For Ermila Rodriguez , the topic of immigration has always been close to her and her family. Her mother migrated to the United States from El Salvador years ago, Rodriguez told a solemn audience last Tuesday.
She paused, struggling to maintain composure.
“People don’t understand,” Rodriguez said.
Through tears of guilt, anger and frustration, Rodriguez and her 14 classmates returning from a week-long expedition to the U.S.-Mexico border to study immigration first-hand tried to express to their fellow students and several University officials what they had learned during the newly developed two-week summer course.
The class, founded by education professor Edward Olivos, left for San Diego on August 2 for an intensive week working with a local non-profit organization devoted to helping Latino immigrants on both sides of the border.
“The class is really about experiencing what is happening and seeing what it is like down there,” Olivos said before departing for San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. “My hope is that students will be able to better relate to the immigrant population.”
The students registered for the new course came from a variety of backgrounds and occupations. Some – like Rodriguez, a family and human services major – come from immigrant families, while others were experiencing the issue for the first time.
“I don’t know what to say still,” said Brooke Fischer, a Woodburn native and pre-education major. “This class is everything I should have already learned (after growing up in a town with such a large immigrant population).”
During their week at the border, students alternated between fieldwork with the non-profit organization Border Angels and seminars at St. Rose of Lima Parish. Olivos said the students spent the first day meeting with immigrant men who live in the canyons near San Diego trying to find work whenever and however they can.
The class arrived in several large vans to talk to the men where they gathered to look for work, and this lead the men to believe that the students had come to offer them a job for the day.
“Getting off that van was so hard for me,” said Juliana Guzman, whose parents migrated to the country. “These men were like my uncles, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful to them.”
Many of these men will only find work a few days out of the week and struggle to provide for their families, Guzman said. Other students were also moved by the visit.
“One of the men said to me, ‘God doesn’t punish. These are just challenges that we have to overcome,’” said Cynthia Medina, a graduate student in counseling and psychology. “That was an emotional part of the trip.”
Medina said she migrated to the U.S. as a child with her mother and had a green card for several years before becoming a U.S. citizen in high school.
The class also headed into the Mexican desert for a day to fill water stations maintained by Border Angels, which devotes itself to minimizing unnecessary immigrant deaths along the border, according to its website.
During the expedition, the temperature reached 107 degrees, a far cry from the 130 degrees the area has been known for, said Enrique Morones, founder of Border Angels.
“The desert was really demanding,” Medina said. “And all I could think about was how strong those men are I had talked to the day before, crossing for three days and three nights with no food or water.”
Many of the students were sobered by the expedition.
“A lot of people mix up the politics of immigration with the human aspect,” said Alison Ecker, an ethnic studies major. “The fact that there are groups that vandalize the water stations – to deny someone something as basic as water is just cruel.”
The students also spent a day working with refugees in Tijuana, Olivos said, and went to view the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
“I want students to see what the fence really looks like, and what the other side of Tijuana looks like … (And) to get to feel what it is like to cross in these conditions,” Morones said before the students arrived.
The class attended various seminars during the evenings at a local Catholic church. Olivos said the Church, which has faced a great deal of criticism in the United States for supporting immigrants’ rights, gave several presentations to students about the Catholic Campaign for Immigration Reform. The campaign hopes to bring more benefits to immigrants and potential immigrants, according to its website.
Olivos said the class is primarily designed to give the students enough background and first-hand knowledge on immigration to continue working in the field, or at least leave with a better understanding of it. Many students said that the class has motivated them to continue working in the field.
“Honestly, this class did change my life,” said Maggie Gonzalez, a graduate student studying communication disorders and science. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this strongly about (anything) in my life.”
In addition to the fieldwork, the students spent roughly a week in class studying immigration globally, especially the changes seen since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed.
“The class is about understanding immigration under the context of the global economy,” Olivos said, “not as a human choice that people suddenly woke up one day and decided to migrate, but as a necessity. The U.S. is not the only place getting immigrants.”
Olivos said the class will become a permanent fixture in the College of Education curriculum next year, but he does not know if or when it will head to the border again, though some of the students feel very strongly that the trip to the border should continue.
“This is an experience we will never forget and I will never forget,” a tear-choked Medina said. She added that she hoped that Olivos can find funding to take the class to the border again because it is such an important part of the class.
The class was able to take the summer trip this year because of a grant provided by the Wayne Morris Center for Law and Politics, which provided the students with a travel stipend to help cover some of the expenses at the border.
“This class is something that the school can actually pride itself on,” Guzman said. “Classes like this actually impact people.”
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