What Does Activism Mean to Me?

A short 5’2’’ girl towed along a pink, two-inch binder that was bursting with worksheets that detailed the chemical pathways of glycolysis, the Kreb’s cycle, and the Calvin cycle. Everyday after class, she spent hours memorizing the enzymes that would catalyze these reactions and memorized the different functions of ribosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, and microtubules. These long hours of grueling work earned her a purple T-shirt with the words, “I want your myosin head to power stroke my actin filament” emblazoned on the back.

A long picket line formed outside the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago. There were always people stationed outside the hotel, but this particular day was especially important because it marked the nine-year anniversary of the day when hotel workers began their strike. Organizations from across the city gathered on this one strip of Michigan Avenue to protest the hotel’s poor labor practices. With such a long picket line, it was hard to keep the entire group shouting along to the slogans and small pockets of silence inevitably formed. One girl found this unacceptable and began leading the chants.

“WHAT DO WE WANT?”

“CONTRACTS!”

“WHEN DO WE WANT THEM?”
“NOW!!”

She didn’t need a bullhorn. She was the bullhorn.

Can you guess which girl I am?

Both.

I began my studies at Yale with the heart of a science nerd set on being a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology major following a pre-med track. Then I got more involved with MEChA and my perspective dramatically changed. I had always been very passionate about issues revolving around human rights, immigrant rights, and women’s rights, but I had never formed a part of an organization that actively tried to change these issues. I was very shy in high school and not very outspoken. I shied away from situations that put me in the spotlight because I was afraid of doing or saying something that was wrong. However, that began to change when I met the Mechistas here at Yale. I saw that same passion I possessed in the members of the organization. The difference was that they voiced their passion. There wasn’t a day that passed that I didn’t hear Diana speak about the grave consequences of the drug wars in Mexico or Alejandro rant about the system of oppressions that are built into our society. I slowly began losing my fear and became more actively involved in projects. I helped put together a panel, I canvassed during this past election, and now I am attempting to put on a large-scale project that will bring to light the issue of wage theft in New Haven.

Activism helped me find the voice that I had been trying to find for a very long time. I thought I had found it in the research programs I had participated in during high school. However, I realized that wasn’t it at all. My internship this past summer at a worker’s rights organization showed me what it was that I had loved about those experiences. I loved talking to people, learning from people. While doing clinical research at the University of Chicago, my favorite part of the day was talking to patients. The highlight of that summer was listening to Mr. Biggs’ story of surviving cancer not learning to use STATA statistical software. My favorite part of this summer was being able to talk to workers, community leaders, and faith leaders. All of these conversations and joint collaborations would lead to a change that actually mattered. I’ve always been a listener and these experiences gave me the opportunity to listen to the community’s real needs. Now it is time to act. What good is it if I can listen but do nothing to enact change?

I will continue listening to empower not only myself but also those others around me. My mission is to effectively foster change. Together we will build a future where systems of oppression are not the norm and equality is expected.

As us Mechistas love to say,

La lucha sigue

-Evelyn Núñez 

Diversity

Rural Western Nebraska is not a diverse community. Sure there are towns every so often in which Hispanic communities grow, but these communities are generally transient and migrate back to their homelands once the harvest has ended. My family was one among several migratory bands that moved with the seasons from Nebraska to Texas and back again annually. Like every other Mexican migrant, I’ve spent my share of time working in the fields. Sweltering summer months spent weeding fields were my inspiration for furthering my education. I knew ever since I was 12 that a life filled with weary limbs and low expectations was not for me.

Regardless of my dislike for fieldwork, it was never something I was ashamed of, like I realize now, most people my age were. It’s hard, honest labor and unfortunately, it carries a stigma. “If I hadn’t met you, I would think all Mexicans were the same,” someone once told me in school. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Silence. Stereotypes. A provincial upbringing. Every other person in my graduating class was white. I had never paid much attention to it until I received that comment my senior year.

“My Mexican works for less than yours.” “Excuse me?” Slurs tossed out casually, because, hey, who cares? “You shouldn’t be offended so easily.” “But I’m not racist.” “What do you mean you don’t like Taco Bell?” “People write songs in Spanish!” That’s news to me. For the most part, I took these comments for granted. But now, I’m realizing just how ignorant they are. Before coming to Yale all the Hispanics I knew were from one place. We shared slang, we danced to huapangos, and I had most certainly not heard of Mexican vegetarians. Before MEChA, I never had a place to talk about these things. In a predominantly white community, the issues affecting minorities weren’t a concern. Coming to Yale and joining MEChA really opened my eyes to all the injustice around me and, more importantly, to what I can do to fight it.

