Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley.

In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can be as close to him as possible.

It’s easy to understand the devotion. Bermúdez, the “Tomato King,” who died of cancer in 2009 at just 58, willed himself from undocumented field worker and ranch hand to naturalized U.S. citizen; from successful farmer and labor contractor in California to pathbreaking congressman and migrant politician in Mexico.

In 2001, he made history by being elected mayor of his hometown of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, which has sent over half a million people to the U.S. over the last half century. Bérmudez is believed to be the first U.S. immigrant to win a mayoral election in Mexico. His first victory was overturned—because his primary residence was in the U.S.—but he won again in 2004 after his binational residency was established, then left that post to run for federal congress in Mexico City two years later. There, Bermúdez championed migrant causes, including allocating greater federal resources for the repatriation of paisanos who died in the U.S.

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

And so I take the 99 Highway to Porterville, where the Bermúdez clan’s U.S. trailblazers first arrived in the mid-20th century as part of the Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Mexico to the fields of California. Fiddling with the radio dial, I’m as likely to hear conservative Christian propaganda as I am to stumble over country music or a Mexican station with Mixteco programming.

In Porterville, I meet a group of Bermúdez’s first cousins and contemporaries. Their aging bodies and visible ailments—strained backs, aching knees—are a testament to lifetimes of physically taxing work in the fields.

We sit in their back patio under a light drizzle and talk. Like any good transnational testimonio, the assembled elders start by honoring their elders, the patriarchs who first came to the U.S. They left rough upbringings in the scattered ranchos of the Zacatecas mountains, where they migrated seasonally between their native El Cargadero and Cueva Grande, tending drought-stricken land and famished dairy cows.

After stints in construction jobs in L.A., these pioneers eventually landed in the Central Valley. They worked the crop circuit up and down rural California, picking grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, strawberries, cherries, oranges, and olives. Labor contractors murdered workers for their paychecks. The migra launched raids that sent them scattering through orchards “like deer.”

When Bermúdez followed these forbears, arriving in town in his late teens in 1969, he did what the rest of the single migrants did, his cousins tell me: worked, drank, smoked, dated. You couldn’t tell, in Porterville, that his trajectory would be any different.

And so I head to Winters, a small town of just over 7,000, the place where Bermúdez’s path diverged from other young undocumented migrants’ stories. After his stint in Porterville, Bermúdez briefly returned to Mexico to marry and start a family. He then moved them to the U.S., choosing Winters for yearlong agricultural work—more appealing for a new father than following the crop circuit. A local white rancher named Tufts saw in Bermúdez a swift English learner and a hard worker, consistently the fastest picker on his crew. He invited Bermúdez and his young family out of the subsidized housing they lived in on the other side of town and into a trailer home on the ranch property.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the flow of migrant workers into California was plentiful, and Bermúdez, now bilingual, struck out on his own and began recruiting laborers for the U.S. Forest Service. By the 1990s, he returned to Winters a wealthy man and ventured into tomato growing—this time, as his own boss. He got involved in every stage of production, from sowing to transplanting, even innovating a technique that would earn him the “Tomato King” moniker, adapting agricultural machinery for a greater yield. He supplied Ragu, Morning Star, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

In Winters, memories of the man in his “Tomato King” prime abound. Driving through the quaint town with Junior, he’s quick to point out McArthur Street, where his father bought his first property. Where he leased land to grow tomatoes. The exact spot where he got pulled over for driving under the influence, or where he broke out into a brawl. The Buckhorn, his favorite bar to rub elbows with the region’s white farmers. Rotary Park and the Winters Community Center where he hosted the Fiesta Mexicana and delivered impromptu speeches. The place where he threw epic parties for hundreds of his workers, many from his hometown of Jerez.

