Photos by Patrick VerelMore than 50 community leaders and scholars from the New York City area came together on June 1 and 2 for a summit geared toward creating a more just sustainable and dignified immigration system.

“Partnering for Migration Justice: Building Sustainable Collaborations between Migrant Communities and Higher Education,” featured a welcoming address by Jacquelyn Pavilon, associate director of research at the Vera Institute of Justice.

‘You Were the Only Person Who Tried’

Pavlion highlighted the importance of academic partnerships by sharing how she decided to dedicate her life to helping the less fortunate.

In college, she interned at a community-based refugee shelter in Rome. On her first day, she was asked by an Iraqi refugee to help her apply for a visa to enter the United Kingdom.

“His visa was denied, and I felt destroyed. I couldn’t imagine how he felt. He came back to say thanks, and I didn’t know why. He said, ‘Because you were the only person who kind of tried.’ I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life,” she said.

“So that’s just the first way that community-based organizations and higher-ed institutions can unite.”

Empathy Over Sympathy

The conference also featured a June 2 panel about what engaged research and accompaniment might look like. Leo Guardado, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, was joined by Dejia Marie James, director of policy advancement at the Partnership for the Public Good in Buffalo, New York, and Isaac Scott, founder of the Confined Arts and chair of the human services committee for Manhattan Community Board 11.

Scott, an activist who spent a decade behind bars before joining the Justice and Education Scholars program at Columbia University and earning a bachelor’s degree in visual arts, stressed the importance of sympathy over empathy.

“Surely none of you have been incarcerated, but if I share with you an experience I had about being lonely in my cell one night, I’m sure you can relate to a time when you were lonely in your life and be able to empathize,” he said.

Breaking Bread

James spoke about how in Buffalo, organizations such as hers have had a decidedly mixed experience with universities. She stressed the importance of human connection, including breaking bread.

She learned that early on in her career from a mentor who insisted on having food at every meeting.

“It broke the barrier immediately. It made us all comfortable because we’re eating and sometimes you’re embarrassed because you spill stuff on yourself or something happens. Connecting in that human way is just invaluable.”

Guardado, who has shared the story of his own immigration to the United States, said that for him, practicing accompaniment means giving preference to the most invisible members of society. He does that through research that he hopes will convince the Catholic Church to better serve immigrant communities.

“I believe that accompaniment is walking with the displaced with standard notions of rigor that hold us accountable, not just to the academy, for whom we do research, but rigor in terms of–are we credible to the communities that we work with?

Above all, he said it takes time.

“You don’t parachute anywhere and leave. It’s the foundation for long-term relationships.”

The summit was supported by a recent $200,000 grant from the Cummings Foundation. It is part of the Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity, which is spearheaded by Fordham College at Lincoln Center professors Guardado, Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish at Fordham, and James McCartin, Ph.D., associate professor of theology.

“The Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity” is spearheaded by Assistant Professor of Theology Leo Guardado; Associate Professor of Spanish, Carey Kasten; and Associate Professor of Theology, Jim McCartin. The professors recently received a $200,000 grant for their work from the Cummings Foundation, a Massachusetts-based non-profit.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, in 2022, over 100 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide by conflict, poverty, and human rights violations, an increase of more than 10 million individuals from 2021.

The grant will provide funding for a two-year pilot program, based at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, that aims to “cultivate student leaders committed to becoming activists, policy-makers, and researchers who are dedicated to affirming the human dignity of migrants and prepared to address complex challenges related to migration in U.S. society into the future,” according to the professors’ proposal.

As a first-generation immigrant, Guardado knows the migrant experience intimately. He made the difficult journey across the border with his mother as a child when he was just 9 from their remote mountain town in El Salvador. He has spent most of his young academic career working with NGOs and churches on the US-Mexican border helping migrants detained by ICE and those seeking sanctuary.

“I’ve been at Fordham for four years. When I got to New York, it felt like there wasn’t much at Fordham in terms of long-term sustainable engagement with migration,” said Guardado.

“My vision was building this interdisciplinary team of scholars thinking together and bringing disciplines and critical thinking from the academy to bear on the questions that the people on the front lines, the activists, the pastoral workers, the NGOs, have,” he said, explaining his inspiration for the proposal.

“Then we can develop relationships at the border and locally where a community group says, listen, ‘we, we need data on this because if we have data on this, maybe we can file a lawsuit. Maybe we can create an advocacy campaign.’ Here are the tools that we need to do that. Here’s the expertise that we need to make this happen.”

