Category: News

JHISN Newsletter 06/26/2021

Posted on June 26, 2021 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

With you, we welcome the arrival of summer and its promise of warmth, and green shade, and shared gatherings that one year ago seemed dreadfully out of reach. Food will be at the center of so many of our renewed gatherings this summer, and this week’s newsletter takes a deeper look at the intersection of food politics and immigrant justice. From farmworkers to restaurant workers to street vendors, immigrant labor is a huge force in the harvesting and production of our food. We look at one essential sector of that labor: the tens of thousands of food delivery workers in New York City.

Delivering Justice: Immigrant Workers Fight Back

The bitter truth is that many food delivery workers can work 12 hours a day in the cold or rain for multiple food service apps and still not make enough to feed their own families.   —Los Deliveristas Unidos

Restaurant delivery workers helped keep New York alive during the worst days of the pandemic. They are celebrated as “heroes,” and as “essential.” Yet every time we accept a food delivery at our front door, we are interacting with one of the most exploited workforces in the city–almost all immigrants, and almost all people of color. 

For years, delivery workers have fought for justice against their employers and a callous city government, determined to improve unacceptable pay and working conditions. Now these skirmishes are turning into an outright battle, as delivery workers gain allies and move to a new level of unity and organization.

Restaurant delivery in the U.S. is a massive industry, worth tens of billions of dollars. And New York City is its epicenter. Just a few years ago, food delivery in New York was arranged mainly by individual restaurants, usually paying undocumented immigrants “under the table.” In parts of the city, this notoriously harsh model continues. Many delivery people work up to 16 hours a day, for a few dollars an hour with no overtime.

However, the advent of delivery apps like UberEats, Seamless/Grubhub, and DoorDash, has rapidly transformed the industry. The app services hire people as “independent contractors”; workers must now supply social security numbers, and are usually given basic English language tests. 

When Covid-19 closed down much of the city, unemployment and demand for food delivery both skyrocketed–and so did “gig” delivery work. Before the pandemic, New York had an estimated 50,000 app delivery workers. In just one year, ending in March, UberEats alone added 36,000 more “couriers” locally. Other app companies had similar exponential growth.

 The app services have upended the old business model in many ways. What hasn’t changed is the relentless oppression experienced by delivery workers, mainly immigrants from Latin America and Asia. App workers are poorly paid, with no benefits. They work long hours in bad weather. They buy their own e-bikes, which cost upwards of $2,000, and also pay for batteries, parking, and supplies. Their jobs are dangerous–not just because of traffic, but because delivery people are often assaulted and robbed. There’s a long history of tips and wages being stolen by restaurants and app companies. Delivery workers are subjected to racist disrespect: denied use of bathrooms (which especially impacts women workers), harassed by police, forced to use “poor doors,” insulted on the street. Referring to restaurants that won’t allow the use of their bathrooms, delivery worker Williams Sian comments, “We’re what’s driving their income right now, but…they treat us like insects.”

New York has seen a series of struggles by delivery workers and their allies to combat such abuses in recent years. When Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD started ticketing e-bike riders and confiscating thousands of bikes in 2017-18, grassroots groups like Make the Road and the Chinese Mutual Association helped pressure them to back off. Widespread public outrage about credit card tips being ripped off by restaurants and app services forced some of the big companies to improve their policies. (Grubhub, Seamless, UberEats, Postmates, Caviar, and DoorDash now promise that 100% of customer tips will go to the workers.)

When the pandemic hit, and thousands of laid-off restaurant workers started streaming into app delivery work, the Workers Justice Project, which was already meeting with delivery workers, decided to organize Los Deliveristas Unidos (LDU)–United Delivery Workers. Worker leaders soon emerged to run the LDU collective. Many of the founding members are indigenous Guatemalans or Mexicans. Their demands are simple:

  1. The right to use restaurant bathrooms
  2. A living wage and hazard pay
  3. Protections from e-bike robberies, wage theft, and health and safety hazards
  4. A place to eat, rest, and escape bad weather
  5. The right to organize