-Sandra Mendiola

Papeles

One fine November afternoon, I became legal. There were no celebrations, no congratulations, no proclamations. I did not shout to the world that I was once-and-for-all and forevermore a documented young man. There was only a blanched piece of paper, hastily ripped out of an elegantly stamped envelope, bearing the bold, bureaucratic inscriptions “The United States of America” and “Notice of Deferred Action”. I skimmed the letter’s contents, and then stuffed the paper back into its envelope. I smiled, but only a little. I neatly slipped the envelope into my backpack and then I went about my business. That’s how I became legal.

Years of uncertainty had not prepared me for that moment. I had been rejected from too many jobs, too many scholarships, too many opportunities to have been ready for the day when my legal status changed. It’s not that I was not happy or that I didn’t comprehend the significance of my deferred action letter. I was simply numb. For most of my short life, I had expected crumbs from the table of the American Dream. Yes, I worked hard to earn what I got, including admission to Yale, but I always seasoned my success with a dash of modesty, if not outright pessimism, because I knew that my effort would be worthless without papeles. Without papeles, I was just another “illegal”, another shadow that wasted space. Throughout my freshman year of college, the futility of my predicament weighed on me like a stone. And so when I finally did receive deferred action last November, I did not leap out of the shadows; I crept out.    

I admit that I have been more fortunate than other undocumented people. I was able to pay the deferred action fee because I worked the entire summer with a fake social security card, and I quickly cleared my (nonexistent) criminal background record. I had few doubts about getting approved. But other indocumentados have not been so fortunate. I have a friend who must wait to apply for deferred action until she can assess her foggy immigration record and raise enough money to pay for a lawyer. She still stands in the shadow of uncertainty, unable to step out. My brother also has a similar problem. And many other indocumentados simply do not qualify for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) because they happened to be in the United States at the wrong time. Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, my friends, my cousins, my parents…

Yes, I am quite lucky, I tell myself. Every so often I reach into my wallet and pull out my papeles. I look at them. My glossy red, white, and blue work permit glistens in my dorm’s pale yellow light. My social security card poses a grayish-blue text marked with my careful signature. “NOT VALID FOR REENTRY TO THE UNITED STATES”, they proclaim. I stare at them for a while. And I still wonder whether this is what it feels like to be out of the shadows.

Juan Carlos Cerda

You Cant Ignore Us - Latino Vote

ENRIQUEZ: You can’t ignore us

BY DIANA ENRIQUEZ
GUEST COLUMNIST

Friday, December 7, 2012

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Election results do not lie. As statisticians break us down, Latino voters went 75 percent for President Obama this November. I saw campaign ads in Spanish whenever I turned on the TV. Linda McMahon’s ads sat on the sidebar of my computer whenever I logged on to Facebook, but translated into Spanish. Now, the immigration debate is creeping into political coverage across the board. America must keep paying attention.

This election we voted against those who tried to suppress our votes. On Yale’s campus, we responded to voter suppression and sent canvassers of all kinds to Fair Haven. On several doors that we knocked that week, we met registered voters in Fair Haven who were told by the others that their votes didn’t count or that they could not vote because their driver’s license had recently expired. What began as voter outreach turned into a full-blown campaign, as Americans alongside Latin Americans and undocumented students reminded residents across the city where they could go to vote.

Now, it will be our students who make lawmakers keep paying attention. The DREAM Act — a piece of federal legislation offering undocumented students a pathway to citizenship, provided that they serve for two years in our military or completed high school — grabbed everyone’s attention when it reached national headlines. While it did not pass, states across the country have considered their own versions of the bill, and Massachusetts became the 13th state to pass its own version of the DREAM Act this month. “Groups like Connecticut Students for a DREAM,” a local immigration activist group, are pushing Connecticut’s legislature to improve access to colleges and universities for undocumented but very well-qualified students. This was the first time that undocumented students held such a symbolic voice in politics, and politicians like President Obama and Sen. Marco Rubio reached out to them with variations on the bill.

This past week, local activist Lorella Praeli, who stared the Connecticut Students for a DREAM and now works for the national umbrella organization United We Dream, was featured in a New York Times article discussing immigration reform. On the same weekend I heard Gabby Pacheo, the other woman featured in the article, speak for senior partners at Morgan Stanley, startup gurus and nonprofit heroes at TEDxWomen. She shared her story with the crowd, about growing up as a very successful student whose options were limited by her immigration status. Every face in the room was deeply moved. The stories of our students are everywhere and permeating different levels of society than they could before.

We’re still a mixed bag: As the recent report from the Pew Hispanic Center reminds us, Latino voters were not solely concerned about immigration. More often, our immediate concerns were focused on economic, education or health care issues. I’m a Massachusetts liberal, but I still work in communities that aren’t familiar with what homosexuality and gay marriage entail. While I support decriminalization of marijuana for numerous reasons, I have never and will never smoke in my lifetime. I still cringe whenever I smell marijuana smoke because statistics from the drug wars flood through my mind, and all I can see are images of violence.

