Dreamers Working Group: 2019 Impact Report

2019 Impact Report: Dreamers Working Group

From the report:

“Thanks to the generosity of donors, the support of the UO Advancement team, and the determination of DWG staff, UO Dreamer Scholarships are now available to undocumented & Dreamer Ducks! The Opportunity Through Excellence, or Fund the Dream Scholarship as it is known through our outreach efforts, aims to bridge the gap for those undocumented, DACA, and Dreamer students who are not able to complete a FAFSA and obtain federally-funded financial aid.  These students are not able to access scholarships such as Pathway Oregon and grants such as the Pell Grant.  Thanks to the generosity of our donors we have been able to offer, for the first time, scholarships to students beginning in spring 2019.” 

 Feather J. Crawford, CLLAS event planner & project manager, is also a staff member of the Dreamers Working Group.

The UO Dreamers Working Group is supported by the Office of the President, the Office of the Dean of Students, the Division of Equity and Inclusion, Undergraduate Education and Student Success, and the Division of Global Engagement. EO/AA/ADA Institution; Committed to Cultural Diversity.

Tags: UO Dreamers Working Group

The Migrant Caravan: From Honduras to Tijuana

The Migrant Caravan: From Honduras to Tijuana
An Analysis by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies Fellows (2018-2019)

Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies School of Global Policy and Strategy
University of California San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive # 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519

This PDF is a recent report about the migrant caravan published by the Center for U.S.-Mexicana Studies, which granted permission for CLLAS to disseminate via our website.

The report talks about the conditions that produced the caravan in Central America, responses from civil society in Mexico and the U.S., explains what asylum is and how and why people seek it and some stories about asylees, and then political responses in Mexico to the caravan.

This report includes pieces by CLLAS founding director Lynn Stephen, Philip H. Knight Chair, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, and James Daria, a PhD student at University of Oregon in cultural anthropology and a previous CLLAS Graduate Student grantee and Faculty/Student Collaborative grantee.

See their articles on these pages:

• “The Northern Triangle of Central America: Violence, Displacement, and Refuge,” by James Daria / p. 4
• “The Response of Civil Society on Both Sides of the U.S.-Mexican Border,” by James Daria, Carolina Valdivia, and Abigail Thornton / p. 22
• “The Path to Legal Safety: A Mismatch between the Law and the Practice.” by Lynn Stephen and Teresita Rocha Jiménez / p. 32

Following on the 2018-19 AY visits by Judge Yassmin Barrios and Dana Frank (professor of history emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz), this report should be of particular interest to the CLLAS community of faculty, staff, students, and community members.

Tags: CLLAS, James Daria, Lynn Stephen, Migrant Caravan

Spring 2019 CLLAS Notes

0519-CLLAS-newsletter_FINAL

The 2019 spring edition of CLLAS Notes, our twice-yearly newsletter, is now available online and in print.

History professor Carlos Aguirre reviews his tenure as CLLAS interim director and takes us on a look ahead at the new two-year plan for CLLAS, a series of initiatives and events under the theme “The Politics of Language in the Americas.”

Learn about Judge Yassmin Barrios’s visit to the UO campus in March and her lecture on “Justice and Reparation in Guatemala,” where she talked about her experience with the High Risk Crime Tribunal over which she presides. Check out the accounts of graduate student research in Peru and Guatemala and faculty research in Bolivia. Read about CLLAS founding director Lynn Stephen’s experience as the president of the Latin American Studies Association.

CLLAS event planner & project manager Feather Crawford fills us in on the January CLLAS Town Hall with Mae Ngai, the 2018-19 Wayne Morse Center Chair. And thanks to Crawford’s excellent reporting, you can find out more about why migrants are fleeing Honduras when you read her account of historian Dana Frank’s detailed talk held in April.

The 2019 Spring edition of CLLAS Notes, Volume 10, Issue 2 includes:

• Letter from Interim Director Carlos Aguirre
• “Justice and Reparation in Guatemala”—Judge Yassmin Barrios’s lecture about justice & human rights in Guatemala
• “Lynn Stephen Completes Her Tenure as LASA President”
• Faculty Research—“Strugging with Sustainability: Guarayo Cultural and Environmental Management Challenges”
• Graduate Research—“Responses to Gendered Violence in Costa Rica and Guatemala”
• Graduate Research—“Sounds of Power: Peruvian colonial pipe organs in the interplay of cultures”
• Graduate Research—“Environmental Justice and the Local Effects of Glacier Melt in the Peruvian Cordillera Huayhuash”
• News & Book Notes
• Event Reports
• 2019-20 Grant Recipients

Tags: CLLAS, CLLAS Notes, UO

2019-19 Dreamers Working Group Update

May 8, 2019—The Dreamers Working Group (DWG) includes staff, faculty, graduate students, and community members committed to creating a community of welcome and support for undocumented and Dreamer students, students with DACA, and students in mixed-status families. 

