interviews
Reshaping The Immigration Narrative
by Lizania Cruz
July 15, 2019
This conversation with Albert Saint Jean and Lizania Cruz was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Albert: My name is Albert Saint Jean. I am the New York City organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration [BAJI].
When I heard about BAJI, this was before Trump, I had gotten interested in volunteering, in organizing with BAJI, because a lot of the stuff they were focused on were things I’d seen throughout my life. I was born here, but I was the first of my grandmother's children born here. Everyone older than me had migrated over and I saw what they had to go through with their status, their relationship with law enforcement, their relationship with the criminal justice system, their fear of deportation. I felt like BAJI was at the nexus of a lot of those things when I found out about it three years ago – and long before Trump, because they were things affecting black people. Basically I got into it because it spoke to the things that I saw in my own personal experiences.
Lizania: I'm Lizania Cruz. I'm an artist and a designer originally from the Dominican Republic. I moved here in 2004 when I was 21 to finish college. I started We The News – doing work around shifting the current narrative on migration and trying to figure out how we [people] change.
As we move into different geographic spaces what is our greater sense of belonging and home throughout that?
I was frustrated with the way the current immigration narrative was – only talking about the majority within the minority group, and how the media was taking over the narrative. I didn't feel represented. I didn't feel like our stories were pluralistic in any way. So I started wondering what if we told our own news and our own stories – what would that look like? That's how We The News as a project started. I was talking to different organizations and someone recommended BAJI. I thought it was super interesting how they were talking about migration, blackness, and at the same time talking about the correlation of that and the criminal justice system, which for me, no other organization was doing. Getting involved with BAJI has made the project what it is today. It has also politicized me in ways I wasn't thinking about.
Image via Lizania Cruz, center, with Albert Saint Jean, 3rd from the left.
What are those ways?
Lizania: Looking more at the similarities between disenfranchised communities already in the US and the immigrant movement. Again, I don't think we do that as often, and now I'm constantly thinking of ways that story could be told, and what are the lengths, and how do we organize collectively rather than organize in silos. We're organizing for LatinX folks and maybe labor workers, and we're organizing for people that have been affected by mass incarceration, why are those two things not organized in tandem while looking at the policies in the same way?
You mentioned you feel like the narrative is not pluralistic.
Lizania: Yeah.
And very mono.
Lizania: Exactly.
Does the division of groups fighting for their specific causes as separate give their stories more autonomy? If all these issues are nuanced, where do they blend and how do you deliver a message that covers, or even touches on, all of the personal?
Albert: Particularly with BAJI, they look at the nexus between the similarities between African Americans and black immigrants.
The most common thread we find, is that number one, we all look at each other through a white supremacist lens.
When we talk about the immigration issue, we shy away from the racial aspect of it. This is a racial issue. The diversity of immigrants we have now is only possible because of the rights that African Americans fought for in the early 60s. The 1965 Immigration Act was a part of that, the whole civil rights act. That allowed for the diversity of other immigrants to come here. When we shy away from that, we miss a large swath of what's going on in the immigrant community. We miss talking about what are the drivers that send people here in the first place?
US policy is responsible for a large bulk of us being here. My family wouldn't have come here if it wasn't for the United States supporting a dictator for so long. Her [Lizania’s] country wouldn't be the way it is if it wasn't for US agribusinesses and foreign policy.
Where did your family come from?
Albert: Haiti.
Another place that they [US] supported dictatorships. It's kind of like the stories we're able to show the common thread is US policy, and a lot of it is the racialized aspect of immigration in the United States.
Lizania: I'll add to that. I see specifically in the work that we've been doing with We the News, a creation of a platform where all these stories could live together. There's not as many platforms like that. Finding a place and a platform where people could come together and share their stories and have a voice. None of us are the same and we all have different experiences, but how the commonality becomes the difference, is always what I'm interested in questioning.
Even when we facilitate the story circles, we open with a prompt that is the same for everyone. But nobody responds the same way. How do these stories sit together and how do we make a space for that to happen?
