Katherine Franke is a Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. She’s considered to be one of the “nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion, and rights” and has written books on topics such as abolition and reparations. Now, Franke is joining a different distinguished group of Americans, she and her partner have decided to sponsor an asylum seeker, a young trans woman from El Salvador. They will take her in and be responsible for her until she is given permission to permanently reside in the country.

The woman, Ana, not her real name,  was being held in Tijuana when Franke met her. She was with a group of Columbia students volunteering with Al Otro Lado, an organization the provides legal assistance to migrants on both sides of the border when she met Ana and heard her story.  Ana told Franke about severe abuse she fled in El Salvador and then endured in Tijuana when she was sent there by the U.S. government. She says she was beaten and terrorized by drug cartels and the Mexican Federal Police.

“She had been into the clinic a couple of times, one of the other lawyers there had done an intake with her and had just been completely flattened by the story,” Franke explained. “We sort of took her under our wing when we were there, and get her ready as possible before she was put into detention.”

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Under a Trump administration policy (“Remain in Mexico”) that started in late January, Central American migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, are sent back to Mexico once they reach the U.S. border, to wait while their asylum claims are processed. In March, when Franke met Ana, it was projected that nearly 100,000 people  tried to cross to the U.S. – Mexico border just in the month of March.

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Franke did not become a sponsor through a religious organization, but instead through a non profit called Showing Up For Racial Justice. The group runs a program that supports “folks on the caravan by connecting them with volunteer sponsors in the U.S. in order to give them a chance to get out of detention and plead their case for asylum,” according to their website.

It was clear to Franke that Ana was facing incredible odds, and Franke was reminded  of the case of Roxana Hernandez, another trans woman who died in ICE custody in 2018. After weeks in Tijuana, Ana’s number was called – she would be moved to the San Ysidro, San Diego, CA., Customs, and Border Protection processing and detention facility – the same facility that held Hernandez before her death.

Franke decided to become Ana’s sponsor, responsible for her legal resettlement in the U.S. – she filled out the paperwork and will be responsible for everything from finding her a place to stay, to help with medical care, and bringing her to court appointments. When Ana entered detention she had Franke as a sponsor and a man named Jose Campos as her attorney. Campos spent the first week of Hernandez’s detention trying to find a way to get in contact with Ana. They hoped that because Ana had what so many did not – representation and sponsorship – that she would be processed and released quickly. Instead, she has been detained since she was taken from Tijuana.

“The biggest reason why we want to get them out of there is that they’re not being recognized as trans women, they are being put in with the men,” said Meredith Vina over the phone.

Vina is a trans woman living in San Diego. She and her wife Eleanor are both retired, and they have been able to visit Ana in detention.

“For example, we went to see Ana* today and she was in a room with five other men. Now, fortunately for her, we talked to her and we said: ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And she said that the men were respecting her and actually respecting her pronouns so far.”

Vina not only visits Ana in detention – she is also sponsoring a trans woman seeking asylum from Central America.

“The way I got involved – It was just all these caravans coming up to Tijuana, and having friends getting involved in going down there and bringing supplies,” Vina said. . “Getting to the point where we said ‘How can we get these people to the United States?’”

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Metropolitan Detention Center is in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It’s right next to the East River, and when it is cold in the city, this area is even colder. But it that hasn’t stopped activists in the city who have occupied the parking lot of the federal jail since February 1.

They have been there through freezing temperatures, altercations with NYPD, and the constant tapping of the men and women inside the jail, who had alleged they’ve been denied heat, hot water, and hot meals during the coldest months of the year.

Signs reading “Turn on the heat” and “We hear you, we love you” are still taped to a brick wall facing the front of the facility. Family members and activists spent their first days begging for the heating in a cold prison to be turned back on. When the heat and electricity in MDC was restored on February 3, after nearly three weeks without both, activists and family members did not leave. Rather, they remained occupying the jail, trying to push the conversation beyond just just this example. They believe inhumane conditions alleged at MDC could be a turning point for how incarceration in New York City is discussed.

Kei Williams is a leading organizer of the No New Jails NYC movement, and has spent over 26 hours in a row protesting at MDC. Williams and No New Jails NYC are working to organize shifts outside of MDC so that someone is there at all times of the day, until their demands are met.

