2011 August | VivirLatino

Archive for August, 2011

Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Makes It Clear that Secure Communities Was Always Mandatory

8:03 am By Maegan La Mala · Immigration|Justice|Politics · 4 Comments

8 Aug 2011

If there was any question about whether the Secure Communities deportation program was voluntary, we are one step closer to a clearer answer. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the roll out of the program would be continuing and that all Memoranda Of Agreement (MOAs) with states that have implemented the program are terminated. In other words, the intentions of the administration are crystalline. States that have “opted out” like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts really never were meant to have that option and no one in the future will have that option. Deportation is the Obama’s administration’s commitment to the the immigration reform process.

It has been interesting, being able to read the responses from organizations, many who were demanding clarity on the issue of jurisdictions being able to opt out. Since the news was released on Friday afternoon, it hasn’t gotten the buzz it should in the so-called progressive media. There were no protests this weekend, that I know of anyway. Hopefully everyone is planning (she writes optimistically). But I doubt it (she writes more honestly).

If I were more creative, had more time and resources I would make a little puzzle, asking you, the reader, to draw a line from the language used to the organization that used it. But I have none of the aforementioned so I will just tell you what the statements said without naming names. Some organizations have called the program “botched” as if a roll out of any mass deportation program could be done in a correct way.

As pointed out by @DREAMActivist on twiter on Friday, other language being used is that of “states rights”, how through this announcement, the Federal Government is effectively using words that historically have been used as a justification for segregation and lax environmental protection. Are we seeing another example of just how big the gap is between reform and real transformation?

Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice : The Real Problem with Choice

12:39 pm By Maegan La Mala · Health|Immigration|Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice|Women · 6 Comments

5 Aug 2011

As part of the Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health asks participants in it’s blog carnival : What’s the REAL problem with scapegoating immigrant women?

I wrote a very brief intro yesterday, questioning how we frame the question even and who gets to speak for themselves vs. who is spoken for.

My family is an immigrant family. I have taken heat from other Latinas for claiming this, for claiming being the first generation in my Puerto Rican family to be born in the United States. It is often raised that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, so that the migration patterns of the women who came before me, my tias and later my abuela, who came to New York looking for work in the garment industries, mujeres who came before their husbands to work in sweatshops run buy famous fashion designers, mujeres who now can barely see – and not just because of age, don’t matter or worse, don’t exist. As amiga Bianca Laureano wrote in her submission to the blog carnival :

Many folks think those narratives are not worthy or important, when really they have impacted me! And don’t I matter? Don’t the women with similar testimonios and experiences matter?

Bringing this back to the issue of immigrant women and reproductive justice, the buzzwords, according to mainstream (read white led) feminism and non-profits, is choice and access. The choice of how to prevent and plan pregnancies, allegedly revolutionized by the birth control pill, used Puerto Rican women of my grandmothers’ generation as the perfect test subjects. When our uteri weren’t being experimented on, they were being forcibly sterilized. My tias and my grandmothers weren’t accused of harboring anchor babies in their wombs, turning the possibility of “poor brown babies” being born as U.S. citizens as threats because of the colonial occupation of Puerto Rico sure sounds pretty damn close.

2nd annual Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice – Caminamos: Justice for Immigrant Women, August 1-5, 2011

8:51 am By Maegan La Mala · Activism|Immigration|Justice|Politics|Women · 1 Comment

4 Aug 2011

On behalf of VivirLatino, I am proud to be a part of the 2nd annual Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice. This year’s theme is Caminamos: Justice for Immigrant Women.

Co-sponsored by California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ) and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR), Latinas across the country will elevate the voices and experiences of immigrant women at community forums, letter writing events and signature collection campaigns in California, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New York and Texas and a “What’s the Real Problem” online Blog Carnival 2011. Activists will also be collecting stories of immigrant women to change the existing negative ways in which immigrant women are viewed in the media and society.

“Mean-spirited law enforcement, workplace exploitation, criminalization of basic life including education and health care are just a few of the challenges that have forced immigrant women into the shadows and ignore the often vital, positive role they play in communities across the country”, said Maria Elena Perez, interim Executive Director, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Here at VivirLatino, we have written for years about sexuality, access, and our immigrant communities. I use the word “our” very deliberately. Perhaps it’s unfair to get caught up in the use of one word, but reading/writing “for” immigrant women when many of us are immigrant women or have mothers, hermanas/sisters, tias who are immigrant women. Defining immigrant womanhood from the outside complicates if not obstructs the real struggle for justice – whatever that means and all that means.

I am going to work on a post for tomorrow that looks a little further/deeper at this issue and the path we are caminando on/walking on – together.

I welcome and look forward to your thoughts.

Department of Justice Files Suit Against Alabama Anti-Immigrant Law

3:38 pm By Maegan La Mala · Alabama|Immigration · 3 Comments

2 Aug 2011

Yesterday, the US Department of Justice file suit against the state of Alabama charging that HB 56, anti-immigrant legislation signed into law in June and slated to take effect on September 1, conflicts with federal law and undermines federal immigration priorities. The lawsuit also argues that the state law expands opportunities for police to push immigrants toward jail for various new immigration crimes.

HB 56 includes provisions that require local school districts to check and report on the immigration status of all children enrolling in public schools. It also transforms local police into federal immigration officers, and creates criminal consequences for anyone who provides housing, transportation, or employment to undocumented immigrants. HB 56 is considered one of the many Arizona SB1070 copycat laws that have been multiplying across the country, each meeting legal and community action in response.

Parts of SB1070 were effectively blocked, at least temporarily, by legal action, but it is interesting, at the very least, to try and reconcile the Obama administration’s lawsuits against anti-immigrant laws in Alabama and Georgia with it’s own policies. Federal deportation programs like Secure Communities and 287g deputize local law enforcement as ICE agents. So while these lawsuits are important and hopefully their success means more equitable living conditions and quality of life for immigrant communities. What these lawsuits do not do, is change the way the federal government has essentially abandoned all efforts of immigration reform and focuses on detentions and deportations.

Late to the Civil Disobedience Party (Again)

2 Aug 2011

Last week, Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) was arrested in front of the White House protesting the over one million deportations that have happened under President Obama and as a push for President Obama to use his executive power to stop the deportations of at least some undocumented.

While there was some media coverage of the event that created a short term buzz, the overall response from many in pro-migrant circles was a collective, non-impressed yawn. Especially given the fact that while Gutierrez was getting arrested “for show”, a young man was getting deported for real.

Civil disobedience is important. I feel it is a tool like street protests, like voting, like not voting but civil disobedience in a vacuum, and a divided one at that smells of opportunism. For a while now, DREAMers have been getting arrested, risking not just a few hours in jail (and usually getting little to no mainstream media coverage- hell Fox News covered Gutierrez’s arrest), but risking their very existence in the United States. At first their campaign was to push the DREAM Act when it was before Congress, lately to push for more equal access to educational opportunity and executive action. Gone on the days when bodies participating in civil disobedience needed to represent, be symbolic for something else. Young people have been and are standing as themselves, confronting a system that wants to disappear them, their families, and their opportunities.

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