When there were no books, Hayle Perez created stories through journalism
'Most of the students were Mexican, and they'd tease me about how my family looked 'different.' That hurt,' said Perez, 17, a rising senior at Alliance Collins Family College Ready High School.'But instead of hiding it, it made me more proud of who I am. I started embracing my culture more and wanted to show it through my work.'
The work Perez was referring to was journalism, where she channels her cultural pride to promote literacy and celebrate her identities.
But at a school where all students were minorities, Perez noticed something was missing.
'I had never met someone who actually wrote stories about people from our backgrounds – whether Black or Hispanic. That lack of representation made me realize how important it is to have someone who understands and tells those stories,' she said.
As a sophomore, Perez set out to address the lack of books and literary resources at her school. She started a journalism club where students could pitch and discuss story ideas. They also set out to host more field trips and attend journalism events and conferences like J-Day.
'There were so many events happening, and nobody knew about them, not just in the school but in the neighborhood and the community,' she said. 'Writing about a college trip or getting students informed through the newspaper, you could do that.'
Perez faced challenges leading the journalism club, especially in introducing students to reporting and storytelling, since many had never written a news article before.
But the setbacks didn't stop Perez from launching literature-focused programs at Collins. She launched a book vending machine stocked with BIPOC authors to promote reading at a school without a library.
'She'd run the whole initiative; she's a huge advocate for reading, promoting literacy in a community that doesn't have many books,' said Melisa Alcala, who taught Perez ninth-grade English and ran ASB her junior year.
Daphnie Gutierrez, 17, who has been Perez's friend since sixth grade, specifically admires Perez's passion and dedication to writing and journalism. She said she sees Perez as someone who is able to 'get stuff out there.'
'People wouldn't assume she would voice her opinion because she's more shy and timid. She's really not,' said Gutierrez.
Perez's Guatemalan identity is her main source of pride and the foundation of her voice. She has participated in cultural pride days at school, where she wears traditional Guatemalan attire. Every year, she takes a trip to Guatemala, which helps her stay connected to her roots and deepens her sense of purpose.
According to Perez, her parents' journey to America is something she will 'never forget.' Her father immigrated from Guatemala, and her mother came from El Salvador.
'My dad always reminds me of where we come from. He tells me about how hard he worked, and how far we've come,' she said. Perez attributed her main motivation in journalism to her own family's story.
'I want to showcase every part of a person's truth, no matter where they come from or who they are; I want to shed light during dark times and uplift voices that have been ignored. That's always been my vision,' said Perez. 'And I carry my mom's Salvadoran roots and my Guatemalan identity with pride in every story I tell.' Related
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A day in the strawberry fields seems like forever
About 30 minutes into my job as a picker, the strawberry fairy left her first gift. On one of the beds of berries that seemed to stretch forever into the Santa Maria marine layer, Elvia Lopez had laid a little bundle of picked fruit. She and the other three dozen Mexican immigrants in the field were bent at an almost 90-degree angle, using two hands to pack strawberries into plastic containers that they pushed along on ungainly one-wheeled carts. They moved forward, relentlessly, ever bent, following a hulking machine with a conveyor belt that spirited away their fruit. But Lopez, a 31-year-old immigrant from Baja California, knew I was falling behind. And she responded with an act of kindness. Like the other women, Lopez wore a cap, several layers of clothing and a bandanna over her face to protect her from dust — and, she said, to keep her complexion nice. I wore the uniform of the other men: jeans, a tad too baggy so that I kept having to pull them up; a sweat shirt with a hoodie and a jacket over it; a baseball cap; and dusty, steel-toed work boots that a daddy long-legs had called home. But even if I was dressed like the other workers, the clothes felt like a disguise. As soon as I opened my mouth, my fluent but American-sounding Spanish, not to mention my baby-soft hands, gave me away. I shared that my parents were immigrants too. It was a defense mechanism, I guess, as much as a way of connecting with them. It didn't matter — they probably would have been generous either way. About an hour into the picking, my upper and lower back were beginning to tighten and my legs began to burn a little from the stooping. 