The Twitter account for No New Jails NYC frames all of their organizing at MDC around more central ideas of abolishing detention centers. “If you’re also angry about Rikers, and angry about MDC, and angry about the Tombs, Brooklyn Detention Center, and the boat, we hope you’ll stay angry until we have a #JailFreeNYC where punishment is not the solution to poverty, conflict, or violence,” they wrote.

“In the long term, we know these conditions are multiplied across the millions of people who are incarcerated,” said Williams. “We know that this is not only federal jails. This is the story in city jails. This is the story in Rikers Island. MDC is not unique. The only thing that is unique is that there is a spotlight at this point and time.”

According to a study from the Prison Policy Initiative, 90 percent of the people incarcerated in New York are black and brown people.  With at least 230,000 people in New York State’s carceral state, there is often a major intersection of advocacy between the groups who working to free those people– or at the very least, ensure that the conditions they are held in are humane. Whether the focus is prison abolition, criminal justice reform, or expanding conversations about who is put in jail, the crisis  at MDC presented an opportunity. The situation became a conduit for all other jails and prisons in the city.hey wanted to take advantage of the local and national press to send a message to city and state leadership: no new jails.

“I have heard horrendous stories about people who have been detained in every jail, not just in New York, but across this country. But especially in New York state,” said Brittany Williams, who was one of the first organizers on the ground.

What she witnessed made her angry, but her experience and knowledge of New York detention centers meant that it was not new information to her.  

“I was not surprised to hear that they didn’t have heat,” she said, “I was not surprised to hear that they didn’t have food, I was not surprised that to hear that people didn’t have their rights. Because that’s how, systemically, jails are operated.”

For other activists at the scene, MDC was an opportunity not only to talk about the pervasive human rights abuses committed in jails, but also to shed a wider light on who is impacted.

Linda Sarsour and a crowd of protesters standing at the back of Metropolitan Detention Center, making noise so the women at the back of the jail could hear them. February 3, 2019 by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

Ify Ike, who is an attorney and professor came to MDC after seeing posts about the lack of heat circulating on Twitter.  She also wants to bring attention to the plight of women. About 100 female inmates are housed there.

“As an attorney who has done human rights work, including being on the ground in Ferguson – women are invisible in this conversation, ” she said.

There are fewer women being detained – 95.5 percent of New York State’s prison population are men. But the treatment of female prisoners is often just as severe as that of male prisoners, and their lack of visibility often means that fewer people are advocating for them. In order to hear or see the women banging on the windows of their cells, people protesting at MDC had to walk around to the back of the jail. For people like Ike, this was an opportunity to push for their stories to be included in media coverage.

The protestors said they will continue because there is nothing normal about mass incarceration. For now, they said they will remain outfront of the jail, hoping their message reaches the ears of government officials.

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On January 24, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and several other American digital media outlets announced massive, company-wide layoffs – a total of 1000 jobs would be disintegrated. The layoffs were chilling to witness; Twitter soon flooded with messages from well established journalists and columnists, all of them announcing that they were now out of work and uncertain about future employment.

It wasn’t the first time that the industry seemed to contract, but it was the largest blow to digital media yet, and it signified that the new platform may not be able to save journalism. Alex Pareene wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review: “What became clear this week is that if the digital natives do survive, it might not have much to do with news gathering.” The most recent round of layoffs hit at a crucial time in American politics, and it left a lot of people wondering: What will happen to journalism? It’s a question that feels impossible to ignore at journalism institutions where professors, who are journalists themselves, are tasked with teaching the next generation.  

Ted Conover

“My initial reaction is horror and sadness for those journalists who lost their jobs,” said Ted Conover, who is the director of the Arthur L.Carter Institute of Journalism at NYU. “And also that it is coming in the digital area, which we’re less accustomed to, I think than the fairly steady state of disruption that has characterized all journalism for at least a dozen years.”

Conover shared that even though journalism has been an industry in decline, NYU is still seeing success with their graduates. He explained that 61 percent of NYU Journalism undergraduate majors were employed in their field following graduation – a high number considering that many who major in journalism don’t necessarily expect to pursue it as a career.

