Begun in 2019, the DLP connects Fordham students and New York City high school students with professors from around the country who have written academic articles about the politics of language and how it can be used to exclude or empower. Working in teams, the students and professors created new versions accessible to readers at the high school level.

“We’re becoming a multilingual, multicultural society as we speak, and we think that students have a right to have access to academic tools that help them think critically about the ways they’re taught language,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and founding director of the DLP and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, at the website launch.

Held at the Lincoln Center campus, it brought together the Fordham students and high schoolers with the DLP’s leadership for the debut of the website where their work will be housed. Also present were DLP co-organizers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and other universities, as well as a UMass student participant.

Changing Ideas About Language

Grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded the project, enabling collaborations like a three-day workshop last summer.

The teams produced 12 plain-language versions of the professors’ articles. One of them has been uploaded to the site. Titled “Speech or Silence?,” it’s an adaptation of academic writing by Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Ph.D., a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and DLP participant, about language used by children who are undocumented immigrants. 

The other 11 adapted articles produced by the teams will be uploaded this summer. Over the next few years, the center will hold workshops for New York City high school students and teachers to help them put the articles to use in their classrooms and in their lives, as well as workshops to help other academic authors adapt their articles for high schoolers, said the DLP’s co-director, Johanna Quinn, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

Nicolle Jimenez, soon to graduate from Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan, enjoyed working with the academic authors and looking at language in new ways. “You don’t really think about these things” on your own, she said, referring to how language “plays a part in your life and how you can help change these ideas of language and create something new out of it.”

Unlocking Doors with the Liberal Arts

Her teammate Ashira Fischer, FCLC ’24, who studied anthropology and acting at Fordham, said the program is “unlocking a whole lot of doors for everybody.”

“The scholars get to re-understand their article in a new way, and make sure it hits a wider audience,” and the high school students get exposure to college-level work, she said.

DLP co-director Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Fordham’s languages and cultures department, said it was “immensely rewarding” to take part in the project and “to be cognizant of how much work and effort goes into making writing simple.”

Roddy Boyd and Bernice Yeung are using new models to keep hard-hitting investigative reporting alive in the “fake news” era—bringing to light shady business practices contributing to the opioid crisis, and amplifying the voices of those largely overlooked by the #MeToo movement

Seven years ago, Roddy Boyd was attending a journalism conference when he came to a startling realization. He’d already had a long career exposing financial companies’ chicanery for the likes of the New York Post and Fortune before he was laid off after the financial crash of 2008. And he was well into writing his first book, an exposé of corporate insurance giant AIG. As he looked around at the conference, however, he realized that many of his colleagues had been laid off or taken buyouts from newspapers that had cratered in the past decade.

“All my peers from 15 years of reporting had gone,” he says, “and no one was doing business stuff.” Instead, the room was filled with reporters from nonprofits, including venerable outfits such as the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and upstarts like ProPublica. Sensing the winds, Boyd decided to start his own nonprofit focusing on financial investigations: the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, or SIRF, a reference to the surf culture in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina.

“I thought, ‘I’ll put on my Brooks Brothers suit and go to the Ford Foundation, and they’d give me money,’” he says. It didn’t quite work out that way. Still, Boyd persisted as SIRF’s sole journalist, peeling the tops off hedge funds and pharmaceutical firms to reveal rotten layers underneath. In the past six years, he has exposed frauds, scams, and lies that regulators have been unable or unwilling to uncover, and SIRF’s coverage has played a role in putting upward of 20 people in jail. “I personally don’t want to live in a world where corporations have only modest fear of government intervention,” he says. “Someone’s got to stand in the gap.”

Even as journalism has struggled in the past 20 years, investigative reporting has managed to survive, even thrive, reborn in new models that have reinvigorated its function as a watchdog on democracy. Oftentimes that means ferreting out stories the daily newspapers and TV news programs miss. That’s what CIR reporter Bernice Yeung has done in tackling harrowing stories of sexual violence against immigrants, years before the #MeToo movement made sexual assault mainstream news. First appearing in a pair of documentaries for PBS Frontline, her reporting has grown into a book, In a Day’s Work, published last March.