'Listo para el contrato, amigo?' Seferino Rincon, a 42-year-old veteran of strawberry picking from Oaxaca, cheerfully yelled when I was allowed to catch up with the other workers. He was talking about the super-fast paid-by-the-piece picking — the contract — they were hoping to do tomorrow. I laughed and made a self-deprecating joke about just lasting the day. And yet, I was already thinking about the second day. My body was holding up all right, even if I was falling woefully behind the other workers and for stretches was almost alone. A month before, I stood thigh-high in a field of broccoli. I had always imagined that it grew close to the ground, like lettuce. Mark Teixeira, the owner of Teixeira Farms, which owns much of this land, snapped a long stalk and said: 'This is how you eat broccoli.' With his front teeth, he skinned the stalk and ate it like a carrot. He invited me to try it. It was sweet and better-tasting than the broccoli head. Teixeira, an affable guy with a sharp sense of humor, has argued publicly that Americans are unwilling to do the hard work that's necessary to gather crops. Like other growers, many of them conservative Republicans, he argues for immigration reform that provides for a steady stream of immigrants to do the work others won't. 'Americans don't want to do the fieldwork. They'll go over and make hamburgers for $8 an hour with no insurance, no nothing, when they can make more money here,' Teixeira said. 'I don't care if you pay $20 an hour, they'll come here one or two days, and they're gone. It's a mind-set: They think fieldwork is below them.' Teixeira was receptive to my idea of picking crops, but he didn't think strawberries were a good idea. Try broccoli, he said. Broccoli wasn't easy, he said. None of the crops were. But I wouldn't last doing strawberries. A group of broccoli pickers had gathered around us and I asked them which crop they hated picking the most. Almost all mentioned strawberries. How long did they think I'd last? An older man answered without hesitation: Quince minutos! Fifteen minutes. The men laughed. A moment later a young man hollered at the older man to stop gabbing and get to work. The men laughed again — the older man was his father-in-law. Tough crowd. I was glad I wasn't picking broccoli. Coming back to Santa Maria to start work, I slowed past the strawberry fields, looking at the men and women covered up like Mexican Bedouins, bowed over the earth. The day began with a lecture on the dangers of pesticides and keeping hydrated, followed by calisthenics I probably hadn't done since physical education in junior high. There was fog and a nice breeze from the Pacific. It wasn't the worst day to pick. Antonio Lopez, 34, one of the foremen for Mar Vista Berry, gently urged the workers to leave no good fruit behind. You might think strawberries are carefully sorted — possibly by a machine — into the clamshells you buy at the supermarket after being washed at some facility. They're not. The strawberries are picked by fieldworkers and placed directly into those containers. And you don't just throw strawberries into a clamshell and close it. They have to be sorted in a nice way, so that the strawberries on top don't show much of the stem, just their redness. The strawberries were the largest, ripest I had ever seen. There were fat ones that were completely symmetrical, and others that were huge and flat, like alluvial fans. Others were hook-nosed, like peppers. The farther behind I fell, the more obsessed I got with shapes. Sorting the fruit into the clamshells got to be like a game of Tetris from hell. I would stand up like a startled meerkat, looking at a clamshell and trying to figure out how to make the pieces fit. Then, when I began to fall comically behind, the strawberry fairy would leave another bundle for me. Porfiria Garcia, a 45-year-old Oaxacan immigrant, sidled up, offering encouragement. She tried working in a restaurant once, she told me, but she felt cooped up. She liked working in the open air, though it was hard work. She worked six days a week, often 10 hours a day, and her Sundays were often spent cooking for her family, doing laundry and preparing for the week of work ahead. From time to time, she'd take my near full clamshells and find a way to make the strawberries fit. Porfiria said she was glad my parents encouraged me to study. She hoped that for her children and grandchildren. 