Teaching Immigration at Borough of Manhattan Community College

Abstract

Icame to the topic of immigration through my experience in the anti apartheid and Latin American solidarity movements during the 1980s. As a student, the horrible violations of human rights in South Africa and Central America that led many to flee from their homelands were matched only by the level of depriva tion I saw among the children in foster care and the homeless that I encoun tered as a social worker in the United States. The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador were building schools, homes, hospitals, and providing uplift to the worst off members of their societies. Ironically, these regimes were being attacked by the U.S. government for precisely the same reasons that poor people and minorities across America were deprived of these necessities: they are a threat to the domi nant e?tes. The struggles by poor and working people for social and economic justice in the neighborhoods where I worked in New York City, San Francisco, and New Brunswick, N.J.?like the lib eration movements in South Africa and Central America?were by-products of neo-liberal policies, which produced ram pant inequalities. Another of my political coming-of age-moments was during the 1984 and 1988 presidential election cam paigns of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. The Rainbow Coalition that sprung up around Jackson's campaigns represented an ideal for our society, one that was becoming increasingly multicultural in large part because of increased immigra tion. This new political formation, an alliance among blacks, Latinos, Asians, progressive whites, gays, feminists, unions, faith-based organizations, and a myriad of other groups, held out the pos sibility of making strides towards social and economic justice. In important ways, these were exciting and hopeful times. In 1989, David Dinkins was elected as the first African American mayor of New York City by just this sort of multiracial electoral coalition, which he called a gorgeous mosaic.1 Despite these gains (and probably because of them), however, dominant elites sought to thwart such mobilizations, including political elites that formed the Democratic Leadership Caucus (DLC) within the Democratic Party in 1985, whose mission was to distance the Party from special inter ests (read: blacks, women, unions, gays, environmentalists) and move the Party to the center, which meant to the right.