Boyd and Yeung use different skills, with Boyd performing a deep dive into complicated financial documents and Yeung patiently interviewing subjects in difficult situations, but both have shone a light in dark corners.

“When you hit that sweet spot of strong edited reporting with a strong human story,” Yeung says, “you show people why they should care about an issue—and how we should rethink things that are doing people harm.”

Two Worlds on Wall Street

Boyd grew up in Westchester County, where his father was a hedge-fund manager. He always wanted to be a journalist. At Fordham, he wrote for the paper, an alternative weekly that saw itself as a campus watchdog. He recalls how he and his fellow reporters investigated crime on campus. They assumed most of the crime would be coming from off campus; when they looked at the data, however, they realized that 80 percent was student-on-student crime. “It was a really powerful moment to me; you could walk into something with a totally fixed preconception, but then the data shows you things that will change your view,” he says.

That combination of targeting hard issues and supporting them with data would come to define Boyd’s career as a reporter—but first, he says, “life threw me a curveball.”

After college, his girlfriend (now wife) Laura Ann Caprioglio, FCRH ’90, became pregnant. In order to support his new family, Boyd took a job on Wall Street, working at his father’s hedge fund for eight years. In retrospect, the experience was invaluable for a future financial reporter. “I met a lot of CEOs and CFOs, and with a couple of drinks in them, what they said was very different than what they said on the conference calls,” he says. He got the sense there were two worlds on Wall Street—one generating incredible wealth and prosperity through the free market, the other hurting real people through instances of fraud and greed.

Boyd became committed to exposing that world, writing first for the now-defunct New York Sun. He dug into the financial documents of companies to find out what they weren’t saying in public. “You really get a hell of a thrill when you’ve got a conference call transcript in your left hand assuring you all is well, and you’ve got an exhibit from a buried state lawsuit in your other hand where they are clearly doing the precise mathematical opposite,” he says.

While working at the Sun in 2004, Boyd began investigating insurance giant AIG. When the financial crisis occurred a few years later, he saw the company’s habit of insuring banks without hedging its investments as a perfect microcosm for everything wrong with Wall Street. “The world frigging changed on its axis, and AIG was ground zero for all of it,” he says. “To use a phrase, ‘All of the devils were there.’”

After Fortune laid him off in 2009, he turned his reporting into a book, Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide, published in 2011. By this point, Boyd and his family had moved to North Carolina, and he had started a blog that eventually grew into SIRF. One of his first targets was Anthony Davian, a hedge-fund manager who was siphoning off thousands of dollars into his own pockets. He ultimately pleaded guilty to 14 counts of fraud and money laundering, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison. In raving about Boyd’s work, the Columbia Journalism Review commented that “this kind of story is enough of a high-wire act when you’ve got a big media corporation and its well-paid legal team behind you. It’s something else when you don’t have that.” But Boyd, the magazine said, “had the reporting nailed down.”

Exposing Pharmaceutical Fraud

More recently, Boyd has turned his attention to the pharmaceutical industry. For one story, he spent countless hours investigating Insys, a drug company producing a late-stage cancer drug called Subsys that led to some complications, including several deaths. Boyd pored over legal and financial filings to reveal a clear pattern in which Subsys was being prescribed by doctors for all kinds of ailments it was never intended to treat, in exchange for cash bribes from the company. “These products were being sold fraudulently and abusively,” he says, “and they were making many more corpses than they were helping people.”

Boyd says he drove himself into debt traveling around the country to talk with patients and their families, but the stories he heard kept him going. “Thousands of people were overdosing on this stuff, and it wasn’t being reported. They were selling something a hundred times more powerful than battlefield morphine and talking about it like it was a hamburger from Hardee’s. I had total moral outrage and conviction that this company was worse than the Mafia.”