'What's the use of being born in this country if you don't study?' she said. That's what my parents wanted from me, my brothers and my sisters. Two weeks before heading up to Santa Maria, I was reaching into a closet in my parents' Boyle Heights home, looking for an old photo album, when I pulled out a day planner that my dad had kept in 1992. After coming to America in 1965 in the trunk of a car, my dad took all manner of jobs, including scrubbing toilets. By 1992, he was in his second decade as a machinist in Orange County. It was the job that helped him bring his family of six into the middle class. No detail of his life was too small for the day planner: like my older brother buying him The Club anti-theft device for Christmas; a son's appendectomy and a wife's surgery; his youngest child's toothache or the parking ticket he got on a Tuesday 'por buey' — for being an idiot, in his own words. My dad was working six days a week, often more than 12 hours a day. Most of his musing involved bills paid and unexpected expenses for the family. When his car battery went dead or was stolen, that was a calamity. It meant hours of work and money lost. He fretted over 'small checks' he got for 'only' eight hours of work and once, with no money to spare, simply wrote: 'Ni para el periodico.' Not even for the newspaper. His children, myself included, were a money pit. One January day, he wrote, in a mix of Spanish and English: 'Hector olvido luces 'on' —dead battery' after I left my car lights on while studying at UC Irvine. He had to bail me out. A month later: 'Hector olvido luces 'on.' Dead battery—Again.' That year, the economy soured and people were being let go where my father worked. He took a buyout. With my mom he opened a corner dry cleaner, but when that wasn't enough he tried to get another job. Finally, he took a job as an unarmed security guard in South L.A. working a graveyard shift — at a time when L.A.'s murder rate was sky-high. Americans, whether of Italian or Irish or Mexican descent, often refer to their immigrant bona fides. Sometimes we speak about our immigrant or working-class roots as if our forebears had passed on their fortitude, or that reserve of desperation that made them press forward, to do what they had to do. I'm the son of immigrants. But I'm not the same as them. The lunch hour came and, sore and exhausted, I grabbed the Playmate cooler I'd borrowed from my father-in-law and plopped down on the ground. My lunch selection probably didn't help my field cred: a can of Diet 7-Up, $7 beef jerky, mixed nuts with sea salt. Organic. A banana from the hotel. And a turkey sandwich from a fridge at Dino's Delicatessen. I ate half a banana and gave up. My appetite was gone. Noemi Lopez sat next to me. The 21-year-old worked six days a week to pay for four nights a week at a community college. A couple of years of this and study, and she hoped to reach her dream. 'I want to make wines and go to Italy ,' she said. Many of the workers said they not only took pride in the work, but enjoyed it in their own way. But others said they worked so hard and for so long for one reason: 'I have to — not because I want to, but because of necessity. I had to pay the coyote who brought me here. I had to pay rent, for food,' said Domingo Suarez, a soft-spoken 25-year-old who had herded goats and cattle in Oaxaca and was the father of a 1-year-old American girl. 'I have to take care of my family. I have to send money to my parents in Mexico .' As lunch ended, someone good-naturedly ribbed me, once again, with: 'Listo para el contrato?' Moments later, Seferino Rincon, seeing me struggle to keep up, turned to me, pumped his fist and said: 'Animo amigo, animo! Ya mero.' Keep your spirits, friend, and press forward. You're almost done. By then I was using my knuckles to prop myself up on the strawberry beds and the cart had become a walker. At about 2:20 p.m., a little more than seven hours after starting work, I took a break to grab a drink of water. After guzzling down six cups of the best water I had ever tasted, I trudged back to my row, boots feeling like they were stuck in sand. I took a peek at my Blackberry and shook it. I could have sworn more time had gone by. Porfiria Garcia stood next to my cart as I walked back to my row. I debated whether to try to continue. I surrendered. I didn't need this job. She smiled at me, as if she understood. Early the next morning, a deep fog blanketed the ground. In the darkness, car lights looked cottony. The workers arrived at yet another strawberry field, but this day was different. They were going to get their chance to work on el contrato. The best pickers could in five hours of work make upward of $150—or nearly twice as much in half the time. The workers did their calisthenics, and Antonio Lopez called out before they raced down the field: 'Ay que Dios los ayude.' May God help you. Within half an hour, the workers I had picked with a day before seemed more than a football field away, following the machine. A skinny immigrant approached Lopez and shyly asked if there was work. Lopez asked him if he would stay for the entire season — until about December. 'Yes, I want to stay for the entire season,' the young man answered. Moments later, work badge in hand, he jogged toward the machine, passing the bowed pickers into the fog.
