Stand With Immigrants – Speak Up

Photo: Amy Toensing

We asked a friend with the Workers' Center of Central New York to share a sense of what their members are experiencing right now and to talk about one of their projects for economic and worker justice. ¡PA´LANTE! (Onward) is a new booklet, available from SCW, with early excerpts from this project to share the stories of 49 brave Latinos who have dared to tell the world their truth.

Dear friend:

Let me tell you about the leader of our organization in Lewis County who hit a deer as she was driving one evening. Must have been a bad crash since she had to walk to a nearby home to request aid. Instead, the police and ICE were called on her. We have not seen her since.

In the following days, her husband, throughout the course of trying to find and assist her, heard repeatedly from ICE agents he would not be arrested. (He had applied for asylum in 2018 and his wife had a deportation order inactive since 2022.) About ten days after her detention, ICE detained him at home, first thing in the morning. Then the officers convinced him that the whole family would be better off, legally, if the agents could pick up the couple’s two daughters, in school at the time, one of them a U.S. citizen. The father went to the elementary school with the agents and the girls were also taken.

Yes, a virulent old-fashioned mass deportation is in the works, but up to the very last days of the previous presidential administration, our far-traveling narrators, most of them undocumented, kept gathering to discuss how the written word could redeem them from the lies, the prejudice, and the dangers of our time. The most pressing question of their latest congress was: out of the very various forty-five chapters, which span the breath of life, should we prioritize the editing and publishing of those narratives which most urgently address the violence looming over their families and communities?

“Let’s put the combative stories first,” one storyteller said. “I spoke about being locked up hoping that, eventually, nobody would have to go through what I went through. We need the community’s support, for people to come to our defense right now.” Another one said: “Frankly, it doesn’t matter who is in power. I was taken away from my children and my husband during the Obama administration. They only let me out with an ankle bracelet. The democrats almost destroyed my family.” A third chimed in: “We should title our book Migrant Apocalypse: Is This the End?” We all laughed. They voted to prioritize the stories that denounced.

All in all, we expect our communally-owned-and-directed book of non-fiction to run anywhere between a third and a half larger than War and Peace. The storytelling and recording part of our labor, which we began in July 2022, is finished. What lays ahead is to edit and translate collaboratively our mountain of tales: these encompass myriad genres and styles, not to mention more than a dozen full biographies, whole books in their own right. (People told whichever story they wanted in both the length and the style of their choice.) Aside from the only demographic requirement that the group defined since early 2023—that the storyteller be a Latino immigrant, or their descendant—I do not select whom we include, nor do I choose which part of which story will appear in our book. Insane to say it, but we base our aesthetic in total inclusion and anarchy.

Contrary to the designs of our main project, this ONWARD! series can only be a selection. Here our response to political violence, the somewhat random assortment of stories ready to be shown, and the desire to showcase the astonishing variety of our collaborations work it out.

DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF POETRY AND LOVE,

-Victor María Chamán
Workers' Center of Central New York

PS: There are organizations like the Workers' Center across the country that need support to protect immigrants in our communities.

Check out Immigration Justice Products