"This place has given me life again," says Carlos González. (Photos: Valeria Fernández)
PHOENIX, Arizona – A broken, rusty voice is the only trace of the former life of drugs and alcohol José Aguilar used to lead. Now mostly known as “El Padrino,” Spanish for The Godfather, Aguilar runs a recovery center for drug addicts from his home in Phoenix.
His Centro de Rehabilitación “Volviendo a Vivir“ (“Returning to Life” Rehabilitation Center) rests in the heart of a neighborhood surrounded by drug dealers’ stash houses and provides services to men who live in the area without any government help.
“We’re here because this is where we’re needed the most,” Aguilar, 52, said.
Sociologist Graciela Mera, an advocate for Volviendo a Vivir, said the center is unique because it’s not operated by any government agencies and it focuses on a minority population made more vulnerable by their immigration status.
Ben de Guzman, first from left, Ronald Lee and other activists gathered in Washington D.C. to listen in on Rep. Gutierrez virtual town hall. (Photo: Jelena Kopanja)
Activists gathered Wednesday night at house parties across the country in a day of action for comprehensive immigration reform organized by the Reform Immigration for America campaign. According to organizers, some 16,000 telephone lines were connected in a virtual town hall meeting in which Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D.-Ill.) announced that his reform bill will be ready in December, despite his earlier promise to introduce it last October or “soon thereafter.”
For Ronald Lee, senior staff attorney at AAJC, the movement is much stronger today than two years ago when comprehensive immigration reform failed, in part, due to disunity among activists.
“The message I think was not clear, and in some ways not as unified as it needed to be across many groups that are allies,” Lee said. “Our messages may have conflated with each other or conflicted with each other. I think now, we are learning from our mistakes and we are providing a much more unified front.”
According to the report by the Washington-based think tank, the current recession has reversed a trend dating back to the mid 1990s in which immigrants performed better than the native-born in terms of employment.
The authors, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas senior economist Pia Orrenius and Agnes Scott College Economics Professor Madeline Zavodny, analyzed employment patterns for the last 15 years, “showing that immigrant economic outcomes began deteriorating before the current recession officially began in December 2007,” MPI said in a press release. [The report is here in pdf.]
As a first-generation American, I’d always found it difficult to imagine my parents’ journey from their homeland of the Philippines to their new home: America.
Over the years, they chose not to mention it very often, much less discuss their memories at length. But I wondered what situations caused them to leave their country behind, and what fears and dreams came with them to the United States. What was it like to travel so far away from your loved ones?
What were their first impressions upon arriving in New York City? How did they find jobs or make friends? Even now, if I ask about those times, my father will answer, “That’s old news, you have to keep thinking about what’s next, not how hard it was in the beginning.”
I thought of my father on a recent rainy morning, when I visited the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan to check out a new interactive exhibit called Voices of Liberty.
Looking out over New York harbor at the Statue of Liberty, with headphones and an iPod provided by the museum, I listened to a poignant soundscape of voices, first person accounts from immigrants coming to America for the first time. There were celebrities and common folks, accents from Poland, Egypt, Rwanda, Germany and elsewhere. Many were refugees, forced by political or economic circumstances in their own nations to seek a new life in the States.
In their testimonies I discovered a deeper understanding of the pain of leaving home and the hardship and excitement of starting over in a strange place. Perhaps I felt my parents’ own hidden feelings and stories resonate in those voices.
Voices of Liberty is part of the museum’s Keeping History Center, which uses digital interactive technology that not only encourages visitors to explore the center’s collections in new ways, but to also add their personal stories and become custodians of their own immigrant history.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is located at Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Place in New York City and you can find out more about them at http://www.mjhnyc.org or by calling 1.646.437.4200.
“We are committed to achieving reform that treats immigrants humanely and fairly, enhances our national security, and puts the undocumented on a path to legal status and eventually citizenship,” campaign manager Rich Stolz said in the statement. “Secretary Napolitano made clear that the political and policy context for reform is decidedly better and different than it was the last time reform was attempted in 2007. Now it is up to the President, Congressional leaders, and us to make reform a reality. We are ready to get to work.”
This Week on New America Now: Reznet editor Victor Merina reports on the 564 federally recognized tribes in the United States in Washington for an historic summit with President Obama. Also, Lloyd Newsom, director of To Be Straight With You, discusses his unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and homosexuality, Director Yoav Shamir explores the state of antisemitism in his new documentary, Defamation, and Carolina De Robertis talks about her novel The Invisible Mountain, a marvelous blend of history, storytelling, romance and revolution set in Uruguay.
New America Now: Dispatches from the New Majority airs Fridays at 12:00 p.m. and repeats Sundays at 3:00 p.m. on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco. Listen to MP3 audio from New America Now Radio or, copy and paste the following URL into a podcasting tool, like iTunes: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510213
It’s not often that the disparate collection of organizations, individuals, websites and media outlets that are pushing for progressive immigration reform can enjoy such a clear-cut victory as the announcement Wednesday by now-former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs’ that he is leaving the network. His decision came after a slew of campaigns by pro-immigrant and Hispanic groups calling for his departure.