Our views are more nuanced than politicians often give us credit for in campaign ads and targeted speeches. We are not a one-issue community, and we never will be.

One of my professors made a joke at an election panel we held this year about how the “Latino vote gets rediscovered every four years.” After this election, we are no longer in the shadows, waiting to be “rediscovered.” Our activists are in the streets, spreading information and dispelling myths. Politicians are reaching out to our communities, even in states like Connecticut where the Latino presence is quieter than it is in states like North Carolina and Texas. We’re here, and we’ve been here for a long time. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes to the table for immigration reform in these next few months.

MEChA Eboard 2013!

Please welcome our new eboard! Congratulations to all of our candidates, we are so excited to have you!

o   The Moderator: Katie Aragon

o   Treasurer: Juan Carlos

o   Secretary: Cristina Moreno

o   ECCSF Representative

§  Juan Diaz

§  Jack Mejia-Cuellar

o   Historian: Kim Mejia-Cuellar

o   Freshperson Liason: Cyndi Campos

o   Political Action Chair: Chris Rodelo

o   Community Action Chair: Evelyn Nuñez

o   Social Activities Chair: Karen Lazcano

o   Publicity Chair: Sandra Mendiola

Op-ed- Don't ban ethnic studies

This is belated but it was sitting in the drafts so thought I'd publish it anyway. An op-ed from last spring, 2012, when Mecha staged a protest in Commons concerning the Ethnic Studies Ban in Arizona.

Yale Daily News

ARAGÓN AND ZEPEDA: Don’t ban ethnic studies

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By Katherine Aragon, Raquel Zepeda

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

On Jan. 1, 2011, Arizona House Bill 2281 took effect, having passed the previous year on a wave of popular political rhetoric of racial tension and distrust. Republican Tom Horne, the author of the bill, accused ethnic studies curricula of “promoting resentment” and encouraging the overthrow of the U.S. government, a charge school officials in the state have decried as unfounded.

Last month, the Tucson Unified School District voted to enact HB 2281, buckling under threats of $15 million in annual fines if it did not comply. In the words of TUSD superintendent John Pedicone, the penalty “would have been impossible … to absorb.” During an administrative meeting conducted in early January, administrators advised teachers to avoid books that address themes of race, ethnicity and oppression, including Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

The bill is based on the misguided belief that ethnic studies promote a radical and hateful discourse. In fact, an ethnic studies curriculum does the opposite. It intends to shed light on the often ignored and dismissed experiences of millions of Americans, including the persecution minority communities have often faced throughout the course of history.

Although HB 2281 includes the caveat that it does not intend to censor instances of oppression, that is effectively what it has done. It has forced the TUSD — 75 percent of whose students are not white — to eliminate curricula that included over 50 books dealing with issues of ethnicity and social movements. Now, there will be no more “Ten Little Indians” by Sherman Alexie and no more accounts of American minorities’ histories by historians like Ronald Takaki and Howard Zinn.

Now, students in Arizona cannot count on public education to discuss Cesar Chavez and his leadership in the nonviolent American Labor Movement. Three-quarters of TUSD students will be taught that their place in history is limited to servitude and violence and will not be able to read narratives of their ancestors’ creative successes.

High school retention rates show the positive impact of ethnic studies. Studies have found that minority students enrolled in ethnic studies courses are more likely to perform better in all of their academic classes and are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college.

However, ethnic studies classes do not solely empower minority students: In their investigation into the value of the courses, the National Educational Association concluded that “both students of color and white students have been found to benefit academically as well as socially from ethnic studies” and that “the overwhelming dominance of Euro-American perspectives leads many students to disengage from academic learning.” A curriculum with demonstrated success including lessons on diverse cultures should be expanded, not eliminated.

HB 2281’s proponents have thus far relied on paranoid rhetoric, making unfounded speculations without ever setting foot inside an ethnic studies classroom. Though the bill attempts to couch its racist motives in legal terms as an effort to outlaw “treatment of pupils as anything but individuals,” they ignore the fact that history has rarely acted in accordance with this tenet. History has instead, time and again, grouped people in broad and generalized terms, often on the basis of race.

Though HB 2281 doesn’t explicitly ban books, books have nonetheless been taken from students, boxed up and sent to gather dust in a warehouse. Administrators claim these books are still available to the approximately 63,000 students in the district through the public school library system, but the system only holds a few copies of select texts. Teachers were also told they would be increasingly monitored to ensure they don’t violate the bill, thus turning classroom instruction into a fearful process in which threatened teachers shy away from any curricula that provides more than a slim view of another side of American history. This climate of censorship is unacceptable.

