Latest news with #inmigrantes
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Spanish-language journalist who documents immigration raids detained for ICE after protest arrest
A Spanish-language journalist known for documenting immigration raids could face deportation proceedings after police arrested him on charges of obstructing officers and unlawful assembly as he was covering a weekend protest outside Atlanta.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Spanish-language journalist who documents immigration raids detained for ICE after protest arrest
A Spanish-language journalist known for documenting immigration raids could face deportation proceedings after police arrested him on charges of obstructing officers and unlawful assembly as he was covering a weekend protest outside Atlanta.
Washington Post
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Mariachis and ballet folklórico energize resistance in L.A. protests
LOS ANGELES — For a while, City Hall stood quiet. Police stood behind barricades, arms crossed, still as statues. The sun beat down on the empty steps. Then Maricela Martínez stepped forward. She wore a black charro suit, its silver trim flashing like armor. She dragged a wooden spoon across the ridges of her lavadero, a metallic washboard. Rassss-ras-rass, rassss-ras-rass. Moments later, they came: ballet folklórico dancers spinning in bursts of color, mariachis wielding guitars, trumpets and violins. From all across the city, they were gathering in this public place — not just to celebrate their culture, but to defend it. What began as a single beat soon exploded into song. 'La Negra Tomasa' rang out defiantly across the plaza. After more than a week of immigration raids, demonstrations and military presence, mariachi musicians and folklórico dancers are now energizing protests with their sounds and swirls — a way to reclaim space in a city they helped build, in a country that hasn't always made them feel like they belong. As a force of resistance, they show strength in boots and braids, strings and brass. 'We are going to fight back this injustice with the music, joy, culture and traditions that represent us,' said Martínez, who left Mexico for the United States 20 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. 'We will not be silenced.' She lifted her voice above the trumpets and chants and sang: '¡Viva México, Viva América!' Mariachis are more than just performers here. In this sprawling, polyphonic city, where nearly half the population is Latino, they are part of the architecture. Their music is a fundamental thread in the soundtrack of life — passed down through generations, present at births, weddings, birthdays and funerals. Nowhere does this heritage run deeper than in Boyle Heights, a working-class enclave east of the Los Angeles River, hemmed in by freeways and rail lines. Decades ago, the neighborhood became a haven for those locked out of other areas by redlining and housing covenants that discriminated against people of color. Within that exclusion, something enduring took root. At the corner of First and Boyle streets, mariachi musicians once gathered each morning, hoping for work. Their meeting place became Mariachi Plaza — a public square modeled after Mexico City's Plaza Garibaldi, and a sanctuary of sound, memory and pride. And their influence grew; today, schools across the city offer mariachi and ballet folklórico programs. 'When it comes to mariachi music, it's always served not only as community for ourselves, but a way to bring and create community for everybody,' said Alexandro D. Hernández, a professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. 'And especially here in L.A., it's incredibly multicultural — a space of welcome and a great symbol of cultural empowerment and of resistance.' Mariachi music was born in the 19th century in western Mexico — in the hot lands of Jalisco, Michoacán and Nayarit. It began as a reflection of the country itself, a composite of Indigenous, African and European elements all coming together. Over time, it absorbed influences and crossed borders, eventually adding instruments and adopting the polished charro suits that became iconic through Mexican cinema. It evolved even further in Los Angeles, stretching across cultures, communities and genres. 'I mean, there's a mariachi singer in Kendrick Lamar's new album, 'GNX,' so you can really sing anything in mariachi,' said Hernández, who co-founded 'El Mariachi Manchester,' a tribute to Morrissey and The Smiths. 'It's just such a popular type of music that as long as you know how to keep the foundation of it together, you can literally fuse it with whatever you want.' That flexibility is what makes mariachi such a powerful vehicle for protest, he noted, and why it's long been a fixture in demonstrations — from the Chicano movement of the 1960s to the rallies of recent days. 'It translates to virtually all settings, from rites of passage to protests.' Coral Alonso is among the mariachis who have become a fixture at some of those events. The 27-year-old grew up in an Arizona border town where life is split between countries, 'with one hand firmly in Mexico and the other in the United States,' as she put it Wednesday. But unfulfilled by her studies in chemical engineering and frustrated by the lack of job opportunities at home, she packed her bag and headed west. Alonso found a life in music in Los Angeles. Today, she plays in restaurants, at private events and concerts, on TV shows. 'I love what I do,' she said. 'This city has given me a place to be who I am, and the people here truly support and love us.' Over the past weeks, though, that sense of belonging has begun to feel fragile — especially as the federal raids spread, with people seized in the middle of daily routines or workplaces. President Donald Trump deployed both the California National Guard and the Marines, saying the military needed to 'liberate' Los Angeles from a 'migrant invasion.' 'Every day, I carry the Mexican flag, the Latino flag, through my work,' Alonso said. 'So if I represent Mexico every day — literally — then now, when our community is being unfairly attacked, when their rights are being violated, I have to stand up. I have to speak.' She picked up her violin and played. On the steps of City Hall, she sang 'Flor de Capomo,' weaving verses in Spanish and the Yaqui language. It is a way to protest not with anger but with beauty, she said. Around her, three women swept their skirts though the air and stomped their heels in unison — embodying a tradition that has survived conquest, colonization and the passage of time. 'To stay silent at this point is just not an option,' said Audrey Alvarez, 30, 'especially because when I walk through my community, the fruit guy is missing, the taco people are not there anymore, and people are getting literally taken off the streets. I dance for them.' For Carmen Flores, 24, and Victoria Trevizo, 25, ballet folklórico is also a tribute to the sacrifices their families made. Their grandparents were once segregated in schools and shamed for speaking Spanish, they said. Now, with flowers in their braids and skirts swirling at their ankles, the women reclaim what others were once told to hide. 'This is pride,' Flores said, smiling. Not far from the dancers, Aurelio Reyes stood with his guitar in hand, waiting to buy a paleta from a street vendor. Known as El Gallo de Chiapas, Reyes arrived in Los Angeles more than 40 years ago, carrying little more than his voice and a dream. Now 71, he performs as part of El Trío Palenque — a family band made up of his wife and daughter. A smile tugged at his face as he looked over the crowd of Angelenos. Even with fear rippling through the city, it moved him to see people coming together and refusing to go quiet. Still, Reyes couldn't help thinking of the musicians who weren't there. The ones who had lost gigs or no longer felt safe enough to play. He thought of them before breaking out into an original verse. '¡Sacaremos ese buey de la Casa Blanca!' he sang. People clapped. It was a twist on a familiar Mexican idiom, 'sacar el buey de la barranca,' to get the ox out of the ravine, a phrase about doing the impossible or overcoming huge obstacles. This time, the ox was in the White House — and music and dance was the response.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Mayan languages spreading across the US
Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are taking their ancient languages to new territories. Three days had passed since Aroldo's father died. Aroldo was still mourning, and he couldn't even bring himself to tend the cornfields his father had left him in their community in San Juan Atitán, Guatemala. At dinner, as he stared into the flames of the wood stove, feeling the weight of loss on his chest, he told himself it was time to breathe fresher air. Turning to his mother, who was quietly eating beside him, he said in Mam, the Mayan language spoken in their town: "Nan, waji chix tuj Kytanum Meẍ," – "Mum, I want to go to the white men's nation," meaning, the United States. In Mam, his mother told him she would set things up, but first, he had to wait until the mourning period was over. A year later, with cousins in California willing to host him, Aroldo set out (the BBC has chosen not to name him in full to protect his identity). It took him more than four months to descend the slopes of the Sierra Madre, cross the deserts of Mexico and Arizona and reach the San Francisco Bay Area. "[My father's] death put life in front of me and made me realise it was time to face it by myself," says Aroldo, in Spanish, which he also speaks. Behind him, a photo of his father, wearing a traditional hat and hand-knitted magenta shirt under a black capixay of San Juan Atitán, guards him on a chilly December night in the Bay Area. One of the few things Aroldo took with him was his language, Mam, whose roots reach far back into the Mayan civilisations that ruled over Central America thousands of years ago. Today, Mam and other Mayan languages are expanding their reach, as indigenous people from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are spreading them in the US through immigration. In fact, in recent years, Mayan languages, originally spoken across the Yucatán Peninsula, have grown so common in the US that two of them, K'iche' (or Quiche) and Mam, now rank among the top languages used in US immigration courts. The rise of these indigenous languages in Latin American immigrant communities in the US is only beginning to be fully understood, experts say – and has important implications for the communities and their needs. The San Francisco metropolitan area is one of the top destinations for Latin American immigrants. One in four of the Bay Area's more than seven million residents are Latinos, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, according to calculations based on US Census Bureau data.