“I totally worry about the value proposition, and I feel sick every time I hear a story of journalists being laid off,” Conover continued. “But overtime, even as one kind of journalist has been losing his job, another kind of journalist has been getting one.”

“I was expecting this,” explained Nicholas Lemann, the former Dean of Columbia Journalism School. “It’s was dwarfed by the 15 year shrinkage of the headcount, particularly in the newspaper – it was much much bigger numbers.”

Nicholas Lemann

Lemann explained that during his ten years at Colombia, he and the rest of the staff made sure to not only monitor the changes to the industry, but to make sure that their institute contributed to the conversations about creating an industry of sustainable journalism. “When I was dean, I tried very hard to make the school a center of that conversation.”

Mohammed Bazzi, who teaches NYU’s introductory undergraduate journalism course, Journalistic Inquiry, says that it is important to think about undergraduate and graduate journalism programs differently – highlighting that grad programs involve students specifically entering a program to further enhance their skills and enter the job market. This makes the increasingly volatile state of the industry more worrying.

“Digital media is now hitting some of the same walls and some of the same barriers that legacy and print media has had,” Bazzi said. “The industry seems to be going through another phase of retrenchment… for graduate programs it’s a different calculation. My worry and fear would be, you know, for graduate journalism programs to not become like MFA programs, which I think is the trajectory of where they’re headed.”

NYU’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute

For Lemann and Conover, this worry didn’t seem to occur to them. Both believed that their institutions offered valuable instruction and access to the field that people pursuing journalism might not otherwise be able to benefit from outside of their institution. And neither believe that the need for journalism will lessen.

“I personally think that there is zero chance that journalism as a function of society will completely disappear, it’s too important. We need to have a conversation to figure out how to pay for,” Lemann said.

Conover echoed that sentiment.

“Anybody who enters journalism these days needs to do so with their eyes wide open,” Conover said. “But I do believe journalism isn’t going to go away, regardless of how much our current president wishes it would. There’s an important fight to be fought and we’re a great way to prepare for that.”

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On Thanksgiving day, it was 22 degrees in New York City. It was the kind of cold that seeped through walls and drafted through windows. Viviana Wrenn was one of hundreds of New York City Housing Authority residents in the city who didn’t have heat. She and her son, who turned one-year-old just a few days before, huddled under blankets near her space heater to stay warm. After one month of living in the Stebbins Avenue Bronx NYCHA development, she said her apartment was heated less than 30 percent of the time.

Wrenn is not alone. Of the estimated 400,000 people living in the NYCHA housing developments, countless filed complaints over the Thanksgiving holidays about lack of heat, hot water and other essential services. The news reports closely about the lack of heat and hot water followed other recent public investigations into lead, mold, and vermin infestations that marred the agency’s reputation. NYCHA has launched several smaller programs to address certain  developments’ most pressing problems, but with older buildings and costly system issues, even minor repairs are a challenge.

“I’ve had nothing but problems since I’ve moved in,” Wrenn said. “I’ve just got out of the family shelter system. I was living in the shelter system since I was pregnant. I was lucky enough to get an apartment with NYCHA.”

Viviana Wrenn lives on the 800 block  of Rev James A Polite Avenue.   Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

But the process of moving was riddled with issues. First her keys didn’t work. Then the apartment unit she moved into wasn’t clean and the door looked like it had been pried open by a crowbar. The intercom system for the entire housing complex didn’t work. Wrenn filed complaints repeatedly. They were marked as completed – but nothing changed. She contacted management. She stopped maintenance workers in the hallways. Nothing changed.

“I feel like they are constantly trying to pass the buck,” she said. Every system in place for Wrenn to address her issues failed her. Between working and taking care of her young son alone while her husband served his prison sentence, trying to make her home livable drains her remaining energy. “Whenever you put a ticket in for heat or hot water, they don’t contact you. They don’t have maintenance come and check what could possibly be wrong.”

“It’s very frustrating. I give my son a warm bath, and as soon as I take him out of his bath, he’s shivering. In his towel. Which is wrong.”

Caridad Nova also lives in NYCHA housing. She lives in the South Jamaica projects in Queens. Her heat works and her windows don’t let in the cold air, but her ceiling lets in the rain. She’s lived in NYCHA housing almost her whole life with the exception of two and a half years she spent living in the family shelter system. Nova lives with her daughter, who is only three years old.

