It has been almost a year since hundreds of students and faculty marched through Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus in a public outcry against racism.
On February 21, 2008, protestors, joining a small but vocal group called the Anti-Racism Movement (ARM), donned electric green armbands and shouted slogans like, “We pay for education, not discrimination!” They stormed across campus to the offices of Father Garanzini and Campus Security, demanding that attention be paid to what ARM called “the systemic racial inequalities on our campus.”
After the widely reported “Labor Day Incident,” in which a campus security officer berated and removed a small group of minority students from Loyola’s campus, ARM had created an undeniable tension and presence within the community. Weeks of phone calls, petitions, and gathering buzz finally reached a climax when the huddled mass of students sang “We Shall Overcome,” led by freshman Erica Granados-De La Rosa.
Erica is a petite latina with soft features, sporting a recently buzzed head of hair and eyes that speak along with her animated voice. Her apparent youth belies the fact that, at only 18 years old, Erica is completing her sophomore year at Loyola, having entered into the university at the age of 16. As a victim of the incident that inspired action, De La Rosa was a likely candidate to be a part of the movement. Having been a student for barely six months at Loyola, however, it may be surprising that De La Rosa herself created it.
Entering the microcosm of politics and power plays entangled in Loyola’s student groups, De La Rosa contends, “I wouldn’t have been able to take that next step if it had not been for other people sharing their experiences, similar experiences, with me.” Through what De La Rosa calls a grassroots campaign, she and several other members of the Loyola community created a movement that captured an unprecedented amount of attention among the students of the university, with mixed results from the school administration.
For De La Rosa, issues of race and inequality have pervaded many of the defining moments of her life. A daughter of two undocumented immigrants, Erica described her childhood as one of many hardships, “affected deeply by many things that I feel we have been a victim of, as a first-generation, lower-class Latino family in the U.S.”
Her mother grew up in a family of migrant workers from Northern Mexico, moving listlessly through various low-paying agricultural jobs in the U.S. Erica’s father, whom she connected with for the first time two years ago, was raised as a criado, given away in order to work for a wealthier family in Morzan, El Salvador. As the nation descended into civil war, he became politically active as a guerilla soldier for FMLN, the people’s army; though he left the country to work within a Salvadorian community in Washington D.C, Erica’s father continues to send much of his income to foster political activity in his native land.
Erica’s parents (whose names she requested be omitted) met through their social activism in Columbia Heights, D.C. While their pasts were mired by struggle and poverty, Erica believes “my parents were given the opportunity to receive their education and develop their social consciousness.” Both received some college education in the U.S, an advantage which allowed them to understand the implications of their reality as U.S. immigrants. De La Rosa saw the achievements of her parents as monumental. “I always felt like people around me were kept on a leash that only allowed them to see so much or go so far,” Erica said. Fortunately, both Erica and her parents were able to transcend these limits.
Erica, too, faced the burden of placelessness, as a result of divorce and family difficulties; born in Baltimore, Md., De La Rosa spent her early years in Langley Park, Md., and the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C, which she described as “low-class black and Latino communities, affected by the crack epidemic of the early 90’s.” At 9 years old, after two years in a migrant community of Lincoln, Neb., the beginning of Erica’s adolescence was spent in the Chicago neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Pilsen, and Evanston. At 12 years old, her family settled in Dallas, Texas, where she completed her high school education in 2006.
“Dallas is the most difficult place to describe,” Erica adds, “because of a lot of instability and moving around the city. I spent the most time in Texas, although it feels like the shortest.”
At 12 years old, she discovered her passion for community organizing in her neighborhood of East Dallas. Attempting to start an after-school church program for her peers, De La Rosa was met with opposition from the community.
“Church dynamics and politics, is like, these ghetto kids are coming into the church, and they’re like, ‘Whoa! We don’t want to let you come in,’ Erica noted laughingly. Still, it was an unsettling response from the community. “They wouldn’t even get to close to us,” Erica said. “It was like they needed special equipment to even talk to us. We were kids.”
Despite the implicit discouragement from community leaders, Erica sought out grant monies and developed a comprehensive summer program, which provided her peers with activities, including a trip to Six Flags amusement park, and opportunities for community service. “And at the end of it,” Erica recalled, “this woman came up to me and she was like, ‘You’re amazing! You’re 12 years old, about to be 13, and you’re organizing! Do you realize how much power [you have]?’”
Six years later, Erica once again felt the need to exercise her power, after being orally harassed and removed from the college campus that had only months ago become her home. A campus security officer at Loyola, suspecting De La Rosa and her friends were members of a neighborhood gang, refused to allow them to walk through campus, even after they showed their student ID cards.
After informing Loyola’s Latin American Student Organization of the incident, Erica quickly acquainted herself with other victims of discrimination on campus and those who, “even if they weren’t active on campus, were conscious of this idea of racism and this idea of race and just, you know, forms of systematic discrimination and prejudice.” Through her aggressive campaigning to find a solution to her experience, a coalition of students formed the foundation for the Anti-Racism Movement.
The founders of ARM, a small, tight-knit group of primarily minority students, met in the office of the Black Cultural Center, cloistered in the basement of Loyola’s Campion Hall. In heated discussions that went well into the night, ARM members sacrificed the social opportunities of their Friday nights in order to craft a detailed mission statement and organize large-scale public events, including a kickoff rally and the February protest.
Initially, allied organizations, like the Black Cultural Center, and even ARM’s co-founders, were skeptical of the movement De La Rosa was attempting to build. Her inexperience in student government, coupled with a tenacious pursuit of immediate action, may have at first appeared unrealistic, if not radical.
“One of the first things we did as a group was, we had to go to Office of Student Diversity and let them know that we’re going to start something on this campus,” Erica describes. “And so we went… and I was like, ‘Okay, gentlemen, you ready? Today is the beginning of something, blah blah…’ And I gave this huge lecture. And they [ARM’s co-founders] were like, ‘O-okay, let’s just go into the office.’ I’m sure, I think about it now, I’m like, man, they must have had some crazy idea about me.”
The results of ARM’s presence at Loyola, however, seem to be uncertain, even a year after its grand entrance into the community. Shortly after the public outcry by ARM and its supporters, Loyola Phoenix columnist Nick Gamso described the aftermath as “a moment of defeat, when you realize that good intentions and a megaphone have done little to change the world, that the powers that be will keep, uh, being.”
As ARM continues to work alongside with the Black Cultural Center, Latin American Students Organization, and other minority groups on campus to pressure the administration, its demands have yet to be met. Many of the changes, including the establishment of an oversight board to deal with complaints of discrimination, have been gridlocked in the arduous process of negotiation.
“When we sit down with administrators, we can pretend like we’re running shit the whole time, and we can pretend like we understand the game,” Erica said. “But these administrators, these old white men, they’ve been doing this their whole life. They get paid to sit here and do what they’re doing. And they know all the laws, and they know the policies, and they know what we can and can’t do, and they know how they can manipulate us.”
Yet the obstacles to De La Rosa’s current cause are small compared to the hurdles of her past. As she ends her second year at Loyola, Erica is studying abroad in Mexico, an experience which she describes as “healing.”
“Being here, learning my language and culture, is an act of reclaiming my humanity and resisting the injustice against my people,” she said. As she pursues her degree at Loyola, Erica aspires to continue building systematic reform, particularly in the public education system. “I have lived through injustice,” Erica states, “and I continue to keep it company every day. But I have learned to challenge its presence and find the strength to act against it.” With or without her megaphone, De La Rosa’s voice remains one that demands to be heard
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment