UCLA Congo Basin Institute receives W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award
| June 22, 2021
Dear UCLA Faculty and Staff: It gives me great pleasure to announce that the UCLA Congo Basin Institute (CBI) has received one of four W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Awards , given annually by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and the Engagement Scholarship Consortium in collaboration with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This prestigious national award recognizes programs that have an exemplary record of productively engaging with communities through their teaching, research and service activities, putting knowledge and skills to work on today’s most critical problems. This award is particularly significant as it acknowledges UCLA’s commitment to community-engaged scholarship both in the region of Los Angeles and beyond, extending to sustained and reciprocal relationships with global communities and institutions. Founded in 2015 as a partnership between UCLA and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, CBI focuses on finding solutions to some of Central Africa’s most urgent challenges, including food and water security, climate change, human health and the loss of biodiversity. CBI is a campus-wide resource that currently engages 12 academic units across seven divisions and schools at UCLA. In Africa, CBI co-creates programs that bring together community practitioners and researchers from Central Africa, the U.S., Europe and Asia to solve problems, while creating opportunities for African scholars to pursue meaningful research careers in their home countries. Our campus community can take pride in this recognition and UCLA’s positive impact on the world. Sincerely, Roger Wakimoto Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities |
Presenting The Zine: A Bridge Called Solidarity – Un Puente Llamado Solidaridad
September 9, 2021
Saludos UCLA friends, colleagues, and partners,
On behalf of the 2021 UCLA Community Scholars Program, Narrative Team Cohort, it is my great pleasure to introduce the Zine (English and Spanish versions); A Bridge Called Solidarity and Un Puente Llamado Solidaridad. (As the title implies, this zine was inspired by Gloria Anzalua and Cherie Moraga’s classic masterpiece, This Bridge Called My Back.)
After almost a year of collaborating with a wide range of Tijuana and San Diego organizers, artists, activists, organizations, collectives within the migrant justice movement, we have completed our final class project for the Cross-Border Solidarity For TransBorder Migrant Justice course.
The zine is available for viewing, printing and downloading for free at these links. (We recommend reading it digitally, as we did not have time to create a printer friendly version.)
This Bridge Called Solidarity – English Zine Final Version Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1i-zHyQP43ylMgHDGc2rCKW7MLg7hhO_M?usp=sharing
Un Puente Llamado Solidaridad – Spanish Zine Final Version Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dgbgOqmO3Mp84ApWH1qlqXF9Yb4wAyqh?usp=sharing
Please share both the English and Spanish versions of the zine widely with all your friends, family, colleagues, partners, accomplices and allies. We hope the zine will serve you and your networks as a beautiful, inspiring but also practical guide. It is meant to uplift the black, indigenous and trans migrant communities in particular, but is relevant for all forcibly displaced peoples living within our transborder communities.
The zine includes several pages of original artwork made by migrants/refugees/asylum seekers, low-cost/free health care and free food resource lists for both San Diego and Tijuana, in addition to a historical timeline of recent immigration events in the US and Mexico border regions.
Although this zine may not be absolutely perfect, given the time constraints, complete lack of funding for printing and other resources, it was produced with so much love, hard work, passion and dedication. With this zine, we have begun to build a world where there are no borders, no nations, no more deportations; a world where migration is not a crime; a world where everyone, no matter their immigration status, has their human dignity ensured.
In the near future, we would like to translate this zine into Haitian Creole. Given the increased numbers of Haitian migrants/refugees coming to the border right now, we believe it is urgent to translate it. If you or someone in your network can support this process, please contact us through our email address.
In closing, our entire Narrative Team cohort would like to recognize and give a special thanks to those of us who worked on the zine within the last three months, especially after the course officially ended, and who personally ensured the zine was finished; Nanzi, Sebastian, Kevin and Devi. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Solidarity Forever!
2021 UCLA Community Scholars Program, Narrative Team Cohort
uclanarrativecollectiveteam@gmail.com
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El 9 de Septiembre, 2021
Saludos amigos, y colegas de la UCLA,
De parte del equipo de Narrativa, del Programa de Sabios Comunitarios de la UCLA 2021, es un gran placer presentar el Zine (versiones en Inglés y Español); A Bridge Called Solidarity – Un Puente Llamado Solidaridad. (Como implica el título, este zine fue inspirado por la obra maestra clásica de Gloria Anzaldua y Cherie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back – Este Puente Llamado Mi Espalda.)