When Boyd’s series came out in 2015, the company was rocked by the allegations. Multiple doctors went to jail for their participation in the kickback scheme, and the top executives were arrested.

Over the past five years, Boyd gradually built up his nonprofit through grants of $100,000 to $150,000 a year. This past year, he saw a huge jump to more than $600,000, driven by several large contributions from financial executives, with more than half of that funding coming from Wall Street short-seller Marc Cohodes. His first goal after receiving that money will be to turn his eye back on the financial markets. “I don’t want there to be any suggestion I am getting paid off,” he says, and besides, “there are some damn interesting stories that are largely untold.”

Rape in the Fields

At the time that Bernice Yeung began reporting about rape and sexual harassment in the fields of California, that story was largely untold as well. The story began as a tip from a University of California, Berkeley, student who was doing a summer internship at CIR and had heard about a farmworker who had been forced by her supervisor to have sex with him for years as a condition of keeping her job. That led Yeung and her colleagues to ask a classic journalist’s question: “Was this an isolated incident, or is this part of a larger phenomenon?”

It was a difficult question to answer. After all, Yeung and her fellow reporters couldn’t just go into the fields and start interviewing people. Even if they could find women and men who had experienced sexual abuse, they were likely to be hesitant to talk with strangers. “People don’t want to talk to journalists about this for the same reason they don’t want to report it,” Yeung says. “Shame, self-blame, fear of not being believed. Then you add to that the challenges of immigrant status and poverty.”

Yeung and her colleagues started with a few cases that, against the odds, had been reported to the courts, where documents could help fill in the gaps and offer some corroboration for details. In talking with the women (and a few men), they still had to overcome the barriers to discussing such a taboo subject; oftentimes, they let women choose where they wanted to do the interviews, or talk off the record until they were comfortable. Some interviews led to others, revealing hundreds of cases in which women were raped and abused with impunity by supervisors in the fields. Even when women came forward to report years of abuse, their attackers were rarely prosecuted, and labor contractors who employed them rarely punished.

In talking with subjects, Yeung drew upon the training she’d received at Fordham. She had grown up in San Jose, California, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who came to work in Silicon Valley. She originally thought she might be a music journalist, but that all changed when as an undergrad at Northwestern she discovered the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted inmates. “That was a complete game changer for me,” she says. She began doing investigative reporting, moving back to the Bay Area to work at SF Weekly. Even as she wrote about tobacco companies and school funding, she felt she needed a stronger grounding in the topics she was covering.

While reporting on criminal justice issues, she spoke with Fordham sociology professor Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D., and began considering grad school. “It just seemed to fit,” she says. At Fordham, Flavin became her adviser for her thesis, which examined procedural justice, a movement to treat citizens with dignity and respect in the Bronx criminal court. Her sociology training helped her become a better interviewer, she says, by showing her how to think critically about the power dynamics between investigative reporters and vulnerable subjects. “It gave me the vocabulary to think through the thorny ethical issues about how we get informed consent.”

When the documentary Rape in the Fields finally aired in June 2013, it didn’t have an immediate effect. “It was a little of that deafening silence,” Yeung says. At screenings of the film held in farmworker communities, however, she was amazed to see how personally affected many in the audience became. “Women would get up and talk about how they had experienced something similar, and were sharing it publicly for the first time,” she says. As attention built, calls grew to pass legislation to deal with the issue. Finally, in September 2014, California passed a law to require sexual harassment training of all labor contractors, with provisions to revoke the license of contractors who hired supervisors who sexually harassed their workers. “That’s the gold standard,” Yeung says, “when you can affect policy.”

Seizing the MeToo# Moment

Even after that success, Yeung doggedly continued her reporting on sexual violence. When Rape in the Fields aired, she was contacted by an editor from the New Press about the possibility of turning the subject into a book; by that time, Yeung was already on to a new topic, examining sexual abuse among janitorial workers in offices on the night shift. She helped to produce the documentary Rape on the Night Shift while gathering material for the book, In a Day’s Work.