Last fall, deliveristas held a series of rallies and gained wide press coverage of their problems. In October, some 800 delivery workers demonstrated in lower Manhattan. In April, thousands of delivery e-bikes snarled traffic in a protest near City Hall, demanding justice from the mayor. On June 8, deliveristas rallied in support of a series of six reform bills introduced in the City Council by LDU allies. SEIU Local 32BJ, one of the largest unions in the city, has been actively supporting LDU, as has outgoing Comptroller Scott Stringer. The deliveristas movement, it appears, is emerging rapidly as a powerful force for immigrant worker justice in New York.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

  • Tip well, and in cash, unless you’re sure that the full credit card tip will get to the delivery person. 
  • Donate to the Workers Justice Project/Los Deliveristas Unidos
  • Support the legislative package introduced in New York City Council to secure delivery worker protections and economic justice. 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 06/12/2021

Posted on June 12, 2021 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

On Tuesday, June 22, a very small percentage of registered NYC voters will head to the polls for the Democratic Party primaries which, in a city like ours, basically decide the outcome of next November’s municipal elections. We encourage all of you who will vote to take immigrant justice issues with you to the voting booth (or absentee ballot!). The pandemic brought many of us into new intimacy with our streets, our small businesses, our neighbors, our park, our local issues, and our differences in class, race, citizenship status, vulnerability to disease, and access to care. We hope that intimacy carries over into a sustained commitment to participate in local forms of self-government and community-based power. 

Several immigrant justice groups that JHISN deeply respects are focused on the upcoming primaries. Make the Road New York has co-authored a report, Dignity, Community, & Power, laying out an election-year vision for immigrant communities’ collective dreams and demands; their candidate endorsements can be found here. Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) has offered specific endorsements of City Council candidates who support participatory working-class, immigrant-centered politics for economic, gender, and racial justice. Adhikaar and members of the NYC Care Campaign hosted a Candidate Forum for the District 26 City Council race. And to see what NYC mayoral candidates are saying about immigration politics–and why they need to say more, in a city of over 3 million immigrants–check out this recent article. 

In the meantime, we offer you an update on what’s up with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) several years after the cry, ‘Abolish ICE!’, was raised by tens of thousands here in New York, and beyond.  

ABOLISHED ICE? Not yet …

Street Arrest – Story 1738
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
March 17, 2021

“ICE agents arrested LN on the street near his home in Jackson Heights around 10am as he was walking with his laundry to his local laundry mat. ICE agents left LN’s laundry bag on the street as they drove away with him.”  —  ICEwatch raids map / Immigrant Defense Project

As ‘Story 1738’ makes poignantly clear, ICE is still on the streets of Jackson Heights conducting arrests that disappear immigrants from our neighborhood as they go about their daily life. ICEwatch’s invaluable map of verified ICE raids, launched in July 2018, also shows that ICE arrests in Queens County appear to be dropping off since the latest peak—right before the November 2020 election. Six months into a new federal administration, what is ICE actually doing? How are people continuing to resist ICE’s key role in the criminalization of migration, and the harassment and terrorizing of immigrant communities in the US?

At first glance, some of the numbers seem promising: ICE arrests are reportedly plunging nationwide. “Interior arrests” by ICE (arrests not conducted at the border) are down to about 2500 per month, compared to an average of 6000 arrests in the last months of the Trump regime, and a grotesque 10,000 per month before the pandemic. In April, ICE deported 2962 immigrants, the lowest monthly number on record. 

In addition, Biden has ordered a full review of ICE priorities (not yet released). New interim rules prohibit ICE agents from arresting anyone who is not a national security threat, an aggravated felon, or a recent border crosser, without written authorization from senior ICE supervisors. And the new director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has finally placed significant limits on ICE’s ability to arrest immigrants at or near courthouses–something immigration activists have fought for for years. 

