“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

It was around then that the New York Immigration Coalition, where he is executive director, started to receive notices in the mail for unknown people who were due to appear before court. 

“The notice would say, “Hey, your immigration court date is X day, at this time, at this location. But we never knew who these people were. So, we were receiving people’s notices to appear who we had never engaged with,” he said on Sept. 19 at an appearance at the Lincoln Center campus.

A few weeks later, he said, people started showing up at the coalition’s midtown office, bearing documents that listed their home address as the office. Federal officials, they said, had told them that the coalition would provide them with housing, health, care, and legal services for free. 

“We work to bring services to communities that need them—everything from legal services to adult literacy, education, classes on financial literacy, health care enrollment, whatever you can think of, we try to bring it into the community,” he said.

“But we don’t do housing, and we don’t do emergency shelter. We’ve never engaged with emergency shelter up until this point back in May and June. So, we quickly realized that this is bigger than we had thought.”

An Unexpected Influx of Arrivals

Awawdeh, a native of Brooklyn who had only just taken on the executive director role that month, didn’t know at the time that his group had been pulled into a crisis orchestrated by Texas governor Greg Abbott, who had begun busing immigrants from the border to cities such Washington D.C. and New York. An estimated 11,000 people have arrived in New York City since May, straining the city’s shelter system. 

Awawdeh spoke about that crisis as part of “Coalition Building in New York Communities: A Conversation with the New York Immigration Coalition,” a conversation hosted by Kujegi Camara, assistant director for community engagement and operations at Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.

In a wide-ranging conversation and follow-up Q&A with audience members, Awawdeh addressed everything from the ways his organization has adjusted to the influx of immigrants to the ways he learned to become a community organizer.

For starters, the group now distributes at its offices “dignity care packages” with toiletries, PPE, and snacks to new arrivals. Immigrants are also given service guides that can help them navigate the various agencies that can help with basic needs.

“The service guide breaks down everything, from where to get legal services to health care to DOE enrollment for kids, and everything you need to know,” he said, noting that everything is packaged in a sturdy backpack. 

“The reason why we give them book bags, and not just some plastic bag, is because people show up with nothing but their paperwork in their hand and their clothes on their back,” he said.

“So it allows them to put their paperwork somewhere safe. If they lose it, they’re going to have an incredibly hard time navigating the immigration system.”

The group also launched a Welcoming New York campaign, to ensure that every level of government is stepping up to support the recent arrivals.

An Evolving Focus in Helping Immigrants

When the coalition was founded 35 years ago, it was primarily focused on providing services, he said, but it gradually shifted to focus on coordinating with other service providers and then began advocating for immigrant-friendly policies. It currently has 200 member organizations in the state and serves between six and eight million people annually.

“A lot of our work in coalition buildings trying to bring together diverse voices, to be able to find the shared values that we all have, find an issue and a shared solution, and then fighting for that solution to become a reality,” he said. 

He cited as an example the 2019 passage of the Green Light Law, which made New York one of 13 states that allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain a driver’s license. 

The coalition has had to shift its priorities again in response to the convoys being sent from the border, becoming more involved in efforts to provide emergency housing. But Awawdeh cautioned that it is neither a new phenomenon nor is it one that will be resolved soon.

“There are an enormous number of issues that we’ve never had to deal with before that we’re trying to figure out now”, he said noting that when one also includes people who are not being bused by the Texas government, the true number of recent arrivals is probably closer to 15,000.

“It is an incredibly cruel and unjust system that just needs to be flipped on its head, and the solution isn’t going to just be a quick, rapid response campaign,” he said. 

“We need to change our immigration system. It is not built to support people, it is not built to be just, and we’re going to continue to see horrific stories.”

Grateful for a Fordham Education

Awawdeh also talked about his own experience at Fordham. He initially attended Long Island University with the goal of earning a B.S. in biochemistry, but when his mother got sick, he had to drop out to support her and his six siblings. In 2013, he enrolled at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies (PCS); in 2019 he graduated with a B.A. in organizational leadership and psychology.