As part of the grant, faculty and students will partake in immersive workshops on current immigration issues, trips to the border, internships with migrant organizations like the Kino Border Initiative and LSA Family Services (two of the grant’s main partners), and several courses that are refocusing their curriculum to incorporate community-engaged learning. Arts and Sciences courses like the Politics of Immigration, and Global Health and Psychosocial Humanitarian Aid will offer new opportunities for students to get out of the classroom and into the community to interact directly with New York City migrant communities and organizations working on the border.

For Kasten, it was a trip to the border in 2019 that really sparked her desire to help create a more hands-on learning approach to immigration issues.

“I teach Spanish in the modern languages department. And my research, when I came to Fordham, was really about contemporary Spain,” Kasten said.

“I started teaching a bit more about migration realities in New York City, and kept wondering how to bring that into my research. In 2019, I went to the border with a group of faculty on a trip that professor McCartin was leading. It was through that I started thinking more deeply about connecting my research work to migration.”

McCartin envisioned the grant as an opportunity to connect Fordham faculty and students more directly with the University’s mission.

“This is a Jesuit institution, and my work is substantially about trying to invite all sorts of faculty members at Fordham—Catholic, Jewish, nonbelievers, Buddhist, etc.—to find ways to connect more with Fordham’s mission,” McCartin said. “So, the idea is this will not only enhance the experience of their work, but that will also redound to the mission of the University more.”

A major component of the initiative is what McCartin, Kasten, and Guardado refer to as “accompaniment.” The trio describes this practice as being there, side by side, and immersing students and faculty within migrant communities, so they can just absorb, without trying to critique or problem-solve.

They see accompaniment as a crucial component, but also as one of the greatest challenges and possibilities of the program.

“Since we are not located close to the border, it will look more like immersions for now, with groups of faculty going to the border for short trips,” said Guardado.

Much of the direct accompaniment work students are doing now involves hands-on interactions with recent migrants to New York City, many of whom arrived this fall on the buses sent from Texas and Florida. Through LSA Family Services, they have been working with a mostly Mexican population in East Harlem, helping them begin their asylum cases and assisting with direct needs like food, clothing, etc., Kasten said. Student interns are also helping families navigate the high school and college admissions processes.

“The longer-term accompaniment will come when students do their summer internship and spend months with these communities,” Guardado added.

“Accompaniment really means walking together, simply spending time together, and just really listening and learning from humanitarian workers and migrants on their journey. They will teach us what Fordham can do to support their struggle.”

–by Jonathan Schienberg

“All of the things that we teach and talk about at Fordham—the city as our campus, research with justice and solidarity, attention to those on the margins—those are all at the center of this project,” said Brenna Moore, Ph.D., project co-leader and Fordham theology professor.

The organization, LSA Family Health Service, was founded by the Little Sisters of the Assumption in 1958. It’s a community-based organization that provides free services to disadvantaged families in East Harlem, with the goal of strengthening and empowering them to uplift the entire community. Last year, LSA enlisted two Fordham professors—Moore, a theology professor who serves on LSA’s board of directors, and Carey Kasten, Ph.D., an associate professor of Spanish—to help them tell their story. The resulting research project, “Mutuality in El Barrio: Stories of LSA Family Health Services in East Harlem,” will be the first academic study of LSA’s 63-year history and its long-term impact in the community, said Moore. 

In February 2020, Moore and Kasten launched their project, thanks to funding from CCEL’s Faculty-Led Initiatives program, which supports interdisciplinary projects that serve the local community and advance social justice. 

“We thought it was a great fit for CCEL and Fordham,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., executive director of CCEL. “This entire project, from conception to implementation, is about practicing mutuality.”

Mutuality is the guiding spiritual principle of LSA, which was originally founded by Catholic nuns, said Moore.

“They are now run by a more secular staff, but they’re still grounded in this principle of mutuality that distinguishes them from other organizations. They have a two-way relationship where both parties cultivate their strengths and learn from each other,” said Moore. 

In spring 2020, Moore and Kasten hired seven Spanish-speaking student researchers from Fordham—three undergraduates and four students from the Graduate School of Social Service—to help them interview immigrant families who have used LSA’s services. In fall 2020, the team interviewed 19 mothers in their native language about what brought them to the U.S. and how the skills they learned through LSA have empowered them and their families.

The women’s stories were emotional and poignant, said Moore. 

“There were several people in one household who had COVID, along with a little sister who had leukemia. There was so much trauma and struggle in these interviews. But it was also remarkable to hear about the resilience and the creativity these women possessed, as well as their desire to give back to their community through volunteering and helping their neighbors,” said Moore.  