Después de casi un año de colaborar con un amplio círculo de organizadores, artistas, activistas, organizaciones, y colectivos que forman parte del movimiento de justicia para los migrantes en Tijuana y San Diego, hemos completado nuestro proyecto final para la clase Solidaridad TransFronteriza Para La Justicia Migrante TransFronteriza.
El zine está disponible para ver, imprimir y bajar gratis en estos enlaces: (Recomendamos que lo lean digitalmente, porque no tuvimos tiempo para crear una versión fácil de imprimir.)
This Bridge Called Solidarity – English Zine Final Version Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1i-zHyQP43ylMgHDGc2rCKW7MLg7hhO_M?usp=sharing
Un Puente Llamado Solidaridad – Spanish Zine Final Version Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dgbgOqmO3Mp84ApWH1qlqXF9Yb4wAyqh?usp=sharing
Por favor compartan las dos versiones del zine, en Inglés y Español, con todos sus amigos, familia, colegas, parejas, cómplices y aliados. Esperamos que el zine te sirva a ti y a todos tus contactos como una obra hermosa e inspiradora pero también como una guía práctica. Es dirigida para alentar a los migrantes Afrodescendientes, indígenas y trans en particular pero es relevante para toda la gente desplazada forzosamente que vive en nuestras comunidades transfronterizas.
El zine incluye varias páginas de obras de arte originales hechas por migrantes/refugiados/solicitantes de asilo, listas de recursos para salud médica gratis/de bajo costo y de comida gratis en San Diego y Tijuana, además de una línea cronológica marcando recientes eventos de migración en las regiones fronterizas de Estados Unidos y México.
Aunque este zine no es absolutamente perfecto, dado la falta de tiempo, total ausencia de fondos para imprimirlo y otros recursos, fue producido con mucho amor, trabajo duro, pasión y dedicación. Con este zine, hemos comenzado a crear un mundo donde no hay fronteras, naciones, ni deportaciones; un mundo donde la migración no es un crimen; un mundo donde todos, sin importar su estatus migratorio, tienen su dignidad humana garantizada.
En un futuro cercano, queremos traducir el zine al lenguaje Criollo Haitiano. Dado el incrementado número de migrantes/refugiados Haitianos que van llegando a la frontera ahorita, creemos que es urgente poder traducirlo. Si tu o alguien en tu círculo de contactos puede apoyarnos con este proceso, favor de contactarnos por correo electronico.
Para concluir, nuestro equipo de Narrativa quiere reconocer y darle muchas gracias a nuestros compañeros que trabajaron en el zine los últimos tres meses, especialmente desde que se terminó el curso oficialmente, y que personalmente aseguraron que se completara el trabajo; Nanzi, Sebastian, Kevin y Devi. No hubiéramos podido hacer esto sin ustedes.
Solidaridad Para Siempre!
2021 UCLA Community Scholars Program, Narrative Team Cohort
uclanarrativecollectiveteam@gmail.com
2021 Pritzker finalists: David Diaz, Farwiza Farhan, Chook-Chook Hillman
In the wake of the sobering findings of the Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the community-focused work of three emerging leaders reminds us that local solutions must be part of our response to the global crisis.
UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability is proud to announce the 2021 finalists for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award, as chosen by a committee of 12 faculty members.
David Diaz, Farwiza Farhan and Chook-Chook Hillman were selected from a pool of 18 candidates to move on to the final round of judging. Each of them takes a community-focused approach to improve not just the environment, but people’s lives.
To view the whole story, please visit: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/article/2021-pritzker-finalists-david-diaz-farwiza-farhan-chook-chook-hillman/?mc_cid=07a8c897c8&mc_eid=f6503f755f
5 professors receive 2021 Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Research
Five UCLA faculty members will create dynamic new courses for undergraduates thanks to the third annual Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Research. The awards program, supported by the UCLA Center for Community Engagement and the Chancellor’s Office, provides recipients with individual grants of $10,000 for their projects.
