Leah Mlyn
Centro de los Derechos del Migrante
Mexico City & Oaxaca, Mexico
It’s hard to believe that I’m halfway done with my time at el Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM). My position as a volunteer/intern has had its ups and downs (mostly ups), but it’s important that I briefly summarize my efforts and experiences thus far.
The office I was working at in Mexico City was a short walk from my apartment through the streets of Colonia Condesa, a neighborhood within the Cuauhtémoc district of Mexico City. It has a sophisticated, safe, Parisian vibe, distinct from other parts of the city. Cupcake shops and espresso cafés scream the globalization of “hipster” culture, but only a few steps away can usually promise a torta stand, fresh fruit juice, or La Michoacana paleteria (these mango, coconut, strawberry-vanilla popsicles are truly the best I’ve ever had).
My coworkers in that office were bright and friendly. Half are Mexican women, half American women. This was not something I was expecting, and that’s evident in my reflections prior to my placement regarding my position as an unemployed gringa in the struggle for migrant rights, labor rights, and Latina women’s rights. I feel comfortable in the office setting, though being thrown into a fully functioning organization with rituals, jargon, only 2 phone lines, Skype meetings, “flexible Fridays,” and late lunch breaks can be a little overwhelming. A few of these smart, powerful women are lawyers.
CDM does more legal work than I anticipated, though they emphasized to me during my orientation that their work is truly divided and varied, in terms of outreach, litigation, and transnational attempts at policy reform. This is what I have come to realize defines a truly successful human rights organization; human rights and labor rights violations are complex, multifaceted, stemming from a broad range of actors and power structures and must be addressed through various veins of activism, litigation, and hard work.
The problem with a 5-week internship in CDM’s Mexico City office and a 5 week internship in the same organization’s satellite office in rural Oaxaca is that it’s easy for my position to feel very temporal, unimportant, and outside-the-action. My supervisor has gone to wonderful efforts to make sure my work is engaging, appropriately time consuming, and challenging, but I can’t help but feel not wholly responsible (a bad feeling).
One of my main projects included organizing a focus group during one of CDM’s outreach trips at the end of the month in Hidalgo, Mexico, to get feedback from a group of migrant women (both with and without official work visas) with an end result of an updated and revised pamphlet that CDM distributes during their ProMuMi workshops. These workshops are the ones I was most interested in during the proposal and planning process for this summer, in which they educate women on their way to work in the US for their first or not first time about their inherent rights as workers in the US.
My project of organizing this focus group then revising the format (the lawyers will take care of the actual facts/iterations of human rights) of the pamphlet to increase accessibility and usability would not be possible without the involvement of the members of CDM’s comité, a group of migrant workers currently living in different states throughout Mexico who act as community liaisons between the organization and the mass of migrant workers in their home communities. These members are dedicated to increasing access to rights and resources for members of their community through partnership and collaboration with CDM, especially with helping organize location, date, times, and spreading knowledge about the know-your-rights workshops CDM does throughout Mexico about monthly, and for things like these focus groups which I am organizing.
My lack of legal knowledge, lack of graphic design skill, and lack of fluency in Spanish are the central barriers to me taking on the complete project of updating and revising the ProMuMi pamphlet. Even the phone calls in Spanish to the members of comité to figure out the best days, locations, and evaluate community interest in the focus group is extremely difficult for me, because though I imagined my decade-worth of Spanish classes would allow the nuances and fluency of the language to come rushing to me the moment I surrounded myself with Spanish speakers (the whole office functions almost entirely in Spanish), such was not the case.
Each day my brain feels tired and sore from the constant language navigation to which I am dedicated. It feels good to have such a prolific challenge, and I know that my comprehension, writing skills, and communication skills have improved even in these first ~3 weeks here. I take each opportunity to explain myself, talk on the phone, ask for directions, order off a menu, write an email, or listen to a meeting or conversation as a learning opportunity. And I’m being patient with myself.
Other projects I’ve worked on include side projects that support other members of the office. I created a fact sheet about the New American offices in many US states; these offices offer free or cheap services to “new Americans,” like English classes, legal support, connections with community organizers and organizations, and are often run by city or county political office holders in conjunction with other state-wide immigrant-accepting initiatives. I researched grant-givers and foundations, locating similar organizations to CDM that have received significant grants or funding, and worked closely with CDM’s development director to brainstorm ways to get more money to the organization. I did office “bitch work” (it’s important too!) like mailing letters to clients about the status of their class action case. I created a document with a list of tweets to be sent out at later dates about ProMuMi, working on PR for the project and creating new hashtags and spread of information for both migrant women and their allies.