Most dream of a return. But Bermúdez actually managed to go back—and to take an unlikely and unprecedented leap into the Machiavellian world of Mexican politics. His critics will insist that Bermúdez was drawn by the allure of power; still, as a mayor and congress member, he battled the establishment by giving migrants a voice. “I am here to represent my people,” he once told me. He always told elite politicians that “to do away with migration, they need to have been migrants themselves. Nobody can do away with that which they have not felt.”

Death brought Bermúdez back, again, to the U.S. In the five years that I’ve been researching my book, I’ve grown close with the Bermúdez family; on another recent trip to Winters, I attended a rosary for Andrés Junior’s maternal grandmother, who died last year; Bermúdez jokingly called her his favorite suegra (mother-in-law) in an unabashed reference to his infidelity and cheating ways.

The family buried her just a few yards away from Bermúdez, where the entire nuclear family has plots. To paraphrase the migration scholar Osman Balkan, the interred bodies serve as anchors, investing the soil with political meaning for their relatives and survivors.

In death, as in life, Bermúdez has imbued this corner of California with his legacy—one that stretches to Zacatecas, and beyond.

The post In Search of the ‘Tomato King’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, 13-year-old José Azel joined the ranks of the underground opposition engaging in acts of sabotage. When Castro closed the country’s schools, José’s father became worried. So he sent his teenage boy on a brief trip to West Palm Beach in June 1961 on a cargo ship full of seminarians. It was the last time they saw each other.

From 2021 to June 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just over 400,000 “encounters” with unaccompanied children. The quality of care for these kids has been dubious at best and abusive at worst. Today’s numbers may be unprecedented, but this group is not—in fact, they are part of a long tradition of young people finding refuge in the U.S. without their parents.

In the early 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program to care for thousands of minors fleeing their country after its 1959 revolution. Colloquially, it was known as Operation Pedro Pan—a reference to the tale about the boy who could fly. Like today, in the 1960s a vocal contingent of naysayers balked at the newcomers: Some feared that there could be communists in the unvetted masses, while others asked why taxpayers should shoulder their financial weight. Yet drowning out these doubtful voices was a larger willingness to accept the children and to affirm the country’s tradition of sanctuary and freedom in doing so.

The more than 14,000 Cuban minors who arrived to the U.S. between 1959 and 1962—then the largest group of unaccompanied children in U.S. history—were among the 250,000 Cubans who trekked across the Florida Straits during that period. In contrast to today’s migrants, the Cubans were cast as refugees and symbols of anticommunist heroism. President John F. Kennedy reminded the country that welcoming refugees was a Cold War imperative. In a letter to Congress, Kennedy heralded the U.S. as “a refuge for the oppressed” with a “long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in freedom, self-respect, dignity, and health.”

The Children’s Program resettled young people across the nation in group homes and with foster families throughout the country—from Helena, Montana, to San Antonio, Texas, to Dubuque, Iowa—largely paid for by state and federal coffers. At times, parents did not know where their children had been relocated.

The program relied on a vast network of federal and state offices and a long list of nonprofit church groups, child welfare agencies, and Pan American and KLM airlines, which would help procure seats for these children, as well as embassies, parochial schools, and a counterrevolutionary network in both nations. Those without immediate family support in the United States—more than 8,300 children—received care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.

Some Pedro Pans found respite with Protestant, Jewish, and secular organizations, but the nucleus of the program was the Catholic Church, which assumed responsibility for 7,346 Cuban children. At the program’s helm was Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest who’d recently relocated to Miami, and embraced his mission with gusto. Walsh later called his role in Operation Pedro Pan “an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat communism.” He had ample support from the Church, which also opened its doors to Catholic leaders isolated and banished by the Cuban government.

After arriving in the U.S. with a group of Catholic seminarians, José Azel jumped into the world of American adolescence. The transition was connected to the automobile, and he remembers the immense glee he felt registering for a driving permit. Football, rock ‘n’ roll, and an occasional cigarette rounded out the adaptation process for the young man.