“This is going to sound so corny, but I didn’t think I needed to get my college degree.

But when I went through the courses, the professors at PCS are folks just like us just living their lives, but they gave so much to every single student that it made it so much easier for you as a student to advance in your educational learning experience,” he said.

“So, I have to give it up to Fordham. I was super skeptical, and then they made me a believer.”

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.”

“I was struck by the diversity of projects featured, but what most impressed me was the creativity and resilience of our students, several of whom had to reinvent their projects in the face of pandemic restrictions,” said Stark-Gendrano. “It was inspiring to see such good work come out of such challenging conditions.”

From combating global warming to undermining misogyny to embracing immigration to parsing gender identity and sparking the attention of boys with ADHD—the ideas of graduating seniors and their undergraduate peers filled four days of sessions on Zoom.

This Land is Her Land

Senior Selena Juarez-Galindo, a visual arts major, presented her multimedia work in a project titled “Exploring my Mexican Family History through Art.”

“My family are all basically undocumented immigrants and I am the first generation,” Juarez-Galindo said, noting that since she was born in the U.S. she has full citizenship.

Juarez-Galindo’s family is from a town called Guerrero, where people native to the land still speak Mixteco, a language that predates the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The intention of her artwork is “to chase a native narrative” and portray distinct images of her family’s culture and show others that it’s not unlike their own.

She noted that her required courses in theology deepened her understanding of the plight of her family and the struggles faced by immigrants and refugees.

“When it comes to immigrants here, there has to be a kind of morality that’s above the law, especially when American nationalism can create really horrible effects,” she said of the consequences facing people crossing the border, such as separating children from their parents. “There have been so many immoral things in history that were legal, such as slavery. Our morality has to come first.”

Keeping Boys’ Attention During Online Programs

Senior Arbi Kumi, a psychology major, has always been interested in what makes the mind tick, though he had never concentrated on the mind of a child. His study, “Exploring the Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Virtual Summer Treatment Program for Children with Behavioral and Social Problems,” sprang from an internship at the Child Mind Institute, a mental health nonprofit clinic for children. There, he was assigned to a virtual summer camp for boys with ADHD. With permission from the institute and from parents, he studied how boys’ attention improved and/or degraded during a virtual adaptation of a summer camp program. Instead of five days a week at six hours a day, the program ran for just two hours a day for five days a week. The boys, who worked in peer groups, showed substantial gains during treatment that sought to improve their social skills over the course of the program, he said.

“We knew anecdotally that screen fatigue was a problem and it might not be interesting enough to keep the boy’s attention, so online games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox were used as a reward and something we could use to teach them new social skills,” said Kumi.

By using parental surveys and a point system administered by camp counselors, Kumi found that post-treatment levels showed significant improvement in social skills, including group discussions, helping or being flexible, and sticking to a plan—particularly with peer support. However, he said, certain problem behaviors, such as interrupting, did not improve. Beyond the findings, Kumi said that he learned a lot about his own perceptions of children.

“It was so much fun; this one boy had a new nickname for me every day, he was so funny, so smart,” he said. “I also realized how much stigma is placed on mental health as opposed to physical health.”

Delving into Arabic LGBTQ+ Identity in NYC

Senior Batool Abdelhafez, who goes by the pronoun they, majored in anthropology and psychology. For their project titled “Identity, Duality, and Kinship Among LGBT Arab-Americans in the American Diaspora,” they interviewed 15 members of the LGBT+ Arab American community and the Southwest Asian and North African community (SWANA). They set out to find what gave people in the group a unique sense of personhood, and in what spaces the group felt free to be true to themselves. Lastly, they sought to define whether LGBT+ Arab American and SWANA individuals consider themselves to be a separate subculture from the LGBT+ community at large.

“The emergence of colonialism demonized and categorized LGBT+ Arabs as something to be duly exoticized, but also viewed as somehow degenerate, backward, or uncivilized,” they said. “We see this context even today just for Arabs in general, right? But it’s even more so for LGBT Arabs.”

