Borders and Boundaries: Human Rights
and Social Justice in a Transnational Context
By Billie Drakeford, student development coordinator
in the Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning;
Sylvia Escarcega, assistant professor of Latin American
and Latino studies; and Charles R. Strain, associate
vice president for academic affairs and professor of
religious studies—all at DePaul University
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DePaul students paint a community center in
Nogales, Sonora. (Photo from the Nogales files
of S. Escarcega)
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Immigration has become a “hot button” issue
in the 2008 presidential campaigns. Candidates outdo
one another in declaring how tightly they would seal
our borders, especially the southern one. Yet Mexican
and Central American migrants appear in these discussions
only as objects of policy proposals. No one seems to
consider walking even a footstep in the shoes of people
who are literally “dying to get in.”
Our students have walked in those shoes. Since 1994,
DePaul University students have examined globalization
and migration, human rights across borders, and race
and racism on both sides of The Wall. The Nogales Study
Abroad program explores these issues at the border between
cultures and nations, in a transnational community where
first and third worlds collide.
Nogales Program Structure and Pedagogies
The Nogales Study Abroad program unfolds in three distinct
stages:
- An autumn quarter preparatory phase
- The twelve-day trip to the Arizona/Sonora borderlands
- A winter quarter reflection, action, and synthesis
stage
| Civic Engagement after Nogales |
| After returning
from the border, students have reached out to
both local and global communities through a variety
of projects oriented toward service and increased
awareness. These have included:
- Providing after-school tutoring programs
for children and education for immigrants who
are studying to pass citizenship tests in Chicago’s
Latino neighborhoods
- Performing poems, songs, and monologues that
reflect on transnational issues at campus and
community events
- Presenting their experiences at an international
conference focused on indigenous peoples’
struggles for human rights
- Promoting Just Coffee (www.justcoffee.org),
a Chiapas- and Sonora-based cooperative movement,
in coffee shops across the city
- Organizing the DePaul Medical Brigades, which
(under the direction of a single student) delivered
medical supplies to outlying villages in Honduras
in December 2007
—Billie Drakeford, Sylvia
Escarcega,
and Charles R. Strain
|
In Stage One, students work with two faculty members
to explore the history of U.S. relationships with Mexico,
giving particular attention to migration, labor, and
policy issues. Discussions ready students for the physical
and emotional rigors of living in makeshift housing
with migrants who work in the maquiladora industry
(consisting of assembly factories in “tariff-free”
zones established beginning in the 1960s) in Nogales,
Sonora. Students prepare themselves to meet with migrants
desperately seeking jobs on either side of the border
to support their families.
In Stage Two, faculty and students spend twelve days
on both sides of the Arizona/Sonora border. Through
the mediation of Borderlinks, a binational educational
organization, we meet with migrants, maquiladora
workers, human rights activists, religious leaders,
refugee lawyers, directors of NGOs involved in microfinance
and community development, mural artists, border patrol
officers, and representatives of the American criminal
justice system. Students absorb multiple points of view
about the central issues we discuss during the course.
This stage of the program in particular gains its strength
from a variety of pedagogies, including experiential
learning, discussion, and reflection activities. In
one event that could not have been replicated in the
classroom, students spoke with migrants in a plaza in
Altar, Sonora, a small town that has become a stopping
point for migrants headed north. Days later, they saw
some of the same migrants in a Tucson courtroom, caught
in the snares of the U.S. criminal justice system. During
the trip, nightly group reflections help participants
to contextualize their experiences. Students also keep
journals of their readings, experiences, and reflections.
They later refer to these journals as guides to analyze
specific issues and to develop guidelines for social
justice.
In Stage Three, back in Chicago, some students engage
in university-sponsored service learning projects in
Chicago’s Latino communities, linking the global
and the local. Other students take initiative to develop
long-term projects focused on social justice issues
in the DePaul community and beyond. Students also read
further about the issues they studied experientially,
continuing to process their experiences through class
reflections and a final synthesizing paper.
Course Themes and Learning Outcomes
The program’s outcomes cluster around three themes:
Globalization and migration, human rights across borders,
and issues of race and racism. The words of the students
themselves best reveal the depth of student learning.
Emily, a senior political science major, wrote a paper
that focused on the global economy. She stated:
I see the beginning of a story for a just society.
Essential to facing the problems of economic oppression
is being willing to move beyond the easy response
of paralysis that often comes with hopelessness. I
was very deeply impacted by the fact that it is really
our northern privilege that prevents us from acting
and perpetuates complacency with injustice [through
neoliberal economic policies such as the North American
Free Trade Agreement].
Reclaiming responsibility for one’s own choices,
Emily concluded, is key to moving beyond a paralyzing
despair.
Charlene, a sophomore accounting major, focused on
worker’s rights. Her understanding of those rights
was cemented by her visceral experience in a Mexican
assembly factory:
I walked into the Maquiladora with a frown
on my face . . . . [we encountered the possibility
of] great health risk or injury because of the chemicals
and substances used . . . . The noise was so heavy
on my ears that it made every other sound seem dead
to me . . . . [the workers] were forced to stand on
bare wooden floor[s] . . . .
Charlene concluded that transnational corporations
should take immediate action to improve working conditions
in the maquiladoras.
Alejandro, a junior music major, focused on the public
murals and graffiti art that adorn the Mexican side
of The Wall. His paper was itself an act of reclaiming
identity as he reflected on the art of La Frontera.
For a long time, I have struggled to claim a cultural
identity. I never seemed to be “latino”
or “Asian” enough. As a result of my marginalization,
I have had to create an identity for myself . . .
. My existence as a mestizo . . . becomes a political
existence, a position that allows me to challenge
and contest any binary opposition and labels that
are placed upon me and other marginalized/oppressed
people . . . . But being mestizo is not just an ethnic
identity. For me […] it can mean any set of
mixed identities: spiritual, cultural, or social .
. . . In this sense, everyone is a mestizo. But for
some reason, we have managed to create divisions within
ourselves that cause us to deny our mestizaje;
we are unable to struggle with the idea that we could
be many things at once.
These students’ claiming of their own voices
is one of the most powerful outcomes of the Nogales
program. Our students have learned to speak with words
far more eloquent than those pre-scripted for the presidential
candidates. They describe a future shared with our hemispheric
neighbors, a future characterized not by walls built
in a futile effort to exclude desperate people but by
acceptance of our own responsibility to our neighbors.
If their actions following the trip are any indication,
our students are developing the tools to improve conditions
locally for people in Chicago and globally for people
not only in Sonora but in places like Belize, Honduras,
and Colombia.