But beneath the numbers and temporary rule changes is a more disturbing reality. As ICE pulls back on ‘interior arrests,’ Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) under the Biden administration continues to expel migrants at the southern border in huge numbers, including those legally seeking asylum or refuge. Using an obscure CDC public health regulation called Title 42, activated in March 2020 by the Trump regime, over 750,000 migrants have been ‘returned’ to Mexico as public health threats, without any recourse to legal proceedings. Approximately 350,000 of those expulsions have occurred since Biden took office, including at least 50,000 families who have been turned back. Challenged by the ACLU as unlawful and opposed even by public health scientists, Title 42 remains in place with the new administration, keeping ICE deportation numbers low while in fact choking off migration across the border.

Even more tellingly, Biden’s proposed $7.9 billion budget for ICE in 2022 echoes the Trump regime’s funding levels, with about 50% dedicated to detention and deportation of immigrants, also in line with fiscal 2021 priorities. 

Several state-level legislative initiatives aim to press further than a new administration that claims to support immigrants and reign in ICE, but carries on policy and funding decisions of the malevolent anti-immigrant Trump era. Legislation has been passed or introduced in California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington, and Virginia, restricting government collaboration with, and funding for, ICE’s detention infrastructure. In New Jersey, where most immigrant detainees from New York are incarcerated, political pressure grows to end detention programs in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson county jails. On June 8, fourteen protesters outside Bergen county jail were arrested while blocking an ICE van believed to be transporting immigrants to the airport for deportation.  

In New York, the recently introduced Dignity Not Detention Act calls on the state government and local communities to get out of the business of immigrant detention by ending ICE contracts and refusing to enter into new or expanded contracts. The bill would halt the jailing of New York immigrants who face deportation, allowing them to remain united with families and communities where they can more effectively fight deportation through legal avenues. 

A statement of support for the NY Dignity Not Detention Act was signed by over 75 activist organizations including local immigrant-led groups like Centro Corona, DRUM, The Street Vendors Project, NICE, and Emerald Isle Immigration Center. Tania Mattos, a local immigrant justice activist and co-founder of Queens Neighborhoods United, says: “We look forward to making New York the next state in the union that … fight[s] to end our costly, inhumane, and unaccountable detention system.” 

WHAT CAN WE DO?

  • Get your activist group to sign on as an organization supporting the New York Dignity Not Detention Act. 
  • Support the campaign to #FreeThemAll with Detention Watch Network’s toolkit.
  • Vote for local candidates who fight for justice for immigrants. Check out DRUM Beats (a new sibling organization of DRUM) endorsements for City Council races. Find Make the Road’s candidate endorsements here.
  • Use ICEWatch to report or keep track of ICE raids.

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 05/29/2021

Posted on May 29, 2021 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends

For lots of us, this is a time for optimism, as Covid-19 slowly loosens its grip on our lives and our nightmares. But for too many of us, the nightmare continues–this is a time for worrying, for mourning, for reckoning. The coronavirus still surges in South Asia, Latin America and so many other places where immigrants have loved ones. Here in New York, vaccination rates are starting to taper off, and the familiar wound of inequality continues to characterize “the recovery.” In this week’s newsletter, we consider some of the factors that have held back vaccine use in our community, and efforts by activists to overcome those obstacles. We also spotlight a moving public art tribute to essential immigrant workers who were lost to the pandemic. For the communities they helped save, fully honoring their humanity is a test of our own.

  1. In Memoriam to Essential Workers
  2. Vaccine Access @ Jackson Heights 

1. Memorial Art in Covid Times

“We have to remember exactly who has been affected. We have to remember the communities who have lost people needlessly …. Those losses have to be mourned, they have to be acknowledged, and they have to be honored.”  —Mourners Walk video (P. Mendoza, 2020)

The violinist, in a black mask, plays at the intersection of 35th Avenue and 95th Street. White roses are laid on the steps of Elmhurst Hospital. In October 2020, artists, activists, and community members gather after dark in Jackson Heights to mark the beloved dead, and call attention to the unfathomable loss and unacknowledged grief borne by communities like ours ravaged by COVID-19.