* The US government counts them all as Hispanic upon entering the country, a term denoting people from Spanish-speaking countries, even though for some of these migrants – like Aroldo – Spanish is not their mother tongue, but what they use to talk to those outside of their home villages. Others don't even speak Spanish at all, and only speak their indigenous language, according to several Mayan immigrants and experts interviewed for this article. "Many Mam speakers come to the US and have a different set of needs, experiences and histories than monolingual Spanish speakers and those not from indigenous cultures," says Tessa Scott, a linguist specialising in the Mam language at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you call everyone from Guatemala 'Hispanic', you might assume everyone in that group speaks Spanish fluently, and they don't." In California, a new law passed in 2024 requires state agencies to collect more detailed data on Latin American immigrants' preferred languages, including indigenous languages such as K'iche' and Mam, in order to better understand and meet their needs. Besides needing different interpreters, Mayans and other indigenous immigrants face unique challenges that mestizo or white Latin Americans don't, and that often go unnoticed when all are covered under the blanket term "Hispanic", Scott says. "Indigenous Guatemalans, many from Mayan cultures like Mam, frequently face intense discrimination and violence by people in a different social category, and this is what often drives them to come to the US, where they may seek asylum," she says. Labelling all Latin Americans as Hispanic can hide these complex social, cultural and ethnic hierarchies, and prevent asylum seekers from receiving specialist services such as legal help and trauma support, she adds. The growth of Mayan communities in the US has also given their ancient languages new platforms, adding to a long and rich history. Though the ruins and carved hieroglyphs of ancient Mayan cities may seem like relics of a long-lost civilisation, many Mayan communities survived the Spanish conquest of the 16th Century and preserved their culture and languages. In places like the Bay Area, you can now find Mayan languages on the radio, in local news outlets or even in classrooms. "We are as involved with the world as any other society," says Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar at Bishop's University in Canada. "We continue to speak our languages and use them not just to write our history, but to write new ways to deal with what affects us." Mayan words have also long made their way into different languages, through loanwords tied to Mayan inventions. Cigars and chocolate When the Spanish landed on the coasts of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th Century, they found around a dozen Mayan city-states tied to a shared past but also facing deep divisions. Some Mayan rulers saw the arrival of the Spanish as an opportunity to settle old tensions and allied with the Europeans to crush their rival cities. Learning the languages spoken in the area was crucial for the Spanish wishing to maintain these new alliances. And, once the Peninsula was conquered, they used the local languages to evangelise, administrate and create a new society. In his travels throughout the Americas, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish missionary, described a widespread local custom: "sipping" and "sucking" burning herbs. In Mayan culture, tobacco was smoked and drunk in rituals. The act of smoking those "dried herbs stuffed into a certain leaf", as de las Casas put it, was named siyar in ancient Mayan, which later evolved into the Spanish cigarro and, much later, into the English word cigar, to describe a roll of tobacco leaves. Another Mayan word that slipped into other languages is cacao, the beans that make up chocolate and that de las Casas himself introduced to Europe in 1544. Today, more than 30 Mayan languages exist and are spoken by at least six million people worldwide. Although some, like Chicomuseltec and Choltí, have disappeared or are close to extinction, others, like K'iche', Yucatec and Q'eqchi, have around a million speakers each. They all come from the same language, Proto-Mayan, spoken before about 2000 BCE. They are so different from one another, however, that speakers of Mam, which has around half a million speakers, can't understand K'iche', and Yucatecans can't understand Mam. Of Yucatec, Aroldo says, "it's like German to me" – a language he doesn't speak at all. For nearly 2,000 years, Mayan languages had their own writing system, known as Classic Maya. Composed of hieroglyphs, it was only used by those at the top of the social pyramid. "If we want to make a historical equivalency, we can compare Classic Maya to Latin," says Llanes-Ortiz. "It was a prestige language. It was spoken by the elites, while the rest of the population spoke their own language that, little by little, mixed with Latin." The Spanish missionaries deemed hieroglyphs pagan, and systematically purged them. The sons and daughters of the Mayan elites were forced to abandon hieroglyphic writing and learn to use the Latin alphabet, and most of the books written by that time, known as codices, were destroyed. But the oral languages were tolerated, and under a new robe – the Latin alphabet – have survived until the present day. "The use of Mayan languages was so common and widespread during colonial times that community acts, balance sheets, wills, political declarations, memorials were all written in them, but everything was in Latin characters that remain in the archives of the city of Seville," says Llanes-Ortiz. "Even after Mexico's independence from Spain, Mayan languages continued to be used as lingua franca throughout the Yucatán Peninsula." Western scholars began to study the Mayan hieroglyphs, long suppressed by the Spanish, in the 19th Century. While American and Russian linguists made significant progress in deciphering them throughout the 20th Century, Llanes-Ortiz says that huge breakthroughs were reached in the 2000s when Mayan scholars