“Every time I report that I have a problem in my apartment, they don’t come on the day when I ask them,” Nova said. “Like right now, I have a leak in my living room, right? And everytime it rains, it’s like it’s raining in my house. I reported it before, and they never came. So I reported it again.”

Nova said that she’s had the leak in her ceiling for three weeks. Every storm brings cold, wet weather into her apartment. She and her daughter developed asthma while they were living in the family shelter system, and the damp air doesn’t help. Previous studies have found links between people who live in shelters and high rates of asthma.

“I haven’t gotten any of my furniture yet because I’m waiting for them to fix what they need to fix,” Nova said. “They need to renew NYCHA, NYCHA buildings, they need to do something. Because this is crazy. Everything is getting worse by the day.”

The conditions Wrenn and Nova described have caused a public crisis. Lynne Patton, who oversees New York and New Jersey’s Division of the Federal Housing and Urban Development agency expressed extreme dismay on Twitter following the circulation of a video of a NYCHA resident recorded her ceiling leaking. “Dear Migrant Caravan: We know the majority of you seek asylum for a better life in America,” Patton wrote, to people fleeing “abject poverty” in their home countries. “Well, with all due respect, don’t come to NYC.”

While Patton’s comments were not widely accepted by many New York City politicians – NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson called the remarks a “publicity stunt” – those living under the conditions of NYCHA housing aren’t batting an eye at dramatic comparisons. On Dec. 3, the water at the Patterson Houses, another development managed by NYCHA that is also in the Bronx, lost all water. Tenants were forced to line up on the block in cold temperatures in order to get water from fire hydrants.  

The rules posted at  a NYCHA development on Rev James A Polite Avenue in the Bronx.  Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

“Staff have been working on repairing the house pumps and are in the process of setting up temporary pumps now,” NYCHA officials said in a statement to the press about the Patterson water outages. “This is yet another example of the problems we face given our aging infrastructure, but we must do better providing basic services despite these challenges.”

New York City Council member Rafael Salamanca represents the 17th District and 15,000 NYCHA residents. His district has the third largest population of NYCHA tenants. His office has made a point of actively showing up at NYCHA developments when issues facing residents go unaddressed. He is aware that NYCHA will sometimes only address an issue after they’ve been publicly called out.

“From broken elevators to huge holes in the walls to leaking roofs, many of the 15,520 NYCHA residents I represent live under terrible conditions, and it’s an utter disgrace,” said Council Member Rafael Salamanca Jr. “NYCHA is broken. Years of mismanagement and dwindling federal investment has left hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents in unlivable apartments.  NYCHA is NYC’s biggest landlord and they should be able to address the basic requirements demanded of any landlord. My office has been working hard to remedy issues constituents face and hold NYCHA accountable.”

Throughout an endless number of issues, NYCHA’s response – if there is one – has targeted specific and immediate issues. Following the multiple news reports this year about unfulfilled maintenance requests (like Viviana’s), NYCHA announced a program in July 2018 to fulfill 50,000 requests through 2019. The program is called NYCHA Cares.

“NYCHA Cares is the latest demonstration of the Authority’s renewed commitment to improving our residents’ quality of life both today and tomorrow,” said NYCHA General Manager Vito Mustaciuolo in a statement to the press. “We are focused every day on making sure our residents know that we are not only listening to their needs but also working proactively to deliver tangible results.”

The maintenance repairs happened in “blitzes.” Hundreds of work orders would be filled in over a single Saturday. On Dec. 8 five different developments were repaired – none of those developments were Caridad Nova’s or Viviana Wrenn’s. Posts on NYCHA’s Twitter account showed sinks being repaired, door knockers being fixed and plumbing issues being addressed.

“Saturday maintenance work order blitz is kicking off at 5 [sic] sites across the City” the agency wrote on Twitter. “If you’re a Baruch, Patterson, Kingsborough, Ravenswood or West Brighton resident, management offices are open for recerts and other assistance until 4:30 today.”

But even as work orders are being addressed, residents are still having to endure daunting living situations in the interim. Viviana Wrenn was told that she would have to wait until Dec. 21 until her broken fridge (which was broken when she moved in) was fixed. NYCHA previously filed that her work order was fixed– but Wrenn still tapes her fridge shut with duct tape.

While work orders can be filled and issues like clogged toilets and broken fridges can be fixed, if maintenance workers do show up – citywide issues with aging infrastructure and lack of sufficient funding leave residents like Caridad Nova and Viviana Wrenn feeling like they’ve abandoned by their local government. They are systemic issues that cannot be repaired in a maintenance “blitz.” As the temperatures continue to drop, residents without heat and hot water might have to live through more cold holidays – and hope that the rain and snow stays out of their living rooms.

“If you wouldn’t live in our buildings in these conditions,” Wrenn said. “Why would you make us live in these buildings in these conditions?”

The post Left in The Cold: NYCHA housing residents wait endlessly for repairs appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Austin is a hub for organizers who working to get out the progressive Latino vote across the state. Thirty-one percent of the eligible voters in the state are Latino, and by 2030, that number is expected to hit nearly 40 percent. But voting eligibility and voter turnout aren’t often the same thing. Women like Cristina Tzintzun know this. She is the founder of JOLT Texas, a progressive Latino voter organization that worked to register of thousands of Latinos to vote since November 2016.

Now, she and her hundreds of volunteers have to get them to the polls.

“We are one of the largest and fastest-growing voting blocs in the state, but we’re also largely ignored by both major political parties,” Tzintzun said. “One of the reasons we are under assault and under attack is because we’re actually really powerful and here in the state of Texas, we will soon be the majority.”

The Houston Chronicle reported that in Harris County, Texas, Democrats increased voter turnout with Latinos by nearly 300 percent, compared to a 50 percent increase by the GOP. Democrats have an approval rating of 49 percent, compared to 32 percent for the GOP from Latinos in Texas and other key battleground states, according to a poll released by NBC on November 5.

“People feel like they’re a minority even when they’re in a state where people of color are the majority,”  Tzintzun added.

“¡Vote!” crocheted into a fence along a major highway in Austin, Texas, ahead of the 2018 midterms. October, 26,2018. Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

Some Latina women are those new voters that Tzintzun is talking about. Marciela Salazar is a social worker that lives outside of Austin. Her father is from Mexico, and her mother’s parents brought her mother across the border when she was young. This will be the first election Salazar votes in. Her parents never told her she was supposed to vote, and she never felt truly engaged by politicians. For a long time, she felt like she didn’t know enough to make an informed decision. She broke down in tears when recalling the moment she realized that her reason for not going to vote wasn’t stopping other people she knew, who voted for Republicans.

“I think this is just coming from regret,” Salazar said, sucking in her breath. “From not voting, from not being aware, from not understanding. I see those people that are affected by it –– my family, me. And I do have a desire now to know, and to be informed.”

Salazar’s friend Ana Zepeda is also a social worker. She is the daughter of Puerto Ricans, and since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, she’s felt a constant anxiety – one that has pushed her to be more vocal about politics with her family and friends.  

“It feels so bad, but I was seriously so heartbroken in 2016,” said Zepeda. “I’ve had a lot of anxiety leading up to November 6. I almost haven’t allowed myself to think of past election day. I have just thought about bugging everyone I know to go vote. Which I’m really good at. I’m really good at pestering people.”

JOLT volunteers canvassing in Austin to encourage Latinos to get to the polls and vote early in the 2018 midterm elections. Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

An underlying theme among Latina women in Texas is how they are often the organizers in their communities. They consistently turn out to vote more than their male counterparts, according to a study completed by JOLT, with the exception of the 69+ age group. In Austin, they are on the ground organizing and canvassing, and working with civil engagement groups to reach people who’ve never been spoken to before.

Maria Medina Miller, who is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the League of Women Voters – Austin Area, feels the weight of her work.  She explained that there’s a constant exhaustion of feeling under attack by an administration that has been vocal about their disdain of women, of Mexicans, of organizers, and she is all three. But that she doesn’t have the luxury of stopping.

“It’s heartbreaking, but at the same time, we know who we are, we know who are as a culture,” said Medina Miller. “It’s exhausting to go through the same hurdles over and over and over again. But the only thing that does is make me better at what I do. We have a stewardship that we owe to people around us, not just to ourselves.”