Other Pedro Pans tell similar bittersweet stories of their crossings. Mayda Riopedre was a 15-year-old student at American Dominican Academy in Havana when she arrived in Miami. Mayda had lived a privileged and “very American” life in Cuba— she took classes in English and U.S. history, listened to American shows on the radio, took ballet and piano lessons, and had a French tutor.

After spending a month in a transitional shelter, Mayda Riopedre and her sister spent a month at St. Mary’s Home in Dubuque, Iowa, where they went bowling for the first time, before being sent to live with a family in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She retains some very pleasant memories of her time there, but she also recalls a favorite outdoor spot where she would look at the mountains and cry inconsolably. The sisters and their parents reunited two years later, and today Mayda considers herself “lucky” and will be “forever grateful” for the foster family.

Why did so many parents choose to send their children away? The upheaval of the revolution—including school closures and new revolutionary pedagogy, nationalized property, and rumors that Castro’s government would dispossess parents of their children—was frightening enough to make the decision feel warranted for many Cuban families.

They also believed that the separation—and Castro’s reign—would be brief. But most Pedro Pans did not see their parents for months or even years —and in rare cases, like José Azel’s, ever again.

Now in their 60s and 70s, the former Pedro Pans—many of whom are part of Florida’s large Cuban community—find themselves ensconced in the vitriol surrounding today’s migrant children. Unlike the majority of Pedro Pans, who lived comfortable lives in Cuba, these young people come from locales ravaged by violence and economic scarcity.

And they are receiving a very different welcome. In 2019, 3,000 children were housed at a center in Homestead, Florida, five miles from the Florida City camp that had sheltered hundreds if not thousands of Pedro Pans. Then the Trump administration closed it, which drew criticism from those who argued that the state should provide suitable accommodation for children, as it had done 60 years prior with the Cuban Children’s Program.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bickered with the Miami Archdiocese after he issued an executive order that curtailed the ability of Florida agencies to care for undocumented migrants, including children. Pedro Pans took sides: Some argued in favor of sheltering the minors while others sided with DeSantis and drew differences between today’s young migrants and the Cold War context of their own crossings.

As their hesitancy indicates, today many Americans are reluctant to support similar groups in need. The country took in just 11,411 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year, the lowest number since 1980. UNICEF estimates that a record 43.3 million children live in forced displacement worldwide. Those crossing the U.S. border often remain invisible or banished to the status of a national crisis rather than an opportunity to provide help. But the Pedro Pans, aided by government assistance and everyday American altruism, exemplify what is achievable when we harness our abundant resources and guarantee our healthy tradition of refuge for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The post When the U.S. Welcomed the ‘Pedro Pan’ Migrants of Cuba appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s especially true when undocumented immigrants are characterized as criminals—often merely on the basis of their legal immigration status. This rhetoric isn’t new—it has long been used to justify immigration crackdowns. But the framing of unauthorized migration as illegal does have an origin point: a little-known law in 1929.

The law—Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act—was notable because it was the first time criminal penalties were attached to undocumented entry to the U.S. While the law’s passage was not big news in 1929, it is vital to understanding how we discuss undocumented immigration today.

To understand the 1929 bill, it’s important to understand the nativist wave that gripped the United States in the 1920s. That wave most famously produced the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set national quotas for immigration in a way that was transparently designed to preserve the cultural dominance of Northern and Western Europeans. The law also marked a transition from earlier anti-immigrant campaigns that had targeted Catholics, Southern Europeans, Chinese, and other Asian migrants, because for the first time, the law targeted Mexican immigration.

As historian Mae Ngai documents in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, immigration across the southern border went largely ignored until the 1920s. It was mostly seen as being regulated by labor demands in the Southwest, but this changed after World War I ushered in an era of harder borders. In 1924, the Border Patrol was founded to stop Mexican immigrants from entering illegally as undocumented entry began to be seen as a problem.