Miami Herald
10 hours ago
- Miami Herald
When tenants have a right to counsel in eviction cases, but there aren't enough lawyers to help
When tenants have a right to counsel in eviction cases, but there aren't enough lawyers to help Icy snow crusted the sidewalks outside the Bronx housing courthouse on a Thursday in late January, a bitterly cold day in a string of bitterly cold days. Inside, spread out over three floors, dozens of people in puffy coats, some cradling babies or hunched over canes, waited to find out whether they would be kicked out of their homes or what it would take to stay housed. Every few minutes, a lawyer or court employee exited one of the courtrooms and shouted a name down the hall, searching for whoever was needed to proceed with an eviction hearing. Even more people were crowded inside the hearing rooms on each floor. Inside Room 550, around 11 a.m., a man in a black-and-white tracksuit and gold chain sat next to a woman in a sweatshirt and jeans who was wiping away tears. They faced a judge with long black twists and large, round glasses. No lawyer was with the couple, only the court's Spanish-language interpreter, in a blue suit and neat gray beard. Their landlord wasn't in the room, either; the landlord's attorney was there instead, texting and stepping into the hallway to talk to his client on the phone. The couple was trying to move back into the home they'd been evicted from, but the judge denied their request, informing them that they had to remove all their belongings within five days. "Good luck," the judge said at the end of the proceedings. The next defendant, a Black woman dressed all in black, had accumulated $27,849 in outstanding rent; she was given until the end of February to pay it off, plus the next month's rent. If she paid up, then the case would end, the judge told her. But if not, the landlord would have the right to seek an eviction warrant. Because she had no lawyer to help her parse the proposed deal, the judge had to stand in to make sure she could legally agree to it. Did she understand that she was waiving her right to a trial? Yes. Was she coerced into entering into the agreement? No. "Good luck, ma'am," the judge told her. "Thank you," she said softly as she left. For a brief time in the depths of the pandemic, the hallways and courtrooms of this courthouse had sat empty; eviction moratoria kept most cases from moving forward, and any that did proceed happened online only. But those measures are now long gone, and courts across the city have filled back up. "Housing court is like what it was before," said Munonyedi Clifford, attorney-in-charge of the citywide housing practice at The Legal Aid Society. Yet one key thing has changed: All of these tenants are, by law, supposed to have legal representation at their side. As the late January proceedings in Room 550 would prove, however, that right on paper has not prevented thousands of people from facing eviction all by themselves. Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler examined the high number of eviction cases in New York City, in which most tenants have no legal help despite residents' right to counsel. Other jurisdictions that have passed similar laws should pay attention to New York's current predicament. The unrepresented This isn't supposed to happen in New York City. In 2017, it became the first place in the country to enact a right to counsel in eviction cases, a guarantee of legal help for tenants navigating the process. In much of the rest of the country, just 4% of tenants have lawyers at their sides in eviction cases, compared to 83% of landlords. This creates a "huge imbalance," according to Peter Hepburn, associate director at The Eviction Lab, a research project at Princeton University, "not just in terms of power but just of procedural knowledge." Landlords find themselves in eviction proceedings frequently, and their attorneys deal with it daily. "The system works very well for them," Hepburn said. For tenants, eviction yanks them into an unfamiliar and often confusing world of legal maneuvering. "It doesn't work so well for them." New York City's landmark Universal Access to Legal Services law-codifying the right to counsel-was designed to fix this imbalance for households earning up to 200% of the poverty line, or $64,300 for a family of four. It started in just three zip codes per borough and was supposed to expand gradually, with five new zip codes added each year for five years, until the entire city would be covered. Before the pandemic began, right to counsel applied to only 25 of the city's 180 zip codes. The program quickly proved successful. Research published in a June 2023 issue of the Journal of Public Economics found that tenants who got legal representation through the program faced smaller monetary judgments and were less likely to be evicted. For tenants lucky enough to have representation in court in 2023, 84% percent were able to stay in their homes. The program has also reduced the number of eviction filings in the first place. "There's no question that the right to counsel works," Clifford said. After COVID-19 hit, the city's program was abruptly opened to all low-income tenants in early 2021 in an effort to keep people housed and healthy. At the time, caseloads were low, thanks to eviction moratoria, and in early 2022, close to 70% of tenants facing eviction were represented by an attorney. But after the CDC's nationwide moratorium was struck down in August 2021, and New York City's version ended a few months later, the floodgates were flung wide open. Stalled eviction cases started to move forward just as landlords filed a flurry of new ones: Eviction filings jumped 83% between 2022 and 2023. "It's back to business as usual," Clifford said. As a result, things quickly deteriorated. The percentage of tenants represented by an attorney declined steadily after January 2022. According to a paper written in 2023 by 11 legal services organizations, the right-to-counsel program has been plagued by "client eligibility outstripping provider capacity, funding shortfalls, and staff attrition, while tenant needs continue to rise." There were 111,830 eviction filings across the city last year, compared to just 42,203 in 2021. The Bronx is consistently the hardest hit, experiencing an eviction rate double that of the other four boroughs. And the majority of those Bronx tenants go it alone. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, only 42% of people facing eviction in New York City received full legal representation, while about half had no legal help at all; in the Bronx, less than a third were fully represented, while about 60% went through eviction proceedings by themselves. When a New York City tenant receives an eviction notice, they must reply to avoid automatic eviction. Their response triggers an "intake part," or IP, date. That's where, if they're lucky, they'll be assigned a legal aid lawyer who can help them. But there are 80 households at each IP date, which are held over Microsoft Teams for cases in the Bronx, and legal aid lawyers "just don't have the capacity" to cover all of them, said Jennie Stephens-Romero, deputy director of the housing unit at Bronx Legal Services. Her organization and the five others that offer free legal help to tenants facing eviction in the Bronx use a calendar system to make sure that one of them covers at least some of each weekday's IP date. Stephens-Romero's team was "very big," but they could only cover part of their assigned day; for a while they were able to cover either the morning or the afternoon, but after staff departures, they can only take on the first 20 tenants on their given day. Other organizations, she imagines, can take on even less. "It's really luck of the draw," she said, as to whether a tenant's IP date corresponds with the part of the day when attorneys are able to tune in and help. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves. It's "incredibly rare," Stephens-Romero said, for a tenant facing eviction to be able to afford their own lawyer without the help of a legal aid attorney. Last year, 11,587 tenants without representation called The Legal Aid Society's hotline (some may not be eligible for the right to counsel, and others may get a lawyer later in the process). Stephens-Romero said it's unusual for her to come to housing court and not be approached by somebody asking how to get a lawyer. Post-pandemic flood There doesn't seem to have been any planning for what would happen when the housing court system returned to its pre-pandemic state. Right-to-counsel lawyers in the city quickly realized that they couldn't handle all of the cases for eligible tenants; they didn't have adequate funding to meet the demand. So they, along with elected officials, asked housing judges to issue adjournments and postpone cases for tenants who weren't yet represented to give them time to get an attorney. The courts refused. "Courts are totally aware legal service providers can't handle all these cases," Stephens-Romero said. Indeed, as Community Service Society of New York policy analysts Oksana Mironova and Yvonne Peña write, courts are "choosing to move cases faster than the legal services providers can take them on, prioritizing speed over the tenants' right to due process." These priorities are precisely backward, Stephens-Romero said. "We're pushing tenants' rights to the side to clear the docket." Meanwhile, New York City's right-to-counsel program has only expanded further. In 2023, eligibility was extended to anyone of any income age 60 or older facing eviction. Legal service providers calculated that they needed $16 million a year to be able to handle those new cases-an alarming number, as the program wasn't fully funded even before that expansion. In 2023, legal aid providers told the city that it would take at least an additional $351 million to adequately serve the tenants they were already taking on plus all of the qualified tenants who were estimated to go through the process solo in 2024. Yet legal services providers in the city were granted only an additional $36.6 million for this work last year, and even then, the Eric Adams administration failed to pay out the money on time, forcing some organizations to contemplate cutting the help they offer. This is despite the fact that an analysis found in 2016 that the city would actually save $320 million a year in foregone shelter and housing costs by providing tenants with attorneys in eviction cases. "We want the right to counsel to really have the true meaning of what the tenant movement and folks who fought for this right really wanted, which is that everybody will get it," Clifford said. "But the city doesn't seem to be putting resources toward that kind of idea." More funding could also ease the staffing problems plaguing legal services organizations. Of the $351 million that these organizations have asked for, $226 million would go toward hiring more than 880 staff attorneys, a badly needed influx. Public interest lawyers face crushing workloads on salaries far lower than what they could command at private practices. In 2023, legal aid organizations reported attrition rates ranging from 