New Haven Independent

Moderator Kica Matos, executive director of JUNTA for Progressive Action, introduced speakers including Maryam Elahi, director of Trinity College’s Human Rights Program and a 1979 refugee from Iran, and Keith Calhoun, a Smithsonian-featured photographer from New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward (pictured left and right, above), as linked by personal understanding of what it means to be forced to leave home.

With the majority of the non-U.S.-born residents making up approximately 12 percent of people in this country now arriving from Latin America, the struggle of undocumented Hispanics for rights and dignity here was the main focus at the Tuesday afternoon forum.

“Nobody leaves their home country because they want to,” said Elahi. The undocumented Hispanics at work here to support their families — “stimulating our economies [and] enriching our lives” along the way — deserve decency and recognition in return. This is a country of immigrants, reminded Matos, and to shut the doors on Latin Americans now is to expose “immigration policies [that] have always been racist” all the more starkly.

Walls like the one running 200 feet out into the ocean to divide Tijuana from San Diego are shameful and violent, said choreographer Allyson Green (pictured at center), whose dances take up the issue. And ineffective, added Unidad Latina en Accion President John Jairo Lugo (left), who crossed into San Diego under that wall 20 years ago after fleeing Colombia as a political refugee. “Walls will be crossed when you have millions of poor people on the other side,” said Lugo.

If the U.S. wants fewer Central Americans crossing into its territory, it should start by reversing its impoverishing free trade agreements with those countries, Lugo suggested. Market-opening deals like CAFTA cripple the little economies that can’t compete with heavily-subsidized U.S. agricultural exports, he said. Nor is there a ready Central American industrial product to come to the rescue. “What can a country like Colombia export to the United States” as retribution for all these TVs and junk? asked Lugo.

For the U.S. to then turn around and threaten workers who have immigrated here to survive is beyond wrong, said Lugo. Current notions of deporting 12 million workers are lunatic, and the proposed guest-worker program that promises to maintain a “second class of citizens” is “another kind of slavery.” Returning wistfully to the personal, Lugo seconded Elahi on the note that people wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have to be. “I am one of those who crossed the border illegally. And I am one of those who keeps saying, Next year, I’m going back.”

The angle on Latin American laborers changed somewhat when displaced New Orleansians Chandra McCormick (pictured below, right) and Keith Calhoun had their turn to speak. The two have been documenting the post-Katrina “new New Orleans” — including the large new presence of Hispanic workers lining up daily for reconstruction jobs. “They were the first thing we noticed,” said McCormick, who returned home with Calhoun after eight weeks’ refuge in Texas, cameras in hand. The photographers’ lens on the immigrant workers is sympathetic. “They’re being exploited,” affirmed McCormick, narrating a slideshow of her work with tales of contractors stiffing Latin American workers on promised hotel bills and whole months’ wages.

It was Calhoun who connected their exploitation to the joblessness of poor New Orleans residents trying to resettle back home. “These migrants, they’re bringing them in by the busload!” said Calhoun. He told a story of a friend Mike, whose repatriation to the Big Easy depended on a twelve dollar-an-hour construction gig he’d landed. “Then three Mexican guys came up and said, You can have all three of us for that. It wiped him out.”

Was there a new resentment, then, of the under-bidding immigrants arriving in New Orleans? “You might hear someone say, These Mexicans, working for free!” allowed Calhoun — but the feelings weren’t damning. “It’s not the fault of immigrants. They didn’t choose to be here. They’re just trying to feed their families,” said Calhoun. Nor was there anything to be gained by dividing, Calhoun said, making reference to prison situations of Hispanics facing off against African-Americans. “Instead of concentrating on the people who have the shackles on you, you take it out on each other,” he said. “Ain’t nobody who can’t feel the same oppression. We know what it is to feel out in the cold.”

Calhoun did float an idea to stop wages from getting driven too low. “They should have a standard. They should all talk to each other and say, We’re not going unless we all get ten dollars an hour!”

“Union,” mouthed Matos to Elahi, eyes sparkling. “I was so glad when he said that,” she said afterward, newly-bought McCormick/Calhoun photograph tucked under her arm. “I think there are a lot of opportunities for alliance between disenfranchised peoples.”