“I think the book was already out of my hands before Weinstein,” she says, referring to the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein that ignited the #MeToo movement, exposing sexual transgressions by powerful men in media, politics, and the arts. “#MeToo has created this opening, and is not going away,” she says. “I hope that we get to the point where we are not focused purely on reporting after the fact but thinking more about the mechanisms we can put in place to prevent this.”

In a Day’s Work is refreshing in not only focusing on the problem but also weaving in stories of activists and policymakers working to address it. “Investigative journalism can be heavy and, frankly, depressing,” she says. “I wanted to not leave people feeling like they are powerless in the end.”

Yeung is heartened by the resurgence of interest in investigative reporting. She sees a hybrid model of newspapers partnering with nonprofits to pull off complicated, important stories. “I think it is especially important at this moment in time when things seem very polarized and there are all these claims of ‘fake news,’” she says. “The power of investigative reporting is in really digging into a topic, but also providing the necessary context historically, socially, and culturally so we can come away with a better understanding in the end.”

—Michael Blanding is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

“This was a working farm from colonial times all the way down to about 1907 or so,” said Roger Wines, Ph.D., FCRH ’54, professor emeritus of history, who has written about Fordham history in partnership with anthropology professor Allan Gilbert, Ph.D.

The food was produced within sight of the building—today’s Cunniffe House—where the students studied, slept, and ate. On the site of the Rose Hill Gym was an orchard that produced apples, pears, and cherries, according to the professors’ research. Potatoes, corn, and other crops were also grown on campus. A vineyard on the site of today’s college cemetery yielded two or three barrels of wine per year, and the field at present-day Fordham Prep was a pasture populated by 30 to 40 cows.

The farm produced “a good percentage” of the food and milk for the college, according to a new history of Fordham by Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, GSAS ’66, professor emeritus of theology. Wines and Gilbert said the college also purchased meat and groceries from New York merchants, and Fordham’s first Jesuits, Frenchmen who liked to drink wine with dinner, imported wine from Bordeaux to supplement what was produced on campus.

Dietary staples at Rose Hill included beef and pork; pigs as well as cows were raised at the farm, Wines and Gilbert said. On special occasions, students dined on oysters and other shellfish. Bread was probably baked on campus, and vegetables may have been grown in a greenhouse east of the University Church. Jesuit brothers oversaw food production.

(In recent years, Fordham students have made a modest return to Rose Hill’s farming roots by maintaining St. Rose’s Garden on one edge of campus and organizing a weekly Fordham Farmer’s Market in front of the McGinley Center.)

After a few decades, the students’ dining area was moved from today’s Cunniffe House to a newly completed space in Dealy Hall. Eating was a solemn affair, far removed from the freewheeling atmosphere of today’s campus dining venues. It was strictly regulated by the college’s Rules and Customs Book, according to a chapter by Gilbert and Wines in Fordham: The Early Years (Fordham University Press, 1998), edited by Thomas C. Hennessy, S.J.

A student read aloud from literature or history during meals, and No. 5 in the Rules for the Refectory section of the customs book required students to eat in silence so they could “give an account of what is read, if called upon.” Students stopped eating at the ringing of a bell and then rose to face the prefect, answer a prayer, and make the sign of the cross before turning to silently leave in single file with their arms folded.

Indeed, students were expected to keep quiet during most of their daily routine, which was akin to the rigors of a “medieval monastic regime,” according to Msgr. Shelley’s book, Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016). But they still found moments for food-related levity, he wrote: “God sent food; the devil sent cooks,” the students would gripe, echoing a longstanding complaint of college students everywhere.

“An unfinished house in a field” is how Archbishop John Hughes would later describe the state of Fordham’s property at the time he bought it in 1839. The first Jesuits wouldn’t arrive until 1846, five years after the small college was up and running. Meanwhile, going south into New York City was a tougher trek in those days before cars and commuter trains—and that’s just how the college fathers liked it.