The hour-and-a-half long conversations were emotional for the interviewers, too, said Kasten. 

“Those women are trusting you with so much at that moment—their story of coming to the U.S., with both trauma and reflection,” said Kasten, a fluent Spanish speaker who spearheaded the interview process. “The students were also moved by the interviews and drawn into the project because many of them are members of Spanish-speaking households whose parents have stories similar to the women that they interviewed.” 

This past spring, Moore and Kasten’s team transcribed their interviews and researched LSA’s history, spirituality, and ministry. In November, they were awarded the $15,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Religion and Theology Program to take their project to the finish line. From now until January 2023, the team will complete their book, present their research at a conference, and host a public event where all project participants can celebrate their work. Their project is now under advance book contract with Fordham Press’s Empire State Editions. 

“It means everything for us to have our stories told,” said Trish Gough, director of volunteer services at LSA. “We’ve lived within this community for 63 years. Our history is so rich, and capturing it in a book filled with research means so much to us and our community.”

Hostile Terrain 94, an art installation that aims to call attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the southern border, will debut on Thursday, Nov. 4, in the Lowenstein Center’s Lipani Gallery.

Composed of 3,205 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019, the ongoing project includes participants from several communities—including Fordham.

Members of the Fordham community have been recruited in classes and at table, sessions to fill out the tags, some of which contain personal information about those who died. Information about each of the migrants was collected by a nonprofit group called the Undocumented Migration Project and provided to groups that participate.

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, spearheaded the effort, which was originally timed around the November 2020 elections. Kasten opted to wait until after the pandemic because in-person participation was key to the project, which was funded by a $10,000 dean’s challenge grant and support from the offices of the Chief Diversity Officer and the Office of Mission Integration and Ministry. In January, the installation will move to the Rose Hill campus offices of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

“It’s great because you get people coming to these sessions because they know about them, but you can also stop people and talk to them, which is what I really like because you have an interaction with someone who may not initially be interested in this, and then they take a moment to enter into this space where they’re thinking about border policies from a personal standpoint,” said Kasten, who has also recruited participants from outside groups such as the Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation in Washington Heights and Ellis Preparatory School in the Bronx.

“That encounter with someone’s life is intense, and I think it’s surprising to people, the emotions that come up and the experience of writing down someone’s name, or even an unidentified body.”

The exhibit is part of a series of pop-up exhibits that the Undocumented Migration Project has promoted at 150 locations around the world. The tally begins with migrants who attempted to cross the border in 1994 because that was the year that the United States Border Patrol formally implemented an enforcement strategy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence.” The idea was that discouraging undocumented migrants from attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border near ports of entry would force them to attempt to cross through areas such as the Sonoran Desert, and the treacherous natural environment would act as a deterrent.

Instead, more than 6 million people have attempted to migrate through the desert since 2000, and at least 3,200 people have died while attempting the journey, largely from dehydration and hyperthermia.

At Fordham, Kasten has reached out to fellow faculty to ask if their students will participate. Yves Andradas and Tzipporah Goins, first-year students enrolled in an honors natural sciences class taught by Jason Morris, Ph.D., professor of biology, recently filled out toe tags as part of their classwork. Morris incorporated discussions about the effects of hyperthermia on the human body, and the geologic patterns behind the creation of deserts.

Andradas, who hails from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and plans to major in philosophy, said he was generally aware of what is happening on the border, but has a better appreciation for the severity of the problem now. Still, watching videos and reading articles about it didn’t really prepare him for the day he and his 18 classmates filled out tags.

“The activity was only about 15 minutes, but it felt so much longer,” he said.

“There was a very strange silence in the room. I don’t have a problem with silence, but in this situation, the silence was very purposeful. People knew not to start a background chat.”

Goins, a York, Pennsylvania, resident who is planning to major in film and English, was struck by how many tags in the envelope she was given were for bodies that were never identified when they were found in 2003 and 2004, when she was just 2 years old. One of Goins’ best friends is an undocumented immigrant and is very open about her status, so immigration is not new to her. But as a daughter of an immigrant herself, she said that filling out the tags still hit home.

“I had to restart twice, and I was so focused on the fact that I made a mistake, I had to take a step back and, tell myself, ‘It’s ok that you made a mistake,’” she said.

“Focus on the fact that you’re writing about someone who has actually died. This is someone else’s name, and this is their life, and this is their story.”