20 to 55%; one provider lost six of 13 new hires within a year. "This is a tough job," Stephens-Romero said. If caseloads could be brought down and salaries increased, more people might stick around. The state court system released a report in 2023 recommending that attorney caseloads be limited to 48 a year. That represents an improvement from what caseloads used to be; Clifford said lawyers were routinely taking on more than 60 a year. But it's still a high number, according to Stephens-Romero, especially when some can be lengthy. Housing laws "are pretty complicated and complex, and each housing case requires a tremendous amount of work," Clifford said. Legal service lawyers wouldn't have to work so hard, however, if there weren't so many eviction cases inundating the system to begin with. As much success as the right-to-counsel program has shown for the tenants it's able to reach, New Yorkers would be much better off if they could simply stay housed in the first place. Yet New York City has long struggled to build and provide affordable housing, and the housing crunch is now the worst it's been in 50 years. "So many people wouldn't be ending up in housing court if apartments were eminently affordable," Clifford said. The city could also offer more help covering rent. Vouchers, which help low-income tenants afford apartments on the private market, are notoriously hard to use: The eligibility limits are stringent, and although it's illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to voucher holders, many do in practice. But the city has struggled to make improvements. In 2023, the city council overrode Mayor Eric Adams' veto to expand eligibility for some voucher programs, but Adams refused to implement the expansion, claiming it was too costly. After the city council sued over his refusal, a judge sided with Adams last summer. Other attempts to protect tenants might prove more successful. New York State approved good cause legislation for the city in 2024, which, for covered buildings, caps rent increases and bans landlords from evicting tenants except for things like nonpayment of rent or illegal behavior. But the law has a number of carveouts, including for buildings constructed after 2009, luxury units, rentals in condos and co-ops, and those owned by landlords with small portfolios. The hope, Clifford said, is that the law will eventually push the number of eviction filings down. "It's not everything that we wanted," Stephens-Romero said. But "it's definitely something we can use." Going national The early success of New York City's right-to-counsel program inspired other lawmakers around the country. "It basically made right to counsel seem achievable for lots of places," said John Pollock, coordinator at the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. In the three years after New York City enacted its program, four other jurisdictions-Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, and San Francisco-passed their own. Then the pandemic, which exposed not just the way job loss deprives people of the income to pay rent but also the impact of housing on people's health, lit a spark. Since the start of 2020, 14 cities, two counties, and five states have passed programs. Three states and six cities added their programs in 2021 alone. That frenzy has calmed down, but "we're still seeing the momentum rolling forward," Pollock said. These jurisdictions, and any others that join in, will have to heed the lessons of New York. Funding is one of the biggest question marks for other right-to-counsel programs, too. Many were set up with pandemic-era federal aid, money that has all been disbursed. When Hepburn and his colleagues at the Eviction Lab recently interviewed people working on implementing all the right-to-counsel programs across the country, "underfunding was something that came up throughout," he said. Still, Pollock hasn't seen any jurisdiction renege on its right-to-counsel program even as federal funding has dried up, and many are turning to their own sources to keep it going. In Hepburn's research, he and his colleagues found that thirteen programs are supported by state and local funding, including four that have their own revenue streams from things like taxes on landlords or developers. But even if programs were flush with cash, there is still a shortage of lawyers interested in and willing to do this work. "This is a sector-wide problem," Pollock said. Fixing it, as in New York, will take not just enough funding to make salaries competitive and workloads bearable but also a steady pipeline of new lawyers ready to go into housing law, which some law schools don't even cover. Then there are the court systems themselves, which have appeared to resist slowing things down to make sure tenants get the legal representation that they're due. "That approach of continuing cases when lawyers are not available, making tenants go through when unrepresented, that's a huge part of the problem," Pollock said. Courts tend to favor the interests of landlords. But in Washington State, judges are required to delay a case if a tenant who is eligible for the right to counsel appears solo. "Courts could take a different approach. They're choosing not to," Pollock said. He pointed out that, at less than 8 years old, the movement for the right to counsel in eviction proceedings is a relatively new one. "As with any movement, you expect there are going to be challenges," he said. But if New York wants to retain its status as a leader, it will have to pave a path toward finding the resources and the political willpower to make