They noted that all their subjects were proud of being LGBT+, which helped them dissect layers of identity that included class, national identity, and being LGBT+ in New York City. Their study found that all subjects expressed sentiments about being racialized, being discriminated against, and feeling exoticized. The group’s experiences were unique enough that a community separate from the LGBT+ community has formed, they said. They spoke of a burgeoning scene expressed in art, music, and culture at nightclub parties such as Yalla! and via community groups, such as Tarab NYC.

Teenage Girls on the Verge

Senior Gillian Russo majored in journalism. Her presentation, “Women Of Mass Destruction: Power, Violence, and the Supernatural in Teenage-Girl Theatre,” examined four recent plays that combine violence and witchcraft as perpetrated by teenage girls. The plays were produced and directed by women and non-binary artists. Russo asserted that the plays shocked audiences with an uncomfortable truth that teenage girls—”the last group you’d expect to be violent”—could also be viewed as “natural partners” to horror.

Russo chose the plays because she saw a trend developing between magic, witchcraft, and teenage girls in the theater. She also noted that the plays took on societal views of women more broadly. Too often media employs the catty girl trope, she said, and ignores the depth of adolescent emotion that could rise to the level of theatrical violence.

“Most girls aren’t necessarily this violent in real life, but in the elevated world of the theater you can go to extreme examples,” she said. “What better way to drive that home than putting it live on stage in front of you, and showing the most extreme thing that a girl can do, like violence, so she can lead her own charge for self-recognition and self-realization?”

Going Rooftop Green

Lydia Hallett, a senior majoring in environmental studies, presented on “The Cost-Benefit Analysis of Urban Green Roofs.” After studying abroad in Sweden, Hallett saw a proliferation of green rooftops there and decided to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of green rooftops in New York. She found herself with more questions than answers.

“In my research that I wanted to understand these kinds of large solutions, and what it actually means for a city to take that on,” said Hallett.

Hallett identified public benefits that green roofs provide, including stormwater management, biodiversity, and improved air quality. However, she also found that high up-front installation costs often overshadowed returns on investments for most developers.

“No one wants to put a price tag on nature, but that’s kind of what has to be done for order in order for people to understand the benefits of green roofs,” she said.

Pope Francis: In Your Eyes I See My Words

This spring saw the publication of the second volume in Fordham University Press’ collection of homilies, letters, and speeches by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, in the years before he became Pope Francis. (The third and final volume is due in October.) In an introduction to this book, which covers 2005 to 2008, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, writes about the future pope’s focus on “ecological ethics” during this time, and his growing ability to “[enter]into the tragedies of his fellow citizens” and “speak truth to power,” particularly after 194 people were killed in a fire at a nightclub whose owner had ignored the fire safety code in the building’s construction.

For Marina A. Herrera, Ph.D., GSAS ’71, ’74, who translated the pope’s words into English, the book highlights the pope’s “boundless linguistic creativity” and gives readers an opportunity to see how “a mind destined to lead the Church in this turbulent time was shaped in the laboratory of a life lived among the people he served, traveling in public buses and shunning the trappings of hierarchical privilege.”

That Further Shore: A Memoir of Irish Roots and American Promise

In this memoir, John D. Feerick, FCRH ’58, LAW ’61, dean emeritus and Norris Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, reflects with characteristic humility and humor on his upbringing as the eldest child of Irish immigrant parents in the South Bronx, his landmark role in framing the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment during the 1960s, his leadership as dean of Fordham Law for 18 years, and his commitment to a life lived in the service of others. The Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”) hung on a plaque on his Fordham office wall for many years, he writes, a reminder of “the importance of being a bridge builder” and “not letting the pressure of everyday life take away from our capacity to feel for one another.”

Related Story: On May 27, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, served as guest host of the show Fordham Conversations to interview John Feerick for WFUV, the University’s public media station. 

