The grassroots power behind New Haven’s communal decision to embrace, rather than shun, the city’s burgeoning immigrant population took stock of its progress, and pledged renewed action, at a music-filled party Saturday night.
The party celebrated the 36th anniversary of Junta for Progressive Action, the city’s leading Latino social-service and political action group. The Fair Haven-based group has enjoyed a renaissance under the leadership of Kica Matos, who this Wednesday receives a national award in Boston for being one of the two most outstanding American public-service activists under 40 years old.
Saturday’s crowded party took place at the Whitney Arts Center, a stately 105-year-old Colonial mansion reborn as a performance and banquet center. The party’s theme was “Una Onda Sin Cresta” — a wave without a crest, referring to the fast-growing immigrant population in New Haven and across the country.
Junta chose the evening’s two honorees based largely on their work with that population: Unidad Latina en Acción (Latinos United in Actino), a grassroots group that pushes for immigrants’ rights; and Francisco Ortiz, the city’s first Latino police chief and an outspoken advocate of having police work to help rather than hound immigrants.
In accepting the award, Ortiz mainly praised the other winner for making a difference in New Haven. He promised his police force will “treat our community” — including the immigrant community — “with absolute respect and integrity.”
“Since the colonization of the Americas, immigrants have been arriving and settling in the Elm City — first English, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European, then black migrants from the South and Latinos from Puerto Rico. All have left indelible marks on this city we call home,” Kica Matos said in a “Welcome to the Wave” introduction published in the party’s program book.
“Today, the fastest growing population of New Haven immigrants is coming from Mexico, Central America and South America. Like each wave of immigrants before them, they have primarily settled in Fair Haven. They, too, are making cultural, economic and social contributions to this city. Unfortunately, they, too, face significant and familiar obstacles including discrimination, violence and hostility. However, there are those in our community who have devoted their time and energy to making life fair for these new immigrants.”
Junta, along with the party’s two honorees, was behind the package of reforms City Hall has embraced to ease life for New Haven immigrants. Junta also worked with Yale Law School researchers to prepare a report on proposals to improve immigrants’ life in New Haven, including the legal basis for issuing i.d. cards to immigrants. (Click here to read that report.)
Before the band started playing, and the guests hit the dance floor, Professor Alicia Schmidt-Camacho spoke movingly about the “wave with no crest,” a subject she also addressed in a commentary in the program booklet.
“The United States has never come to terms with being a nation built on the mobility of poor people,” she stated. “A school textbook might speak of waves of people reaching American shores. Now, just as the global traffic of peoples across borders has reached its height — to become the wave that has no crest — it is no longer possible to address the immigrant and the sojourner as partakers in our national story. No official acknowledgement of the 11 million nurses, nannies, gardeners, carpenters, seamstresses, harvesters and janitors can speak of their labors without concluding that this is all the work of trespassers, of illegals.”
Schmidt-Camacho called it “inhuman” and “unnatural” to “stop a wave in motion, place it under arrest… Those who affirm the search [for a better life] affirm the dignity of our humanity, for they acknowledge the essential nature of our existence, of our common history. When migrants claim their rights, they remind us… no human being is illegal.”