After the passage of Johnson-Reed in 1924, some members of Congress, looking for new targets for their anti-immigration work, pushed for a way to limit Mexican immigration to the United States through the extension of quotas to Mexico as well. In their arguments, Mexicans were often characterized as economic burdens, threats to American jobs, unclean and potentially diseased, and with a greater tendency towards criminality.

They also were not considered white. Representative Robert Green, a Democrat from Florida, would make the racial aspect of his opposition clear in a radio address on January 27, 1928, on the subject of “Immigration and the Crime Wave.” In this address, Green noted that quotas should be applied to Mexico because of the mixture of “White, Indian, and negro” blood, which placed a “very great penalty” upon any society attempting to assimilate it. Making a eugenicist argument, he continued, “influx of all types of undesirable aliens and their amalgamation with our people will cause a general weakening, physically and mentally, of our civilization.”

One of the most outspoken, and ultimately successful, critics of Mexican immigration was Democrat John Box of Texas. Box had opposed quotas for Mexican immigrants in Johnson-Reed because he feared it would kill the legislation, but, beginning in 1926, he introduced a number of bills specifically seeking to limit legal Mexican immigration. Box would become so associated with the push for restriction of Mexican immigration that one House bill he introduced, H.R. 6465, which would have imposed quotas on immigration from both Canada and Mexico, was nicknamed the Box Bill.

During a January 1928 address at an immigration conference organized by the briefly popular, anti-communist Key Men of America, he declared: “One purpose of our immigration laws is to prevent the lowering of the ideals and the average of our citizenship, the creation of race friction and the weakening of the Nation’s powers of cohesion, resulting from the intermixing of differing races. The admission of 75,000 Mexican peons annually tends to the aggravation of this, another evil which the laws are designed to prevent or cure.”

Box catered to his Key Men audience, not only by calling them a “patriotic organization,” but by tying immigration to their fears of communism. “In proportion to her population, Mexico is now by far the most bolshevistic country in the Western Hemisphere,” Box later said in testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. And he didn’t stop there, suggesting Mexican immigrants were poor, illiterate, criminal disease-carriers who posed threats not only to American culture but also to the very safety of its citizens.

In the same Key Men address, Box claimed, “the Mexican peons are illiterate and ignorant. Because of their unsanitary habits and living conditions and their vices, they are especially subject to smallpox, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and other dangerous contagions….Few, if any, other immigrants have brought us so large a proportion of criminals and paupers as the Mexican peons.”

Despite this, the Box Bill failed in the Congress—but Box and other restrictionists would adopt a new tactic in their push to restrict Mexican immigration by targeting the undocumented. When Senator Coleman Blease, a known white supremacist from South Carolina, introduced Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act the next year, Box became one of its most outspoken supporters. The bill proposed to criminalize illegal entry—making it a misdemeanor—and to turn illegal re-entry into a felony, which made the immigrant inadmissible to the United States in the future. Reentry after deportation also carried penalties of up to two years in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. Illegal entrants would face misdemeanor charges and one year in prison, a $1,000 fine, or both.

The bill was not unopposed. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, submitted a protest at committee hearings. “It is one thing to deport a person for coming here illegally; it is quite another thing to imprison for a year or fine him a thousand dollars, especially as he might be quite ignorant of the law when he starts his journey,” the ACLU memo said. But the ACLU’s criticism proved to be a lonely one and the Hoover Administration supported attaching criminal penalties to illegal entry. The Senate Committee’s report included a letter from the Secretary of Labor, James Davis, noting that a deterrent penalty was necessary if undocumented entry was to be dissuaded.