Six months later in the windows of an empty storefront in Manhattan’s SoHo, a memorial exhibition appears honoring seven undocumented immigrants who have died during the pandemic. Each beloved loss is marked with a huge poster of their image, and a QR code linked to an oral history of their life. The street installation is designed by artist-activist Paola Mendoza, who also co-organized the Jackson Heights ‘Mourners Walk’ last October. She names the public art memorial Immigrants Are Essential:

“The word ‘essential’ has become an identity during this crisis, of the people and places that keep our society moving even when everything else is on pause, of those that are too often in the background but without whom we would fall apart … This is exactly who immigrants have always been and will continue to be in the United States: essential. May their stories inspire and ignite change…” –Paolo Mendoza (April 2021)

To date, over 9,800 people in Queens have died of COVID, disproportionately working-class, of color, and undocumented. The intimate stories featured in Mendoza’s public art exhibition narrate just seven out of tens of thousands of undocumented lives ended by a virus that fatally tracks unequal structures of vulnerability and social suffering. 

On Memorial Day weekend, a nationalist holiday dedicated to remembering US military lives lost, how to also honor the undocumented dead? How to continue the collective task of memorializing our community’s incalculable loss from this pandemic?   

2. Pop-up sites and worker protections vital to getting people vaccinated

While COVID-19 vaccinations lag across the country and around the world, several efforts have been launched to get shots into the arms of Jackson Heights and neighboring communities.

“We’re in a pretty good news period around the effectiveness of pop-ups, and going where people are to make this more convenient,” S. Mitra Kalita said on a recent episode of WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” speaking about the mobile vaccination sites showing up in New York’s working class communities.

Kalita founded Epicenter NYC, a news site that aims to highlight pandemic-related developments in Central Queens, often focusing on issues that immigrant communities face here. In addition to delivering news, Epicenter NYC offers help booking vaccine appointments. The website has important resources for both people looking to get vaccinated and those who want to help others in their community do so.

Neighborhoods with high populations of Latinx residents continue to face high barriers to vaccination, often due to the inability of employees to miss work so they can get the shot and recover. Restaurant workers, in particular, have had difficulties getting time off for a vaccination, Kalita said.

She recently demanded that the city transform its signage at pop-up sites to make it immediately clear, in multiple languages, that the vaccines are free and, especially, that immigration status will not be questioned. According to New York protocols, any ID will be accepted to confirm an appointment–even an old phone bill. But this fact is not widely known in some communities.

Several organizations are working in our neighborhood to help people get vaccinated easily. They show up on street corners, under tents, and in front of stores. It’s quite possible you’ve seen them around.

If you or anyone you know has questions about how, when, or where to get vaccinated—and if you’re wondering whether it’s a good idea (many people are understandably concerned)—these organizations will likely be able to provide helpful information. Whether it’s online or on Roosevelt Avenue, there are many places to go to learn more. Here are just a few:

  • NYC Health + Hospitals provides vaccines at its sites and sponsors many of the local mobile vaccination clinics.
  • The city of New York has information on its website about where vaccinations are available.
  • Epicenter NYC has updates and vaccination appointment help.
  • City Council Member Francisco Moya has hosted virtual vaccine town halls in English and Spanish to help increase confidence in the vaccine.
  • Voces Latinas frequently hosts pop-up vaccine sites in partnership with other organizations near 83rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

Vaccination is critical to protect health and lives, for people to be able to gather with communities and family, for businesses to reopen safely, and to prevent the spread of new coronavirus variants. If more people in the United States and around the world can get vaccinated, we may be able to truly begin the long road to recovery from COVID-19.

In memoriam and in hope,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 05/15/2021

Posted on May 15, 2021 by - Jackson Heights, News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

Greetings to each and all of you, our readers, as we continue to find our way in an unfolding pandemic. For some of us, this is a season of vaccines and anticipated freedoms. And for some of us, especially South Asian immigrant families in Jackson Heights, it is a time of brutal sorrow. The ravages of Covid-19 burn across India, Nepal, and beyond, as global inequalities in wealth and the reality of vaccine apartheid lead to obscene differences in vulnerability and death. Thank you for continuing, with us, to learn and invent what solidarity looks like in this truly global pandemic. 

We turn this week to examine how one predominantly immigrant workforce—taxi cab drivers in NYC, many from South Asia, and many residents and neighbors here in Queens—is fighting for their survival.          