The personal narrative is a driver for policy in this case. Are you guys interested in changing policy?
Albert: Exposing policy, changing policy. Those are important. But I think with my work, what's even more important is changing structural issues.
Is policy complicit in structural issues?
Albert: Well, there's policies that are a symptom of structural racism. Most people look at the Trump era as, for what it is, a terrible era, especially for immigration. But these problems have been going on long before that. The 1996 laws were implemented after Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City. A provision they made was that anybody that commits a crime that's a foreign national would be deported. Whether it’s retroactive or not, you don't even have to be convicted. A lot of people I come across aren't convicted. Yes, it's policy driven, but a lot of it is also sustainable. I'd say a majority of this is systemic. So yeah, there's policies that are pushing against it – but also these narratives show the systemic issues I see as well.
Lizania: It's a way of popular education. I think policy is important, but I think you have to start from the bottom up and create the popular education. People vaguely understand where all these issues are coming from. And you could potentially organize to create policy – but even at BAJI, those who are organizing and those who are going to Congress to affect policy, are different.
Albert: Yeah, that's true. Sometimes I'll go to DC and help lobby for certain things or meet with city officials along local issues. But the bulk of that work is in the hands of people who specialize in policy. Not that these folks have any faith in this system, it's just that they know that this is another strategy.
They know that the system is not broken. It is inherently working the way it's supposed to work.
They feel as though we still have to use policy as a tool. So my job is to create the pressure that Lizania is talking about. Creating a space for people in the community to not only learn about themselves and their rights, but also learn to advocate for themselves. The more they start to realize that their experience is not an anecdotal experience, that this is more of a trend than a norm, they're able to do all the things she just mentioned. That's an organizer's job. To make sure that education is there. When we look at past movements, it wasn't Malcolm X or Martin Luther King who started those movements. They came out of those respective movements, to articulate the needs of the people. We have to start somewhere. I think the more we share this with people, the more likely people are going to be able to fight for liberation so to speak.
What's your dream in this?
Albert: In an ideal world?
Yeah. What do you want immigration in America to look like? To feel like?
Albert: I would say the way it was when my grandmother came in, in the 70s. You just come here – I honestly don't believe in borders, to tell you the truth. But, in my lifetime, I would like for people that are undocumented to obtain amnesty, I would like for there not to be any caps or quotas, regardless of where people come from.
Lizania: I ask this question to myself all the time. We're doing this work but what does it look like when the work is done? I think that if this system runs how it's supposed to, there wouldn’t be quotas for the people that could come here.
Albert: Diversity visas.
Lizania: There won't be diversity visas. I was just having a meeting with my lawyer, and the type of visa I’m applying for has a two year backlog, and he's like, "that's actually nothing." Plus the amount of money that goes into the process. It's just not realistic.
It’s interesting to look at the immigration argument coming from the GOP in the 80s, Bush H.W. and Reagan in 1980 are wildly different than Ted Cruz today.
Albert: What a lot of people don't realize, and this is where I hate the two party system, for the reason you pointed out, is at one point in time the Republican party was way further to the left than Democrats now, than Obama. What Reagan did, the amnesty – and don't get me wrong, all the fuckery that's happened started with Reagan in this country, it started before, but Reagan really took it off – but he gave general amnesty in the 80s. This is someone who right wing people worship, you know what I mean? When I look at Democrats and I look at how they're like, "Oh no, be realistic. This is what we can fight for."
Pit Dreamers against everyone else. Good immigrant versus bad immigrant. All of that stuff is bogus to me. It shows me how far right the pendulum has swung.
When people claim to be moderate now and think, "Oh, I'm moderate, I'm in between. I understand both sides." No, you're a conservative. When you look at the historical analysis of it and how far right this country has gotten, how this country doesn't recognize that is even scarier. The fact that it is normalized, even on the democratic side, is scary. The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can be considered extreme, it's very scary because these were all basic ideas people had.
