by | Feb 10, 2016 12:57 pm | Comments (1)
Elona Vaisnys.
Every time Elona Vaisnys speaks people want to know where she is from.
“Because I have an accent,” she said. “I was older than 9 when I came to the States, and by that age the cerebral cortex matures, and we keep the accent unless we work on losing it.”
by | Feb 5, 2016 5:14 pm | Comments (1)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Matalon gets some post-talk love from students.
Eliazer asked Eliana Matalon in Spanish how to deal with the memories — of gangs snatching people and killing them in front of him — that he has of trying to get from Guatemala to the United States.
Matalon, a Holocaust survivor, replied in the same tongue: Don’t dwell on them. Focus on getting an education. Improve yourself. Become a good man.
by | Feb 4, 2016 8:41 am | Comments (12)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Ted Cruz in New Hampshire Wednesday.
Henniker, N.H. — If elected president, Ted Cruz promised, he will reverse the policies of sanctuary cities and cut all federal funding of any that resist.
by | Jan 29, 2016 8:00 am | Comments (5)
My wife, Sahar Usmani-Brown, with our family and Judge Vanessa Bryant, after a Jan. 7 ceremony where 55 new U.S. citizens were naturalized.
On Jan. 7, at the Abraham Ribicoff Federal Building in Hartford, my wife (Sahar Usmani-Brown) was among the 55 new U.S. citizens sworn in at a naturalization ceremony.
In her case, it came some 14 years after — having grown up in New Delhi—she received a J‑1 visa, which was eventually followed by permanent residency in the U.S.: a “green card.”
Participants had to take an “Oath of Allegiance,” before everyone recited or read the Pledge of Allegiance, as well.
It appeared that, with the possible exceptions of Australia and Antarctica, every continent was represented among the 55 new citizens (eight of whom reportedly requested name changes).
by | Jan 19, 2016 4:16 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photo
Roccapriore in the WNHH studio.
The latest broadcasts on WNHH Radio celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr’s legacy, examined homelessness in Connecticut, made predictions for professional football and basketball and offered an impassioned plea for better environmental legislation.
by | Jan 18, 2016 4:02 pm | Comments (2)
Kathleen Cei Photos
Ute Brinkmann had a realization when she was 18 years old and finishing up years of playing — and falling in love with — the double bass in youth orchestras across her native Germany: She could continue onto the professional level, where the collegiality of younger players gave way for stiff competition and musicians who were physically bigger and stronger than she. Or she could learn how to fix the instruments on which that competition played.
by | Jan 18, 2016 8:48 am | Comments (1)
Allan Appel Photo
When the image of a black Christ filled St. Rose of Lima Church, New Haveners who originally hailed from Guatemala felt a bit more “a la casa” — as if at home.
by | Jan 14, 2016 5:13 pm | Comments (3)
They wait for the bus in Fair Haven. Cook in a restaurant kitchen. Wash windows. Play soccer in the park. Send money back home.
Continue reading ‘Trump—Then Obama—Inspire Fair Haven Video Appeal’
by | Jan 11, 2016 6:00 pm | Comments (4)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Harp, at left, with schools chief Garth Harries and Police Chief Dean Esserman at last week’s rally.
Toni Harp inherited the mayoralty of a “sanctuary city” — and she plans to keep it that way.
by | Jan 8, 2016 6:18 am | Comments (1)
Paul Bass Photos
Matos and Rivera-Forastieri Thursday in the WNHH studio.
As New Haven immigration-rights activists scramble to fight a new round of deportations, a leading organizer spoke not just about what’s wrong with our government’s current policies — but about what an ideal federal immigration policy might look like.
Continue reading ‘What If Immigration Advocates Made The Rules?’
by | Jan 6, 2016 4:53 pm | Comments (25)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Harp with Junta’s Sandra Trevino at Wednesday’s immigrant-rights rally in Fair Haven.
If federal immigration officials come knocking to seize and deport undocumented immigrants, New Haven police, school and city officials can’t stop them — but they won’t help them, either.
by | Jan 6, 2016 1:58 pm | Comments (1)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Chokairy at Choupette Crêperie & Café.
Adil Chokairy couldn’t afford to open a shop when he came to New Haven. He could afford a bike, barely. That proved enough to propel him into business.
by | Jan 4, 2016 1:24 pm | Comments (20)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Activists press a point with mayoral aide Joseph Rodriguez.
Immigration activists knocked on their mayor’s and Congresswoman’s doors Monday to ask for help amid a wave of deportation raids — more than eight years after federal agents swept through Fair Haven snatching undocumented immigrants from their homes.
by | Jan 4, 2016 8:17 am | Comments (11)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Rodriguez pitches idea to alders.
