Your Vote, Your Voice!

As I cast my ballot early today in the voting booth, I decided to stop dawdling and write something about the importance of voting. I have wanted to post my daughter's words, because — as a millenial — she has something important to say about voting in a way I could never replicate. 

So an article right before Super Tuesday I thought would fit the bill. 

Sandra Karina Tovar, center, main speaker at the LASSO Conference (Latin American Student Success Organization)
Tarrant County College, South Campus in Dallas, Texas

Camila Pacheco-Fores is young, yet she is old enough to vote, and she has the privilege to do so, as many students and young professionals do. A surprising percentage, however, choose not to use that right. I am glad she has been thinking long and hard about the vote, however, and she is talking about it, discussing it with friends, and writing about what moves her. 

Are Refugee Children Lesser than Other Children?

I have recently been posting a myriad amount of articles on the atrocities of what is going on with detention centers nationally. With the help of activists, lawyers, and too many to be named, we were able to stop the government from continuing to license Berks County Residential Center in Berks, Pennsylvania, 

Texas has decided to turn up the heat, however, to make up for this "loss." It will now allow not only these notorious for profit centers to continue, but also it will allow them to become daycare facilities as well. 

Though no one is allowed to take photographs in Dilley, ICE certainly does.
How is that playing by the rules?

Virginia Raymond, immigrant lawyer, human rights activist -- ex adjunct professor -- writes to us the next steps we can take in this battle of David against Goliath, and she shows us her own example, so that we might emulate.

I urge all of us who care about our future as a free society -- comprised of diverse human beings -- to join in her call and write to any and all who will listen. 

Ana M. Fores Tamayo, Adjunct Justice

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To all of you who spoke or wrote in opposition to the Texas Department of Family & Protective (sic) Services (DFPS) proposed rule 40 TAC 748.7, which allows ICE and ICE-contract facilities to apply for licensing as "residential child care." 

Thank you. 

introducing #Ayotzinapa Matters

…Ayotzi Vive because Ayotzinapa matters.

The collection of Ayotzinapa links and images below updates automatically from multiple sources to bear digital witness. It is also a righteous and appropriate part of Adjunct Justice and the Precarious Faculty Network. Ayotzinapa's "disappeared" student teachers, marginalized educators, belong to adjunct and precarious worker communitie

Briefly, the horrific state violence of September 26, 2014 in the Mexican province of Guerrero has come to represent the deepest problems of an entire nation: a corrupt, violent government and military, their complicity with drug cartels, the many murders, even more unexplained disappearances, and disenfranchisement of the poor and powerless. On that day, 43 students from Raúl Isidro Burgos, the historic and revolutionary teachers' college in Ayotzinapa, were "disappeared" from the provincial capital Iguala.

To this date the state has failed to offer families a plausible explanation or reliable information and closed the case over strong public objections. The Ayotzinapa story is also the global reaction to these events. Spontaneous protests spread throughout both hemispheres and around the world. Fueled by the refusal to forget or be silenced, Caravana43 took the families' search for justice across both hemispheres, to the U.N. in NYC and across the Atlantic to the Hague.

... now visit the collection celebrating that refusal by saving and sharing stories and images of Escuela Normal Raúl Isidro Burgos, the Ayotzinapa 43 and their families' journeys

Refugees & Hysteria: A Modern Day Witch-hunt?

As the new year 2016 gets under way, and we have completed our good tidings to all, I tend to wonder what might be in store for the thousands of immigrants who suffer violence and displacement from their homelands either south of us — especially in Central America — or across the Atlantic. I wonder what awaits all refugees suffering the endless pain and miles of degradation as they journey toward hope, only to arrive at a land that does not welcome them. I wonder, if we were in their shoes, what would we feel? How would we react? What kindness might we show toward others sharing our same circumstances? How understanding might we become, if we were to suffer only one hour in their shoes?

Yet we have never had to.

Donated shoes at the Humanitarian Respite Center in MacAllen, Texas

© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

But if ever we had to suffer such indignities — like our parents, grandparents, or great grandparents did — we have most likely forgotten.

Although the Salem Witch Trials in Massachussetts may not have been initially traced to one specific immigrant or refugee, it was a well-known fact that between 1689 to 1692 Native Americans had been striking out against English settlements, so that many people were displaced, and there was an influx of refugees to the area near Salem. Thus the fear that surfaced everywhere in the general population — plain folk panicking with unfounded beliefs running amok because of "witches hiding as neighbors among them" — caused innocent women and one old man to end up losing their lives, based on groundless fears.