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Women from across religions, socioeconomic statuses and political parties gathered in Washington Square Park yesterday to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The rally was organized by Erin Lynn, who wanted to find a way to protest when the logistics of getting on a bus to D.C. weren’t coming together. So she made a Facebook event page, and invited two friends. By the end of the day, thousands marked that they would be attending. The National Women’s March reached out to Lynn to coordinate.

The southwest corner of Washington Square Park soon became crowded with hundreds of protesters. They took turns speaking and offering different solutions to the issues plaguing the United States, sometimes directly disagreeing with the person who spoke before. Some women were so determined to be a part of the protest, they arrived hours early, just so they didn’t miss anything.

“About 35 of us just marched around the park,” said one early protestor, Lindsay Borden, who is the Interim Pastor at New York City’s Second Presbyterian Church. “We weren’t sure if anyone else was going to show.”

Rally crowd listening at the Stop Kavanaugh Rally yesterday. Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler

The time coincided with protests in Washington D.C., where hundreds of women flooded the Senate galleries, and at least 164 were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police, according to law enforcement. Women in D.C. and New York were united by fury and they rallied against a man accused of sexual assault and misconduct, who would be sworn in just hours later.

“We knew we were going to be under attack,” said Julianne Hoffenberg, director of The Gathering for Justice, run by Women’s March organizer Carmen Perez. “It was just a matter of how they were going to do it. Personally, I have been blown away by how fast fascism has sort of toppled the revolution that was coming before.”

Hoffenberg said that a year ago, she never would have guessed that she’d be on the ground organizing against a Supreme Court nominee like Kavanaugh. She was at the event on behalf of Linda Sarsour, another Women’s March organizer, to assist Erin Lynn with the logistics of putting together a rally at the last minute, and to make sure the protest stayed safe and nonviolent.

Lynn said she didn’t want to just sit at home. She couldn’t. She brought a box of coffee and several boxes of donuts. She wasn’t sure what to expect. But she went on to lead the crowds in speaking out, beginning by sharing her own story as a survivor.

“I have been sexually assault three times,” she told the crowd later in the afternoon. “And it took me a long time just to admit that.”

Erin Lynn, rally organizer, setting up a new microphone at the Stop Kavanaugh Rally yesterday in Washington Square Park. Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler

She then invited other people to take the megaphone and share their stories. Some took the opportunity to share their own stories of surviving sexual assault. Others just screamed. Some broke down in despair as they begged the crowd to get registered to vote. Some called for the downfall of capitalism, of the republic, of President Donald Trump.

“I thought I couldn’t feel more heartbroken than the day I learned how they were ripping babies from their mothers’ arms at the border,” said Vicky Barrios Newsom, a member of Movimiento Cosecha. She spoke through deep, shaky breaths. Her face was red and wet with tears. She had been crying since she arrived. “I feel betrayed. I feel betrayed by white women. Please. Please. Please. Talk to your family.”

Many protesters echoed similar feelings of betrayal from white women – even white women themselves. This was especially true when it came to Republican Senator Susan Collins’ decision to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Many held out hope that she would vote against party lines and block Trump’s nominee from the lifetime appointment. Walking through the cramped crowd, it was impossible to go a few feet without hearing someone mutter her name in disgust.

For others, the betrayal was less shocking. Zakiyah Anarsi, an education advocate in the city of New York at the Alliance for Quality Education has long steeled herself against the disappointment politicians can cause. While the nomination of Kavanaugh was particularly painful for Ansari, who is the mother of a sexual assault survivor, she is hoping others who are outraged will see the intersectionality of the issue.

“The work that I do, I’ve been active for almost 20 years,” she said. “But all this stuff merges into one. Like you can’t talk about one without the other. What this has done is it has left us with an opportunity of folks who aren’t normally engaged with stuff to now be engaged, specifically white women.”

Zakiyah Ansari speaking to the crowd at the Stop Kavanaugh Rally yesterday. Photo by Opheli Garcia Lawler.

Despite the differences between protesters, whether they were new organizers like Lynn, or career activists like Ansari, Barrios Newsom and Hoffenberg, or faith leaders like Borden, each gladly deferred the mic to the other, listened intently to each other’s stories, and offered support when a personal testimony became overwhelming. Midway through the rally, all their voices joined in chorus: “I believe you,” they shouted.

