Four weeks ago, I went to Georgia. Little did I know that Georgia, in her own way, was coming home with me. At the beginning of this month, the inaugural convening of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance was held in Atlanta. And a few days later, 8 undocumented youth participated in civil disobedience at Georgia State University, with 7 of them arrested at the risk of being placed into deportation proceedings.
Why Georgia? Last fall, state legislation passed that banned undocumented youth from enrolling in Georgia’s top 5 public universities. The same 5 universities, ironically, that were de-segregated due to their deep-rooted racial history fifty years ago are now in effect, being re-segregated, this time by immigration status. In addition, Georgia’s Governor Deal is expected to soon sign into law HB 87, an SB-1070 style bill that would further brutalize Georgia’s immigrant community. And yet people still argue that the struggles undocumented youth face are not civil rights issues. I beg to differ.
The question should be, Why NOT Georgia? When we think of immigration battles, we think of Los Angeles, Texas, Chicago, New York, Arizona. But trouble is brewing in the Deep South, like a wound that is festering and the country refuses to even take a look, much less slap a band-aid on it. But as the plight of the Southern undocumented community worsens, that wound spreads deeper, infecting the very hearts of tradition-bound communities hell-bent on keeping Change locked out. If we keep ignoring the issue, that wound becomes a sore, and that sore becomes gangrene, and who gets amputated in the end? The immigrant community. Because we obviously can’t have gangrene all up in our business.
But what happens when you refuse the germs, when you rip off the bandaids and actually attempt to heal the wound? Refusing the ban is just the first step to refusing the gangrene. That first blast of alcohol stings like a beast, and you’re tempted to jerk away in pain. The students (and commuters) of Georgia State University witnessed this pain first hand as 8 undocumented youth marched up to the center of this wound, blocked traffic, and sat. down.
They sat down asking university presidents to refuse the ban. They sat down asking fellow undocumented youth to continue to nurture the fire within themselves. They sat down asking Georgia and the rest of the country to take a long, good stare at this festering wound. They sat down asking the Obama administration to stop deporting our youth and tearing apart our families, to become the administration that we believed had the audacity to believe in true change. They sat down in the belly of hate. And they refused to get up. They refused.
I still have trouble explaining the intensity, the rawness, the pride, or the grounded feeling of Dignity on that day, surrounded by echoes of Undocumented! Unafraid! Echoes that I long to believe were loud enough, unapologetic enough to reach into the closets of those youth in Georgia and across the country who yearn to be able to come out and to say those words, but are in such hostile territory they cannot.
Before being arrested, something that David Ramirez said stuck with me:
“I’m 21 now, and I feel like I’ve finally made it, like I have a community. And I know that right now there’s a 13 year-old kid who feels absolutely alone. Somewhere, most likely, in a place like Atlanta, Georgia, where there’s this ban that’s completely closing off all of his options of going to college. I’m doing this in hopes that he’ll hear about me doing it and that it’ll inspire him to not give up, and to stand up and fight.”
These words took me back to someone else I also admire, who had a similar message:
“Two days after I was elected, I got a phone call. The voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said – thanks. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that that young child and the thousands like that child know that there’s hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow.”
Being reminded of Harvey Milk as I listened to David’s words made me realize how relevant that message was and is for both the LGBTQ community and the undocumented youth community (and their intersection) today. How relevant hope is, hope that these actions will be a testament to youth that are still silent, still scared that we stand with them and we fight for them, not only because we support them, but because we ARE them. Because our struggle, we on the forefront, serves as a magnifying glass to the struggles that happen behind closed doors.
David’s and Harvey’s words also bring to mind a quote by Lilla Watson, that
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
It is neither our job nor our goal to be the great undocumented leaders that have come to save the adorable, helpless undocumented youth from the big, bad machine. Our mission, our aim is to work on our liberation collectively, to empower all undocumented youth by creating this environment, these safe spaces, this critical mass that enables them to own any and all parts of their identity with dignity.
