960-1990." Diss. University of New Mexico, 1992.
"Company Perspectives." Grupo Taca. 10 Dec. 2008. <http://www.
fundinguniverse.comlcompany-histories/Grupo-TACA-CompanyHistory.html> .
Euraque, Samantha. "Honduran Memories: Identity, Race, Place, and
Memory in New Orleans, Louisiana." Thesis. Louisiana State
University, 2004.
Garcia, Olga Ponce. Telephone Interview. 20 Dec. 2008.
"Garifuna in New York Rally for Hurricane Katrina Victims in
the South." Garinet Global, Inc. 6 September 2005. <http://
www.garinet.comlmain.php?module=gcms&node=gcms_
front&action=get_content_detail&content_id=2931 &category_
id= 166&parent_id=230> .
Grillo, Evelio. Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir. Houston: Arte
Publico Press, 2000.
Henao, Luis Emilio. The Hispanics in Louisiana. New Orleans: Latin
American Apostolate, 1982.
"Honduran Immigrants in New Orleans: Fleeing Hurricane Mitch,
Katrina, and Now the U.S. Government." Narr. Amy Goodman.
Democracy Now. 13 September 2005. Transcript.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: voo doo and life in Haiti and
Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Kames, Thomas L. Tropical Enterprise: The Standard Fruit &
Steamship Company in Latin America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1978.
i~cfIccl
inn'. .. 228
Kochhar, Rakesh, Roberto Suro, and Sonya Tafoya. "The New Latino
South: The Context and Consequences of Rapid Population
Growth." Pew Hispanic Center. 26 July 2005.7 Dec. 2008 < http://
pewhispanic.org/reports!report. php?ReportID=50>.
Korrol, Virginia Sanchez. "Bridging the Caribbean: Puerto Rican Roots
in Nineteenth Century America." History Now: American History
Online 5 (2005).10 November 2008 <http://www.historynow.
org/03 _2005lhistorian4 .html>.
Lavastida, Jose and Beatrice Rodriguez Owsley. "Hispanic Presence in
Louisiana and the Catholic Church." Cross Crozier and Crucible:
A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial ofa Catholic Diocese in
Louisiana. Ed. Glenn R. Conrad. New Orleans: The Archdiocese of
New Orleans, 1993.77-87.
Lea, Henry Charles. The Inquisition of the Spanish Dependencies: New
York: Macmillan, 1908.
Maritime Timetable Images: Standard Fruit & Steamship Co. (Vacarro
Line). 20 November 2008. <http://www.timetableimages.coml
maritime!images/stand.htm>.
Murphy, Brenda. "In New Orleans: Hondurans on the verge of being
deported." Jambalaya News. 10 Nov. 2007.
Owsley, Beatrice Rodriguez. Interview with Father Luis Henao. 9 July
1987.
Painter, Norman Wellington. "The Assimilation of Latin Americans in
New Orleans." MA Thesis. Tulane U, 1949.
Peat, Don. "Hondurans Helping Hondurans After Katrina." Honduras
this Week: Your Central American Weekly Review. 17 June 2007.
<http://donpeat.comlstorieslhondurans-helping-hondurans-afterkatrina/>.
Ross, Elmer Lamar. "Factors in Residence Patterns Among Latin
Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana: A Study in Urban
Anthropological Methodology." Diss. University of Georgia, 1973.
Retlections •
229
Sanchez, J.P. Honduras' Banana Trade Industry. LaCeiba.com. 8
December 2008. <http://www.laceiba.comllaceibalbanana-trade/
banana-trade-chl.html>.
Spanish Governors. Encyclopedia of Louisiana. 10 December 2008.
<http://enlou.comlpeople/spanish_governors.htm.>
Treadway, Joan. "Honduras fest coincides with independence." Times
Picayune. 13 Sept. 1995: B-1.
Trujillo-Pagan, Nicole. "From "Gateway to the Americas" to the
"Chocolate City": The Racialization of Latinos in New Orleans."
Racing the Storm: Racial Implications and Lessons Learnedfrom
Hurricane Katrina. Ed. Hillary Potter. Lanham: Lexington Books,
2007.95-114.
Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr., ed. Tribute to Don Bernardo de Galvez.
New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1979.
Refl eet i 011"
•
230
Listen to My Story: The Transformative Possibilities of
Storytelling in Immigrant Communities
Mark Lyons, Proyecto Sin Fronteras I Open Borders Project
Since 2006, Open Borders Project I Proyecto Sin Fronteras has
used digital storytelling in our work with teens and adult
learners in summer workshops, computer courses and ESl
classes. Participants write stories or interview others about
their immigrant experience, record, edit and mix their stories
on an open-source program, and create short audio stories.
Their stories are published on our website, used to stimulate
discussions, shared in public forums, and played on the radio.
The process of creating stories and sharing them has been
profound. Listening to each other's stories and reflecting on
our common experience is an act of honoring our lives and
affirming our sacrifices and dreams. Through our stories, we
build a collective identity as immigrants. Telling our stories
allows us to take risks, to talk about missing our families, our
isolation, our frustrations as we try to feel at home in our
new world. Our stories create openings for conversations
with our friends and family, to say things unsaid. Our biggest
challenge: how to use our stories as instruments for change,
to give us a voice, to be heard, to organize, to become
actors responding to issues that affect our lives. This article
is accompanied by a CD of several of the stories produced at
Open Borders Project and referred to in the text.
Ret1ections •
231
Sanchez, J.P. Honduras' Banana Trade Industry. LaCeiba.com. 8
December 2008. <http://www.laceiba.comllaceibalbanana-trade/
banana-trade-chl.html>.
Spanish Governors. Encyclopedia of Louisiana.! 0 December 2008.
<http://enlou.com/people/spanish_governors.htm.>
Treadway, Joan. "Honduras fest coincides with independence." Times
Picayune. 13 Sept. 1995: B-l.
Trujillo-Pagan, Nicole. "From "Gateway to the Americas" to the
"Chocolate City": The Racialization of Latinos in New Orleans."
Racing the Storm: Racial Implications and Lessons Learned from
Hurricane Katrina. Ed. Hillary Potter. Lanham: Lexington Books,
2007.95-114.
Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr., ed. Tribute to Don Bernardo de Galvez.
New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1979.
Rd'lcl'ti(ln~
• 230
Listen to My Story: The Transformative Possibilities of
Storytelling in Immigrant Communities
Mark Lyons, Proyecto Sin Fronteras I Open Borders Project
Since 2006, Open Borders Project I Proyecto Sin Fronteras has
used digital storytelling in our work with teens and adult
learners in summer workshops, computer courses and ESL
classes. Participants write stories or interview others about
their immigrant experience, record, edit and mix their stories
on an open-source program, and create short audio stories.
Their stories are published on our website, used to stimulate
discussions, shared in public forums, and played on the radio.
The process of creating stories and sharing them has been
profound. listening to each other's stories and reflecting on
our common experience is an act of honoring our lives and
affirming our sacrifices and dreams. Through our stories, we
build a collective identity as immigrants. Telling our stories
allows us to take risks, to talk about missing our families, our
isolation, our frustrations as we try to feel at home in our
new world. Our stories create openings for conversations
with our friends and family, to say things unsaid. Our biggest
challenge: how to use our stories as instruments for change,
to give us a voice, to be heard, to organize, to become
actors responding to issues that affect our lives. This article
is accompanied by a CD of several of the stories produced at
Open Borders Project and referred to in the text.
Reflections. 231
pen Borders Project / Proyecto Sin Fronteras is an educational
organization based in the Latino community of North
Philadelphia. Our mission is straightforward: to provide
immigrants technical computer and language skills that will improve
their employment opportunities, to use our classes as a venue to create
a community, and to identify and develop leaders who can involve our
community in a dialogue with the institutions that affect our lives.
recording is edited in an open-source program called Audacity. The
voice is mixed with music, voice-over, and sound effects. The final
product is an audio story, between two and ten minutes in length, which
can be burned on a CD, put on a website, played on a radio station, sent
to families back home, or used in a campaign. The producers learn two
important skills related to literacy: to tell a story that has meaning to
them and their community, and to use computer technology.
