Greater Austin

It is with great pleasure to share with you the good news of being elected as President of the YWCA Greater Austin Board of Directors! The YWCA Greater Austin is located at 2015 South IH 35, Suite 110, and has been a part of the Austin community since its incorporation as the YWCA of the University of Texas in 1907.  It has supported and educated women and girls by providing workshops, counseling, trainings, community service, fundraising events, and more. Its mission to eliminate racism and empower women is one in which I adamantly believe and support. I have taken the President’s role wholeheartedly, and look forward to the work in the areas of advocacy and community outreach. Please contact me to collaborate on women’s issues and immigration. I look forward to joining forces in the effort to eliminate racism and empower women.

The YWCA Southwest/Delta Region held its annual conference in Fort Worth, TX, Friday, January 28^th through Sunday, January 30^th. The YWCA Southwest/Delta Region is one of nine independent regional organizations in the YWCA USA. The region includes YWCA associations from the states of California, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. The YWCA Greater Austin participated in the conference sending a delegation of three, Diana Gorham, Executive Director; Karen Hunt, Southwest/Delta Regional Council Voting Delegate; and me.

The conference agenda included discussions on governance, communications and advocacy. I was specifically impressed and inspired by Interim CEO YWCA USA, Gloria Lau, who presented on the YWCA USA priorities and aspirations, also Regional Director, Christie Dailey, presented on the associations’ financial vitality. The conference concluded with specialized trainings for local organizations on topics such as advocacy, effective YWCA Boards and Executive Directors/CEOs.

The resounding focus throughout the conference centered on the embodiment of the YWCA’s mission, that is eliminating racism and empowering women, and a renewed dedication to advocacy by a collective YWCA voice. Be on the lookout for an increase in social awareness and education from the Southwest/Delta Regional YWCAs, particularly from the YWCA Greater Austin as it works to strengthen outreach efforts with regard to advocacy on social services and immigration.

 About the Book: For nearly a decade, Margaret Regan has reported from Arizona on the escalating chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border. Undocumented migrants cross into Arizona in overwhelming numbers, making the state a test case for the nation’s border policies. In 2007, agents in the Tucson Sector alone caught more than a thousand people a day, far more than in other states. The vigilante movement had its roots here, and the state’s employer laws are the most stringent. And for years Arizona has had the highest number of migrant deaths. Fourteen-year-old Josseline was just one of thousands who have perished in its deserts.

With a sweeping perspective and vivid on-the-ground reportage, Regan tells stories of a varied cast of characters while darting back and forth across the border. She rides shot-gun with the Border Patrol, hiking with them for hours in the one-hundred-degree desert; she interviews deported Mexicans and angry Arizona ranchers; she visits migrant shelters in Mexico and camps out in the thorny wilderness with No More Deaths activists. Using Arizona as a microcosm, Regan explores a host of urgent issues: the border militarization that threatens the rights of U.S. citizens, the environmental damage wrought by the new border wall, the desperation that compels migrants to come north, and the human tragedy of the unidentified dead in Arizona’s morgues.

Photograph by Jay Rochlin

About the Author: Margaret Regan is a longtime journalist in Tucson, Arizona. The art critic at the Tucson Weekly since 1990, she has won more than 50 journalism awards, including a dozen for her border reporting. She has a B.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania; she studied French in Paris at the Sorbonne and Spanish in Antigua, Guatemala, at the Popol Vuh School. Margaret lives with her family in Tucson, 64 miles from the Mexican border. The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands is her first book.

Thank you for this interview Margaret. It is good to meet with you to talk about your first book.

The significance of the book’s title, The Death of Josseline as the title story, is the death of a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador who was left behind by her coyote when she fell ill in a mountainous wilderness in southern Arizona, close to the border. She was on her way to Los Angeles with her 10-year-old brother to meet their mother. The mom had left the kids in El Salvador with family while she worked in LA, and had finally saved up enough money to pay a coyote to bring them to the U.S. The younger brother continued on, at Josseline’s insistence, and raised the alarm when he reached LA. Three weeks later a No More Deaths volunteer named Dan Millis found her body in Cedar Canyon. This all happened exactly two years ago.

• Was the death of Josseline the impetus that initiated this writing experience? How did you hear of her story?