Lady Liberty: An Illustrated History of America’s Most Storied Woman

In a series of brief essays—richly illustrated with 33 full-page reproductions of paintings by Antonio Masi—Joan Marans Dim recounts the epic struggle to create the Statue of Liberty and transport it from France to the U.S. during the 19th century. She also writes about the immigrant experience, and how “The New Colossus,” an 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) helped transform the statue into a symbol of American freedom and economic prosperity for arriving immigrants—an ideal often at odds with U.S. immigration policy and Americans’ shifting attitudes toward immigrants through the years.

A Mexican State of Mind showcases the creative endeavors of Mexicans in New York City, many of whom are undocumented. How did you start working on this project?
I actually started it [as a graduate student]at Fordham. Even though I was studying English, [the program]gave me so much space to explore other interests, [so]I took a course on sociology and minorities, and for my final project I did an ethnography about Mexican hip-hop. After Fordham, I reworked it and presented it at a conference, and there was a lot of interest. And then I worked on it more, looking at graffiti and other art forms, while I was also working in restaurants amongst some of these same people, [the artists featured in my research]. And then I kept working on it for my Ph.D. at Yale. I just felt their stories needed to be told, and I was in a unique position to tell them.

So how did your identity as a Mexican-American poet play into that unique perspective?
I think I saw, as an artist and restaurant worker, how I was treated differently than undocumented people or people perceived as undocumented because of their skin color. But to me what was most amazing was, despite these hardships and marginalizations, they were fighting for creative lives. I think that’s what’s most important. There’s such a focus on what undocumented people lack—rights, health care, education, employment stability. But what do they bring to the world? Obviously they bring their labor, but beyond that—we need to think of them as three-dimensional human beings with creative lives and interests. They’re forming collectives, they’re forming sometimes transnational and multinational networks. They’re shaping and creating culture.

Two concepts you touch on in the book are how we view migrants versus immigrants, and the idea of a mobile borderlands. What do you mean by each of those?
I like to think about my subjects—many of whom are my friends now, I have tattoos done by them on my body—as migrants instead of immigrants. That’s because I want to emphasize two-way mobility, and movement as a human right. It also shifts the idea of immigrants as “invaders” just coming into a country. We’re all potential migrants. And for the borderlands piece, I wanted to take Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the U.S.-Mexico border as a wound that causes both pain and creativity out of the traditional Southwest borderlands where it originated and think of it in a New York context, where Mexicans are coming up against not just white people but some of the most diverse populations in the world. How does that multinational world change their creativity? I think it affects the type of culture they produce. They embrace, for example, the history of hip-hop in New York City as well as international sounds and people. It changes their interactions, their experience, and their creative work.

How did your subjects feel about being featured in the book?
They were all down for it. One of the things I always remember that one of them said was, “Dejamos una huella que estuvimos aquí,” or “We are leaving a mark that we were here.” And I think they saw I could help them leave that mark—because these are vulnerable populations; many of them could be deported at any time. And they care that there’s something to show for their time in New York. I did get some feedback on the book—I asked them how they felt about how I was representing them—and it was always positive. But they would say you could highlight this more, or this. It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever written, with new ways to think about diaspora, transnationalism, Mexican studies … but I didn’t want it to be too academic-y. They helped me bring out some on-the-ground theory. I can’t wait to give them copies.

How do you create the same space for new voices in your classroom?
I think it’s really important for students to see themselves in the authors they’re reading. If students can see themselves in the curriculum, I hope they feel empowered by it. So I bring in a number of Latino or African American authors, many of them living authors, often from the Bronx. You have to widen the canon. But there’s also the canon within the canon. The Latino canon is marginalized within the American literature canon, but the Afro-Latino canon is marginalized within that. Many of these students experience racism within their own communities. There is colorism, or people think they’re not Latino because of the color of their skin. I want them to know there’s a body of literature that talks about these issues. And we’re not just talking about issues of race but also issues of sexuality. I want them to think on their own, to challenge ideas, to think of themselves as scholars who can have a voice about what the future of the canon is going to be.