As immigrants, one of the greatest challenges we confront in our new
world is our anonymity. We are separated from those we love back
home, are often isolated from each other on this side of the border, and
are invisible to the larger world that does not know who we are, does
not value the contributions we make as we work, pay taxes and add
our rich cultures and sense of family and community to the weave of
America. We feel like non-beings.
We chose Audacity as our editing tool because it is free (just Google
Audacity, and follow the directions) and very user-friendly. Participants
are energized by the ease with which they learn the program, and
quickly begin to explore its creative possibilities. It is an ideal tool
because it is accessible to our community, which has limited financial
resources and limited experience working with computers.
One of our great strengths is that we are a community of storytellersour oral tradition is the glue that connects us to our roots in Guatemala
or Mexico or Ecuador or Colombia or Puerto Rico. Our stories can help
us create new communities in EI Norte, affirm our common experience
and dreams, and work together to speak to the larger society, to be
heard, to become visible.
In 2006, Open Borders introduced digital storytelling into our work. We
began with teens in our summer program, then gradually expanded to
the point that we incorporate storytelling into almost all phases of our
work with youth, communities, ESL classes and technical classes such
as webcast design. Since the inception of our program, students from
service-learning programs at several universities in Philadelphia have
played important roles in our digital storytelling program, especially in
our work with youth and English language learners.
This is how a digital story works: The producer creates a story, as
a written narrative or an interview. The story is recorded, and the
Reflect iOll;'"
•
232
The stories that have been produced in these workshops stop me
every time I listen to them. But what is even more powerful are
the stories around the stories: risks taken, experiences honored,
thoughtful feedback given, conversations initiated, reflections shared,
a community of storytellers cultivated, the potential for these stories
to give the immigrant community a voice in the larger community of
Philadelphia. I will share some of these remarkable stories, as well
as their back stories-how they were produced and the effect they
had on the narrators and the listeners. (In the jacket of this edition of
Reflections is a CD that includes eight of the stories that I will discuss.
Stories found on the CD will be noted by: [CD-Track # ].)
The Open Borders Youth Radio Project
I ask Micaela Hernandez, Glenda Vargas, and Tatyana Martinez why
they chose to be on the production team that will interview Gregory
Taylor, an ex-offender who works for the National Comprehensive
Center for Men, where he mentors other ex-prisoners who want to
re-build their relationship with their children. Tatyana talks about
Reflections • 233
her father being
in jail since the
day she was born;
Glenda tells of the
years her father
was away injail;
Micaela says, "Its
". just a topic I'm
interested in. " Two
days later, when we
are developing the
question set for the
interview, Micaela
"comes out" about
her father being in jail since she was three-the first time she has
told anyone for many years. After sharing the details of their fathers'
incarceration, the three decide they will weave their own stories of
being separated from their fathers into Gregory s story [CD Track 3).
For the last three summers we have held the Open Borders Youth
Radio Project, in which 15-20 teens from North Philadelphia were paid
to work as producers, twenty hours per week for six weeks. Seventy
percent of the teens were Latino, thirty percent are African-American.
We divided the project into two sessions. During the first two weeks,
we used a set of exercises to teach participants the elements of telling
a good story--how to build a story arc, using description and creating
scenes, being specific while exploring a universal theme. Participants
wrote personal stories about the most important thing in their room, or
a sad or happy memory, or an event that changed them forever. During
this period they also learned technical aspects of recording and sound
editing in Audacity. Most importantly, the first two weeks were about
taking risks by telling stories that were important to them, and building
trust as they listened to each others' stories carefully and honored them.
During the second session, which lasted four weeks, teens formed
Refl cct lPl1 "
•
234
production teams and interviewed local heroes in our community. For
example, in the summer of2008, a team produced a radio· show about
an ex-offender who mentors other men who have come out ofjail and
want to rebuild their relationships with their children [CD Track 3].
Another team did a show about a Mexican woman who fights racism
and sexism in South Philadelphia [CD Track 6].