The bill passed with little fanfare and without a recorded vote, but the debate set many of the terms for immigration discussions for the rest of the century and beyond by making dubious connections between immigration and a variety of social ills. Representative Green of Florida noted that, “if you will examine the criminal records you will find that…the percentage of criminals is largely foreign.” Representative Box would repeat the negative stereotypes he had drawn on in pushing for quotas on Mexican immigration: “They are badly infected with tuberculosis and other diseases; there are many paupers among them; there are many criminals; they work for lower wages; they are as objectionable as immigrants tried by the tests applied to other aliens. Republican Representative Roy Fitzgerald of Ohio would claim that Mexican immigrants were poisoning American citizens, and fellow Republicans John Schafer of Wisconsin and Thomas Blanton of Texas would accuse Mexican immigrants of taking the jobs of native-born Americans, with Blanton going so far as to suggest that Mexican immigrants would cause the starvation of the native-born.

The passage of the Undesirable Aliens Act shifted how Mexican immigration was treated in the U.S. Later that same year, 1929, the federal government, along with state and local governments, began a program of Mexican Repatriation as America slid into the Great Depression. This campaign sought to coerce Mexican immigrants to return to their country of origin through immigration raids and threats of penalties for those who could not prove they were in the country legally.

Indeed, the criminalization of undocumented entry, in combination with decreasing job opportunities during the Depression and aggressive tactics by the Immigration Service and other authorities, made the Mexican Repatriation a success. The program resulted in an estimated 20 percent of the Mexican population of the United States returning to Mexico.

The undocumented were now criminals, and could be treated as such. In this way, the Undesirable Aliens Act established a new pattern of American policymaking that holds to this day: The law, and the many that have followed it, have reinforced the tendency to see the solution to undocumented immigration as more punitive policy, instead of treating it as an issue of labor.

It has not mattered that such policies have not worked, or that they create pain for undocumented immigrants, who have contributed so much to America throughout its history. Instead, such policies are justified by the argument that they are just the law—laws that continue to rely on the dubious racist and nativist arguments of 1929.

The post The 1929 Law That Turned Undocumented Entry Into a Crime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Micronesians, mostly from the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), are the newest group of migrants to Hawaiʻi. They come in search of opportunities: better education for their children, better jobs, and better health care. In this way, they are no different from other immigrants who preceded them. Only the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) people are indigenous to KaPaeʻaina, the Hawaiian Islands. The rest of us are settlers and some of us are colonialists.

Those who have come before control the political economy. Lacking marketable skills, many Micronesians end up with minimum-wage jobs: dishwashing, serving fast food, hotel housekeeping, or attending parking lots. The high cost of housing forces them to stay in public housing or in crowded housing conditions in neighborhoods where their children attend underfunded public schools.

The slights suffered by Micronesian migrants—from name-calling in the schoolyard to maltreatment by law enforcement—have been many. But the bigotry and backlash against them did the most damage when they provided the inspiration to exclude migrants from Medicaid, the federal health program for the indigent.

This is a recent story of how a group of people, living in the United States, were reduced to second-class status.

In 2009, in the face of budgetary constraints during the Great Recession, the State of Hawaiʻi removed from the Medicaid rolls all migrants from the Compact Nations (the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau), who are permitted by a compact with the United States to live and work here. A court battle ensued, in which a federal district judge ruled that Micronesians and their allies were entitled to Medicaid benefits under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. Subsequently, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision. And so the state rolled out its plan to remove the migrants from Medicaid.

I am a family physician in Hawaiʻi who has learned firsthand about the special health challenges of these migrants. Over the years that I have taken care of Micronesian patients, I have had a number die from hematological or thyroid cancers, legacies of nuclear testing in Micronesia. The scale of that testing is stunning. The total yield of U.S. nuclear tests in Micronesia between 1946 and 1962 was 152 megatons. The total yield of all the tests at the Nevada Test Site was one megaton. The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima (my hometown) was 15 kilotons.

The most powerful detonation that the U.S. conducted was the Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. As the thermonuclear device was encased in uranium, which underwent fission, the test released extraordinarily dirty radionuclides. This fallout was deposited over the populated atolls of the Northern Marshall Islands.