The Harp administration is considering borrowing an idea from health ratings to advise the public about restaurants’ treatments of their workers: letter grades posted in front windows.
by | Dec 23, 2015 2:52 pm | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Smith-Holness in the WNHH studio.
Karaine Smith-Holness didn’t think that moving to West Haven from Kingston, Jamaica, and then to New Haven from West Haven, would instill in her a new appreciation for her Jamaican heritage, or the thought of opening a business like Hair’s Kay Salon. Not initially, at least.
Continue reading ‘Mayor’s Hairdresser Rediscovered Jamaican Heritage In New Haven’
by | Dec 21, 2015 5:25 pm | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Addams.
Courtesy Co-Op
Monday’s broadcasts on WNHH radio explored the newest addition to the Star Wars franchise, got an end-of-year report on the city from the mayor, and shared information about a new East Rock bike co-op.
by | Dec 21, 2015 8:10 am | Comments (2)
“Most martial artists think capoeira is just a dance,” said Efraim Silva, “but it is really a very powerful hidden martial art.”
Continue reading ‘“I Am More Brazilian Than When I Was In Brazil”’
by | Dec 8, 2015 5:19 pm | Comments (1)
David Sepulveda Photo
Before his choice to leave the New York gallery scene for timid one in New Haven, before he purchased the Frame Shop in 2002 to turn it into The Frame Shop & Westville Gallery, and certainly before he was informally crowned the unofficial “mayor of Westville,” Gabriel Da Silva was a 17 year-old Uruguayan immigrant working odd jobs in New Haven to “make ends meet” as he, his parents and three siblings sought to put a life under rotating military dictatorships in Montevideo behind them.
He was homesick, and working hard, and not entirely sure what the future would hold.
by | Dec 7, 2015 2:26 pm | Comments (0)
Corey Lynn Tucker Photo
Isabella Mendes’s life has never been without music. “The running joke in the family is that the first word that I said was ‘piano,’” she said. “Every toy store that I went to, I always looked for the little keyboard. That’s always been my passion, since very young.”
Continue reading ‘Isabella Mendes Brings Brazil To New Haven’
by | Dec 4, 2015 8:26 am | Comments (8)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Four months into resettlement in New Haven, Noor is finding her new country friendlier and less violent than she expected — after first learning about the culture by watching Hollywood action movies back in Syria.
by | Dec 3, 2015 2:28 pm | Comments (38)
After receiving a scathing legal analysis critiquing the police’s “constitutionally troubling” actions, Mayor Toni Harp promised to look into the arrest of a local immigrant rights activist at a picket outside Goodfellas restaurant on State Street.
by | Nov 26, 2015 9:04 am | Comments (59)
Paul Bass Photo
Forty immigrant-rights activists brought complaints about the arrest of a wage-theft protester to the mayor’s office on Thanksgiving Eve — and refused to leave in what became an extended stand-off.
by , , and | Nov 25, 2015 8:06 am | Comments (3)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
IRIS chief Chris George.
Seventy five years ago, a German Jewish teenager who had been sent to safety in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport arrived in New York where she was reunited with her parents. After a brief stay in New York, the three of them travelled by bus to Scattergood, Iowa, where the American Friends Service Committee had turned a school into a hostel for European refugees. As the Nazi terror spread through Europe, the members of a Disciples of Christ Church in tiny Eureka, Ill, decided to go beyond reading newspaper headlines and praying and offered to adopt the family. The teenager and her parents moved into a fully furnished apartment on the edge of the Eureka College campus and were welcomed into a community that had known few Jews, let along foreign-born Jews. The father got a job auditing municipal books in small Illinois towns. The mother got a job in the college kitchen. And the teenage girl got a free college education there. Her brother interned in England – he was considered an enemy alien even though he was a Jewish refugee – eventually joined his family in the U.S.
by | Nov 23, 2015 3:17 pm | Comments (2)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Trevino: Affirming our “deepest values.”
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy got a shout-out Monday from Fair Haven-based Junta for Progressive Action, in support of his controversial decision to welcome a Syrian refugee family to the state after the governor of Indiana denied it entry.
by | Nov 20, 2015 8:19 am | Comments (3)
Paul Bass Photos
Lembo, Markley in the WNHH studio Thursday.
Connecticut served as a beacon to the nation — or failed to heed popular warnings to tread more carefully — when it welcomed a Syrian refugee family to New Haven this week.