The Ecuadorians of Upper Darby
Martha has not seen her children-now 13 and 17-for ten years. As
she edits her interview from 37 minutes down to 5 minutes, the focus
narrows down to her grief of being separated from her children, of
her guilt and pride and dreams for them. Her story tells of the day
she left home, her desperation to find ways to communicate with her
children, her hopes for reuniting with them [CD Tracks 1/English and
2/Spanish). As we listen to her story on the final day ofour workshop,
all crying, Martha says, "This is the first time I've been able to say this
to anyone since coming north. "
A large community of Ecuadorians has recently settled in Upper Darby,
a working-class community on the edge of Philadelphia. Many of
these immigrants come from the village of Sidcay, in the Ecuadorian
highlands; most of them have made the trip north alone and left family
and children behind. Because of their undocumented immigration
status they have not been able to return home for five, even ten years.
On eight Saturday mornings we met in the basement of Lucia P.,
set up laptop computers and held a digital storytelling workshop.
First, participants talked about what it meant to be an immigrant and
developed a list of themes that would help them focus their stories.
Their list was like a table of contents for the diaspora occurring all over
the world, of people moving from poor countries to richer countries,
from the country to the city, to survive: life at home and the decision
to leave, the pain of leaving and separation from family and children,
the dreams that brought them to EI Norte, life in the United States, the
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235
dream versus the reality. After much discussion, the group decided to
focus on the theme of leaving home. We then held a mini-workshop on
how to do a good interview-asking open-ended questions, putting the
narrator in a scene and asking her to fill in the details, listening actively
and going where the conversation leads. The group then developed a
set of open-ended and scene-creating questions to explore the theme of
leaving home, and interviewed each other. Most of the interviews were
15-40 minutes long, which were edited down to around five minutes
in Audacity (a revelation for everyone, especially those who had never
touched a computer). Finally, they added music to their sound track.
English as a Second Language at Open Borders
Xiomara has written her first story in English, and reads it into the
recorder. She tells of taking her two young children on the bus to the
County Assistance Office to get them Medicaid. They miss the stop and
end up in Center City Philadelphia. She tries to ask for directions, but
no one speaks Spanish. She and her children walk the three miles home
to North Philadelphia. She promises herself this will never happen
again. She will/earn English [CD Track 9].
English as a Second Language classes are held at Open Borders. Most of
the instructors are volunteers from undergraduate and graduate programs
at Temple University. In the fall of2008, Open Borders Project did a
workshop with the ESL volunteers which focused on teaching students
to write a brief story about their immigration experience. Students wrote
stories, which we recorded and mixed with music; then we gave each
student a CD of the class stories as a graduation present [CD Track 9].
We are working with Temple to make these stories an integral part of
the ESL curriculum, to enhance written and oral language acquisition.
One class has introduced cooperative learning: one participant discusses
the story she wants to tell, and the group makes suggestions on how to
improve vocabulary, grammar and structure.
Reflectioll" .. 236
Lessons Learned from Our Digital Storytelling Program
The vision of introducing storytelling into all phases of our work is
very much a work in progress. However, after three years of developing
and tinkering with the model, we can make four observations that make
us feel we are on the right track, that we want to continue to deepen and
refine our work in this area.
Lesson # 1: When they feel safe, people will take risks and tell
stories that are important to them; they will begin to believe that
they have an important story to tell. Reyna, age 15, initially wrote a
superficial story about "one of the most important people in my life,"
an aunt who she said she said she didn't really know. I mentioned
that it felt as if she didn't really care about her story, and began to
"peel the onion," as we say at Open Borders. "Why did you decide to
write about your aunt?" "Well, I didn't know her, but I heard that she
would really be there when you needed her." "Does she remind you
of someone who has really been there for you?" "Well (a long pause),
my mom was there for me." When was that?" "When I got pregnant
last year." "Is this the story you really want to tell?" We talked about
risks, and Reyna decided to go for it. She wrote a brutally honest letter
to her one-year-old, Jonathan, about how angry she was that because
of him she couldn't hang with her friends after school or on weekends;
then described all she was going to do to assure he had the best shot
in life. Devon, 17, with a history of problems in school but now back
on track, wrote of being homeless, and his favorite toy in the shelter
being a Power Ranger without any arms [CD Track 4]. Darnell's story
told of planning revenge with his brothers to punish his father for all
the beatings his family had endured. Eduardo, an artist at nurturing
his tough persona, described the favorite object in his bedroom-a
photograph of his mother taken five years before, the last time she was
happy, just before his father left.