This notion of our bound liberation also brings to mind the kind-of-crazy realization that though undocumented, some of us live in “safe states,” states that may not exactly be friendly to undocumented youth, but are miles ahead of states like Georgia and Arizona, who are openly hostile to not only the existence of undocumented youth, but remain hell-bent on stripping the few rights and resources they have away. In addition to this safe state mentality comes this sense of complacency for those living in these states, that as long as we have in-state tuition/financial aid/access to certain resources, we’ve “won” or have nothing to fight for.
We must continue to challenge and push back on that mentality with the fact that, as long as other undocumented youth don’t have these same opportunities, there remains a reason to fight. Though we are all marginalized and oppressed, there should still be a reason, an obligation even, to fight, to defend them, no matter how geographically removed from you they may be.
One central point of consensus of the NIYA convening was the idea of being on the offensive if you haven’t already been forced to be on the defensive, or maybe even better, striving to pursue both. Inaction is not a viable option, not a sustainable option, and sure as hell not an option that serves the empowerment of undocumented youth. No one is going to do our liberating for us. Sure, Congress may get their acts together and pass the DREAM Act, but that is one piece of our liberation puzzle, and a piece that we still have to actively work for, as the past 10 years have shown. We, the affected, know our struggle the best, know our stories the best, and we need to own our liberation.
Another realization? That very strange limbo/backwardness of ICE and police and fear. We find ways to stay in hiding so we don’t get caught by police, and when we do happen to get caught – rolling a stop sign, driving to school – it’s tough love, instant deportation. But when we work through our fears and choose to buck the system and openly risk arrest, something strange happens. Police officers treat you nicely (as they’re arresting you, nonetheless), ICE officers treat you differently and suddenly, under the microscope of the public eye, the PR machine of ICE and DHS decides it’s a bad idea to get involved and try to deport anyone. ICE is a greater threat when you accidentally come into contact with them than when you get all up in their respective grills and tell them that you are undocumented and unafraid.
The combination of these things – addressing the root of the wound directly, fighting the issue on its turf, at its heart, our bound liberation, the backwards limbo of the system, the shedding of fear and ownership of dignity, communities outside of the bubble of the undocumented immigrant community taking note – all of these have have led to a paradigm shift. The overwhelming response of communities stepping up and supporting the Georgia 8 from their respective home bases was amazing and interesting to see. High school or college friends or acquaintances they hadn’t spoken to in years, grade school teachers, sports team members – all emerged out of the woodwork with words of support. The next step is turning those words of support into that shared idea of a bound liberation.
This is about way more than just the DREAM Act. How do we focus on building a movement rather than launching a campaign – for campaigns, alone, will never strengthen our movement or further the needs of the undocumented community. How do we become a movement of consecutive paradigm shifts?
I look at the Georgia 8, my duraznitos as I like to call them, and I see that they are not leaders because of all they have “sacrificed.” They are 8 individuals who were willing to publicly embrace fear, and in turn discovered their true strength.
As I left Georgia, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something concrete, something tangible, but that I am yet fully unable to explain, had changed. I felt it again as I saw Texan undocumented youth make the front page of the Houston Chronicle, after they had come out for the first time at Texas A&M university, a campus well-known for its conservative, traditional, ahem, Republican values. Again my love, for my undocumented siblings, for this movement – continues to grow exponentially.
For each time one of us faces our fears, works through them rather than avoiding them, through the TV screen or the newspaper page, the door is potentially opened thousands of miles away for another undocumented youth. There are thousands of doors to open for the Andreas, Davids, Dulces, Marias, Jose Ricos, Dayannas, Viridianas, and Georginas of this country. We are not here to open doors for them, but to allow them the ability to turn the doorknob themselves.
DREAM may not have passed the Senate last December, but contrary to popular belief, this ball is still rolling. The fire inside still burns, and this movement is more alive than ever. And like the Olympic flame, we will guard the fire within us to the utmost of our abilities. And we will make damn well sure that the fire spreads.
For the DREAM Act, we lobbied. In the words of Cesar Chavez, We Organized. In the words of Harvey Milk, We Came Out. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., We Escalated. Then, and only then, in our words, We Existed.
We are Undocumented. We are no longer afraid. We exist.