One way the DWG builds this support and community is through education and training outreach on the UO campus. Working in collaboration with CLLAS, UO professor Ellen McWhirter (counseling psychology) developed an hour-long info-session to build understanding of the realities faced by students with precarious status. DWG volunteers have led approximately 40 info-sessions since winter 2017, offering these educational opportunity units all over campus and beyond. Julie Weise, associate professor of history, created the Dreamers Ally Training initiative in fall 2017. Since then the DWG has held six robust, four-hour training sessions, training almost 400 staff, faculty, and graduate employees as allies. 

As director of Multicultural and Identity-based Support Services and chair of the DWG, Justine Carpenter focuses on direct student support and access and prioritizes student-facing work.  The successful Duck Funder campaign—and other fundraising activities that created a scholarship for undocumented & Dreamer students—has been at the center of this work.  Nine students received scholarships for spring 2019 and six to nine scholarships will be awarded for AY 2019-2020. The UO Dreamers webpage has also been reoriented toward student access and includes useful information on financial aid, scholarships, wellness, and student support and resources. 

The DWG is ready to build upon the foundation of volunteerism, ally membership, and administrative support to institutionalize strides taken in education, training and outreach for campus partners and access and advocacy for student success. New initiatives include: 1) community outreach to bridge the divide between campus and the Eugene-Springfield community; and 2) development of more effective legal support for undocumented and Dreamer students, students with DACA, and students from mixed-status families. The DWG has made progress toward the first goal of community outreach with a committee dedicated to connecting more effectively with community leaders and Eugene/Springfield school districts and libraries, and welcoming community members to campus more effectively with projects like creating a Spanish-language map of the UO, planning a community reception, and sharing the Latino Roots exhibit. 

The DWG needs the help of allies and experts in pursuit of the second goal of developing more effective legal support for our students, however. Please email feather@uoregon.edu to volunteer.   

— Feather Crawford, the CLLAS event & program coordinator, also works as a part-time coordinator for the Dreamers Working Group. 

Tags: UO Dreamers Working Group

Erin Beck: The Uneven Impacts of Violence against Women Reforms in Guatemala

PLC 348

Join the International Studies Community for a discussion at the INTL Lunch Talk Next Friday, May 10 @ 12 p.m. in PLC 348

The Uneven Impacts of Violence against Women Reforms in Guatemala: Intersecting Inequalities and the Patchwork State
Presented by Dr. Erin Beck, Associate Professor, Political Science, UO

In 2008, Guatemala passed one of the most comprehensive pieces of violence against women legislation in Latin America, which criminalized various forms of violence against women (VAW) and mandated the creation of a specialized court system that would focus exclusively on VAW.

This talk explores the passage of such agenda-setting reforms and analyzes their impacts. It demonstrates that the reforms’ impacts are unevenly felt, with those who are already the most marginalized benefiting the least. It explains these uneven effects by drawing on a historical intersectional analysis of gender violence and an an analysis of state-society relations at their local instantiations where reforms do (or do not) affect state officials’ behavior and individuals’ expectations and experiences of the “reformed” state.

Among other theoretical insights, this analysis reveals the importance of including place in an intersectional analysis alongside more commonly studied categories of difference such as gender, ethnicity, and class. 

Tags: Erin Beck, Guatemala, UO, Violence against Women

Roberto Zamora, “A Long Path: The Right to Peace”

Lewis Lounge
Knight Law Center
1515 Agate St.
UO campus

Please note that the correct time is 5 to 7 pm (we listed an incorrect time previously).

Latin American Studies Event
Annual Bartolomé de las Casas Lecture on Human Rights in the Americas

“A Long Path: The Right to Peace”
Roberto Zamora, Human & Civil Rights Lawyer, Costa Rica

Meet and discuss international humanitarian rights in the Americas with Costa Rican Human & Civil Rights Lawyer and activist, Robert Zamora.

Tags: bartolome de las casas lecture, Roberto Zamora, UO