No, I had been writing about the border off and on since the year 2000, and I had gathered many migrant stories before Josseline died in 2008. I got a book contract in spring of 2008 and it was in the course of doing new reporting that I learned of her death. I camped out with the No More Deaths activists that summer, and one of their volunteers led me to the remote canyon site where another volunteer had found her body in February. I put her story first in the book, and named the book after her, because her death was so tragic and the circumstances so heartbreaking. She was only 14 years old, and she and her brother had been separated for some years from their mother, who was working in Los Angeles without papers. The mom had to save the money to send for her children. Josseline fell ill and was left behind on the trail in Arizona. The mother didn’t know it until days later when her son, then 10, arrived safely in LA and sounded the alarm. Josseline’s body was found three weeks later.

• What compelled you to dedicate much of your journalistic career to the border issues and undocumented migrants?

My interest began in 2000, when the deaths in Arizona started skyrocketing. Under Operation Gatekeeper, the federal government had sealed off the old urban crossings, in places like El Paso and San Diego, and assumed that the Arizona landscape was so dangerous no one would cross here. That calculation was wrong. Arizona became the chief crossing place, and the place where the most migrants died. Almost 2000 migrant bodies have been found in southern Arizona in the last 10 years. As a journalist, I have felt a moral obligation to bring this story to light. On a personal note: when I first went down to Douglas, Arizona, in 2000 to report on the crisis, I had just researched and written a lengthy piece on the tragic lives of my Irish immigrant great-grandparents, who died young and poor in Philadelphia in the 1880s, after watching two of the children die. When I saw what was happening to the Latino migrants in Arizona in 2000, I thought: the details might be different, but this story is the same as my great-grandparents’ story in all the ways that matter. 

• How has this experience affected your perspective on the migrant families and the U.S. immigration policy?

I feel a great compassion toward the migrants I have met. They are motivated primarily by their love for their families and their sense of responsibility to support them. I am in awe of the courage they show in undertaking long and dangerous journeys in order to work. Their work ethic is phenomenal. Whenever I ask somebody what kind of work they plan to do, they seem puzzled. The answer is almost always, I’ll do whatever work there is. U.S. immigration policy has, unwittingly perhaps, caused the deaths of thousands of these hardworking people, and separated families, wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms, imprisoning people for working at low-wage jobs. In the name of homeland security, the government now has the power to curtail the civil liberties of U.S. citizens living in the borderlands. The Patriot Act, in authorizing the building of the border wall, has allowed the unelected Secretary of Homeland Security to overturn 40 years of laws protecting the environment and archaeological treasures.

• Do you have plans to continue authoring books? Was it a difficult process to go from reporting to writing a book?

It was very difficult to go from writing newspaper stories to writing a book! Under my contract, I had only about eight months to turn in the manuscript and I found it hard to do new reporting and research, and the writing, in that time frame. I did use some stories I had previously written as newspaper articles, but even those required updating. I do hope to write more books. I’m thinking of looking at the detention centers in Arizona, part of a vast chain of prisons throughout the country where migrants are held indefinitely for sometimes long periods, with no rights to an attorney. 

• Anything else you wish to share with readers?  

I hope my book helps other Americans become aware of what’s happening along the border, right here in the United States. Most especially I want them to know that every year at least 200 migrants are found dead in southern Arizona, killed only because they want so much to work and to contribute. As a friend said, if every year Tucson had a plane crash that killed 200 people, the rest of America would sit up and pay attention and take measures to stop the slaughter. I would hope they would do the same when they learn of the state’s annual harvest of migrant deaths.

This book is available at Dulce Bread & Book Shop

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands

Margaret Regan 

Beacon Press

A powerful and moving account of four young women from Mexico who have lived most of their lives in the United States and attend the same high school. Two of them have legal documentation and two do not.

I was struggling with what I could possibly write as a review for this universal and human story. To attempt to support the positive praise and add credence to this important immigrant experience only brought nerves to the pit of my stomach, fear, and resentment.  This is an emotional experience, no doubt, for Helen Thorpe and her reader. Immigration is emotional. After all, to have to make the decision to leave a home, a community, a culture, the familiar for a faraway place has to be one of the most difficult decisions to be made by an individual, more so for a family. It is a courageous decision in order to survive and make a home in a new culture, a new language, and with the rejecting Other. These are survivors and the United States was built by them and the nation continues to succeed because of them. Why am I emotional? Perhaps because I am a member of the Girls Like Us club.

I decided to read other book reviews to get a rational perspective on the subject, a more reflective sense. Clearly the close nature I have with this issue dulls my thinking and sharpens my feeling and will. I have not read a mediocre review, nor have I encountered a scathing commentary. On the contrary, all the reviews I’ve come upon are of value and motivational for the thorough and meaningful journalistic work Helen Thorpe has done and the importance of Just Like Us as an example of worthy storytelling. And I agree. I would also venture to add that not only is this story worth telling but also a story of significance and priority. Truly a must read.

Why a must read? When state legislators are considering banning ethnic study programs and collecting data on undocumented students in public schools, with the threat of withholding much needed funding, it is apparent to me that those legislators are working out of inexperience. Inexperience with the Other. There is nothing wrong or offensive in the desire to share one’s culture, one’s language, one’s ethnicity. As an educator I invite and welcome all to my class to learn about me, to learn my language, and to share my culture. I do not designate my programs to students of a particular ethnic group, in fact, I target the Others. It is the Others with whom I wish to share my Otherness. However, sadly it is mostly those of my ethnicity that my program interests. Current U.S. society has not realized the priority of the multicultural experience and therefore educators of languages, culture, ethnicity, and translation studies have been lumbering through opposing, apprehensive forces for affirmative recognition and adequate funding. Moreover, there is nothing fearful in sharing a classroom with a diverse student body. Indeed, this in itself is a cultural learning experience. Imagine the conversation, visualize the sharing. It is akin to participating in a discussion at the United Nations, where the experience of the Other is infectious. That is a classroom in which all present are learning from each Other, including the teacher. It is a most desirable classroom, certainly not one where the Other is intimated and fears her participation.

I invite you, fervently, to experience Just Like Us, if only to achieve a small encounter with the Other, without intimidation, without fear. And I welcome your impressions of this journey. Helen Thorpe has taken the perilous voyage into the Other and has transcended the dreaded cultural divide, only to return with what could be described as none other than a cultural treasure.

Helen Thorpe is a freelance journalist whose magazine stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Texas Monthly, Westword, and 5280.

Previous works by Helen Thorpe include published stories in national and regional magazines. Here are the links to her previous work.

¨       Story in The New York Times Magazine about the economic boom in Austin, Texas.

¨       Story in The New York Times Magazine about a used clothing warehouse on the U.S.-Mexico border.

¨       Archive of stories published in Texas Monthly.

¨       Archive of stories published in New York Magazine.

¨       Summary of personal essay in 5280.

¨       Slate Diary.

A novel of family, una familia americana. A novel of country, a diverse homeland. And a novel of revolution, is it possible for human beings to initiate dramatic, idealistic change? Perhaps not. Raul Ramos y Sanchez writes a bleak and distressing plausible story that can anguish a few and enrage many. This is the most daunting. To read a story that can conceivably happen in today’s social climate and know how to discuss the issue and keep one’s emotions intact. Can a group of people protest peacefully? Can a public official manipulate the fear of a few and divide a diverse nation into an “us and them”? Can an idealist gather enough muscle to initiate a violent revolution? Yes, yes, and yes. How is this possible? Better yet, why is it possible? Ramos y Sanchez suggests that it is the result of societal misconceptions, and, as one of the novel’s goals, awareness is vital to the avoidance of such plausible outcome. However, how can a tense story enlighten all of us to look past the fear and rage that America Libre incites and calmly discuss such issues? I do not know. Perhaps readers will have to wait for the upcoming sequel, El Nuevo Alamo.

I shared this novel with my husband as I wanted to experience his cultural perspective. I’m a Mexican-American that studies the question of identity and mostly writes about cultural experiences by way of identity. He is a Texan, “who happens to be Anglo” and prefers not to include the issues of race and culture in the same conversation. In his point of view, race is rarely relevant and often times wrongly substituted for culture. So his perspective is one in which I’m often curious. And, once again, he brought up an interesting point. If in fact the goal of the novel is to answer and clarify the societal misconceptions of what is a Hispanic and/or Latino, then why introduce a novel that promotes a misconception of what is an Anglo. There is not one “good” Anglo in the story, at least not one that is sophisticated enough to see past the fear or one intelligent enough to ignore the babble of any politician. Why then use race, from the other extreme, to fight the notion that there is no useful definition of race in today’s reality? Which brings to my mind another question, is it possible to share a cultural experience without a severe lesson such as a violent revolution?

I invite you to read this novel and purchase your copy by visiting Dulce Bread & Book Shop.