Since Dobbs broke the news during what would be his last show on the network, statements, tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, newspaper editorials and other victory declarations have been streaming in.
The anchor’s resignation caused a “wave of happiness” among those who wanted an end to his anti-immigrant rhetoric, wrote La Opinión political reporter and FI2W contributor Pilar Marrero in the Los Angeles newspaper.
“Lou Dobbs’ departure from CNN is not only a sign that the network is interested in restoring its credibility but also that immigrants and Latinos will stand up firmly to hate mongering (sic),” said an editorial in New York newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.
“…the victory of the national mobilization, as Presente.org, put it, communicates that organizations will not be able to profit from promoting hate without a firm backlash.”
This is the second report in a special two-part series on domestic violence in immigrant communities by Feet in Two Worlds reporters.
By Valeria Fernández, FI2W contributor
Milagros, an undocumented migrant, is one of thousands of women with children who received help at the De Colores shelter in Phoenix this year. (Photos: Valeria Fernández)
PHOENIX, Arizona — The back of Milagros’ head hit the steps. Her three-year-old daughter stood by the door as her husband dragged Milagros up the stairs. Milagros, 41, had endured a decade of abuse by her husband. But when her daughter witnessed it, she knew it had to end.
She was almost homeless for three years until she found De Colores, a domestic violence shelter in Phoenix that specializes in helping undocumented Spanish-speaking migrant women like her.
“If I had had the information before, I would have left him earlier,” she said.
De Colores, the only bilingual and bi-cultural shelter for battered immigrant women and their children in Maricopa County, has 58 emergency beds. Given the need -about 500,000 undocumented immigrants live in Arizona, most in the Phoenix metropolitan area- there’s a drastic shortage of bilingual domestic violence shelters.
“We’re always full. When women are calling us we have to deny services because of lack of space,” said Maribel Castro, clinical supervisor for the shelter. This year they had to refer 1,096 women fleeing abusers to other shelters.
The problem: many of those shelters don’t have Spanish-speaking caseworkers available all the time, who are culturally sensitive to the needs of migrant women.
“We have heard that shelters are struggling with providing bilingual advocates and struggling with taking in monolingual women,” said Allie Bones, director of the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence,an organization that lobbies for domestic violence funding in the state legislature. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the first in a special two-part series on domestic violence in immigrant communities by Feet in Two Worlds reporters.
By Jelena Kopanja, FI2W contributor
Angela walked into her daughter’s office to find 18-year-old Rocio on the floor, her childlike face swollen beyond recognition. Rocio’s boyfriend was kneeling beside her, the blood dripping from his arms onto her motionless body. The couple’s baby daughter wailed in the corner.
Angela screamed at the top of her lungs, summoning Rocio back to life. “Don’t leave, don’t leave, your daughter needs you!” she yelled. A barely noticeable blink of an eye gave Angela hope that she had come just in time.
The waiting room at St. Brigid's Church in Brooklyn where immigrants come for help with problems including domestic violence. Photo: Jelena Kopanja
On the day that Angela came to see Msgr. James Kelly seeking help for her daughter the waiting room at St. Brigid’s Church in Brooklyn was packed, mostly with women. Kelly is a priest and an attorney, and his parishioners – many of them immigrants from Latin America – often come to him for legal advice as well as comfort.
He sees about four to five domestic violence related cases every day. While he often tries to refer them to community-based organizations, many of the victims are more comfortable talking about their problems in the church. He often addresses domestic violence in his sermons.
Domestic violence is a sensitive topic in any community, but immigrants face added challenges, say activists who work with these groups. Read the rest of this entry »
The sheriff, known for his aggressive tactics against undocumented immigrants in and around Phoenix, happily chatted with reporters — even the citizen reporters that were part of a protest against him –at an event on Thursday in Anaheim, Orange County before heading to Mission Bay, San Diego, for a second fundraiser.
The self-described “toughest sheriff in the country” came to California to support an underdog sheriff´s candidate: Bill Hunt in Orange County. On Friday, he did the same for Jay La Sur in San Diego County in a move that is certain to bring the immigration issue to the fore in those races, both to be decided next year.
Watch Pilar Marrero’s video of Sheriff Arpaio’s visit to Anaheim, California.
At first, Arpaio seemed irritated by the protests that awaited him as he arrived at the event in Anaheim. But then he seemed to relish the opportunity to face the cameras in California as he often does in Arizona. “Why are they always following me? When I went to the O’Brien show and the Colbert show in New York they were there too,” he said to puzzled reporters who were asking him about his controversial law enforcement policies. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Valeria Fernández 
Posted by Jelena Kopanja 
Posted by D. Graglia 
Jocelyn
John Rudolph
Guest Editor
Suman Raghunathan
Aditi Anand
Aswini Anburajan
Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska
Pilar Marrero
D. Graglia
Martina Guzman
Eduardo A. de Oliveira
Soo
Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes
Valeria Fernández
Pedro Pizano
Rima Marrouch
Jelena Kopanja
Go to feed
Or get FI2W by email