It's interesting you brought up this thing with Reagan and Bush. I mean, Republican, Democrat, they were always messed up. But Republicans were more strategic. Coming out of the New Deal Era, they knew they had to make concessions in certain places. Especially since they had a labor shortage for certain sectors of the economy. They needed the Bracero Program and domestic workers to come over. They were like, yeah, why would I be against this? They were very practical.
Wet foot dry foot for Cubans. If they made it to the mainland of the U.S., they automatically got a green card because they were fleeing communism. The Haitians, however, were fleeing a dictator who's indiscriminately massacring whole families, women, and children on the streets. 60,000 people were massacred underneath this dictatorship, and people were fleeing. I had family members who were fleeing, but they didn't have the same privileges Cubans had. Once their foot hit land they could be apprehended and found out. I just thought that aspect of it was very interesting to me. The US link. People magically forgot that the US created the situation in El Salvador and Honduras and all these places as late as the 80s, and no one's talking about that. Why are all these people showing up here?
Like our cognitive dissonance is...that's why I like us telling our own narratives. Because we don't forget.
Do you think there’s a lack of education in America about U.S. presence in Central and South America?
Albert: I think that's true globally. Even when we talk about the Middle East we're not really clear about the roots of all those problems.
Lizania: I did a poster that was also part of We the News looking at all of the different interventions in Latin America specifically by the US.
While you're critical of American actions abroad, are you also hopeful for the "promise" of America?
Albert: No, well, I'll say this. I'm hopeful if we can tear down the structures that we have now.
If the will of the people is truly reflected, if this can become an actual democracy in which politics takes a backseat to justice.
The majority of Americans want the same things. Majority of Americans do not care about if Lizania has access to citizenship or not. But politics makes us pit each other against each other. Politics is what uplifts white privilege and makes white folks say, "hey look, you know what? These immigrants and these black folks and these other folks are threatening my security." Politics does that. In reality, most Americans want the same thing and I think that the system we have now does not allow the will of the people to really be represented.
Lizania: If we aren't hopeful, why would we do it? With my work, I'm just trying to find ways that our reality could actually be a more inclusive, a better reality for all of us. I think the reason I do the work I do is because I believe that there could be a better way and that we have to construct that way for ourselves. Hopeful is not the right word. Let’s see how America could work for our communities in a better way. Or maybe it's not only America – how can we as people of the world, live better?
interviews
Swipe Out Hunger
by Rachel Sumekh
May 16, 2019
This interview with Rachel Sumekh, the founder and CEO of Swipe Out Hunger, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: How did you find yourself doing this work?
Rachel: I'm 27 years old. I live in Los Angeles, which is also where I'm born and raised. I'm a first generation student, both my parents are Iranian immigrants. I was always a student leader. I was student body president in high school – but suddenly in college it became cool to care about leadership as opposed to it being a nerdy thing. I had a friend [Bryan] who posted on Facebook inviting other students to come take action and end hunger with our meal swipes and I messaged him saying, "Hey, I have a background in Photoshop, I will help make the flyers so that students can come donate their meal swipes." He's like, "Cool, come on this day, we're going to move a bunch of food."
We had students donate swipes. After the swipes drive, we had all this food, but barely anyone showed up – except for me and Bryan. The pivotal moment of what really got me into this work was watching him. Instead of saying, "Wow, we have thousands of pounds of food to move, and only two of us on this hot June day in L.A., let's reschedule," he's like, "Cool, we told the school we were going to do it, and now let's do it."
We spent the next five hours moving food across UCLA's campus to the food closet. In my mind what it meant to be a leader changed, and the power of one person to take a stand that seemed really unreasonable, not easy, and unknown, was very inspiring. I decided from that point on I wanted to provide that opportunity for people. I still feel that moment.
