They wait for the bus in Fair Haven. Cook in a restaurant kitchen. Wash windows. Play soccer in the park. Send money back home.
Members of New Haven’s burgeoning immigrant community do that every day.
They do it in a new video aimed at reaching the hearts of Americans bombarded with incitements to hate or else inclined not to care about hard-working families being torn apart and sent away to face a possible death.
The video was released Thursday by a national group called the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.
It intersperses scenes of everyday life in New Haven’s immigration community with the reading of a letter by a deported immigrant named Felipe Montes to his sons left behind.
From “Felipe’s Letter to his Two Sons.”
Fair Haven’s Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the national Center for Community Change, came up with the idea for the video. She decided that people needed to hear another side to the immigration story from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s depictions of criminals who need to be deported and kept out of the country.
Matos enlisted a Chinese immigrant named Frank Chi, who grew up in New Haven and now runs a D.C.-based progressive media consultancy, to put the project together. “Kica was like, ‘Right now a lot of people are hurting oer what Donald Trump is saying about immigrants. I want to do a video about that,’” Chi recalled in a conversation Thursday. “We wanted to respond to hate with love … to show how people are living their lives.”
Chi (pictured) enlisted grassroots New Haven videographer Travis Carbonella to travel around Fair Haven with immigrant-rights organizer John Lugo to meet and gather footage of immigrants going about their daily lives.
Carbonella’s edited footage was overlaid with the reading of Montes’ letter (read the letter here) by U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez.
RIFA released English and Spanish-language versions of the finished video on Thursday on this Facebook page along with a suggestion that viewers “CALL President Obama at 866 – 473-5915 & tell him to stop separating families!”
The page also urges people to sign this petition calling for the president to “stop the raids” of undocumented people that began nationwide last week.
From “Felipe’s Letter to his Two Sons.”
The video project was in the works months before the raids were revealed and begun. The timing just happened to coincide with the raids — and became an opportunity to help organize opposition to them.
So in the end, a project inspired by Donald Trump focused on the actions of … Barack Obama.
“The original intent was to respond to Trump’s hate. Now we have to respond to Obama’s deportation,” Chi observed.
Meanwhile, on Monday the Peace Corps suspended sending volunteers to El Salvador because of the risk of getting killed — while the Obama administration is continuing deporting families back there.
From “Felipe’s Letter to his Two Sons.”
Day by day New Haven becomes a better place to live thanks to local volunteers, nonprofits and responsible small businesses making our community stronger. A free press strengthens the protection of the First Amendment for free speech, and helps us to understand one another better and work harder together for a more just and peaceful city and nation. Today I'm sending a special shout out to Paul Bass and the New Haven Independent for this article and the online Independent newspaper that makes it possible for him to share his essay and accompany it with the two disturbing and inspirational videos he writes about. One video is about murders of young black folks by police, the other is about children of immigrants suffering from the separation, or threat of separation, from their parents.
Sherman Malone