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Serving the Entire Community

By Paul Iskra | Free Press staff

AUSTIN — At a university of thousands, Native American students number fewer than 100 people.

“Most of the time, I feel very lonely. You don’t see a lot of Indigenous folk around,” said Mario Ramirez, Co-Director of the Native American and Indigenous Collective (NAIC) and a dance major at the University of Texas at Austin. “These institutions were not built for people of color in the first place.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 0.1 percent of the population at the University of Texas at Austin identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native amongst the school’s 50,000 students.

Of the students who are enrolled at the university, legal methods of identification, such as federally-issued papers which identify tribal constituency, and cultural disconnection complicate life and unity among the Native American and Indigenous student population. Support from the NAIC has helped, but the absence of a formal Native American and Indigenous student center on campus hinders students’ ability to comfortably engage in cultural practices, Ramirez said.

“The (NAIC) has made some events for us to be seen,” Ramirez said. “But we don’t have a place where we can go and feel like we’re not ostracized. We don’t have a space where we can practice our spirituality and our way of living at all.”

For currently enrolled Native American and Indigenous students au UT, issues of identity are undergoing transformation in the wake of centuries of educational assimilation, said Laura Tohe, an English professor at Arizona State University and the Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation.

“I think it’s going to be a lot of work to reverse generations of the mindset that your way of life is secondary, your way of life is something to be ashamed of,” Tohe said.

Scholars are studying lost aspects of Native American and Indigenous culture that had been previously subdued, Tohe said.

“There is now this movement to try to revitalize our languages, to understand this experience and what it meant to us,” Tohe said. “To understand how assimilation taught us to think: that I have to think in the way of a colonizer.”

The Native American and Indigenous community as a whole faces internal dispute, partly due to government-mandated blood quantums, which validate heritage on a percentage of “Native American” blood composition, Ramirez said. The US National Parks Service categorizes blood quantum as “One-quarter –or at least one full-blooded grandparent,” but this requirement can vary across state lines.

“That causes communities to become smaller and smaller and not mesh with other communities,” Ramirez said. “If people marry outside of the community, the blood quantum will go low, and you can no longer have rights to certain things.”

Biases also work against unity among communities, Ramirez said.

“When I go to certain places, I’m seen as someone who is not Native American because I’m not of a specific tribe,” Ramirez said. “I don’t have something, and it goes back to stereotyping within our own community.”

However, Native American and Indigenous populations are growing again, both in population size and cultural connection, Tohe said.

“We are in an era now where Native individuals are trying to decolonize themselves,” Tohe said, commenting on Native American and Indigenous communities’ re-prioritization of their cultural practices over white-centered ideologies. “We have to deal with the legacy of assimilation.”

The Native American and Indigenous Studies program, which was first created in 2006, was formally certified within the College of Liberal Arts after an open letter was sent to the Executive Vice-President in April 2017, according to Luis Carcamo-Huechante, Director of Native American and Indigenous studies at UT.

“We, as a NAIS Program — a faculty collective and a community of students — have been working in creating a supporting environment for native students at UT,” said Carcamo-Huechante over an email.

However, UT has yet to undertake university-wide efforts to increase Native American and Indigenous student pretense on campus, Carcamo-Huechante said.

“There is no sign of concrete support or course of action on the part of the President¹s office in regard to the recruitment of and support for Native American and Indigenous students,” Carcamo-Huechante said. “There is no a comprehensive institutional plan yet.”

However, a lack of university aid does not diminish students’ determination to stay connected to their roots, Ramirez said.

“There’s a saying we like, ‘our existence is our resistance.’ Our simple way of doing what we do is an act of resistance,” Ramirez said. “We are continuing what we know and what we have been taught, and therefore it is surviving through our subsequent legacy.”

By Zachary Leff | Free Press staff

AUSTIN- African Americans say they feel separated from the city they live in not only because of the rapid growth in other areas of Austin, but the way I-35 has acted as a barrier to equality.

“The east side has long been underserved across institutions — banking, healthcare, transportation, education, employment and all of the quality of life areas,” said Sukyi McMahon, the Director of Operations for the Austin Justice Coalition, a social justice organization for African Americans. “It is a visible demarcation that was backed by red-lining.”

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, red-lining is a practice where institutions deny particular services to people of certain areas based off of the racial framework.

“Austin history is steeped in racism… that segregated the city along I-35,” McMahon said. She said I-35 has been a blockade in the community since these regulations were presented and realize the differences in both areas.

“The Master Plan of 1928 is what started the segregation issues in the city, and has kept African Americans in East Austin today,” said Kenneth Thompson, a long-time resident and chair of the African American Resource Advisory Commission. Thompson said that the plan was designed to make African Americans move over to the eastern part of the city. If they resisted to move from the West side, they would be denied services where they lived and be forced to go into East Austin for their necessities.