How does your poetry address some of these same issues?
A lot of my poetry explores where I fit in. I don’t identify as fully white or fully Mexican, because each negates the other half. I will never give an identity to anybody else. I think we need to stop labeling people, and start letting people identify how they want to identify and let those identities evolve. Identity is transformable; it changes across generations and lifetimes. I’ve watched students who are half white like me read Latino literature in my own classroom and have that part of their identity become something very powerful for them. I want to create that space for people like that, and I hope my poetry does that as well. People feel out of place for different reasons, so I hope that can resonate for whoever feels like that.

What are you working on next?
I have a draft of my next poetry book, called Chingona Rules, that I’m editing. I’m working on a book about Afro-Latino literary history from the 1930s and 1940s, which also came out of my studies at Fordham. And then I’m working on a book with my husband, Tony Planas, about the psychological repercussions of long-term detention on children. He’s a reporter, so he will take the lead on interviews and I will take the lead on research. He’s also a photographer, and he’s taken pictures that I’ve written poems for. It’s cool, because this is a new way to collaborate for us. And to bring more voices to the forefront.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

Since 1914, the church has been celebrating the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. As I am sure you know, the plight of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers worldwide is increasingly dire. This year, the Jesuit Conference President and Provincial Superiors of the United States and Canada have invited everyone in the Jesuit community to expand our advocacy efforts on behalf of our migrant brothers and sisters in advance of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees on September 29.

The University and its students, faculty, and staff already do much in this area, but in accordance with the letter from the President and Provincials (link below) I will be asking our cabinet and our deans to be mindful of opportunities to support migrants and refugees wherever possible, in addition to the many laudable efforts you in the campus community already make as individuals.

Thank you, as always, for everything you do in service to the human family.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

Read the full Document: President and Provincials Letter on Migration

Robin Andersen, Ph.D., a professor of communication and media studies, hopes to show how, with Media, Central American Refugees, and the U.S. Border Crisis: Security Discourses, Immigrant Demonization, and the Perpetuation of Violence (Routledge, 2019).

The key to understanding anti-immigration rhetoric in blaring headlines and incendiary tweets about an “invasion” of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico, she said, is to recognize the language as a “security discourse.”

The narrative starts with a “security” concern, which recently has been the southern border. It asks,What is causing this dire, fearful danger? Immigrants. When news starts from the position of fear of invasion, it must be assumed that those arriving at the border are inherently criminal; they are, after all, invaders, she said. “When news demonizes people who are refugees, they become the enemy; they become othered.”

The next logical step in this media framework is to focus on what security forces are doing to stop them, she said. We look to authority, in this case, the military, for protection.

“The way you open the story and start to talk about it dictates the way the story is going to be narrated in the press,” she said.

“Then we’re going to hear about the soldiers going down and putting up concertina wire and beefing up the border with more weaponry.”

Andersen noted that this is not a new phenomenon. In a 1983 television address, Ronald Reagan warned that unless a tough stand was taken against communism in Nicaragua, a “tidal wave” of “feetpeople” would be “swarming our country.” But a better way to tell the story, she said, is through a humanitarian discourse.

“If you turned the narrative around and started by asking, ‘What’s making it impossible for the people of these countries to stay there, prosper, to make a life for themselves? Why are they being murdered?’ Those questions would lead to a very a different narrative, and a very different news story,” she said.

“What is happening in the countries of Central America? What’s been the U.S. role there? After all, the U.S. has been policing the hemisphere for years. So, let’s take a look at what we’ve actually been doing.”

Andersen, who visited El Salvador as a graduate student in 1979, details in the book multiple instances over the last three decades in which she says the United States contributed to the instability of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Central America.

To understand how the security discourse was embraced and repeated by major media outlets, Andersen, who co-wrote the book with Adrian Bergmann, a research fellow at the University of El Salvador, said one need look no further than the ominous warnings of an “invasion” that President Trump repeated about a caravan of immigrants making its way toward the U.S. in the months before the 2018 midterm elections.

