URBAN LA January 19, 2013 Meeting Highlights

A major focus of LA-URBAN is to help build social movements.  This meeting featured presentations by Alma Castrejon and Sofia Campos about the Dream Act student movement, Dream University, and Dream Summer.  Sofia shared her story as an immigrant from Lima, Peru.  She attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and became part of student groups fighting for undocumented student rights and mobilizing efforts for the California DREAM Act.  Sofia presented a history (and the strategies used) of efforts to pass the California DREAM Act and the Deferred Action Policy.  She described the “intersectional work” that led to the development of the CIRCLE project, the Dream Resource Center, the Dream Summer Program, and the publication of “Undocumented and Unafraid.”  With a recent conference that drew 47 affiliated organizations, the organizing efforts are continuing to advance a national movement for immigration reform.

Alma Castrejon presented on the development of the Dream University, a component of the effort to make higher education accessible to undocumented youth.  There are approximately 2.1 million undocumented youth in the U. S. with 30 states giving no benefits to them.  Both Sofia and Alma stressed that these combined efforts are part of using “strategic storytelling” to shift the narrative in how undocumented youth and their families are perceived and to build a type of empowerment where both the young people and the parents are coming out and helping to build mass actions.

The participants at the meeting agreed that collectively supporting efforts such as the DREAM and Immigrant Rights movements are important to the development of LA-URBAN’s identify.  Various proposals were made on how to support these initiatives.  They include:

1. Advancing the reality that this movement is today’s civil rights movement
2. Using community-based research and the idea of an engaged university to build broad support among faculty and students at our diverse campuses
3. Assigning the various published books, particularly “Undocumented and Unafraid” in our classes
4. Inviting Dreamers as part of a book tour to speak in classes
5. Publish op-ed pieces in the mass media, articles in journals, and carry out teaching and research that counters the anti-immigrant onslaught by the right
6. Link grad students and community organizations on community-based participatory research (CBRP) projects that can advance the objectives of this movement
7. Develop model sermons that preachers can deliver from the pulpit
8. Contact the national urban network to support this movement nationally
9. Be part of broad coalitions of outreach to LGBT, labor, education, and community-based organizations.

To further develop LA-URBAN in the region, it was suggested that:

1. We think of ourselves more as a network (relationship-building, sharing community-based models, supporting each other) than an organization
2. Steps be taken to develop a regional communication link, such as a web site.  Alma Castrejon will begin to look into the possibility of a web site and how it can complement the plans of URBAN nationally to develop a national site.   She will also keep up the mailing lists and send information to participants.  The next meeting will include reports on how LA-URBAN has begun to support the DREAM and immigrant rights movements, what more is needed, and further thinking about how LA-URBAN can serve as a foundation for supporting scholars and community-based organizations in the use of community-based action, pedagogy, and research.

The meeting ended with an invitation by Tessa Hicks to a two-day conference, Connect, Share, Build: Community Engagement as a Central Value for Today’s Liberal Arts Education (JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 1, 2013 at Pomona College hosted by the Draper Center for Community Partnerships), involving 40 national leaders in community engagement and an URBAN reception on the first day of the conference.

This meeting LA-URBAN was held at the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Those present are listed below. 

Garrett Broad, Evelyn Moreno, Karen Kandamby, Martha Escobar, Alfredo Huante, Alvaro Huerta, Kent Wong, Peter Dreier, Gilbert Cadena, Tessa Hicks Peterson, Suyapa Portillo, Jose Calderon, Leland Saito, Marta Lopez-Garza, Bhavna Shamasunder, Suriel Espinosa, Jesse Diaz, Sofia Campos, Alma Castrejon