Afterward, Marshallese people who had been exposed were followed in a U.S. government study called Project 4.1. (That Project 4.1 was included in the planning documents, from fall 1953, four months before the test, demonstrates that the human experimentation conducted on Marshallese people without their knowledge or consent was deliberate.) Over the subsequent decades, this cohort of people, including children, were subjected to human radiation experiments—again without their knowledge or consent. Is it any wonder that many Marshallese believe that their human rights were ignored because they were viewed as less than human?

Despite the toll of these tests, there is another, larger factor in the social production of disease for Micronesians: population displacement from land. Traditional food production, based on indigenous plants and reef resources, has been abandoned, creating an unhealthy dependence on poor-quality, commodity foodstuffs such as white rice and canned meat. Ironically, many now prefer canned fish to fresh fish. The result has been an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other non-communicable diseases such as cancer.

Now with global warming and sea-level rise, life in Micronesia is becoming more precarious. Much of Micronesia, including all of the Marshall Islands, consists of low-lying atolls with an average elevation just a few feet above sea level. It isn’t only the inch-by-inch rise in sea level that poses the greatest threat. With more severe weather come storm surges and higher waves that inundate croplands with saltwater. These gardens are used to produce taro—a Micronesian staple crop—and when they are flooded with salt water they cannot produce taro again unless they remain salt-water free for five years. Father Francis X. Hezel, the foremost scholar of Micronesia, says it is questionable how much longer human habitation will be possible in the remote islands.

While the compacts allow the citizens of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau free entry to the United States and the right to work without a visa, there is no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. The current compacts between the United States and the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia end in 2023, encouraging many to migrate before its expiration. These days many Marshallese skip over Hawaiʻi and settle in Northwest Arkansas, where there are many jobs in chicken processing, the cost of living is lower, and they feel more welcome.

Since Compact Migrants in Hawaiʻi were removed from the Medicaid rolls, many have become uninsured. This makes it more difficult for me to take care of their medical needs. It is difficult enough to deliver medicine to vulnerable populations. It becomes more difficult when the state ignores the human right to health.

The post How an Oahu Doctor Struggles to Care for His Micronesian Patients appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I work as an archaeologist, but two years ago the refugee crisis in my country moved me to make a dramatic change in my life and focus on helping those in need. Baobab was a brand new effort then, and I saw in it the possibility to transform the way we think about and treat migrants—a more human and humane approach.

I came together with other volunteers to provide migrants not only with a bed, a meal, and clean clothes, but with empathy, kindness, and curiosity about their lives, and with guidance and legal information about their status in Europe. Thus far our experience has been filled with challenges, but we are not giving up, and we hope our story will inspire others to adopt a similar model.

The Baobab Experience was born in the spring of 2015, near Rome’s Tiburtina train station, three miles east of the postcard locales where tourists flock. It was May 12, one day after the police had forcibly cleared migrants from the area nearby Ponte Mammolo metro station, where refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, many of them survivors of arduous and terrifying journeys across the Mediterranean, had been congregating for months.

Chased out of their temporary shelter, hundreds of migrants poured into a cultural center in Via Cupa, a few blocks southeast of the train station. The reaction of Rome’s citizenry was immediate: In just a few hours, thousands of donations were brought to the center, and dozens of volunteers showed up, ready to help in any way they could. Some would pop by to donate some basic necessities and end up spending the whole day in Via Cupa, helping out. Donors and volunteers of different ages, origins and experiences would work side by side for hours.

In just a few weeks, Via Cupa became a unique place, with a vital energy springing from the mix of cultures animating it. It also was a place where people who had spent months fleeing for their lives finally could stop and repose in relative calm and safety—a place where they knew that, when they talked, someone would be listening. That deep, reciprocal act of listening forged the bonds that gradually arose between the migrants and us.

While we were listening, Rome’s political institutions stayed silent, not wanting to get tangled up in such a complex situation. During that summer of 2015, Baobab welcomed a total of 30,000 migrants. Doing our best to accommodate 800 people at a time in a space that had been built to host 250, we were constantly battling unsanitary conditions. We began to speak out publicly about the struggles we faced, and to meet with local government officials to begin searching for solutions.