Reflections. 237
Teachers decided that if we were going to push teens to take risks,
we would have to take risks too: we offered them the opportunity to
interview us. Any questions were legitimate, as long as they were
respectful. Students worked in teams, developed question sets, and
interviewed teachers while other students observed. One group asked
a service-learning volunteer about her personal life, what she thought
about living with her boyfriend before marriage. Another group
interviewed a volunteer teacher about being bi-racial. An Anglo teacher
was asked about why he worked in the Hispanic community, what he
got out of it. Student observers gave feedback about the quality of the
questions, extent of active listening, and opportunities for follow-up
questions. With this feedback, the interviews were resumed.
Lesson # 2: A transforming moment within our workshops is the
act of listening to each other's stories, giving feedback, reflecting.
Luis' story described his harrowing five-day storm-ravaged voyage
from Ecuador to Guatemala on a boat loaded with sixty passengers, all
of whom had to stay below deck all day to hide from the helicopters
(his description of being crammed below deck in the fish holds lying
head-to-toe sounded like historical descriptions of slave ships). His
fellow Ecuadorians recounted their stories of paying $14,000 for a
guide, getting to Guatemala or Mexico by boat, and trekking north.
People became very animated retelling their stories, as they realized
that they were in a sense heroes who had embarked on a dangerous
voyage, all for their families. Ourlast night, eating Chinese and
listening to each other's stories, went on to midnight. People cried, told
stories about their stories, talked about how the group was a safe place
to share stories they had kept hidden-even from their families and
fellow immigrants.
Listening, feedback and reflection were all critical components of
the Youth Radio Project. We developed an exercise called "critiquing
the cookie," to model a way of giving constructive feedback to help
students improve their stories. Teachers baked cookies, and students
Reflectillns .. 238
brainstormed a list of criteria of how you know a great cookie when
you taste one. Students then (blind-) tasted the teachers' cookies, and
chose the best according to their criteria. We then developed criteria
for what makes a "good" story. Students met in small groups, listened
to each other's stories, talked about what parts of the story moved
them, suggested ways to make the stories more powerful. When the
stories were completed, recorded and mixed, the entire group listened
to the final cut. We recounted memorable scenes and images, and
acknowledged the bravery of telling stories important to us. Long
discussions were stimulated by the stories, about teen pregnancy, abuse
in the home, difficulties communicating with parents, betrayal by
friends, relationships between boys and girls. Micaela and Tatyana got
into a long discussion about how their lives would have been different
if their fathers had been home, rather than in jail, and tried to imagine
would it would be like if they ever came home. After interviewing
Irma Irma Zamora about the racism she had faced since coming from
Mexico, Daquan and Vanessa reflected on their own experiences with
racism [CD Track 6].
Wednesday morning ESL class: Anthony was stuck on his story about
coming to the U.S. from Santo Domingo. He felt he had nothing
important to say-he had obtained a visa and come legally, no
struggles, no crossing the border in the desert, no danger. Not like other
stories. Uninteresting. "Anyway, actually, my life was much better in
Santo Domingo, I am not living my dream here." His classmates all
chimed in: "There's your story, The American Dream."
Lesson # 3: Stories create opportunities for dialogue, for missed
conversations with family and other important people in our life.
Glenda described her most precious possession-a letter her father sent
her from jail. She decided to ask him to read the letter for her story.