New York’s Immigrant Cab Drivers Seek Justice and Debt Relief  

If you are the owner-driver, you are handcuffed to that wheel and without a real solution you are literally facing a life sentence to debtors’ prison.   —Bhairavi Desai, New York Taxi Workers Alliance

Drowning in debt and devastated by Covid, New York’s yellow cab drivers—almost all immigrants—are carrying out a long-term, militant campaign for relief and accountability from a city that so far has systematically betrayed their interests. United under the banner of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), they are demanding justice and resisting a cynical maneuver by Mayor de Blasio aimed at undermining their struggle.

From 2002-2014, the City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission—packed with Guiliani and Bloomberg cronies—oversaw a massive, artificially-created bubble in the price of taxi medallions (the permits required to operate yellow cabs). Bankers and brokers connected to city officials grew rich bidding up medallion prices—in some cases pushing their price from around $200,000 to over a million dollars. Drivers were “knowingly misled” by the City; encouraged to take out predatory loans as a supposedly unbeatable investment in their future. The Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations took advantage of the bubble to harvest hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of taxi medallions and by collecting taxes on private sales. They used this money to balance their budgets and fund favored projects.

But when the bubble burst, drivers were left with impossible levels of debt. At one point, medallion prices dropped to less than $150,000. Today a medallion once again sells for about $200,000; meanwhile, the average driver owes banks and finance companies more than $500,000. Almost a thousand drivers have gone bankrupt; several have died by suicide.

Even as yellow cab drivers reeled from this personal and financial disaster, the City allowed Uber and Lyft to flood the city with tens of thousands of “ride-hailing” cars—yellow cab competitors, who weren’t even required to buy a medallion. This was a body blow to the yellow cab business, which continues to be tightly regulated. In 2018, the City government finally put some caps on the number of so-called “app” cars. But tremendous damage had already been done, once again, to the livelihood of yellow cab drivers.  

As if this wasn’t enough misery, the pandemic caused taxi usage to plummet. And like other essential immigrant workers, many taxi drivers and their families became sick or suffered fatalities.

But the NYTWA has refused to buckle under. Showing resilience and determination, they are using every available tactic to seek justice. They have demonstrated and lobbied and motorcaded to D.C. They shut down the Brooklyn Bridge twice, blocking it with parked cabs. They took over Times Square. They demanded and won the right to be vaccinated as essential workers. As the central focus of their struggle, the NYTWA formulated and is now promoting a comprehensive plan for taxi driver relief, which has been introduced in the New York legislature and taken up by progressives across the state and nationally. It calls for the City to guarantee and help restructure unsustainable loans. It also puts a limit on monthly mortgage payments and gives drivers in foreclosure a chance to regain their medallions. In the meantime, the NYTWA also reached out and united with the “app drivers,” who have their own problems with predatory corporations. In fact, it was an NYTWA lawsuit that won full employee unemployment pay for Uber and Lyft drivers.

Finding himself under sustained political and legal pressure, in early March 2021, Mayor de Blasio suddenly unveiled his own so-called “relief” plan. Denounced as pathetically inadequate by the NYTWA, it proposes using some of the City’s expected federal coronavirus stimulus money to float $20,000 loans for some individual drivers, and $9,000 to help restructure medallion loans. As taxi workers point out, most of this money would go straight into the hands of lenders and debt collection agencies, without making a meaningful dent in drivers’ heavy financial burdens. “The mayor’s plan is a disgraceful betrayal from a city that already has blood on its hands,” said Bhairavi Desai, Director of NYTWA. Desai commented further this week to JHISN: “We remain vigilant about finding a solution that is comprehensive, ever-lasting and, fundamentally, one that is communal. We refuse to be divided and take an individual approach as the city has done. None of us survive if any of us fail.” For his part, De Blasio has so far flatly refused to consider NYTWA’s proposal, even though it would cost less than his plan.