The professors’ classes — in which students will conduct research addressing questions and needs identified in collaboration with community partners — will span a diverse range of subjects, from web accessibility and urban ecology to human rights violations and community wellness.
The 2021 award winners and their courses are:
Michelle Caswell | associate professor of information studies
“Digital Archives, Communities and Memory”
Working closely with community archives, students in Caswell’s course will learn the importance of communities shaping their own narratives about the past to better envision a collective future. (Caswell is also an affiliated member of the Asian American Studies department.) “I hope students gain a deeper appreciation for memory work, particularly the creation and maintenance of digital archives, as a form of activism against ongoing oppressions.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy | associate professor of design media arts
“Design, Disability and the Web”
In this studio-based course, students will engage in collaborative research with the disability community, with a focus on universal design, assistive technology and disability justice. “What I’ve learned from the disability community is the way questions of accessibility can open interesting, creative conversations around what it means to be present, to be accountable and to build online spaces with care.”
Nick Shapiro | assistant professor of human biology and society
“Biomedicine, Mass Incarceration and Accountability”
Students in Shapiro’s class will work alongside human rights organizations, analyzing medical data on the deaths of incarcerated individuals for the purpose of identifying human rights violations. “I hope a takeaway from this class is that the students can both better account for the missteps of science and have a grasp on more equitable methods to engage with, support and advance communities as they identify their most pressing questions.”
David Shorter | professor of world arts and cultures/dance
“Healing, Ritual and Transformation”
As part of Shorter’s course, students will collaborate with healing practitioners and community-based wellness organizations, researching aspects of community wellness and cross-cultural perceptions of health, including structural inequalities in health care and the history of medicinal development. “One of my central aims remains having students be in service to those on the front line of health care outside of allopathic and pharmaceutical approaches. There, students learn about health and healing beyond textbooks and classrooms.”
Pamela Yeh | associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology
“Urban Ecology and Evolution”
Yeh’s class will allow students to explore cities as ecosystems and to study how plants and animals have survived — and in some cases thrived — in urban areas. They will work together with nonprofits in low-income communities of color to create opportunities for long-term avian population monitoring and scientific research. “We live and work in one of the world’s major metropolitan areas, so right in our backyard, we have a fantastic place to do this teaching and research. I hope our students will come to view the community they live in as both a rich resource for advice, help and support in their work, as well as an important obligation and opportunity to give back.”
The faculty members will spend the 2021–22 academic year developing their courses and will begin offering them to undergraduates in 2022–23 or 2023–24.
Although they span many disciplines, the courses are united by a common thread, according to Shalom Staub, director of the UCLA Center for Community Engagement.
“Rooted in impeccable scholarship, each of these courses will empower our students and faculty to take active roles in making the world a better, more just, more inclusive place,” Staub said. “It is deeply inspiring to see UCLA partnering in such creative ways with such a variety of community groups and organizations. Our students will learn tremendously from the expertise residing in these communities and will be able to bring rigorous research to address community-driven questions.”
Through UCLA course, students deliver funding to L.A. nonprofits
Thanks to an unusual undergraduate course at UCLA, students have distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past decade to Los Angeles nonprofits.
The latest edition of the class, Philanthropy as Civic Engagement, concluded in June. Students distributed funds to three beneficiaries: Open Paths Counseling Center, which received $40,000 toward training clinicians to support the mental health needs of underserved communities; School on Wheels, which received $25,000 to provide laptops for homeless K-12 students; and Jazz Hands for Autism, which received $15,000 to provide musical training, career support and advocacy for musicians who have autism.
And since 2012, when the course was first offered, students have distributed a total of $780,000 to 27 local organizations.
The course enables students to explore their sense of responsibility to care for and improve their communities. While many of the students are already engaged in volunteerism, the experience provides a different perspective, introducing them to the process that individuals and grantmaking organizations go through when deciding how to allocate their charitable giving.
“People sometimes assume that to be philanthropic, you must be abundantly wealthy,” said Jennifer Lindholm, UCLA’s assistant dean of undergraduate education, who has led the course’s teaching team for the past five years. “That mindset can disempower us from engaging actively to strengthen our communities.