Today, Swipe Out Hunger is a national nonprofit that operates on 75 universities and colleges; each of those campuses are committed to ending college student hunger, and that work is led by college students. They reach out to us, say they want the program, then we train them on how to write proposals, how to negotiate with the university, how to organize their campus, how to market the resource – and then they go and make it happen. A bad policy is waiting for a student to say it needs to be changed, a student to know how to organize, and a student to know how to clearly demand what they need. We want to build a movement that makes it easier, with each added campus, to make a basic statement – no one should be able to make money off of food on campus until everyone has access to food.
How does the program work logistically?
The core program, is in the meal swipe drive; essentially, a program that allows students at the end of each semester to stop by a table, say they have extra meal swipes on their meal plan, and donate. Freshmen, and often sophomores, who live on campus, are required to buy a meal plan. They get 10, 20, or 25 meals a week. If you don't use all those meals they don't roll over. Typically at the end of the semester they're completely unredeemable unless you want to buy a water bottle in exchange for a whole meal.
We provide students with an alternative. Stop by one of our tables, say you want to donate your meal swipes. It takes about 30 seconds. The university then takes the funds from students' accounts and puts them into a communal fund. There's a partnership set up between dining services and the social services office on campus; with the person who interfaces with students that are food insecure, and electronically moves the credit from the general swipe fund into the account of a student who's food insecure. That student, just like everyone else, can swipe into the dining hall and have access to more nourishing dining hall meals. That's the core of our program.
It involves a lot of stakeholder buy in. To get started you need to have a meeting; the first meeting should have the dining director, students, dean of student life, and a basic needs coordinator, or the person who manages a food pantry, and whoever would be in touch with students who are food insecure. We train those core people and you're able to establish a swipe program.
In addition to that, we've written and passed millions of dollars in legislation that has funded anti-hunger programs on campus. We push for Swipe Out Hunger programs, we push for legislation that gives more money to schools, and the way we support campuses in spending those dollars is twofold. One is SNAP programs; getting more students enrolled in SNAP and getting more campuses to accept SNAP. Then secondly, strengthening food closets; food cloests are a reactive solution, but they're also an incredible resource for an everyday student to grab what they need, take it home, and have access to food. How do we make sure food closets have really good hours, are centrally located, have good produce, and that student volunteers who are running the closets can get a stipend or something?
How do food closets work?
There’s a big range. On some campuses, like UCLA for instance, access is not regulated. Anyone can walk in, get food, and walk out, there's no check in. There are other campuses like UC San Diego, UC Davis, where it's a point system; you're allowed to get three or five points worth of things. You're able to come to a certain amount and pick up what you need. There's a huge diversity, some are very well stocked and very well resourced, and funding for them comes in a variety of ways. It's, as you can imagine, a very easy thing to fundraise for if the university decides to fundraise for it.
A lot of campuses don't want to be known for having homeless students and hungry students.The reason we have such stunning and robust dining halls is because when a parent is on a campus tour and they're helping their child decide where to go to school, if a school has a beautiful dining hall, that's what a parent who's paying full freight, full tuition is going to want their student to experience. A full tuition paying student wants to live the life of college in the movies. So that's what they prioritize.
There's a tension between that and schools also saying, "Yeah, also we have a bunch of hungry and homeless students." We hear many campuses who won't even fundraise for basic needs, even though it's an amazing way to mobilize their alumni. Traditionally, pantries are funded through parent circles, community events, and student fees. Many campuses receive student fees to fund their pantries.
What percentage of students on university campuses, on average – I know there will be a wide range depending on school – are experiencing hunger?
What sort of legislation are you focused on?
The legislation we advocate for is comprehensive. I was telling this story yesterday to another reporter, they asked me to tell them what we think the solution is. I was called by a legislator recently, she said, "I want to take Swipe Out Hunger onto every college campus in California. What's the bill I should write?" Our response was actually, "Swipe Out Hunger's great, but it's not the solution. I can help write what an effective bill would look like."