Cab drivers show no signs of being diverted from their goals by the mayor’s maneuver. Dozens of demonstrations have been organized in front of City Hall, at Gracie Mansion and in Albany, since de Blasio’s flawed plan was announced. Politicians, including Jessica Ramos, Chuck Schumer, Scott Stringer, and Letitia James, have come out strongly in favor of the NYTWA relief plan. A class-action suit by drivers, demanding restitution of $2.5 billion, may add to the pressure for a fair settlement by the City. Taxi drivers’ long struggle for justice seems to be catching its second wind.

I really don’t believe this is America. Because I know this country. The justice will be delayed; but I’m confident it won’t be denied. One day. One day the truth will come out, and all these things they did wrong to us because we are immigrants, they will pay for it.  —Mouhamadou Aliyu, Taxi Driver

WHAT CAN WE DO?

  • Join NYTWA’s protests. The schedule is on their Twitter page: @NYTWA
  • Call 311 and tell Mayor de Blasio that you support the drivers’ plan
  • Make a donation to the NYTWA Community Kitchen Fund to help out with food and protest supplies

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 05/01/2021

Posted on May 1, 2021 by - Activism, Immigration, News, Newsletter

Dear friends, 

We are delighted to devote this week’s newsletter to the story of Famoro Dioubate—musician, migrant, teacher, griot. In October 2019, Famoro’s live performance was the opening and closing act for JHISN’s third annual Community Gathering, ‘We All Belong Here: Jackson Heights Fighting for Migrant Rights.’ In April 2021, Famoro is working to obtain US citizenship and stay in his adopted homeplace, Harlem. JHISN invites you to listen below to his story, and his music. Please check out the GoFundMe page and help support Famoro’s path to citizenship. 

The living history book of Famoro Dioubate

Famoro Dioubate had just sent his band home and was setting down roots in Sydney, Australia, when he got a call from a friend.

The United States was in need of good balafon players, his friend said. Dioubate was famous in his native Guinea and was known internationally for his skill on the balafon—known as a xylophone in the States. And so, his friend asked, would he come here and help make an album?

More than 20 years later, he’s still here. And after preparing more than once to up and go, Dioubate now has family, friends and a career in the United States, with students and the prospect of live performances once again on the horizon. He also has a mother in Guinea he hasn’t seen since he left. To assure his future here, and to make it possible to see his mother, he’s officially begun the long and expensive road to citizenship.

Dioubate is a djeli, also called a griot, part of a storytelling tradition in West Africa. (“Djeli” is pronounced with a j sound at the beginning.) The djeli tradition is a history passed within families from generation to generation through things like stories, music and poetry.

“It’s called a living history book,” Dioubate said in an interview with the Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network. “That’s what we are.”

Djeli history is passed down orally. Nothing is written down. It was within this tradition that Dioubate learned to play the balafon, which he started at the age of six.

He carried the tradition with him after he left Guinea, playing his music in places from Paris to Bangkok to Sydney, ultimately landing in New York. Dioubate performs ceremonies here as a djeli with his balafon, and in pre-pandemic times, he played many live concerts as a professional musician. Whether it’s a baby shower or a show onstage, “anything is like a concert for me,” he said.

Dioubate didn’t plan to stay in New York long when he arrived in 2000. But soon after he came, he found out that he was going to have a newborn daughter here. His original plan was to help her mother through the pregnancy and then leave, but instead he got sick. So he stayed to get surgery, planning once again to leave after that. But now broke and with no work or money to return home, he had to stay.

Eventually, as he prepared to leave once again, a friend of his, a cellist, stopped him. “Famoro,” he said, “stay here. You are a good musician. We don’t want you to leave.” He invited Dioubate to stay in his living room while he figured out his next steps.

“So I stayed,” Dioubate said.

Dioubate’s daughter is 21 years old now, which means she can sponsor him as he seeks citizenship. It’s important for him to attain citizenship status, not just so he can live and work in the United States, but also so he can travel to Africa to visit his mother.

Death has thinned his family back home, and he and his mother want to be reunited after 22 years apart. But “if I go, I could not come back,” he said. So he tells her, “When I get my citizenship, I’m going to come see you.”