“They didn’t let the students go down to the city. The city was considered ‘sinful,’” said Roger Wines, PhD, professor emeritus of history.

He and anthropology professor Allan Gilbert, PhD, have researched and written about early life at Fordham for years, drawing on the meticulous records kept by Fordham’s early Jesuits as well as their own excavations at the Rose Hill campus. Their archaeological work, part of which they write about in a soon-to-be-published book, helps illustrate just how different life was in the early years of Fordham, which was founded as St. John’s College 175 years ago on June 24, 1841.

For one thing, the small, rustic college was also a working farm, Wines noted. “The students lived here in an atmosphere where the grape jelly came from the grapes [and]the milk came from the cows,” courtesy of the live-in Jesuit brothers who also shoveled the coal, tended the grounds, and staffed the infirmary, among other labors, he said.

Water came from wells, baths were once-a-week, and recreation tended to get the blood pumping, according to Wines and Gilbert. In the summer, it was swimming in the Bronx River or cross-country hikes to the Harlem River or Pelham Bay, led by Jesuits who believed in physical exertion. In the fall,  college elders would block the flow of a stream to create a pond where the campus’ large parking lot and garage sit today, and students skated on the pond when it froze over in the winter, Gilbert and Wines said.

In fact, ice skate fragments were among the many artifacts they found buried in the earth at the heart of the Rose Hill campus.

The Excavations

In 1985, Wines and Gilbert sought permission from Fordham’s then-new president—Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ—to excavate the foundations of Rose Hill Manor, the colonial-era farmhouse that served as one of the original campus buildings. They won over Father O’Hare by taking him to the spot where they wanted to dig: “We said to him, ‘Six feet down is the 18^th century.’ He said, ‘Okay, go for it,’” Wines recalled.

For the next 17 years, they mobilized students from their history and archaeology classes for the digging, covering the crumbly innards of the site with tarps in the off-hours to protect them from the elements. Within a few years they had cleared out one corner of the manor’s cellar, finding a wood floor, brick cisterns, impressions of floral-patterned wallpaper, a bin full of anthracite coal, and many fragmentary objects.

They also dug in various other places around the Rose Hill campus, including, in 1986, the construction site for two residence halls–Loschert Hall and Alumni Court South–after work crews discovered two pits containing pre-1877 refuse from the college. They explored cisterns, drainage basins, and ditches around campus, compiling a list of archaeologically valuable locations.

Their collection of artifacts includes pipe stems, patent medicine bottles, the college’s first set of dishes, rods of lead for writing on slate, and the remains of a toothbrush made from bone and hog bristles. They found dice, combs, pottery, and religious medals, and a remnant of one of the era’s advances in communications field: the nib of a steel pen, a device that allowed for easier writing than did the goose-quill pen that came before.

Studies at St. John’s College

Writing—or, more to the point, penmanship—was a key part of the curriculum, and was especially important for finding a job. “Employers judged your character and fitness for the job on how clearly you could write,” Wines said. Students also studied Greek, Latin, history, literature, and other classic subjects in a custodial, highly structured setting. Students lived barracks-style in wings that were added to what is today Cunniffe House (the “unfinished house in a field” Hughes referred to), the same building in which they attended class. Rose Hill Manor had various occupants over the years, including Jesuits-in-training.

Students followed a six-year curriculum—modeled on a European lycee—that the Jesuits brought with them in 1846. It comprised three years of grammar (corresponding to an American secondary school) and three years of college-level humanities. After six years, students received a bachelor’s degree, and those who stayed for one more year could earn a master’s in philosophy.

The students numbered anywhere from 100 to 200 for the first few decades, and some were adolescents, possibly as young as 10.

Unlike the College of St. Francis Xavier, the companion college founded in Manhattan by Fordham’s first Jesuits, the college at Rose Hill could draw students from beyond the New York area because it was a boarding school. About a third of the students were Latin American boys from merchant-class parents who wanted them to be able to speak English and do business in New York while also maintaining their faith.