She also couldn’t help but take note of her ability to participate in the project from the safety and comfort of the campus.

“I definitely felt very privileged to be able to do this. For us, it can be just a project,” she said. “I wish I had filled out more.”

Kasten said they’ve finished about a third of the tags and is hopeful the rest will be done by mid-November. Anyone who is interested in helping can lend a hand, she said. The exhibit will be on view through Nov. 29.

“3,205 doesn’t seem that big, but I can tell you, I’ve touched each one of these tags as we close out the folder, and the act of collating that many toe tags does make you realize the gravity of that number,” she said.

It’s important to have conversations about this topic, she said, because there are many misconceptions about what’s happening on the ground.

“I’ve had people who’ve been much more touched than they thought they would be, or they’ve been confused as to why this is the way it is,” she said.

“During the Trump presidency, lot of people learned about migration in ways they hadn’t before.
They think this is a new policy, but it’s not; it started in 1994. This is not a partisan issue. It’s something that has been happening systematically for a really long time.”

“The U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a place where the Earth just swallows up bodies,” says Leo Guardado, Ph.D.

He doesn’t mince words about the humanitarian crisis at the border. In May, 144,278 migrants were taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol, the highest monthly total in more than a decade. And each year, the agency finds hundreds of corpses—the remains of men, women, and children who died traversing the vast desert and mountain regions on both sides of the dividing line.

The Trump administration’s efforts—separating migrant parents and children, deploying U.S. troops to the border, sending asylum-seekers to Mexico to await immigration court hearings—have not reduced the number of people fleeing poverty and violence in Central America to enter the U.S. without authorization.

Guardado knows all too well the pain and fear that families suffer when making the dangerous decision to migrate to the U.S. He was just 9 years old in 1991 when he and his mother made the nearly 3,000-mile trek from their mountain town in El Salvador.

Today, he is an assistant professor of theology at Fordham. And while the federal government remains deeply divided on how to handle the crisis, he views it not as a political abstraction but as a theological issue.

A Migrant’s Journey

Guardado was born in a rural town in northern El Salvador during the country’s civil war. As he approached his 10th birthday, his mother feared that he would soon be conscripted by the army or the guerrillas.

She was determined to move him from harm’s way. Family in the U.S. loaned them money, and Guardado said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle the family had to help pay for his and his mother’s journey. He remembers crying with his grandfather as they said their goodbyes, both of them knowing they might never see each other again. And they never did.

“We got on a bus, and I counted palm trees,” Guardado said. He learned two English phrases from his mother—“‘Thank you,’ ‘I’m sorry’—how to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he reached the hundreds, he fell asleep. He awoke in Guatemala, and from there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, mostly involving walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” He traveled with a group of about 15 migrants who followed a “coyote,” a paid guide, for the length of the journey.

He remembers being crammed into false compartments of trailers, packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time. In Tijuana, they crossed beneath a barbed-wired fence patrolled by jeeps, and in darkness jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car,” which took them over back roads to a white van that ultimately brought them to San Diego.

He and his mother eventually connected with family in Los Angeles, where Guardado was educated by the De La Salle Christian Brothers at Cathedral High School. He earned a full scholarship to attend Saint Mary’s College of California, and it was in his first year there that he finally received legal residency status. He became a U.S. citizen in 2010.

Religion, Politics, and Sanctuary

Saint Mary’s is not far from a Trappist monastery, where Guardado spent a year before earning a master’s degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame. For two years, he directed the social justice ministry at a Catholic church in Tucson, Arizona. Then he returned to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate,” he said, and he returned to Notre Dame, where he earned a doctorate in theology.

He initially studied early church history, but his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which emphasizes the perspective of the poor.

“I began to crack open the possibility that my own experience, my community’s experience, and the historical reality of Latin America—poverty, oppression, war, violence—that all of this was raw material out of which I could do theological reflection,” Guardado said.

In his dissertation, he wrote about the 1980s sanctuary movement, when hundreds of Catholic churches provided a safe haven for refugees from Central America. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take that risk. He said bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

“The term sanctuary often mistakenly gets reduced to politics,” he said. “In light of human displacement worldwide and 11 million undocumented here in the U.S., if we’re to be a church of and for the poor, then you can’t just say ‘no.’ You have to engage with the question theologically. Otherwise, one can argue that it’s an ecclesial sin of omission.”

Guardado said the point of theology is not just to “do religious metaphysics” but to deal with contemporary issues head-on. He is developing a course on migration and theology that will include a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I want my students to ask: How does theological thinking change the world? How does it change history? How does it leave an impact so that it’s not just thinking about God but actually aims to transform the world?”

