Judge Us for Who We Are, Not What We Are

As promised, this will be the first of several stories written for my class' ENL Magazine that I spoke about earlier.  It was written by a long time student of mine and it speaks to the feelings of a young girl who has experienced both the good and the bad about coming here.  Take a look...

The United States is a country that offers many opportunities and is a much safer place than El Salvador, but the separation of races to me is ruining the beauty of this country. I am a high school student and it is sad to see how other young people my age see me so differently than they see each other. In the five years that I have lived in this country, I have learned to speak English, to integrate myself in the culture and the way of life here, and yet I have not made one American friend.

None of this has been easy. It took a lot of hard work to learn the language, to be able to communicate, and yet I feel so rejected. I feel so isolated from my American peers, and even some teachers, too. Sometimes I feel that I’m not treated with respect and kindness by them, and they never even try to speak to me. Now I'm not saying that this is everyone, it’s not. There are many very nice and kind people here, too, but the ones who treat me differently because I'm from another country, because I speak another language, or that I have a different skin color, makes me angry. These things don’t make me less than them. Being Hispanic doesn’t mean that I am not intelligent, or that I can’t do what anyone else can do.

This separating ideology that some people have prevents them from seeing that really we are all the same. If they just take notice, they will realize that there is no difference between an American and a Hispanic. We are all human beings! I don’t understand this separation. If we are equal, why are we treated badly because of our differences?

I understand that in my country there are bad people and that many of them come to this country and do bad things. They embarrass me and fill me with indignation and sadness to see that they are like that, but just because they are like that doesn’t mean I should be judged differently or badly. We shouldn’t have to pay the price for their bad behavior. Get to know me before treating me badly. There are as many young Hispanics like me who just want to study, be honest, not do bad things and not take people’s jobs away. I think that God rewards people who struggle so hard to achieve.

For every person who reads this, I invite you to give yourself an opportunity to get to know me, to get to know some of us. We’re not all bad. Know us and judge us according to what you observe in us, not simply because we are Hispanic. We’re not all gang members or murderers. You should thank God that you are blessed. You do not have the need to immigrate to another country for your safety, for food, or to just save your lives. Imagine if you had to move to another country for these reasons, and people there treat you with indifference, as we are treated here. Imagine you had to learn a whole new language in order to be able to survive in that country. Imagine what that would be like. I can tell you it would be frustrating.

Like I said, we are all human, with feelings, emotions, and each with our own problems. We are the same. So I invite you to leave that race-separating ideology, to not judge us without knowing us. Say hello. Make a friend. See that we are all good people with dreams to succeed in this jungle full of wild animals.

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

My Purpose: An Introduction to "Why We Came and How We Got Here"

From my Facebook, about two weeks ago:

Hot off the press...after weeks and weeks of writing, re-writing and editing, this labor of love is finally complete! In this, our 15th edition, my students share some pretty compelling stories of why they came here and how they got here.

Like the generations of immigrants who came before them, these youngsters made their oftentimes dangerous treks here to escape extreme poverty and a very war-like environment.

They’re all great kids and they were afraid to share their stories because, well, we all know the attitudes towards immigrants these days, and so the only way I could get them to share their stories was to promise to publish them anonymously.

I’m very proud of ‘Why We’re Here and How We Got Here: True Stories of Young Immigrants,’ and I am thinking about publishing this as a PDF. Please click ‘like’if you’d want a copy. Thanks!

In the past couple of years it's become evident to me that I have a purpose in life.  It's something that I'm not yet totally comfortable with, but I find myself being driven by it.  From my own actions and reactions to the things going on around me lately, it's become pointedly clear that the things I'm doing are as natural to me as anything else in my life, ever, and so when the recently heated debate about immigration came bubbling to an ugly surface, I decided I had to act on it.  I put myself wholeheartedly behind what I do, what I live, and what I believe, and this is my truth.

It is with that in mind that I pointed my class' annual magazine in the direction of laying stories bare.  As one who teaches some social studies in my classroom, I know that primary sources of information, sources coming from those who have had actual experiences connected to a topic, are the best kinds of sources to go by, and so what better way to convey the stories of today's immigrants than to hear from them.  

Me and my students began this undertaking about six weeks prior to publication, and I'm proud of them for sharing what they experienced.  I've learned a lot about immigration from them that I never knew before, and I think that sharing the stories beyond the area of my school district is a worthwhile endeavor.  So I begin with my own introduction to the publication, a piece that lays out the process behind it.  Read on and stay tuned for some of their stories...

Dear Readers,

Welcome to “Why We Came and How We Got Here,” the latest version of our ENL Magazine. We began publishing this annual collection in 2004 in the hope that readers might gain a new perspective on our students, an often-misunderstood group of youngsters. To this point, I believe that goal has only been partially achieved. With the political climate of the country the way it is these days, misinformation and misunderstanding about the immigrant experience has reached an all-time high, and so our purpose for this year’s edition takes on a greater significance than ever before.