“Through this course, we aim to help students understand the work of nonprofit organizations, consider different perspectives on philanthropic giving, and challenge themselves to consider the myriad ways they can contribute — both now and in the future — to enhancing the common good.”
The money the students give away is provided by UCLA donors who have chosen to invest in cultivating a new generation of philanthropists. Since 2019, the course has been supported by Women & Philanthropy at UCLA, which continues to raise funds toward the class endowment.
In the 2021 class, students were divided into eight-person groups, each of which researched a pool of 14 potential nonprofit beneficiaries. Based on what they learned, each group chose eight semifinalists and held meetings with those organizations’ leaders.
One of those meetings was especially meaningful for Adriana Perez, a psychology major from Chatsworth, California, who is studying how to make mental health resources more accessible. During an online interview with representatives from Open Paths, Perez said, she connected deeply with the counseling center’s mission. But she had never before seen herself as a philanthropist.
“The ability to grant a real monetary award was incredibly empowering in that, as a class, we were able to decide what issues were most important to us, and the ability to encourage change was within our hands,” she said. “Philanthropy was not an area I thought I would ever be involved in, but this course definitely changed my perspective.”
Following those meetings, each group zeroed in one nonprofit as its chosen beneficiary, and presented a funding proposal for that organization to the other students in the class. A class-wide vote determined how much of the class’s total funds should go to each of the three organizations.
Students are free to consider and debate which criteria are most important to their funding decisions. In the latest iteration of the course, which ended in June, some students prioritized pandemic emergency relief, while others were more concerned with programs’ long-term viability or organizations’ prospects for sustained growth. Most were focused on social justice and equity.
Johnny Perez, a psychology major from Whittier, California, was a member of this year’s class. One of his long-term goals is to open a drug treatment center, and he took the course to better understand how funding decisions are made, which could come in handy when he seeks financial backers for his own nonprofit.
Course discussions helped him realize that all of his classmates had their own perspectives and priorities.
“We all had different views, and one was not necessarily better than the other,” Perez said. “I wanted to listen to other people’s views, to have the ability to want to learn and expand, and learn about other people’s values.”
Michael Lima-Sabatani is a public affairs major from Yorba Linda, California, with an interest in organizational governance. He said the course provided real opportunities to evaluate how his and his classmates’ skill sets could determine who was best equipped to serve certain roles on the team.
“I had done a lot of research on one organization and was passionate about it, but from listening to the other presentations, I knew one particular classmate would be the best advocate and presenter,” he said. “She had the most poise and was the best storyteller. And I took on an editorial position, which I know was a good fit for my writing skills.”
Lima-Sabatini said he also appreciated the opportunity to meet with leaders of the nonprofits he researched. “Gaining the first-hand experience in a setting where you are being supported was super valuable,” he said.
For other students, the course highlighted the importance of diversity in philanthropy.
“Being in this position gave me a lot of insight into philanthropy, and how diversity in board rooms is a hugely important issue,” said Aaron Tann, a communications major from Baldwin Park, California. “Different communities have different needs, perspectives and diverse opinions. We also need that diversity at the highest level of power where money is being distributed.
“A lot of us think we know what a community needs, but the organizations that are hands on with the community have a much better idea about the best use of the money.”
Armed with insights like that, those who completed the 2021 edition of the course have already laid the groundwork for the UCLA students who will take the class after them. Damola Adeyemo, a physiological science major from Rancho Cucamonga, California, shared her thoughts in an open letter that will be shared with students who might enroll in the 2022 class.
“This UCLA class is very different and you will be astonished by how much you will grow in 10 weeks. I do not think I will ever have another class as unique and exciting as this one in my time as an undergraduate.”
UCLA Division of Social Sciences Premieres “Community Engaged Scholarship” Video
Here at UCLA, community engaged scholarship is not an option – it is an imperative. Los Angeles is a profoundly diverse, multicultural city and a gateway to the rest of the planet. In the Division of Social Sciences, we take our location and our embeddedness in Los Angeles very seriously. The findings that come out of our research are findings that can be applied to real world community problems. In this sense, we are engaging LA to change the world.