Bearing Witness at the Border

Guardado is far from being the only Fordham professor engaging with the humanitarian crisis at the border.

During spring break in March, a group of 10 faculty members went to see it for themselves. They visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico, side—that serves deportees and asylum-seekers and promotes a spirit of international solidarity.

Faculty members raised $13,000 to buy toiletries and necessities for the migrants, and Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning funded the trip. Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for mission integration and planning, said it was a necessity, given how migration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, and theology professor James McCartin, Ph.D., acting associate provost of the University, co-led the trip.

It was the second time Reich went to Nogales, having worked with the Kino Initiative in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with Border Patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there.

They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tucson, Arizona, where immigrants appeared in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being in the U.S. illegally after asking two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he was surprised to learn that a wall was constructed through the middle of the city of Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year-old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said. “The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there that they just got rushed out, so I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the Border Patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, he said. But it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said that by then he felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept.

‘Accompany, Humanize, Complicate’

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, was moved by learning specific details of the migrants’ experience, like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight.) “We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate,” she said. “To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in [in Mexico], was something that really stood out.”

McCartin, the theology professor who co-led the trip, recalled a conversation with a man from Honduras who asked if all Americans consider him and his fellow migrants to be criminals. “I said, ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said, ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

—Story co-author: Patrick Verel

This spring, a group of 10 Fordham faculty members traveled there to see it for themselves. From March 17 to 22, they visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico side. Kino aims to promote border and immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person and a spirit of binational solidarity.

The trip was funded by Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning and featured faculty from arts and sciences, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Graduate School of Education, the Gabelli School of Business, and the Law School. The group raised $13,000 to purchase toiletries and necessities for the migrants and documented their time on a blog.

Big Changes in Just One Year

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., professor of communications and chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, co-led the trip along with Associate Professor of Theology and Acting Associate Provost James McCartin, Ph.D. It was Reich’s second time in Nogales, having worked with Kino in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed since her last visit, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with border patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there. They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tuscon, Arizona, where immigrants appear in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being here illegally after two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he knew a little about the crisis at the border before heading there, but learned a lot from the trip. He was surprised to learn, for instance, that a wall was constructed through the middle of the Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

‘Never Got to Say Goodbye’

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said.

“The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there, that they just got rushed out. So, I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the border patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, but it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said he now felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept. He also said that the bonding experience he had with the other nine faculty was “very powerful.”

Accompany, Humanize, Complicate

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, echoed this, saying she was moved by the possibility of future projects at Fordham. Her scholarship touches on issues related to the border, so she was familiar with the situation. But she was moved to learn things like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight).

“We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate. To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in, was something that really stood out,” she said.

She was also shocked at the level of needless suffering taking place. When people are deported to Mexico for instance, they are given back any cash they had on them when they were apprehended in the form of a check. But the checks are only cashable in the United States, so once a week, a nonprofit group called No More Deaths visits the comedor to help people cash them. She also wasn’t impressed with the judge who spoke to them after presiding over the deportation proceedings.

“He said, ‘I’m just carrying out my marching orders.’ And I thought, ‘You’re a lawyer. You could leave and get a different job.’”

She felt more empathy toward border patrol agents. “They have fewer choices, and their job sounds really hard,” she said. “I found it really complicated to parse it all.”

McCartin said the goal of the trip was to give faculty members an experience different from their everyday work life that would also then affect their work life. The group will reunite soon for debriefing and discussion of possible future plans.

One conversation that will always stay with him happened when a man from Honduras asked him if Americans all thought they were criminals.

“I said ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

Carrying Their Stories Back Home

Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president and presidential assistant for planning in the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, said the trip was a necessity, given how immigration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Reich is making sure the issue lives on, having structured the syllabus of one of her spring classes, Films of Moral Struggle, to include representations of borders and migration. The class is also sending Easter cards to people in detention at the border to bring a little color and humanity into their lives, she said.

Above all, she said she’ll hold onto memories of conversations with the migrants she met, like one with a man at the comedor who was sporting a University of Michigan hat. He’d lived in the U.S. for 22 years before being deported after being stopped for a traffic violation.

“I will always carry their stories with me,” Reich said.

Photos courtesy of Fordham faculty.

It’s a phrase that’s uttered often in Jesuit circles, and at Fordham, it’s been exemplified through programs such as the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice and Global Outreach.