“This was a good place to send them because they would be in a safe Catholic environment,” Wines said. “Nothing bad was going to happen to them.”

The Jesuit Approach

Vice wasn’t the only worry in the city to the south; hostility to Catholics in New York led Hughes—named the first archbishop of New York in 1850—to buy the college’s land through an intermediary, Gilbert said. Hughes also made sure the charter for the school was approved before announcing it was being taken over by Jesuits, whom critics considered to be “political priests,” Wines said.

The Jesuits brought a rigorous system with them in 1846. Students cycled through a regimen of prayers, study halls, classes, meals, and occasional recreation that stretched out across six-and-a-half days a week. (The weekend hadn’t been invented yet.) They began the day by washing their faces in sinks filled by a servant who’d drawn water from the well outside, and everyone went to bed at the same time every night when the candles or whale oil lamps were snuffed out.

The students stayed in this closely supervised setting for a longer school year, one that lasted until mid-July. One principal teacher taught all major subjects to each class, paying close attention to the moral as well as intellectual formation of students. “They really took care of you for a whole year” and found out everything, including “things you probably wish they didn’t,” Wines said.

Recreation consisted of ball games or indoor games played with plain objects like marbles or dominoes—which Gilbert and Wines found during their excavations—or, simply, words and imagination. “There was nothing to buy; you just made it up,” Gilbert said.

Preserving the Past

He and Wines have put much of the relics into safe storage in Dealy Hall and are exploring the possibilities for finding them a new space. Wines is working on a book about the early history of Rose Hill and the Bronx, and he and Gilbert wrote a chapter about their excavation of Rose Hill Manor for a forthcoming book, impishly titled Digging the Bronx.

In its pages, readers will see the many ways in which schools, colleges, and other institutions are exploring the history of an area that has been transformed from countryside into a major metropolis, all within the lifespan of Fordham.

“It’s a range of different kinds of applications, so that people get a sense for how many sorts of people are out there digging in the ground,” Gilbert said.

Smångs, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, studied hundreds of lynchings in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, focusing on those that were public and ritualistic. By defining white identity in terms of a threat that black people supposedly presented, these lynchings paved the way for repressive Jim Crow laws and, ultimately, for many inequities that are still with us, said Smångs.

In other words, lynching’s past is not fully past.

“It’s important to understand lynching, because it was not just an historical phenomenon. It has implications today,” said Smångs.

He took up this topic during graduate school at Columbia University after seeing that most sociologists treated lynchings as “undifferentiated” killings driven by economic competition between white and black people within the cotton-based economy of the South.

However, this view couldn’t account for the public spectacle and ceremonial violence, which would seem unnecessary if the killers were simply trying to eliminate someone seen as a troublesome employee or competitor, he said.

Smångs’ study included more than 600  lynchings—mostly of African Americans—in Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930. He divided them into two types, private and public, depending on their level of communal participation and support as well as ceremonial brutality.

Private lynchings were typically carried out furtively by small groups, usually to settle interpersonal conflicts, and were sometimes publicly criticized by Southern elites. “They saw it as unwarranted, as conflicting with their interests in having social order,” said Smångs.

Public lynchings, however, were another story.

Before 1890, racism in the South reflected paternalistic views—held over from slavery times—of African Americans as intellectually and morally inferior and needing guidance from whites. Southern white leaders sought to co-opt black elites to say, “‘As long as the federal government and the North stay out of our business, we will foster cooperative race relations—that view of ‘cooperative,’ of course, on whites’ terms,” Smångs said.

But views changed when African Americans refused to play a subordinate part. Around 1890 a long-simmering racial ideology that cast black people as inherently threatening and biologically inferior came to the fore, Smångs  said. “It seems to be a watershed point when it comes to public lynchings,” which he defined as being carried out by mobs of 50 or more and including ritualistic and symbolic elements.