LA Social Science is pleased to share this video highlighting two researchers, Dr. Jason De León and Dr. Jessica Cattelino, and the important community engaged scholarship they are leading in the social sciences.
As a public institution, our work is ultimately in service of you, our community. By engaging LA, we are changing the world.
Michelle Caswell Honored with Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars
Michelle Caswell, UCLA associate professor of information studies, has been given the Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars, which annually supports a cohort of UCLA faculty who will each design a new course to integrate undergraduates into their community-engaged projects, working with the UCLA Center for Community Engagement. Caswell, who arrived at UCLA in 2012, is the first awardee from the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.
Caswell directs a team of graduate student researchers at the UCLA Community Archives Lab, and mentors MLIS students through funded internships at local community archives. She will create a course on “Digital Archives, Communities, and Memory” for UCLA undergraduates, and says that she looks forward to working with her UCLA colleagues across disciplines.
“I’m really excited to be in a cohort with other recipients across campus to be able to talk about the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities for teaching undergrads in community-engaged work,” she says.
Professor Caswell says that she hopes her community-engaged course will attract students from a wide variety of undergraduate majors, including ethnic studies, gender studies, and even more technically focused majors such as computer science. She also hopes that the course will in the future, help shape the University’s undergraduate minor in information studies.
“In the community archives class I’m teaching right now, I have two master’s students from Asian American studies and one from education, and they have been fantastic contributors to the class – they bring totally different and important perspectives,” notes Caswell. “The information studies students learn a lot from those students outside of our department. It really strengthens the conversation when you draw in students from across campus.”
Professor Caswell says that learning about community engaged research and community-based archives will provide useful tools and perspectives for students in all disciplines.
“This is something that the community-based archives students at the master’s level have learned – archival work is a balance of doing technical, practical work and relationship building, and those two aspects are equally as important,” she says. “It’s just as important to know how to listen as it is to know how to create a website.
“What I love about archival work it’s where those two things come together. In the humanities, there is often talk about the archive as an abstract principle or concept, without talking about actually existing archives. I think the class will also be an opportunity to expose undergraduate students to information studies more broadly and to archival studies specifically, where we talk about abstract principles, but we also have to make concrete decisions about actually existing archives. It’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of combining technical skills, relationship building, and more theoretical concepts as well.”
Caswell’s teaching and research includes archival theory and practice, information ethics, the politics of accountability, ownership, and access; archival pedagogy, visual culture, and digital history. She is the co-founder and an Academic Council member of the South Asian American Digital Archive. Professor Caswell’s most recent book, “Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work,” was released in May by Routledge.
Social justice in the spotlight during UCLA Undergraduate Research Week
Robin Migdol | June 16, 2021
An examination of how a museum exhibition that told the stories of HIV-positive people around the world through photographs they took of their daily lives affected people’s attitudes about HIV. An assessment of the effectiveness of a Los Angeles-area non-profit as it tries to empower Black and Latina girls to enact social change through research, training and community mobilization.
They were just two topics that UCLA students presented at Undergraduate Research Week, the largest undergraduate conference on campus. The conference was held virtually for the second consecutive year at the end of May. The event is produced by the undergraduate research centers in collaboration with UCLA Library, the division of undergraduate education and alumni affairs, and this year featured nearly 800 students who presented research posters, gave prerecorded talks about their projects, and participated in live presentation sessions.
The studies of the impact of the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s presentation of “Through Positive Eyes” and the Social Justice Learning Institute’s efforts in Inglewood were part of a new showcase for community-engaged and social justice research this year. Thirty-eight students presented their original research projects in live and prerecorded presentations as part of the community engagement and social justice showcase.
“UCLA students are doing research with community partners, through academic departments and the Center for Community Engagement, which results in a valuable co-creation of knowledge between students and community partners,” said Whitney Arnold, director of the Undergraduate Research Center – Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Arnold said that the event organizers wanted to leverage the work students are already doing with community partners and social justice.
“Many UCLA students’ research projects focus on social justice,” Arnold said, “and we wanted to highlight student projects and voices that identify and research social inequities and also propose ideas for change.”