This year, as part of an effort to advance and expand that work, Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning launched the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Arto Woodley, Ed.D., the center’s executive director, said the goal is to streamline operations, provide support for faculty who integrate community-engaged learning in their classes, and help students become civic leaders.

He also wants to instill what he calls a “philosophy of community.”

“When we say, ‘We’re working with the community,’ what does that really mean? Are we working with certain neighborhoods? Are we working with certain zip codes? What’s our emphasis? How do we engage with them?” he said.

“Part of developing this center helps us say, ‘Who are our neighbors? Who are we working with, and why are we working with them? What will be the impact of our work?’”

A Focus on Faculty

As part of the reorganization, the Dorothy Day Center and Global Outreach no longer operate as independent entities. Former Dorothy Day Center director Roxanne De La Torre has assumed the title of director of campus and community leadership in the larger center. Likewise, Paul Francis, who had been director of Global Outreach, has assumed the title of director of programs and operations.

Woodley said the level of community outreach, leadership development, and faculty support should increase significantly with the reorganization. This, he said, will honor the legacy of Day, for whom the University’s Community Service Program was renamed in 2009.

Faculty will be a key part of the center’s new focus. That’s because like the residents who live near Fordham’s campuses, they have long-lasting ties to the community. The goal is to develop deep and sustainable relationships between the two groups that will provide a context for students to learn.

“At many institutions, it’s activity-based. You know, we sent 50 students to a soup kitchen, they stacked 100 cans, and they gave those cans to five families. Our whole goal is to make sure we expand the boundaries of engaged scholarship beyond that,” he said.

Not every subject taught in the University naturally lends itself to engaged scholarship, but for some professors, it is a powerful tool. Karina Hogan, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology who was part of a faculty advisory committee on community outreach, plans next semester to have students in her Sacred Texts of the Mideast class examine the ways in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam address themes of social justice in their texts. They will split into three groups and work out of a New York City synagogue, church, and mosque, where they will be able to observe how members of the respective congregations put words into action.

“The idea is to really get out and see how these ideas are actually put into action. I think it’ll be a good addition to the class,” she said.

“They Live In This Community”

For Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of modern languages, it would be inconceivable not to send students in her Spanish Language and Literature class off campus.

“They live in this community, and I want them to see that they’re capable of engaging civically with their community, ” she said.

“Speaking in a different language creates foreign travel opportunities in the city we live in, but ultimately, I would like to students to apply those skills to everything they do.”

In the past, Kasten has found partner organizations to work with both on her own and through the Dorothy Day Center. It can be a logistical challenge; since many only need three to four students, she works with several different groups to place all her students. She’s intrigued by possible connections the Center for Engaged Learning will create, and hopes they will add to those that happen organically.

A good example is the immigrant support group New Sanctuary Coalition, she said. Although many students have been referred there via faculty, several have found the group on their own and incorporated volunteering there into their own studies.

Ideally, Kasten said, she’d also like to connect volunteer opportunities to her research agenda, something that Woodley said the center will focus on as well.

“I’ve really struggled with how to bring some of this work out of the classroom and into my research. I hope to see examples from faculty members on how to do this,” she said.

Scholarship Intertwined With Civic Involvement

One of Kasten’s students, Colleen Kelly, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who’s majoring in social work and Spanish, used a Dean’s Summer Research Grant to intern last summer at the Northern Manhattan Immigration Corporation. She was interested in learning what it actually means for New York City to be a sanctuary city.

She learned that immigrants who are in the country legally are being discouraged from applying to become citizens because seemingly minor crimes—such as jumping a turnstile—on their record might trigger a visit from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“In this time, it’s very critical to have an open definition of sanctuary and realize, in terms of the immigrant community, it’s always changing because the current administration is instilling a lot of fear of anyone who’s not a citizen,” she said.

“So anyone that’s not a citizen is really in need of sanctuary, in the form of community.”

Both this internship and one she’s currently doing at a school in the Bronx, where she’s assisting a social worker, have been directly informed by her classwork.

“I also know if a client comes to me and they need help with their asylum connection, I now have connections,” she said.

“Growing my network is not only great for my own job prospects but also my clients I’m going to serve.”

Woodley said establishing successful partnerships will go a long way toward helping Fordham fulfill the tenets of its Jesuit heritage.

“When Jesus was asked by the Sadducees what the greatest commandment was, he said to love the Lord thy God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love thy neighbor as yourself,” he said.

“The center is the ‘love thy neighbor’ part of it, but with a system that’s tied to engaged scholarship.”

On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian