“Immigrants are the majority of the farm workers in Whatcom County. We all eat food, we all are impacted,” said McIntyre. “The people who are growing our food just aren’t thought about.” Gwen Frost // AS Review
By Gwen Frost
On Saturday January 13, over 35 community leaders came together to speak at the 20th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Saturday Conference. The speakers included students and professors from both Western and Whatcom Community College, as well as community members, activists, local artists and educators.
The event was from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Whatcom Community College Syre Student Center.
After a conference opening held by Lummi Elders, participants were invited to break out into workshop sessions.
In one workshop, Western Student Theresa Williams worked with poet Robert Lashley to discuss “Rethinking Certainty: Art During Wartime.” The workshop showcased work for local artists, and involved interactive discussion with attendees about what it means to make art in times of sociopolitical chaos.
“Art can be revolutionary sometimes when you least to expect it, for me,” says Williams. “When I’m actually vulnerable, and I carve away all of the conceptions I have about not only other people but about myself, who or what I am, then that’s when I think art starts to become revolutionary.”
Other topics ranged from decolonizing misconceptions about indigenous peoples, to analyzing the struggle of Palestine, to discussions of adjusting behavior as the best kind of apology, and to flipping the script of marginalization.
In the strain of discussing strategies for effective discourse, local educators Masa DeLara and Julie Mauermann discussed how to develop a foundation of equity-based principles. These women asked us to rethink our standard of ‘equality,’ and to instead compensate for individual uniqueness.
Equality means treating everyone the same, but when we do not all start from the same place, this “fairness” of treatment leads to very different outcomes in one’s own ability and opportunity, they said. Equity, however, asks us to aspire to giving everyone what they need to actually be successful.
DeLara also emphasized another colloquial difference between “diversity” and “inclusion.”
“Diversity is being invited to the party, but inclusion is being asked to dance,” DeLara said.
One attendee asked how to respond to protests of “Oh, but I don’t see color.”
DeLara poignantly responded: “If you don’t see me as ‘black’, that assumes there is something wrong with ‘black’.”
Out of the many sessions, Victoria Matey Mendoza stood out as a powerful voice and young activist. Mendoza is an undocumented Western senior who has lived in the U.S. for 21 years.
Her talk titled “Our Dreams Go Beyond Our Borders” mixed an array of staggering facts with her own lived experience, and an invitation to listen to undocumented people who may not have a prominent voice in academic or political spheres.
“They’re the people who put their bodies on the line to feed you,” Mendoza said of the millions of undocumented residents that carry our agricultural industry on their shoulders.
When the U.S. fetishizes the notion of the good immigrant as “Dreamer” students with a 4.0 GPA, Mendoza wants us to remember that undocumented humans without the ability to access higher education should not be treated as disposable, or lazy.
As for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Mendoza reminds us that though implemented during the Obama administration, Obama also deported the most undocumented people in history.
DACA provided amnesty for individuals under 31 years-old who came to the U.S. before age 16, and either had a high school diploma, G.E.D., or were still in school, as well as individuals in this range who were honorably discharged from the military.. DACA status only granted deferred action of removal from the U.S. for two years, at which time one could reapply.
Mendoza had DACA status until the Trump administration’s decision to phase out DACA.
“I don’t want to talk about DACA. That’s over,” said Mendoza. “It’s gone.”
DACA was not ‘given’ to us, says Mendoza, because “we were never given anything. We fought for it.”
Less than 150 miles from where Mendoza spoke on Saturday is a private detention center for undocumented people. At the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, over 1,000 people are detained and paid less than $1 a day for their exploited labor by a private company, the GEO Group.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mendoza is going with almost 100 other Western students to lobby the state legislature in Olympia for the revocation of the Tacoma Detention center’s business license, among other issues. To contribute, call your legislator (See bottom of article for contact information).
I asked Mendoza how she managed to do it all: take classes, work for the Ethnic Student Center, do a fellowship, intern for a peace center, all of it. She quoted “they took everything from us, including our fear.”
Concluding the conference, AS Pop Music Coordinator Dayjha McMillan (followed by TJ Robinson) performed spoken work.