The public lynchings became more common and more elaborately brutal around this time, Smångs said. Victims were tortured, mutilated, burned, or collectively shot. Sometimes signs were left near the site of the lynching. Sometimes the victim was killed at the scene of the crime ascribed to him, or confronted first with those who suffered the crime.

Meanwhile, public rhetoric—from journalists, politicians, and others—was clearly meant to achieve “a cohesive white community” through public lynchings, Smångs  said.

“They said it’s the duty of all men to come together and punish these crimes, alleged murders, and alleged sexual assaults,” he said. “In the aftermath of some lynchings, newspaper editors and journalists and other people would say that the people of such-and-such locality did their civic duty to the white community.”

“They saw it as a community affair, and as a responsibility of whites towards other whites to come together,” he said.

He lays out his arguments in “Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in March. He is expanding the article into a book to be published by Routledge, and will be presenting his research this summer at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Seattle.

Smångs is departing from the view that lynchings expressed a social system that was already established. Rather, public lynchings cemented views as much as they reflected them.

“It’s not only that belief creates ritual, but rituals create beliefs,” he said. “These public lynchings had clear symbolic and ritual elements. They didn’t just express a collective white identity; they also forged it.”

They also created “a stigmatized collective group identity for African Americans, which included these notions of danger and threat,” he said.

This stigma fomented the passage of Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised and segregated African Americans, as well as the laws’ longer-term injustices that other scholars have documented, Smångs said. These include black people’s disproportionate rate of being imprisoned and receiving death sentences, and also problems in the areas where lynchings took place–like interracial homicide and the presence of white supremacist organizations.

These problems reflect what the scholar Khalil Gibran Muhammad has called the “condemnation of blackness” as dangerous and unworthy, a perception that was given “force and legitimacy” under Jim Crow, Smångs said.

“The ideas about race that are prevalent today are, for the most part, not the ideas that sustained slavery; they are the ideas that came about with the extremist white supremacy of Jim Crow,” he said. “It’s important to understand lynching because it impacted Jim Crow, and the legacy of Jim Crow is still around today.”

Fordham students marked the last day of New York’s Immigration Heritage Week on April 15 with a screening and discussion with an award-winning filmmaker and a performance by a Queens-based Spanish-language hip-hop group.

The Other Side of Immigration (Roy Germano Films, 2009), an award-winning documentary about Mexico’s most crippling economic hardships, was shown on the Rose Hill campus.

Through more than 700 interviews with the families left behind by U.S.-bound migrant workers, the film highlights the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on poor farmers, the country’s vicious cycle of poverty spurred by a corrupt government and the social pressures on Mexicans to seek a better way of life.

The 55-minute film was shot, edited and produced by Roy Germano, Ph.D., a visiting professor of politics at The New School, while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Germano said he was inspired to shoot the film while was working on a dissertation on the political impact of money Mexicans in the US send to home communities.

“I was looking at why people send money home and found a relationship between decreased spending by the Mexican government on things like subsidies and increased money that’s remitted back,” he said. “When people lose a safety net, they find another one.”

Remittances, money transferred from documented and undocumented immigrants living in the United States to their home country, accounted for 2.5 percent of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product or U.S. $26 billion in 2009. When asked if migration is a means for development in Mexico, Germano said the results are mixed.

“On one hand, you can see some people drop out of the labor force when they are receiving money from abroad. Also, lots of times communities are losing their best, hardest-working people,” he said. “But you also get an economic resource that helps people get a foot on a ladder rung. They’ll send their kids to school or be able to get healthcare. If people don’t have to worry where their next meal is coming from, then hopefully they can develop the community.”

But development is not always the first priority for remittance dollars, as Germano found that 60 percent of families who receive monies from abroad first use those funds to buy food.

“But I did find a trend of people who will pool money earned in the U.S. and send back large amounts for community development projects,” Germano said. “The Mexican government has even developed the ‘Three-for-One’ program for migrants, where for every dollar that’s sent back through one of these ‘community bundles,’ the government matches it with two extra dollars for things like building a road or a sewer system.”

