Tag: immigration
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José Orduña: Writing and Justice
I met José Orduña at the Associated Writing Program conference in Tampa, Florida this past spring. He had arrived at the conference about 48 hours after getting arrested in D.C. for civil disobedience, fighting for the rights of DACA recipients. José is a Professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada. His take on…
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Writing from the Classroom: Ailyn Hernandez-Bazan, First Generation College Graduate and Its Discontents
Ailyn Hernandez-Bazan was a student in Literature and Contemporary class, which I taught this spring. She is a first generation college student, a cultural phenomenon I know well–to be the very first to go away to college, and all that means, how it changes our relationships with our loved ones. It begins with thanksgiving, then rips through…
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Witches and Tamales
My mother Romilia had a husband before she met my father. She was fifteen, he was twenty-even. They say that another woman was after him in the town, and her mother cursed him for not marrying her daughter. “May he die within the first weeks of their wedding!” Well, he did. Just a few months…
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Go to War, Save your Parents from “La Migra”
This is a short essay by Amanda Jones, a student at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles. When my boyfriend, David, decided to become a Marine, I was hurt, appalled, and powerless. I understood why he had to do it. His parents were from Guatemala. His father had received a deportation order. His mother…
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Poetry and Injustice
This week we pulled over from our regularly-scheduled program of. . .whatever it was I was gonna teach–maybe it was the villanelle form; anyway–we got off track in order to discuss the United States’ president’s decision to end the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). The basics: DACA promised the children of immigrants two…