What finally “shook the media frame,” she said, was the image of Honduran mother Maria Meza grabbing the arms of her 5-year-old twin daughters Cheili and Saira as they frantically ran from a tear gas canister spewing fumes on the Mexican side of the border wall. When it was published in November, Andersen said, news organizations began quoting from humanitarian aid and human rights organizations. Those perspectives are inherently different from security frames. Our concern was drawn to preserving life and dignity, she said, and we felt compelled to embrace those who have been persecuted in their own countries.

“We rarely discuss the ways in which our culture and our economics have been influenced by military discourse and military practices. We’ve lost a language of diplomacy and negotiation,” Andersen said.

What would a narrative that embraced a humanitarian discourse truly look like? Andersen said it would acknowledge messy truths such as those revealed in Dana Frank’s  The Long Honduran Night Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (Haymarket Books 2018), which she cites in the book.

“We basically helped the military in Honduras depose a popularly elected president in 2009, Manuel Zelaya. That led to the complete destruction of the rule of law in Honduras. The cascading effect since then is that now it’s a dictatorship, and one of the most dangerous countries on earth,” Andersen said.

Today, she said, the exodus is being driven in part by the countries’ own leaders. Whereas urban violence is forcing many in Honduras to flee, she said, in Guatemala, indigenous people are being evicted from their lands by national security forces loyal to elites.

Multinational corporations controlled by those same elites are then moving in to exploit natural resources such as palm oil, biofuels, timber, and sugar cane, she said, adding that any story that addresses migration should also address environmental degradation and the extreme risks faced by those who resist.

Andersen expresses frustration with the Democratic party as well, which she said hasn’t mounted an informed, critical perspective in response to the president.

Instead of challenging the need for more border security, she said, what they say is, “a wall isn’t the best way to secure the border.” What they should be asking is, “What can we do to stop the dismantling of these countries, to stop the forced out-migration of refugees?’” she said.

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.

Guardado is teaching “Christian Mystical Texts” at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and will be teaching a doctoral seminar in the fall. He is also developing a course for next year on migration and theology that will include a visit to the border.

He doesn’t mince words when it comes to his thoughts about the humanitarian crisis at the border. He knows all too well the pain families suffer when making the dangerous and painful decision to leave their home countries and migrate to the U.S. He made the nearly 3,000-mile trek when he was just 10 years old.

“Every year we have hundreds of remains that are recovered from there and so I have problems with the indifference of the church on this issue,” he said. “And by church, I mean the people of God, I mean the institutional church, but I also mean more than just Catholics. I mean the body of Christ in history that we claim to be—all of it.”

As the federal government sits in a stalemate about the fate of the border, each side claiming humanitarian concerns, Guardado views the crisis as a theological issue, not a political abstraction. He has spent years returning to help migrants in an area he knows all too well from his childhood. It’s a journey that propelled him from Los Angeles to the cloisters of a Trappist monastery, and now, to the halls of academia. But, in the end, he’s never really left the border.

“There are just so many forces coalescing at the border and such a rawness of the human experience that those are some of those questions I ended up taking to the monastery, and I think in the monastery those questions perhaps pressed themselves more fully upon me,” said Guardado, who started at Fordham last spring. “And that indirectly led me back to consider that maybe I have a lot more learning to do about deep questions of how the mystery of God, church, and faith intersect and can shine light upon of some of the ills of our world.”

The Journey

Guardado was born in El Salvador in the midst of the country’s civil war. As he approached the age of 10, his mother knew full well that he could be conscripted by either the army or the guerrillas. She was determined to move him from harm’s way. He said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle they had to pay for the journey, along with other monies lent by family in the U.S. He remembers his grandfather crying as they said their goodbyes, both knowing they might never see each other again. They never did; his grandfather died in the years that followed.

“We got on a bus and I counted palm trees, said goodbye to family, a lot of tears,” he said. “I knew two phrases that my mom knew: Thank you. I’m sorry. How to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness. These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He said he thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he got into the hundreds, he fell asleep and woke in Guatemala. From there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, built mostly of walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” The group of about 15 migrants followed a paid guide known as a “coyote,” or “coyota” in their case, as she was a woman. She stayed with them for the length of the journey. It’s a model of migration that no longer exists, he said. Today’s migrants are passed from one person to another, a series of small transactions on a journey through the hemisphere.