The elimination of these programs in Arizona is not just an affront to ethnic studies across the nation. It is also an affront to the entire purpose of educators: to teach students to think critically, creatively and deeply by endowing them with the tools to understand perspectives that differ from their own. The narratives found in ethnic studies texts and courses make up the many faces of American identity. States should not be allowed to edit our cultural history.

We urge Yale students, faculty and administrators to vehemently reject this bill and its implicit anti-intellectual crackdown. No history is illegal. As students and scholars, we cannot stand by as our nation’s history is rewritten. Rather than fear them, we must recognize the histories of ethnic minorities as crucial components to truly understanding both this nation’s history and its current state of affairs. Only then can we be said to fully promote liberty and justice for all.
KATHERINE ARAGÓN is a sophomore in in Timothy Dwight College. RAQUEL ZEPEDA is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

GET OUT THE VOTE! Fair Haven edition

For the past 4 weeks, members of Mecha de Yale and the larger Spanish-speaking community at Yale have gotten to know our neighbors in Fair Haven a little bit better. That's because for the past 4 weekends (and all of Monday and Tuesday last week) Mecha organized groups to canvass for President Barack Obama and Chris Murphy for Senate. In its earliest stages, canvassing includes speaking to people (regardless of their political orientation) about the candidates, their issues, and why voting is relevant to the individual, as well as registering new voters. However, Mecha entered the scene closer to the election, when efforts were redirected towards Getting Out The Vote and making sure registered Democrat and undecided voters in Fair Haven (a low-income area with a large number of people of color) knew the basics of each candidate. GOTV includes helping people make plans to get to the polls, letting people know where their local polling place is (especially important this cycle, after recent redistricting and polling place changes in the city), and in some cases physically driving voters to the polling stations.

These efforts were doubly important this cycle for several reasons. First of all, the Republican senate candidate Linda McMahon, a millionaire who spent over 49 million dollars out of her own pocket to finance her campaign, consistently attempted (and sometimes succeeded) to mislead voters. For example, Linda McMahon paid unemployed people to hand out "Sample Ballots" that contained two candidates, Obama and McMahon, with checks in the boxes right next to their names and photos, suggesting a "Party Ballot" including both Obama and McMahon, when in fact Obama would be on the Democratic voting line and McMahon listed as an Independent (though her politics and endorsements are Republican). Paid canvassers also distributed door hangers telling people to vote for Barack Obama and Linda McMahon because apparently that duo will "fight for us", again despite the fact that McMahon endorsed Mitt Romney and does not support Obama's most notable legislation, including the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Affordable Care Act. She would also vote to defund Planned Parenthood and enact tax cuts for the rich, as well as favor the Blunt Amendment that would deny women access to affordable reproductive care. McMahon used the same tactic in her video campaign ads. The deceitful advertisements and literature were part of a carefully thought-out and employed election strategy used throughout the McMahon campaign to try to trick minority voters, especially those living in low-income neighborhoods such as Fair Haven (many of whom are not fluent English-speakers) into voting for her. Mechistas even encountered instances of voter suppression- one Latino man, a registered voter, told a Mecha canvasser that he had been informed by McMahon canvassers that he was ineligible to vote because his driver's license had expired. Such blatant attempts at voter suppression are one reason why the urgent necessity of canvassing in Fair Haven was apparent to Mechistas- to disseminate accurate information on candidates and voting practices in both English and Spanish.

It was also crucial to mobilize Latinos to ensure that as many of us as possible made it to the voting booths on Tuesday to exercise our right to vote, making our voices heard around the country. That is why in addition to canvassing for many hours in Fair Haven, we spent an evening calling Spanish-speaking volunteers across the country in Colorado to urge them to canvass for Obama in their own neighborhoods as well. Thus we were doubly exhilarated to watch on Election Night as Colorado swung for President Obama.

We did not work alone this election season. For our Fair Haven canvassing, we were joined by members of the Yale Dems, Yale ACLU, and Amnesty International as well as many Yale students usually unaffiliated with Mecha. I felt incredibly proud of both the Mecha and the Yale community the day of the election, when we turned out almost 40 student volunteers to canvass in frigid weather. Mecha cannot operate successfully as a solitary agent. Our community is our power, and to all of our friends from around Yale and Fair Haven who were out there with us these past few weeks (and for those who worked for months canvassing before this such as Kenneth Reveisz and the Fair Haven Democrats and Labor Unions), the results of the election should prove thanks and proof enough that organizing and community activism is invaluable in the pursuit of change.

Of course, nothing ends at the moment of election other than the current election cycle. We must continue to look forward, working for immigration reform, education reform, prison reform- well, the list goes on. It is important to vote, and yes, to mobilize otherwise disregarded communities to take a stand with their vote during an election. But voting is simply one action among many that we must take in order to make change happen.