“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

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.

“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

Students stepped into the lives of migrants—those crossing the border both legally and illegally—at a Rose Hill workshop on March 27.

As part of a two-day forum called “Voices from the U.S./Mexico Border,” Campus Ministry hosted an interactive workshop where students could better understand how difficult it is to immigrate to the U.S.

Leading the workshop was Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI)—a faith-based organization on the U.S./Mexico border that serves deportees and asylum-seekers.

“One of the most common questions that comes up for us is, ‘Why aren’t people just coming legally? Why are people trying to cross the desert instead of just going to the consulate and getting a visa?’” Williams said. The workshop attempted to provide an answer.

In Bepler Commons, Williams simulated the crisis at the southern border with about 30 students. To the right of the room: a group of chairs labeled “U.S. consulate,” where migrants apply for U.S. visas. To the left: the “port of entry,” where migrants show their documentation to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. And finally, in an empty area between the two stations was a “third-world country”—the group of countries migrants were fleeing from.

Each student was then given a slip of paper that explained their new identity. Some of them were border patrol agents and visa interviewers. Others were migrants attempting to legally enter the U.S. But if they found no legal way in, the student “migrants” could break the law. One student, for example, successfully entered the U.S. with fake documents.

What made the simulation special was each of those characters. They were based on actual individuals—migrants who Williams and her colleagues met through the KBI or U.S. state department employees.

“In that sense, this is not a game. It’s not pretend,” Williams said. “These are real people’s lives that you’re going to be representing for half an hour.”

She urged them to think carefully about the people they were representing: “Be conscious of them. Embrace that character. And make decisions the way that you think they would have made them.”

Immersed in a Different Perspective

Christopher Shoudt, a first-year Gabelli School student, played a migrant. He was “Josué,” a coffee bean farmer from Chiapas, Mexico, who made 75 pesos a day—the equivalent of almost $4. He bartered his belongings in hopes that he’d be able to work in the U.S. and pay for his children’s education. But in the process, he lost his home in a scam.

Living Josué’s life for 30 minutes humbled Shoudt. It made him reflect on how privileged—and lucky—he is to be able to afford to attend Fordham. He also said the simulation better prepared him for an upcoming meeting with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congressman Jose Serrano, where he planned to advocate for a Catholic Relief Services initiative to help migrants.

“I hope I can bring [the issue]to her and show exactly what was shown to me today—to understand their situation and be able to empathize a bit more,” Shoudt said.

In an open, post-simulation reflection, students spoke about other things they experienced during the role play. Among them were pawning wedding rings to purchase legal papers and watching wealthier migrants receive aid more quickly. In a more dangerous situation, a drug cartel told a migrant that he and his family would be killed if he stopped paying them.

“At first, you try to go through some kind of a legit process, because you don’t want to stoop so low,” said one student, who simulated a single mother with three children. “And then you realize like … once you’re screwed by the system, you don’t care what you have to do in order to protect your family.”

Migrants weren’t the only ones who faced difficulty. So did those on the U.S. side of the border.

“People would come up and have these really powerful stories,” said a student who represented a U.S. consulate employee. “And you just had to deflect them and be very stonewalled.”

For her, it was a “sad” situation. But for actual migrants, it’s their life.

“As much as it feels realistic, this is still a fraction of how real it is,” said Brett Musalowicz, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior.

An Expansion of Empathy

For one student, the simulation was a close parallel to a past experience. In her junior year of high school, Gabelli School sophomore Samantha Barrett visited the Kino Border Initiative and met migrants who had recently been deported, she said. One of them was a man named Raul, a 29-year-old Mexico native who was taken to Los Angeles when he was three months old.  

“The morning I met him, he had just sprained his shoulder and dislocated his knee, falling off a cliff while trying to cross back into Arizona. He was going to try and cross again the very next day, not giving himself any time to heal or come with up a plan because he was just so desperate to get back into our country,” Barrett said. “To this day, I don’t know if he’s alive or if he’s dead.”

She said the experience has stayed with her: “Even three years later, these people are still people that I think about every single day.”

Overall, the simulation at Rose Hill was a chance for students to recognize the complexity of the U.S. immigration system and expand their empathy for migrants who, far too often in news headlines, are simply a statistic.

“We encounter people for a few moments at the border. You, in the simulation, have represented people for a few minutes. But what I ask and encourage you all to do is to continue to think about that one person you were representing,” Williams urged the students. “Pray for them. Be conscious of them—and how their story continues.”

“I didn’t have that many opportunities myself, so I know firsthand that if we provide education and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, it will make a difference in their lives,” he said.

Whether the cohort is underserved communities of New York City or rural-to-urban migrant families in China, Zhai provides quantitative analysis of survey data in the hopes of affecting policy.

Most of his research has focused on disadvantaged children in the United States. However, the native of China has begun to delve into childcare and education issues in his home country with a focus on migrant workers in Beijing.

Zhai described a country in the midst of extraordinary transformation, but still rooted in some ancient traditions, such as Confucianism, which fosters a preference for sons in a family. He said that traditionally boys, especially eldest sons, have been given more opportunities to succeed. China’s former one-child policy has further influenced the preference.

The one-child policy was implemented differently across the urban-rural divide, with cities strictly enforcing the policy and many rural areas allowed more than one child, especially if the first one was a girl.

Even though the recent phase-out of the one-child policy will free couples from the pressure to have sons, Zhai’s research shows that boys will still be favored compared to their female siblings when it comes to education and opportunities.

Part of the reason, he said, is because China doesn’t have an established pension system; instead the country still largely relies on traditional values where children, especially the eldest son and his spouse, take care of their parents in old age.

“It’s very complicated to shift from the traditional values to a new system,” said Zhai. “That’s why I want to see through data if girls are discriminated of investment in their education and if they are at a disadvantage.”

Zhai’s work also examines the effects of the country’s urban vs. rural services. In the planned economy, urban residents were provided with better services than rural residents, including child education, he said. Even today, Chinese citizens must register with the government as an urban or rural household status.

China’s “Rural” Status

Even as millions of rural residents move to the cities for better opportunities, their “rural” household registration status stands, thereby preventing their children from participating in the city’s formal school system.

“The parents can’t receive several social benefits and their kids can’t go to the public schools,” said Zhai. “It’s a huge problem.”

He said that many of the “rural” migrant communities that live in the cities have started informal schools, but most teachers don’t have proper training. And the problem may intensify, as many expect there to be a baby boom over the next decades now that the one-child policy has lifted.

Zhai said that there are a lot of efforts in China being undertaken to reform the system, and he hopes that his studies will provide solid evidence from data analysis supporting more change.

“The good part of being an outsider is that I can see the system from afar and analyze objectively,” said Zhai.

“But the truth is I know this from both sides, inside and out.”