Dioubate has become well-known throughout the United States. He has a band here, called Kakande, which usually tours around the country. He offers classes to students, who learn in his living room in Harlem. He makes his own balafons, using wood sent from Guinea by relatives.

“Balafon is not only music,” he said. “It’s like school.” He passes stories on to his students, helping the djeli tradition expand here. His daughter, too, is part of the tradition. “It’s happiness for me,” he said. “I’m happy to have a baby in the United States, and to have a djeli girl from America. We are like that. The living history book, the djeli, we are everywhere in the world.”

***

Famoro Dioubate has begun the process of seeking citizenship, retaining the services of a New York-based lawyer. This process, which typically takes years, is also very expensive. To lessen the burden, Dioubate is hoping to receive donations of any amount to a GoFundMe page.

With collective care, 

and respect for our living histories,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 04/17/2021

Posted on April 17, 2021 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

As spring starts to bloom around us, we offer a newsletter with a hopeful eye on the future, and a giant hurrah for immigrant workers’ victorious struggle to secure pandemic relief. ‘Casa de Futuros’ (‘A House of Futures’) is how Centro Corona describes their collective space and cultural center, built in the heart of Corona. We share a history of Centro Corona’s vibrant immigrant-led space and invite your support of their fundraising campaign to cover rent for 2021. And for a third newsletter in a row, we report on the historic—and ultimately successful!—fight to include billions of dollars in the New York state budget for undocumented workers, including tens of thousands of Queens residents.

Newsletter highlights:

  1. Help keep Centro Corona thriving!
  2. Victory for the Fund Excluded Workers coalition

1. Centro Corona — a house of futures

Long before COVID-19 descended on us and ‘mutual aid’ suddenly became a common phrase, Centro Corona already seemed to echo the Mutualistas tradition from another time and culture (Texas and Mexico of the 1800’s). Like those Mutualistas, which provided for working class families, this Central Queens community house places cooperation, and community protection and support as guiding principles of action. Their action recently has been running a fundraising campaign to ensure that Centro Corona can continue operating within and for the community for the rest of the year.

Born of the creative arts, Centro Corona has emerged from multiple pasts. In 2006, Tania Bruguera conceived of the Immigrant Movement International (IMI); an artist’s examination of the political representation and conditions facing immigrants in various cities in the world. With funding from the Queens Museum in 2011 her “arte útil” concept was finally implemented as a storefront called IMI-Corona on Roosevelt Avenue. The local community was invited to use the space, with the intent that the cultural arts site would become a civic agent as a host of workshops. 

Local artists and culture bearers with longstanding ties to the largely immigrant community In Corona began making their own work within the space. By 2013, they pushed to create a community council aiming to develop independence from the IMI. Their reimagining process was interrupted when the landlord displaced them in 2018. For a non-capitalist community space to be ousted by a landlord seeking financial benefit was contemptuous, but the volunteer members came together and rebuilt Centro Corona at 47th ave at 104th Street. They continued using the experience, leadership, and knowledge of people from the working-class, migrant, youth, women, gender non-conforming, trans and queer communities to generate a self-determined and collectively-imagined future.

Some of Centro Corona’s coordinators and volunteers note that when people meet and gather, there is a lot of celebration as well as social justice education. Half of the equation of their success is when someone shows up with certain skills and interests to share. The other half is when those same people come back to support the homework help, or sex education, or community safety training programs. People come back to continue being together.

“During the year, the space is full of political organizing meetings & cultural events, film screenings, poetry readings, celebrations, and discussion groups. Many campaigns have been born there, many more will be born. This space constantly generates new ideas and connections.” Jenny Akchin @jennyaction

COVID forced doors to close in March 2020. Joining with Queens Neighborhoods United and Project Hajra, Centro Corona developed a Mutual Aid network which, in just 13 weeks, assisted over 80 families. Providing food deliveries, supporting health needs, and giving cash assistance, volunteers also conduct well-being check-ins, offer death and grief support, as well as joining virtual hangouts for conversations as a break from daily problems. They supported hundreds of families in the community during a time when federal and state government programs refused. 