I've never written policy before, but I sent back a few ideas including one that would establish a funding pool to any campus that has three things. One is if they have a pantry or some sort of pop-up pantry; two, they should have at least one person trained in how to enroll students in SNAP; and three, if the campus has a meal plan they should give students a chance to donate their meal swipes, and then assign a campus point person to work with students to manage the pragrams. Legislation that we believe is effective has all three of those things built on existing resources in the community. There are food banks who know how to food bank really well – partner with the food banks. The staff already exists, all you have to do is train them in SNAP and that'll happen.
I don't want to be the next Feeding America, our entire model is not built on building a new building, it's built on integrating this into existing campus culture, resources, and infrastructure. When we think about policy, we want more funding to the existing system. We want more funding to schools so they don't have to have food be a revenue source, so they don’t have to prioritize full freight students over Pell students and vice versa.
Have universities been open or reluctant to working with Swipe Out Hunger?
The perspective that we, as Swipe Out Hunger, have on this issue is potentially the longest standing perspective. When we began this conversation in 2009 the response we were getting from the university was, "This is not a problem. Maybe there's a couple students who are going hungry, but this is not a problem." Then they started to say, "Okay fine, maybe it's a problem but it's not our problem." By 2014, we had gotten five campuses to launch.
In 2016 as an organization, we decided not to talk to a single campus who didn't also want to work on campus hunger.
Historically it was always students writing us, saying "I want to start this program." In 2017, half of our interest came from people on campus, administrators saying they want this program.
Social pressure came in 2016 – I credit this shift to Sara Goldrick-Rab and The Hope Center's research and leadership. This issue suddenly became a legitimate thing. It was out in the open and schools couldn't deny it anymore. They began looking for a solution. It became an opportunity to be innovative, to be advanced, and so we had schools reaching out.
This resistance goes back to the decision makers. You look at their LinkedIns, it's all Ivy League schools, private high schools. In large part, many have only spent time with people who've never been food insecure – or they wouldn't know it because shame keeps people who have faced food insecurity silent – so no wonder it's so shocking to them. They genuinely don't believe it. I look at the principles Bryan Stevenson speaks about – one of them is proximity.
The social pressure was huge. 2017 was pivotal.
How do students hear about you?
Almost 60% of the students we serve hear about the resource from a friend, despite it being in the campus newsletters, despite it being in flyers and so on.
All of our programs are run by student leaders. Our special sauce is that we're not just a resource but a resource run by your friends. Who's at the tables collecting swipes? It's other students. Who's helping get the word out, who's in the meetings with administrators deciding the program? It's students. We have universities reach out to us and say they tried to start their own Swipe Out Hunger program, but only had four students apply for free swipes. But it's because no students were involved in designing the program. What would have happened if you had a student tell you that the pick up hours for a meal voucher were off, or that the vouchers were only for the dining hall that's all the way across campus, which is only accessible for students who live on campus?
How do you communicate the importance of this issue to others?
I feel like we immediately dive into the issue without providing context on poverty in general. What I like to remind people is that in America, poverty has become so god damn pervasive it's taking center stage on our college campuses.
That fact that we require students to work 20 hours a week to be eligible for meal swipes, means that our social safety net has failed. The fact that we've defunded higher education means we're not setting up our students to succeed. The fact that families can't be there to support our students – in fact, many students are the ones supporting their families – means that as individuals we are so exhausted by the reality of economics in America, that even our social fabric is failing.
I invested my life in college student hunger because if students are able to get through college and have enough to eat, and feel like their campus was truly built for them, they're going to graduate and they're going to feel like the work force and society was designed for them. They're going to get a job. The lifetime earnings of a person change dramatically depending on degree.
I'm invested in this issue, rather than hunger in general, because if we can help students get degrees, it changes their lives and their families' lives. This is not just ending college student hunger because hunger sucks, this is a systemic way to look at how poverty tends to keep people in poverty. We tell people to pursue education as a way to get out of poverty, but even that advice is failing them because the education system in America is not set up for the diversity of people who are on campus today.