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 La Morada is a restaurant that multitasks. From the kitchen, flautas, enchiladas, mole, tacos are served up. In their dining room, the tables double as a community space, where the words “No Mas Deportaciones” and “Black Lives Mattered” are painted on doors and corners, where a flyer saying “Vote” and “Resist” is plastered repeatedly on the Mott, Haven, Bronx entryway.  

Last night it served as the venue for the Bronx Museum’s second installment  of their Bronx Speaks series, a program that combines art and social justice. Neighborhood women,street vendors, chefs, activists, teamed up with art collectives to trace their journeys to Mott Haven, their home. Throughout the night speakers took turn sharing what the community of Mott Haven meant to them. For the outsiders, from the art collectives, it was an opportunity to share why they became involved.

Yajaira Saavedra, the daughter of the owner of La Morada is one of those women who needed space to express her fear and frustration at the way her neighborhood is changing.  “As an undocumented immigrant, I can’t rely on the NYPD,” Saavedra said, her voice shaking. “I felt safer when they weren’t everywhere. I feel safer when it is just my community.”

She spoke at length about the need to fight back against the gentrification in the neighborhood, that an increased police presence was a danger to a largely black and brown community, to a community of immigrants, street vendors, and working class people.

Yajaira anecdotes are reflective of the neighborhood’s statistics: Mott Haven is 72 percent hispanic, and 25 percent black. Of the 94,000 residents in the neighborhood, 36 percent have a limited proficiency in English. Mott Haven has the highest percentage of adults who have not completed high school in all of New York City and 46 percent of the district lives below the federal poverty level. The neighborhood has the highest rate for child asthma in the whole city,  nearly three times the city average.

Her sister, Carolina Saavedra, the su chef of the restaurant, learned to cook in Mexico, at the Oaxaca Culinary Institute. Carolina was first in the first speaker in the series. Upon returning to the United States, she was dismayed to realize that her Mexican cooking experience wasn’t good enough for most restaurants. She looked around and saw the food of her culture, the precious mole which once used to be considered a gift to the gods, offered up in knock off restaurants for twice the price.

The art that Carolina made was for her children, and for the children she watched grow up in the neighborhood. She recreated “The Hungry Caterpillar” for the kids, and the culture she knew. The caterpillar munched on guacamole and rice and beans, not candy or sandwiches.

As she read her story, Carolina broke down in tears. So did many others who presented their art that night. A woman named Eutiquia Herrera, who sold coco helado immigrated to the U.S. from a poor, small village in Mexico. Juana Tapia, who learned to make her mother’s perfect mole sauce because she missed her so much, but could not return to Mexico – the mole was her only connection to home. Carmela, who made her art to smell like the flowers she misses in Mexico, and that she grows in the Mott Haven community garden.

David Keef, a war veteran and program director of the Frontline Arts group, used papermaking as a way to deal with his traumas – he taught the method to the women of Mott Haven, hoping to make a connection to the community and learn more about people different from him.

“As a veteran myself, I feel somewhat responsible and I feel guilt for the systemic racism, the nationalism and colonialism that America perpetrates,” Keef said into the crowded dining room. “I feel deeply betrayed by my country. A country that strips people of innocence and culture, a country that dehumanizes an entire population”

The betrayal Keef feels, one he tied to mass incarceration, increased deportations, and the criminalization of the poor – an average Mott Haven resident might have an experience with any, or all three, scenarios – Mott Haven has one of the highest incarceration rates in the city, nearly double the average for the Bronx.

For Keef, working with communities like Mott Haven was a way to teach his form of storytelling, one through art, to other people who would benefit from telling their stories. Mott Haven, which was recently almost renamed the Piano District in an effort to gentrify the area, is suffering from rising rents and increased costs at local retailers, a way to share personal experiences in a community setting was a needed catharsis.

Each woman could not separate the importance of their home, their community in Mott Haven, from the feelings of safety and happiness felt in their lives. All feared what gentrification and over policing could do to a community connected by street vendors.

“Who’s going to know us? Who’s going to see us? Who will we talk to?” Carolina Saavedra asked, while clutching the art that featured vignettes of her life.

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