“It’s much more dangerous in that sense [today]and on many other levels,” he said. “That lady was with us, even if she would leave for a day or so, she would be back the next day and arrange the next stage of the journey.”

The group crammed into false compartments of trailers packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time “hoping that thing doesn’t turn over because if it does you’re probably not going to make it out alive.” They spent a night in jail and were bailed out by the coyota.

“You paid people along the way, as needed. The federal officers, the police. They understand that you’re leaving and why you’re leaving,” he said.

In Tijuana, they crossed beneath barbed wired patrolled by jeeps. At 2 a.m. they jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car.” They traveled through backroads to a white van. Finally, Guardado got to sit up front and ride shotgun because “no one will think anything of it, he’s just like a U.S. boy.” Soon he saw Los Angeles.

“My closest neighbor in our Salvadoran village was a quarter mile away and in between were hundreds of trees and wilderness. So, arriving in L.A., where every so often there’s a street light and each house has the same amount of space between it, it just felt so artificial. It just felt like, ‘Wow. Where’s the beauty of the chaos?’”

The Calling to Monastic Life

Guardado was educated by De La Salle Christian Brothers in L.A. and then moved on to St. Mary’s College of California. The college was not far from the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, a Trappist monastery whose abbot at the time was formed by Thomas Merton, the prolific writer and Catholic theologian. The abbot, Thomas Davis, O.C.S.O., had structured the monastery around the teachings of Merton.

“He [Merton] had this cultural and artistic sensitivity, intellectual sensitivity, and curiosity that he passed on to someone like Father Thomas Davis, so I fell in love with that vision of the monastery,” he said.

Guardado began to view the abbey as a way to question the commodified society surrounding him. To this day he cannot explain his calling. “It was a mystery,” he said. But he added that the simplicity of monastic life was “a form of resistance to U.S. values that emphasize upward mobility.”

“It’s less about being in charge of the reflection, but just allowing for a deconstruction of the self, and what emerges is something else,” he said of the prayerful silence.

After an initial year at the monastery, he began a journey that took him to the University of Notre Dame to get a master’s degree in theology and then back to his alma mater, St. Mary’s, where he served as assistant director of justice education. He returned to the borderlands as director of social justice ministry at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, a progressive parish in Tucson, Arizona. Back at the border, in many Catholic churches he witnessed a “vast indifference” to the suffering he saw. After two years, he went back to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate.”

His mentor knew more was in store for him.

“This place is too small for you, Leo,’” he said Davis told him. “I think you need to be open to the possibility that God may be calling you to a new place.”

He soon applied and was accepted back at Notre Dame for his doctorate.

“I didn’t want to live life wondering, ‘Should I have gone?’” he said, so he left the monastery.

Theological Reflection and Supporting Sanctuary

At Notre Dame, he began studying patristics—early church studies that reflected the readings that he immersed himself in at the abbey. But his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which encourages the study of theology from the perspective of the poor. Guardado would go on to become an assistant to Father Gutiérrez.

“For a boy from Chalatenango, a village of El Salvador, I’ve found myself in pretty amazing circles,” he said.

With Gutiérrez, he took a doctoral seminar on Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican friar who stood up to the Spanish government and the church in defense of the indigenous peoples.

“In this class, for the first time really, I would say, I got vocabulary about my own history growing up poor in a village in the mountains, without electricity, without running water, in the middle of a civil war in the midst of violence,” he said.

He began to examine the distinction between the early patristic church he had come to understand at the monastery and the 16th-century church of empire, war, and “commodification of bodies”—a church that even questioned the humanity of indigenous people. The class helped him question what theology is and what it could be.

“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.”

His dissertation, which informs a chapter he wrote for a forthcoming book, An Ethic of Just Peace (Georgetown University Press, 2019), examines the concept of sanctuary alongside theories of nonviolence. His primary focus is on the root of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s when hundreds of Catholic churches provided sanctuary to Salvadorian refugees. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take the risk. He said that bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

Guardado said that his research attempts to provide theological justification for “sanctuary as an ecclesial practice.”