Germano found remittances to Mexico function like an economic stimulus.

“It’s like shooting money into the economy to get people spending,” he said.

By the end of the film’s production process, Germano said he thought there were easy answers in dealing with the issue of immigration.

“But the more cynical I get—and not in a bad way—but maybe more realistic, is that this is going to be an issue that’s solved over the generations partly due to lack of political will,” he said. “It seems that in the U.S., there is a resistance to actually creating a good policy and it’s born from the fact that policy makers are divided over what to do.”

The Republican party is often considered to be the party of business and national security, Germano said.

“So you have a Republican that’s thinking how to vote on immigration. On the one hand, they’ll say we should let in more immigrants and legalize more of them so that businesses can get the workers that they need. But that same Republican might have constituents that are concerned about change of American culture and the landscape of America and there are people who are resistant to that,” he said. “And there’s a similar story with Democrats. They have loyalty to working class but at the same time to lower class voters, so they’ll be torn between these two constituencies.”

This is why immigration reform under President Ronald Reagan in 1986 cracked down on the border more than ever in history, yet at the same time, legalized three million people, Germano said.

“And it’s why we up with an employer sanction regime, where we say to employers, you’ll get fined $10,000 if you hire an undocumented worker, but at the same time, it’s not up to you whether the workers documents are real or not. Essentially we pass immigration policies that conflict with each other and have no teeth,” Germano said.

Queens-based group Hispanos Causando Paniko (HCP), pioneers of Spanish-language Hip Hop in New York City, closed the event with a performance. Their songs, such as Medidas Drasticas, or Drastic Measures, speak to the struggles of Hispanic immigrants in New York.

For more information about the documentary, visit www.theothersideofimmigration.com. For more information on HCP, visit http://www.hispanoscausandopaniko.com/

The event was sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Center for International Policy Studies’ research unit on Migration, Gender and Development with support from the Fordham Deans’ Council.

—Gina Vergel

Perez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University, where she also obtained advanced certification in Latin American and Latino Studies. Her dissertation is a qualitative analysis on the residential outcomes and housing options of middle-class Caribbean Latino, non-Hispanic Black and ethnic White native New Yorkers. In her research, she examines racial and ethnic differences in the road to becoming middle class, exploring issues pertaining to residential mobility, segregation, discrimination, gentrification and homeownership.

Perez recently completed an Alumni Dissertation Writing Fellowship at Fordham and will soon defend her dissertation. She received additional fellowships that supported her research on housing and residence from Howard University’s Summer Institute for Race and Wealth in Washington, D.C., funded by the Ford Foundation, and a dissertation fellowship provided by The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-City University of New York. Other fellowships include her selection as a summer fellow for the Smithsonian Latino’s Center’s Museum Studies Program in Washington, D.C.

Publications related to housing include encyclopedia entries: “Segregation and Latino/as,” “Residential

Segregation,” and “Barrio” in two scholarly volumes: Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society (Russell Sage) and Latinos/as and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press). Perez also published an article in the Fall 2006 volume of The Bronx County Historical Society Journal, entitled: “Movin’ on Up”: Pioneer African-American Families Living in an Integrated Neighborhood in the Bronx, New York.”

She is currently working on a chapter centering on migration and community/cultural formation in The Bronx for an edited volume, tentatively titled: Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx: Hidden Histories of Culture, Community and Politics in New York’s Northern Borough, edited by Brian Purnell, Ph.D., Bowdoin College.

Perez has served as an assistant faculty member for the National Equity Center’s Summer Civil Rights and Social Justice Training Institute, held at UCLA. She also taught as an adjunct lecturer in the Latino and Latin American Studies department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and Fordham University’s College of Liberal Studies, teaching courses in both sociology and Latino/Ethnic Studies.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Studies from Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., and her Master of Arts degree in College Student Personnel Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. Perez says she is a proud native New Yorker, born and raised in The Bronx, New York.