In community-engaged research, students work with partners from local community organizations such as nonprofits to conduct research that will be helpful to the organization and the people they serve.
Senior world arts and cultures and political science major Karina Zysman worked with the UCLA Art and Global Health Center to research “Through Positive Eyes.” The exhibit ran from August 2019 through February 2020 with the intention of destigmatizing HIV and AIDS by providing a humanizing look at people living with the disease.
Zysman studied the comments people wrote down after viewing the exhibit to determine what kind of impact the exhibit had on them. She found that people felt compassion and a common humanity toward the individuals in the exhibit, demonstrating how powerful the arts can be in inspiring empathy.
“The emerging findings show this cathartic process, where people are able to relate and some sort of preconceived HIV-related stigma that they might have had is starting to decrease,” she said. “We can leverage the arts and use the community and provide a space for them to amplify their own voices in the research that’s emerging.”
Zysman said that community-engaged research should be the model for most research.
“This is inviting the community to be active participants in the research that’s emerging about themselves. It’s removing that power dynamic that exists in research,” Zysman said. “It’s removing the sterility that exists in research, and instead it’s replacing it with humanity.”
At the showcase, every student from the community engagement and social change minor capstone research course presented his or her research. The two-quarter course was taught by Bemmy Maharramli, associate director of strategic initiatives at the Center for Community Engagement. Working with community organizations for two quarters on a research project gives students valuable professional experience, Maharramli said, such as participating in strategy sessions, learning to communicate professionally with colleagues, and listening to their needs.
One of Maharramli’s students was senior world arts and cultures major Hanna Young, who worked with the Social Justice Learning Institute in Inglewood. The institute, which was founded by alumnus D’Artagnan Scorza, is looking to expand its programming to support young women of color in addition to men, so Young did an analysis of other female empowerment programs, researched mental health interventions for women of color, and developed interview questions for engaging with community members.
Young said her goal was not to tell the people at the institute what steps they should take, but rather listen to the perspectives of the community members about what they want and provide staff the information to make their own decisions about what would work best for them.
“Central to this research is making sure that community members are asserting themselves, engaging with personal agency and deciding what would suit them best,” Young said. “The success of this kind of program really comes from, are the community members eager and participating in it? Ultimately, they make that decision, not me.”
When we study today’s most critical issues, from global health to climate change, research needs to be in partnership with the communities most affected, Maharramli and the students said.
“To have more effective solutions to these challenges we have to be in conversation with the people who are most impacted,” Maharramli said. “That’s how we’ll contribute as a university to the most innovative and effective solutions.”
Trilingual Zoom class inspires next generation of migrant justice leaders at UCLA
Growing up outside San Diego, California, about 20 miles from Mexico, Sebastian Aguilar’s parents always got nervous when they went shopping near the border and U.S. Border Patrol vehicles drove by. This was what life was like with parents who were undocumented.
For much of his childhood, Aguilar experienced daily life through what seemed like inconveniences, like driving to Los Angeles to visit family at 4 a.m. to avoid checkpoints. At 17, though, he finally comprehended the magnitude of the constant threat of deportation when he went to his mom’s permanent residency hearing. Green border patrol vehicles were parked right outside the open doors to the courtroom, ready to immediately deport anyone who was denied status.
“When she got her status, she got a work permit and 17 years of living in the shadows ended. I could see all the ways the family was better because of it. It made me realize how important it is for everyone to be free from the shadows,” said Aguilar, 20, who is scheduled to graduate from UCLA with degree in political science and labor studies spring 2022. Aguilar’s parents, like many, had crossed the border from Mexico, overstayed their visas, and then applied for asylum.
Aguilar notes that being granted legal status is not guaranteed for the many migrants who come to the United States every year from Central and South America. Informed by his family’s experiences and knowing that other families have had to endure much worse even before crossing the border, Aguilar joined 50 undergraduates, graduates and migrant justice activists in this year’s UCLA Community Scholars Program course called “Cross-Border Solidarity for Transborder Migrant Justice.”