The winter brought concerns of a second wave of COVID, financial stressors from more lost work, and worries about their kids’ emotional and mental health. But recently the conversations seem to have changed as people are starting to think of new futures. Families in the Mutual Aid program have shifted from talking about uncertainty about COVID vaccination news to discussions about people getting vaccinated. And Centro Corona is looking at what its future holds. How will they use their garage/garden space for community gatherings? Will they be able to re-open as they hope in the summer? What will it mean to reopen while COVID is still with us? They know it will not look exactly the same as before … with direction from the community they are determining the best ways to use the space. 

Unlike the Mutualistas that were almost entirely shuttered by the Great Depression, we have an opportunity to ensure Centro Corona continues to be a house of futures for our community. Their primary expense is not the programs they run, but the monthly $3,800 they pay in rent for their space. Last week, as part of a fundraising campaign to raise $50,000 to keep their space for the rest of the year, Centro Corona entertained their community on facebook live events. We encourage our readers to donate what you can to support Centro Corona as a shared community space of collective reflection, encouragement, mutual aid, artistic expression, political action, popular education, cultural thriving and survival—a place of nourishment for the body, mind, and spirit. 

WHAT CAN WE DO?

2. $2.1 Billion towards Budget Justice for Excluded Workers

“Today, our work has been recognized. Our dignity has been recognized, and our dignity has been lifted by passing this fund …. It is more than $2.1 billion dollars. It is actually a recognition of undocumented workers. This is the future. This is the future that we’re leaving behind for our kids, and a reminder for those who doubted us. This is proof that we did it.” –Ana Ramirez, original hunger striker (QNS.com, 4/8/21)

 In what is being hailed as an historic victory, New York State passed a budget on April 6 that includes a $2.1 billion fund to support workers—mostly immigrant and undocumented—who have not yet received one dollar in federal or state support since the start of the pandemic. Over 192,000 undocumented New Yorkers, who pay an estimated $1.4 billion in annual taxes, lost their jobs during the crisis and will now be eligible for a one-time payment of up to $15,600 in retroactive unemployment and stimulus benefits. For undocumented workers in Jackson Heights and beyond, the fund is a lifeline to help cover missed rent payments and accumulated debt as workers struggle to avoid economic devastation. The Fiscal Policy Institute estimates that 290,000 workers statewide will benefit from the Excluded Workers Fund, including up to 58,000 Queens residents.

 The first-in-the-nation fund for excluded immigrant workers is the result of months of mobilization and strategizing by immigrant justice groups and their allies, including Make the Road NY, New York Immigration Coalition, and New York Communities for Change. In mid-March, the Fund Excluded Workers coalition launched a 23-day hunger strike by undocumented immigrants, which ended only after successful passage of the workers fund.

 The hunger strike did not secure the full $3.5 billion fund that would have provided equity with what other workers have received in benefits and stimulus checks over the past year. Recently incarcerated people were excluded from accessing the fund. And last-minute restrictions introduced by Governor Cuomo’s team threaten to exclude many undocumented workers from the highest tier of benefits. Activists were careful to affirm the huge victory for immigrant workers, while condemning the inequities that continue to plague working class communities of color that have been most ravaged by the pandemic. 

 “[W]hile we celebrate today’s news, the fact that workers even needed to fight for this funding is a travesty. The pandemic has made clear that the well-being of our communities is interconnected and the exclusion of some people hurts us all. It has also laid bare racist exclusions in our social safety net that keep some workers from basic support that’s essential to survival. We hope that people across the country will be inspired by the bravery of workers in New York to end this unjust system once and for all.” – Bianca Guerrero, coordinator, Fund Excluded Workers coalition

 And, indeed, inspired by New York, over 30 undocumented workers in New Jersey are now on a hunger strike demanding that the state provide unemployment and stimulus benefits for essential, but excluded, immigrant workers. 

 WHAT CAN WE DO?

  • Celebrate. Worker and immigrant struggles can and do win! Support the hunger strikers in NJ, and follow Make the Road New Jersey here. Si se puede!
  • Share this guide re: accessing the fund with neighbors, activists, and community members.

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.