He had no idea she was making a digital story about him. They talked
about his being away, his leaving suddenly, how important his letters
and cards were, how much they meant to each other. He recorded his
Ret1ections • 239
letter with passion and tears (Glenda decided to edit out the tears~
his and hers. [CD Track 7]) Vanessa recorded the story of the most
important day of her life-the day she went to a baseball game with her
traditional Mexican father. Miracle of miracles--the game was rained
out, and they had The Talk-about her wanting more freedom, needing
him to trust her, how it was hard for him to let go, how they loved
each other [CD Track 5]. Vanessa's father listened to her digital story
and learned how important that moment was for her, how important
he was. Darnell's mother nodded with knowing and a sense of pride
as he publicly played his story about how he and his brothers ended
the abuse in their family. After completing her interview with Gregory
Taylor, Micaela made the long trek by bus to visit her father, who had
been in jail for the last fifteen years. They talked for two hours about
how they had missed each other, what they wanted for their lives, what
was possible. When Gregory Taylor listened to the radio story Micaela
and Tatyana had made about him, he began to cry and asked for a copy.
"My two older children understand why I went away for four years," he
said, "but my younger children don't. I want to play this story for my
two younger kids; it's time we had the conversation about why I really
went away."
Lesson # 4: These stories have the potential to be instruments for
change. As immigrants, we must confront many burning issues that
impact on our ability to share the American Dream: poor schools,
unemployment, lack of ESL and job training programs, limited access
to health care, inability to reunite our families that have been split by
our diaspora, having to hide in the shadows because we have no legal
status. This is our greatest challenge: now that we have found our voice
and told our stories, how can we use our narratives to organize, to be
heard, to become actors in solving the problems that affect us? We
are learning. An example: after sharing their stories of missing their
children and families back home, the Ecuadorians in Upper Darby
decided they wanted to find a way to communicate electronically, face
to face with cameras, with their families in Sidcay. They formed a
committee and contacted some community leaders back home. Their
plan: to create an internet cafe in their village which would also be an
afterschool computer program for their children. Funds would have
to be raised, people back home trained. (For many reasons related to
organizing in a community where people work many hours and have
many priorities related to survival, this project came to a halt). Another
example: When Gregory Taylor and Kofi Asante, the director of the
National Comprehensive Center for Men, heard Micalea and Tatyana's
interview of Gregory they hatched a plan: to incorporate digital stories
into their work, use their computer lab to bring men and their children
together to create mutual digital stories in which they talk about being
separated, how they are learning to be together, future hopes for their
relationship. A final example: The New Sanctuary Movement, which
trains people about their rights and ho~ to respond in an immigration
raid, has begun to use stories of families that have been tom apart by
the raids and deportations, a tool to educate and mobilize.
The Transformative Power of Stories
Telling our stories is a process towards achieving literacy. We learn to
articulate what is important in our lives, what our dreams are, the barriers
we confront as immigrants. We gain a better understanding of our own
lives and the world we live in. Our stories can be a starting point for
profound conversations, analysis and collective problem-solving.
We define ourselves and anchor our identity by our stories. Stories
demand to be heard, they teach us to listen to each other. True listening
is the foundation of all relationships-between students in a class, or
parents and their children, within our immigrant community, as we
negotiate with institutions of power to gain our piece of the American
Dream. When we tell our stories and people listen, we become visible.
Our stories give us power.
Ret1ections • 241
Endnotes
CD List for Digital Stories Referred to in This Article
Track 1: Martha (English translation, read by her friend, Lucia) (5:45)
Track 2: Martha (original, Spanish) (5:45)
Track 3: Tatyana and Micaela, Interview with Gregory Taylor, National
Comprehensive Center for Men (5: 18)
Track 4: Devon (2:54)
Track 5: Vanessa (l :53)
Track 6: Daquan, Vanessa and Janeth, Interview with Irma from Juntos
(9:00)
Track 7: Glenda: Her Dad (4:11)
Track 8: Glenda: Her Mom (3:10)
Track 9: Tuesday ESL Class (Ricardo, Alexis, Jonathan, Xiomara,
Armando, Edmira) (8:17)
I am grateful to Manuel Portillo, Lucia P. and Eli Goldblatt for their
contribution to this article.
Reflections. 242