I made calls to the last-known numbers for some clients of one of CDM’s class action cases with whom lawyers at CDM needed to contact regarding the status of their compensation checks (these were clients who CDM had not been able to reach in a while). If their numbers were out of service, I was told to “get creative” and call pharmacies or tiendas in the client’s town and ask the owner if they knew our client and if they could put up a sign with their name and the number of our agency.
One project I took on with the help of an NYU law school graduate was of special interest to me, though it’s quite honestly a bit boring, mind-numbing, and overwhelming. I learned that CDM receives a plethora of calls from migrant workers with cases that our legal services can simply not take on or represent, including legal issues surrounding immigration status, workers compensation, wage & hour laws, and tax cases.
In these cases, CDM works hard to refer the migrant in need to a legal service in the states equipped with a Spanish-speaking attorney, resources to serve clients across the border, and cheap or free legal representation. The NYU law graduate oriented me to the problem, and let me know that CDM does not currently have a comprehensive referral guide to make these referrals to specific lawyers or agencies easy or timely. For about 25 of the top migrant receiving states, she wanted a list of numbers and contact information about state bar referral agencies and legal aid services.
From these numbers, I was to gather more specific sets of resources, including names and contact information for specific Spanish-speaking attorneys that could take on these types of cases. I got a Skype unlimited worldwide calling account, started an Excel spreadsheet, and made numerous calls to referral lines and different attorney offices. My partner on this project even suggested I write an advocacy piece on how hard it can be for certain foreign/temporary workers with certain types of visas (for example, non-forestry H-2B visas) or without visas to receive legal aid from LSC-funded services or organizations, because since 1996 the LSC placed very strict limits on the types of people or cases Legal Services Corporation-funded lawyers could represent.
The most interactive project I was assigned thus far was to help one of CDM’s lawyers organize details for a deposition for one of our clients that lives in a village close to Puebla. I was to find a room in a hotel or university in Puebla, a beautiful, church-filled town about 2 hours outside of Mexico City (DF), with high-speed internet access that we could use or rent for 4 hours one afternoon to complete a deposition with our client and her lawyers in the US. After the room was booked, I was invited to accompany one member of CDM to Puebla for the day via bus, and help support the process of the deposition.
We left from a metro station I had never been to before at 8AM on Thursday morning and returned to DF at 8PM that night after a long day of wonderful interactions with a lovely migrant worker woman who we met up with at the bus station, a successful deposition, exploration of a beautiful university campus, and even poking around the center of Puebla – visiting the church from 1644, sitting in the green central park, and tasting mole poblano enchiladas with chocolate-flavored curry-like mole for which Puebla is famous. It was a beautiful day, and it was an honor to help CDM in this way.
Every day I have calls to make and tweets to write, but my work is low-pressure. I’m not going into communities as much as I thought or hoped I would, but this is because the focus of the DF CDM office is not outreach.
As I write this now, I sit in CDM’s office in Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca. I arrived here yesterday morning after a 10-hour overnight bus ride from Mexico City. The town, founded in the early 1500s, is primarily composed of poor, migrating indigenous Oaxacans. Over 2/3 of the people speak Mixtec, and many of those people do not speak Spanish. I met two men yesterday during my breakfast of memlitas (beans inside tortillas folded into triangles – complete of course with cream and cheese and salsa) in the mercado who had traveled to the US (Washington state) to work, and who proclaimed that my Spanish was better than theirs.
The town is the complete opposite of Mexico City; I can walk around the perimeter in 25 minutes flat. Everything is inexpensive, including my shabby (and not chic) hotel room for $100 a month. But everything is beautiful, tasty, and friendly. My tasks within the office will remain mostly the same here, and Adelina, the only other person who works in the satellite office, and I will be responsible for two outreach trips in the state of Oaxaca before my time with CDM ends in August.
I hope my fellow fellows are doing great things all across the world, and adjusting well to our perplexing, challenging positions of outsiders.