and speakers were included in the conversation. It was then that researchers understood that hieroglyphs represented not just complex concepts, but also syllables forming words. The involvement of native speakers has advanced the study of Mayan languages, while inspiring a new generation of Mayans to reclaim hieroglyphic writing. Groups like Ch'okwoj or Chíikulal Úuchben Ts'íib are hosting workshops, and making t-shirts and mugs using ancient Mayan glyphs to resuscitate them and transmit them to future generations. Mayan languages move north Aroldo was five when he watched his first cousins leave San Juan Atitán for the US. He wouldn't see them again for years, but he listened to their voices on the cassette tapes they sent every now and then telling stories of a foreign land. The first Mayans known to reach the US, Llanes-Ortiz says, came as part of the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican workers to replace Americans who left to fight in World War Two. But the largest waves came decades later, in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Latin American migration began to peak. Guatemalans living in the US went from 410,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2021, all coming from a country of only 17 million. Among these migrants are many Mayans who have settled in states like Florida and California. "The first migrants went to the US, tested the waters and saw how you could earn real money. Then they told their Mam friends, who followed, and soon, they began pulling others," says Silvia Lucrecia Carrillo Godínez, a Mam teacher living in San Juan Atitán, speaking in Spanish. Migration has transformed San Juan from a corn- and bean-growing economy to one reliant on remittances, much like the rest of Guatemala. Today, nearly one in five Sanjuaneros moves to Mexico or the United States for better-paying jobs. "Migration is what sustains our village," says Carrillo Godínez. "The advice of the Mam people in the US to those here is learn to add, subtract, a little Spanish and go to the United States. It's the only way to progress." For decades, Mayan immigrants in San Francisco settled in the Mission District. But, as housing costs soared in the 2000s and 2010s, many moved to the East Bay, particularly the cities of Oakland and Richmond. "There is a direct line to Oakland," says Scott, the linguist. "When I go to San Juan Atitán, and people ask me where I'm from, I don't say the US or California; but I say Oakland, and they know exactly where I'm from." Aroldo has found a local community tied together by Mam and Mayan traditions. They celebrate traditional events and festivals, and help each other through neighbourhood committees. Occasionally, he receives a WhatsApp message in Mam: At jun xjal yab' – someone is sick; or At jun xjal ma kyim – someone has passed. Like many migrants, Aroldo sees his time in California as temporary – it's a place to work until he can return to San Juan Atitán to build a home for his family. Although he still mourns his father and misses his family back home and the fog-shrouded mountains of his childhood, he finds solace in Mam. "There are so many paisanos (countrymen) here that I rarely feel nostalgic. Language makes it harder to miss your land," he says. That's why he always reminds his nephew, who attends an English-speaking school in the East Bay, to speak Mam at home. "First comes Mam, then Spanish, then English," he tells him. * The calculation for the Bay Area was made based on data from the US Census Bureau on the Hispanic population in the nine counties of the Bay Area and their country of origin. --
New York Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For Some Immigrant Artists, This Is No Time to Retreat
Ruddy Mejia was sitting in a compact studio in the South Bronx, putting the finishing touches on a set of small, brightly colored brass foil plates embossed with images of body parts. His take on popular Mexican religious charms, or 'milagros,' they draw from a tradition of toiling for hours to indent an image — a heart, leg or other body part that needs healing — into a plate of metal. They are about sacrificing 'time, and your hands, in order to ask for a little prayer of help from beyond,' said Mejia, one of the 34 artists, all but one of whom are Latino immigrants or children of immigrants, in a new exhibition, '¡Te Amo Porque S.O.S. Pueblo!,' at the BronxArtSpace. The exhibition is intended as a celebration of immigrants in a time of crackdowns and deportations. It is also a form of outreach, offering access to legal resources and advocacy groups, and a chance to connect with other immigrant artists in the South Bronx, where the population is majority Latino and nearly one-third foreign-born. 'Emotions are running very high,' Mejia, 36, said. 'There's a lot of fear. I wanted to create something that resembles what that feels like.' The exhibition is organized by Blanka Amezkua, Marco Saavedra and Maria Ponce Sevilla, artists and advocates who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border as undocumented minors decades ago (and have since been granted citizenship or asylum). The title of the exhibition, '¡Te Amo Porque S.O.S. Pueblo!,' means 'I love you because you are my people' and riffs on a poem by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) — the Spanish tweaked to indicate a state of emergency in immigrant communities. 'This is a celebration of all those who transform this world through their honest labor,' said Amezkua, the originator of the show and, according to many in the exhibition, a godmother figure to immigrant artists in the South Bronx. 'We should be celebrating despite everything that's going on,' she added. 