On Thursday, June 18th, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, giving thousands of young immigrants a relief from imminent deportation. This decision gives DACA recipients, or Dreamers as they are better known, and the activists who support them a temporary victory and a pathway to building the momentum needed towards permanent solutions such as giving a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. Education on these issues is critical in helping all who support immigrants and want to affect change on behalf of their families, neighbors, coworkers, students, who make an important part of the city and make the country whole.
Over the years, CLACS has created public programming and teacher training initiatives, as well as supported faculty and student research, on different aspects of migration in order to promote an understanding of the diversity of the Latin American experience in the US. Programming such as the decade-long collaborative film and conversation series Indocumentales, opened our space to community members, filmmakers, educators and activists in an effort to build networks of solidarity and resources while exposing audiences to the nuances of issues related to immigration.
On April 2019, Indocumentales featured a screening of The Unafraid, a film by Anayansi Prado and Heather Courtney that documents the lives of three dreamers -Alejandro, Silvia and Aldo- in Georgia and their journey towards college life in a state that denied them the opportunity to attend their higher education institutions. Here is a video of the conversation following its screening featuring Andrew Lim of the Partnership for a New American Economy and Staff Attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP) Celso Perez.
More insightful Indocumentales Q&A sessions can be found on this playlist.