“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.”

But even here, Guardado taps the patristic period to back his arguments for sanctuary. He noted that the earliest mention of bishops providing sanctuary goes back to 343 at the Council of Serdica. Later that century in 399 the archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, gave shelter to a man named Eutropius who, ironically, had been a critic of sanctuary. The archbishop gave a sermon that took a jab at Eutropius and argued for sanctuary.

“You never know when you’re going to be the one who needs sanctuary,” Guardado said, knowingly.

“I understand this from my experience as a boy in El Salvador, but also my experience as a product of Latin America and its relationship to the U.S. and the world now.”

Those relationships are as fraught today as when he arrived, he said. And he acknowledges that it’s as impossible as ever to speak of the Latin American poor theologically without speaking about them politically.

“It is politics that creates the very structures that keep people down and that keep them dying out of injustice and other means, like lack of food,” he said. “You cannot deal, genuinely with the poor if you don’t deal with politics.”

Guardado said that the kind of theological work he does and wants to teach his students at Fordham is the kind of that deals with contemporary issues head-on.

“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?”

He said that is the point of liberation theology, as well as a Jesuit education.

Echoing Gutiérrez’s words, Guardado says, “‘The point is not to do religious metaphysics. It is to figure out and to really reflect out of lived accompaniment with the poor, with the margins. How does our faith connect with that and how does it transform that reality?’”.

“Through personal contact, or travel, or even stories, we are all expanding. We are caring as a people, and we are so blessed here in the United States. We can make life better for our southern neighbors,” Sister Kelleher said on December 2, when she received the Mother Butler Leadership Award at the Marymount College Alumnae Association’s annual Founder’s Day celebration on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Sister Kelleher, a Catholic nun and an attorney, has been on the front lines of immigration issues and asylum requests for more than 30 years. She speaks passionately of her clients at Legal Aid Services of Collier County in Immokalee, Florida, a heavily agricultural area just north of the Everglades. There she mostly supports impoverished migrant farmworkers who were victims of crimes in their home countries in Central and South America.

In one case earlier this year, she advocated for a woman who had fled an abusive relationship with a gang member who was threatening her life. She said he had left him in Honduras and returned to her family in El Salvador, but he pursued her and continued physically and emotionally abusing her. She was unable to leave the relationship without risking her life, she said, so she sought asylum in the U.S. With Sister Kelleher’s help, she was able to stay.

“I could not have won that case later in 2018,” Sister Kelleher told her fellow Marymount alumnae and guests at the luncheon in Butler Commons. “Such victims of domestic violence no longer qualify” to be protected, she said, citing a recent memo issued by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions (a policy which was struck down about two weeks after the event). Many women who are victims of violence and sexual assault will most likely be sent back to countries where their safety is at risk, she said.

“The [long-term] solution to this issue and so many others lies in nations with capacity collaborating with honest stakeholders in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to invest so as to make change in these countries,” she said.

In response to an audience member who asked how they could help, Sister Kelleher encouraged attendees to take “hold of the power that women have.”

“Use your pen, use your voice, and, frankly, get in touch with organizations that you feel at home with” she told them.

After receiving the award, Sister Kelleher, who was one of only three nuns worldwide to serve as an auditor at the Catholic Church’s 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family, spoke about how meaningful it was to be honored by her fellow Marymount alumnae—especially since both her mother and aunt had attended the college before her. “We’re very much a Marymount family,” said the 1960 grad, who also earned a master’s degree in English from Fordham in 1969.

It was while teaching high school religion and reading about various social movements that Sister Kelleher was first inspired to act on behalf of vulnerable populations, she said. And when she saw how integral the legal system was to advancing causes in ministry, she decided to attend law school at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Her motivation is simple. “I can only say that, when my neighbor’s house is on fire, I can hardly say it’s no concern of mine,” she said.