'For this moment, we just want to say: We love you.' Amezkua, an artist who explores the Mexican art of papel picado ('punched paper' in Spanish), is known as a community leader, pulling artists into her orbit and then mentoring them. Several artists in the exhibition have shown work at Amezkua's artist-run space, Alexander Avenue Apartment 3A, which she managed for eight years out of her third-floor walk-up in Mott Haven, the Bronx. Amezkua first crossed the border pretending to be asleep in the back of an uncle's car at the age of about 4, following her parents, who were cotton farmers, to South Central Los Angeles. After returning to Mexico at 10, which separated her from her parents for five years, and making another clandestine crossing to reunite with them as a teenager, Amezkua found a way to a painting degree at California State University, Fresno, and ultimately a life in art. Many of the artists and organizers of the BronxArtSpace show have similar stories— of traumatic family separations, parents working tough jobs and living in crowded apartments shared with other families, growing up undocumented and fearing a knock on the door. But this exhibition is not a 'trauma bomb,' a trope that one of the show's artists, Leslie Lopez, said she was not interested in incorporating into her art. Instead, the show offers a respite from fear, said Sevilla, one of the show's organizers, and is 'a way of saying that no matter what, no matter who's in power, and despite the fear and hate-mongering, people are going to produce beauty and people are going to want to show that.' The artworks at BronxArtSpace include Erika Harrsch's 'United States of North America' passport project, imagining open borders from Mexico through Canada and symbolized by a monarch butterfly (a free migrant between these territories), as well as the textile works of Colectivo Voces, a group of New York-based Indigenous women from the Mexican state of Guerrero who meet to embroider, crochet and speak in their Mixtec dialect. Assembled together, the artworks in '¡Te Amo …' provide a snapshot of a community whose artistic practices offer something of a lifeline. 'We were joking that as undocumented people we're so stereotyped by the work of our hands, this exploitative labor,' said Saavedra, another of the show's organizers. 'Maybe in response to that,' he continued, 'we need to create because we're not just waiters and construction workers and busboys and nannies and caretakers — which we are, and disproportionately so — but we're also tattoo artists and muralists and embroiderers and photographers.' While the show is not a noisy, political one, some of the artworks make subtle references to violence on either side of the border. Rigo Flores, 36, has contributed two intricate embroideries that channel his mother's tradition of embroidering tortilla warmers. One of them is a delicately stitched portrait of Antonio Tizapa, the father of one of the 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero (Flores's home state in Mexico) in 2014; they were found to have been kidnapped and massacred by the local police and military in collusion with drug traffickers. Inspired by Tizapa's fight for justice, Flores has portrayed his subject with verdant green plants and adorned his skin with sequins. He wanted to transport Tizapa to a peaceful environment, he said, as well as to humanize immigrants. Patricia Espinosa, 54, has created a set of wings with tissue paper, barbed wire, and the zip ties that are often used to handcuff people in mass arrests. At the center of the work, she has offered some words that she hopes will lift people's spirits: 'Nunca olvides que tienes alas,' or 'Never forget you have wings.' Espinosa said that more and more, she has been contemplating a permanent return to Mexico, even as she feels an urgency to help those in her community who are the most vulnerable. After entering the United States on a student visa to pursue a degree at Parsons School of Design, which led to jobs at MoMA and the United Nations, Espinosa spoke rapturously of the opportunities she had been given in this country, and the gratitude she felt. Now, her outlook is different. 'As much as I drink my lemon balm tea and stay calm, and say I'm not going to read as much, I cannot take the daily influx of anxiety-inducing news anymore,' she said. 'I just want to help get our motivation, our spirits up. That's the only thing I can do.' Planned before the 2024 election, the exhibition has grown in scale and funding as events have unfolded since President Trump's re-election, picking up support from the Ford Foundation and the Bronx Council on the Arts, among many others. 'We are all affected by this crisis,' said Libertad Guerra, executive director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, which also provided funding for the exhibition as part of a multiyear effort to document the contributions of Latino people to New York. While the exhibition comes at an excruciating moment for the immigrant artist community of the South Bronx, the opening, on April 25, was anything but somber. Preparations had been made for the worst-case scenario, and legal support was on hand should the authorities show up. Still, custom prints were raffled off, and revelers danced. 'This show is dedicated to all the people that crossed that border,' Amezkua said to the exuberant crowd. 'We carry that border with us, and many of us came here as minors without our consent. We came together to create a safe space for us to celebrate all the things that we offer to this world.' She paused and added, 'And this is just the beginning, because we're not going anywhere.'