The Baobab Experience continued to grow, as our volunteers began to forge solutions to our many logistical challenges, and to organize assistance and activities for our migrant residents. They called weekly meetings, organized indoor gathering spaces, and set times for clothing distribution and meals—our volunteer cooks were preparing more than a thousand meals a day. They assembled “arrival and leaving kits” with basic necessities, such as soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, snacks, fruit juice and water. A basketball hoop and other sports equipment were brought to the center, and migrants were given tours of the city to help orient themselves in their new home.

Meanwhile, other civic and charitable groups provided their skills and expertise, as well as space to collect, sort, and store donations. A sanitary squad and a legal team were created. Cultural mediators helped us to communicate across language barriers. Using a world map at the center’s entrance, we encouraged migrants to share their personal stories by pinpointing the routes of their journeys to Europe—and to plan the next passage to their final destinations.

But as autumn turned to winter, our situation changed. With cold weather discouraging migrants from making the perilous sea crossing, the number of new arrivals began to drop dramatically.

In December of 2015 the city shut down the center, with the promise that a new site with adequate living conditions would soon be found. But this promise never came to fruition—so Baobab had to begin welcoming and providing practical and legal information to the continuing trickle of migrants in the street, in front of the closed gate of what had been our center. This was when our group of volunteers evolved from being just a group of citizens brought together by their own solidarity, to formally establishing themselves as an association in order to be able to engage in formal talks with the city government. The Baobab Experience, up until then an informal collection of like-minded people, was formally born.

When spring came in 2016, and heavier migrant traffic resumed, we still had only the outdoor space of Via Cupa to welcome and shelter our new wave of guests. We began pitching tents in the street, and in a handful of days an informal camp was operating. Its conditions were even worse than those in the center. There was no running water, no electricity, and no kitchen to prepare meals.

And yet the Baobab spirit remained steadfast. If anything, it was more determined than ever not to give up our fight for human dignity. Although we had no building to offer the 20,000 people who arrived between April and September 2016, our feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood deepened during those days and nights together on the street. During uneasy nights, we turned to singing and dancing to lighten our mood and pass the dark hours. Once again, the strong support of the citizenry of Rome helped sustain us, and we also gained the backing of Italian and international cultural associations, which launched a petition supporting us.

Officials continued their threats of clearing the camp, and periodic, forced round-ups of migrants by police seeking identification documents never stopped. Migrants spent many anxious nights in police headquarters, often with no legal or cultural mediation to assist them. Despite our ongoing negotiations with Rome’s new city government—which, yet again, had promised a rapid solution to the problem—no alternative to our outdoor, informal camp has emerged.

On the last day of September 2016 the camp was cleared for good. Tents, gazebos, all the donations we’d received, and all the migrants’ personal effects were dumped by the police in the abandoned, locked building of Via Cupa, with no possibility for either volunteers or migrants to retrieve them.

From that moment on, we have been in our “itinerant phase,” constantly on the move, from parking lot to parking lot, trying as hard as we can to guarantee the essential needs of those migrants who have stayed and who are constantly being chased out and stopped by police demanding identification. It feels like a manhunt aimed at scaring and scattering us, trying to push us to exhaustion so that we will give up. For our part, we’ve given up on trying to negotiate with the local government, as every promise they’ve made to us has been broken.

But Baobab will not end. We have vowed to each other that Baobab will keep transforming itself in whatever ways are needed so that we can keep doing our essential work. Since the end of October 2016 we have been welcoming migrants in an unused public square behind Tiburtina train station. We continue giving a Baobab welcome to migrants whose long journeys have brought them here to Rome, trying to give them what we value most: the recognition of their precious individuality, and the desire to hear and keep alive their stories and their spirits.

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