a groundbreaking right mean something real for everyone to whom it's owed. Pay up None of the half dozen Bronx tenants who were called before the judge in Room 550 over the course of an hour on that morning in late January had a lawyer helping them make sense of the process. A woman with the court's Spanish interpreter and no one else by her side was told she had to pay $3,554 by the end of February to avoid an eviction warrant. A white-haired man, also accompanied only by the translator, had accrued $2,221 in outstanding rent; the eviction warrant against him would be put on hold, the judge said, if he paid his February and March rents on time. "Good luck sir," she told him. Another woman, her dark hair tied up in a bun, sat next to her landlord's attorney. She owed $24,660 in outstanding rent. She was told, with the help of the interpreter but no lawyer, that her warrant would also be put on hold if she paid by the end of February. Last was a man who had accumulated $5,395 in outstanding rent; he had nine days to pay $3,200, plus the following months' rent, in order to stave off his eviction warrant. He, too, faced the judge alone. These judgments represent staggering amounts of money for most low-income renters. Many of Stephens-Romero's clients are "in really dire straits," she said. A large number have physical and mental limitations that prevent them from working, while others struggle to find jobs, or at least ones that offer enough hours and pay to make rent. If the tenants in Room 550 had had a lawyer on their side, they would likely have pushed back against the judge and managed to lower the amounts that their clients had to pay, or at least bought them more time. None of the tenants had the capacity to argue on their own behalf. Instead, they all accepted the sums that were handed down, whether they could afford them or not. Right to counsel "is a law," Stephens-Romero said, "and we aren't meeting it." Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler. This story was produced by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker. © Stacker Media, LLC.
Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Chicago Tribune
Waukegan Proud Award given to 108-year-old woman; ‘It's unbelievable what (she) was able to do in her life'
Willabelle Jackson, a Waukegan resident since 2018, broke a lot of barriers as a single Black woman on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s, becoming an entrepreneur and a landlord in her mid-20s. Now 108, Jackson takes life easier than she did when she was operating a laundry business, living in one unit of her South Side six-flat and renting out the other five units, as well as playing in national Bridge tournaments. Born during World War I, she survived the time of the Spanish Flu, started building a small business empire during World War II and came through the coronavirus pandemic unscathed. She also found time to travel, which her granddaughter, Debra Foulkes, credits with her longevity. 'It was family, her everyday life and Arkansas water,' Foulkes said. 'Grandmother would go (to Hot Springs) every year for a month taking sitz baths, drinking the water, taking steam baths, massages (and) manicures. She had the water shipped home.' Jackson was honored with the Waukegan Proud Award by Mayor Sam Cunningham on Thursday at her home, the Terrace Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Waukegan, for her life of achievement and longevity. She turned 108 on March 2. 'It's unbelievable what Mrs. Jackson was able to do in her life,' Cunningham said of the oldest person he has ever met. 'She accomplished all of this at a time when it was almost impossible, being both a woman and being Black.' Cunningham was not the only person fetting Jackson. Lake County Sheriff John Idleburg gave her a proclamation from the county, and U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Highland Park, brought an official letter from Washington, D.C. 'All these barriers she broke were done at a time when it was nearly impossible,' Schneider said. 'She didn't just break those barriers, she charged through them for the rest of us.' Born March 2, 1917, in Montgomery, Alabama, Foulkes said Jackson moved to Chicago with her family when she was 3 as part of the Great Migration, bringing many Black people from the southern U.S. to the northern states. She graduated from Hyde Park High School. Foulkes said Jackson helped family members and others move from the South to Chicago. Johnny Ramsey, Jackson's brother-in-law and a resident of Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, said moving north was a necessity then. 'Birmingham was racist,' Ramsey said. 'You couldn't accomplish anything there. Chicago was a good place to be.' Graduating high school in the midst of the Depression, Foulkes said many Black people did not put their money in banks either because they were unwelcome or they were afraid. It turned out to be a good thing. 'We didn't lose our money,' Foulkes said of her family. 'It wasn't in the bank. We kept it somewhere else.' Starting her laundry business, Foulkes said her grandmother invested her profits in real estate, buying a six-unit apartment in the 6600 block of Cottage Grove Avenue. 'Willabelle (Jackson) valued family unity, helping many siblings migrate north and offering them support,' Foulkes said. At a time when women could not own property or operate a business on their own, Foulkes said her grandmother signed her name using her initials, W.F., before her last name. She was single during her early entrepreneurial years before marrying Charles Jackson in 1957.