A Class Project Leads to a Mission

Early in the school year, the students in my ENL class completed an autobiographical project. This wasn’t the first time I’d ever assigned such a task, but it was the first time I ever really had to sell them on something. You see, with today’s immigrants drawing such open criticism and anger, I wanted to gain a better understanding of their stories. I wanted to know the real reasons why they came here and what they went through in making their way here. Even though I’ve been working with these kids for so long, even I wasn’t aware of the real answers to these questions.

Virtually all of the students were reluctant to tell their stories, and it was a hard sell to get them to do so. I had to assure them that the things they were going to share would stay within our group. In addition to a written piece, the students were also required to make a presentation to the class, sharing not only their personal stories of why and how they came to be here, but other such things as what they’d put on their bucket lists, some of their favorite things, and even their hopes for the future. It was during these presentations that my eyes opened wider than they had in fifteen years.

For more than two weeks, each of my students came to the front of the class to share their auto-biographies, and I learned things that I may have suspected over the years, but never really heard told so openly. Laughter and tears, and plenty of anguish permeated the room with each presentation, and those watching even just one of them either commiserated with the speaker or became consumed with empathy.

Empathy. It’s a word I often use in my classroom and one that I wholeheartedly believe everyone needs a little more of. If we make an effort to empathize more, we might just gain a whole new awareness that we didn’t have before, and hopefully these new perspectives might make this world a more tolerable place.

Once our presentations had finished, we continued with the theme by tackling the NY Times bestselling book, “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario. It tells the story of a boy from Honduras who makes the harrowing and dangerous trek to the United States in search of his mother who had abandoned him when he was only five years old. Once again, memories were jarred by the many stories found in the book. 

A New Mission

When the time came to begin working on this publication, it seemed that general attitudes towards immigrants had become even worse than before. New stories and videos showing harassment towards immigrants, more specifically Hispanics, seemed to pop up every day on social media. News outlets cover raids and roundups of undocumented immigrants, families being forcibly separated, children being held in secretive, jail-like camps. The list of stories goes on and on and the more we hear, the worse the situation becomes.

In the poem, “Push and Pull,” I speak of the plight of the many generations of foreigners whose desperate situations led them to immigrate to this country. Each group of immigrants had its own reasons for coming, and most often it was to flee danger or poverty. The stories of today’s immigrant are no different, only the rules have since changed.

So I thought that perhaps we, our little group of immigrants who chose to settle here in Southold, might do our own little part in helping people gain a better understanding of who they are and why they came. Their stories are sometimes raw and always very personal, and show just how desperate these immigrants must be to undergo such a dangerous journey that they are not guaranteed to finish. I believe that the immigrant population in Southold is a microcosm of the greater immigrant population and their individual stories reflect the experiences of the whole.

Again, selling this idea was a difficult task. Some of the stories contained within are highly personal, and I am sure that still there were difficult details that were omitted because of their emotional impact. I convinced my students that this undertaking will be worth it if we get even one person to see immigration in a different light. The idea of their stories being published elicited an even greater protest than the project had, and so in the end we decided that all of the stories published would be anonymous. I encourage you to read on with an open heart and an open mind.

Thank you,

John Myers

A Different Kind of Separation

From my Twitter, on Monday, edited:

This morning, one of my students, a 14 yo boy from Guatemala, came to school to take a final examination. When I came by to check on how he was doing, he wasn’t doing very well at all. It had already been an hour or so into the test and he was only on question #8.
“Did you study?” I asked.
He looked up at me and with tears in his eyes he said no. He gathered himself and added, “My mom is getting deported,” he told me.

It seems a local immigration lawyer took all their money, $7ooo, and never filed her papers in court seeking asylum. The judge dropped the case and ordered her out of the country in 30 days. Daniel can stay because he had the luxury of being abandoned by his dad when he was a baby. He is not my only student to have suffered the same fate.

Daniel and his mom were abandoned by his father when he was a toddler and are all one another has in life. Back in Guatemala, they were poverty stricken, oftentimes eating only one meal a day, and at 13 years of age, Dan was already within the sights of the local gangs, who would not take no for an answer once
they came calling.

His mom became desperate and reached out to an uncle for help in getting money to come to the U.S. The two of them traveled for weeks, a long and treacherous journey that had them walking for up to fourteen hours a stretch and going without food or water for up to two days.

Luckily, they made it here safe. That was a little less than two years ago. In that time, Dan has learned a lot of English and does what he can to help the two of them survive, working whenever he can to bring money into the house. They are still poor, but rich in comparison to their life back in Guatemala. They're both safe, too, and they still have each other. Well, for now. So they’ve lost all the money they’ve scraped up to an unscrupulous lawyer and in less than 26 days they will be separated barring some sort of miracle.

Daniel is the sweetest of boys, always with a smile on his face and a willing hand to help others by translating, helping with homework, and even cleaning the teacher’s desk for him. Now he faces being all alone at 14, the only other person in his life being ripped from his side.

Dan’s is but one small story in a million stories. He’s lucky he’s got me...I refuse to leave him totally abandoned. Thousands of others are not so lucky. Today’s immigrants are no different than the ones who came before them, leaving their families, their friends, their homes, everything, to escape poverty and danger. Only the rules have changed. We changed them when we starting not liking the places that they came from and we all need to know that.

To be continued...