A class that unites students and activists
Housed within the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, or IRLE, and co-sponsored by the UCLA Labor Center, in partnership with the Center for Community Engagement and labor studies, each year the Community Scholars Program provides an opportunity for students, advocates, community partners and organizers to jointly work on an applied research project that furthers the goals of progressive community partnerships in Los Angeles. This year’s class, which met weekly in winter and spring quarters, also is presented in partnership with the Chicana, Chicano and Central American studies department.
The main goal of the class, said Saul Sarabia, one of the course instructors who is part of the Institute for Research of Labor and Employment and a social justice activist, is for students to work with community-based participants to strengthen the work of those working across borders to support migrants and any migrant-led institutions or programs that are fighting for asylum seekers.
The participants this year are UCLA students — spread across the country because of the COVID-19 pandemic — along with community advocates in border areas including Tijuana and Tapachula, Mexico, which is considered “ground zero” in the migrant crisis. The course is translated by live interpreters over Zoom into English, Spanish and Haitian Creole to make certain there is shared understanding.
“The Community Scholars Program is an affirmation of the wisdom of those in the community who are racial justice leaders, race equity workers, and people who are doing racial justice work in various domains. The class gives them a chance to be scholars, in various different roles,” said Sarabia, who holds both undergraduate and law degrees from UCLA.
Recognizing the diversity within the migrant population, the course specifically addresses some of the challenges faced by Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ migrants.
Josue Castañeda, a class participant who fled persecution in Honduras and experienced firsthand the inadequate housing, tear gas, fraud, lack of legal information and other challenges migrants in caravans faced on the road to seek asylum in the United States, works for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, and spends time at the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Mexico borders supporting migrants and helping them understand the legality of the various options for entering the United States.
Castañeda has said that in his work he has encountered Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ migrants, but was not familiar enough with their experiences to be able to adequately support and advocate for them. He saw African migrants singled out by Mexican officials and put into deplorable holding conditions, and also has seen Indigenous migrants who had no access to interpreters and therefore no ability to access the support he offered. He knew little of gender discrimination and felt he was unable to help LGBT migrants who were denied access to shelters due to their gender identity or sexual orientation.
“The course is helping raise awareness for me and others that if we address the needs of the more marginalized groups of migrants, we can help to produce a more meaningful definition of solidarity and assistance,” Castañeda said.
Expanding the class because of Zoom
An upside of the pandemic is that this virtual classroom has provided an opportunity that would not have existed otherwise. Zoom allows for participants from the United States, Mexico and Guatemala to learn from each other and develop new approaches to support migrants.
“The course has been an important cross border space where we can all problem solve together to help some of the most vulnerable migrants,” Castañeda said. “Had it not been for this virtual course, I never would have been able to participate.”
Instructor Kendy Rivera, who earned both a masters and Ph.D. from UCLA, describes herself as a Tijuana-San Diego transfronteriza, U.S.-México transborder student, first-generation Mexican immigrant, first-generation college educated, first-generation graduate-educated and queer mujer. Rivera, a lecturer in the Chicana, Chicano and Central American studies department, has experience setting up legal clinics, humane encampments, laundromats and kitchens for migrants, and has worked with many of the advocates taking part in the course.
“There is a lot of beauty and power and resistance and resilience to overcome the trauma that migrants go through,” Rivera said. “The voices that you hear in the course are those leaders and those voices that are fighting every day to not give up and give dignified experiences to migrants, north and south.”
According to Abel Valenzuela, professor of Chicana, Chicano and Central American studies and director of IRLE, there is high demand for these types of community-engaged courses among undergraduates.
“The Community Scholars Program is a unique opportunity for undergrads at UCLA to not only engage with community partners doing important work, but also to work with graduate students and faculty to assess what’s going on, and focus on solutions,” Valenzuela said. “The word has gotten out to students about these courses that teach and engage, and the students really appreciate it.”
In many cases, students have seen firsthand the struggles of migrants and migrant families in the U.S., and the course is informing the life and career paths they will embark upon after UCLA.
“This course has further inspired me to want to go to law school and possibly become an immigration attorney,” Aguilar said, “so I can help others come out of the shadows just like my mom was able to with the help of her lawyer.”