There are two main reasons for a highway according to Kyle Shetlon, a professor at Rice University and a well respected urban historian. One is to drive economic development and activity into and through the city. The other is to separate the city or community whether it be racially or economically motivated.

“Highway building operated as a form of urban renewal in this vein, allowing cities to either separate non-white and lower income communities from white areas or the business district (a la I-35 separating East and West Austin) or by completely destroying “blighted” read non-white and low-income areas,” Shelton said.

“Transportation infrastructure has almost always been used as a dividing line,” Shelton said. “Infrastructure serves as a helpful physical and mental marker in the creation of boundaries.”

Lawrence Fowler, a long-time resident of East Austin, talked about his childhood growing up on the East side of Austin.“I was told as a kid from my mom ‘Don’t go over there’ (in reference to the West Side of Austin),” Fowler said. “It was understood that people of color stayed over here unless you are working.”

“My mom worked as a maid and the bus would take here every day East to West on I-35,” Fowler said. He said that when he drives on the highway and looks at both sides, it’s hard to believe that these areas are part of the same city.

Diana Morrison, an employee at the Givens Recreational Center agreed with Fowler’s sentiments on the issue. “I never thought of that before, but I could see how people think I-35 is a barrier,” Morrison said. “I work in a school district on the West side and I rarely see any African American or Latino(a) children in the classrooms.”

Kenneth Thompson historically understand sees how I-35 divided the city, but thinks that it is a “barrier of choice.” “The west side of Austin chooses to when they want it to be a barrier for when they want to identify issues that they are trying to get support for from the community.” Ultimately, Thompson wants the city that gives everyone equal value and that is considered to be a safe place.

“Today, the key questions are about how do we want our cities to grow with and around our existing structures,” Shelton said. He understands that I-35, like many other freeways across the country, continues to represent something more to certain groups than just a way of transportation.

“Desegregation is paramount to me,” McMahon said. “Black people need to have freedom of movement and to see faces that look like theirs in areas where we weren’t welcome before. The city needs to embrace the progressive title it’s given itself by cracking open the west side and ensuring that Austin is livable for everyone, anywhere.”

By Pedro Luna | Free Press staff

AUSTIN — Members of Austin’s Latino community say increased activity by immigration enforcement in their neighborhoods is increasingly discouraging them from leaving their homes.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began cracking down on immigration in February 2017, according to ICE’s 2017 fiscal year report.

“I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t seen it,” said 15-year-old southeast Austin resident Angel about ICE arrests in his neighborhood, “one time my soccer practice was cancelled, because all the families were Mexican — they didn’t want to go to the fields because they were scared.”

Angel is a first-generation child; his parents are legal immigrants and he attends public school. His days are like many other Latino children, school in the morning, soccer practice in the afternoon, and after-school programming in the evening.

At the program, kids run and play games, anything is fair game, from tag to hide-and-seek. They go outside and sit on pastel-colored benches after finishing their assignments, and they eat food provided by the program.

Inside, under a 30-year-old roof and fluorescent lighting is where Angel completes his assignments. The program is where he socializes the most, he said. Here he has met many friends like himself, also children of immigrants, who he says fear their families being arrested by ICE.

“Some are scared but they joke about it to not be sacred,” said Angel.

Angel’s family are among these people, although his mother is a documented resident and working on her citizenship, said Angel.

“Two of my cousins have DACA,” said Angel, “and one of my aunts just did her citizenship.”

“Concha,” who also wished to remain anonymous and withhold her immigration status, is one of many mothers from Angel’s after school program that are fearful of increased ICE presence around the city.

“It’s just something we have to deal with,” said Concha, in a Spanish interview. They didn’t always have to deal with this, she continued, as ICE raids on neighborhoods began early last year.

“ICE moves in a way that you cannot predict,” said a tenured social work professor at a southwest university, who wished to remain anonymous due to his immigration status.

“The Obama administration went after mostly criminals,” said the professor. Non-criminal offenders were being put on the “bottom of the stack.”

During the Trump administration, however, he said, anyone might come home one day to see an ICE truck in front of their neighbor’s house, he said.

Concha says she is very aware of this chilling reality, that any day she could witness her neighbors being arrested by ICE. She blames the Trump administration for inciting fear into her life, she said.

“It wasn’t even a question with the last president,” she said.

“He has hate towards Mexicans,” said Angel, referring to President Trump, “he’s scared that Hispanics and other minorities are gonna take over — that whites are gonna become a minority.”

According to a Pew Research Center Study, conviction of non-criminal immigrants had a steady downwards trend under the Obama administration.

However, this decline reversed in the last year, as President Trump’s January 2017 executive order mandated the “execution of the immigration laws of the United States” against “all removable aliens.”

This has become an issue, said the professor, because ICE is now targeting criminal and non-criminal offenders alike, which is putting families at greater risk of being torn apart. People are getting deported for simply not reporting their immigration status, he said.

The San Antonio and Houston ICE regions accounted for 22,075 ICE arrests in 2017, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study.

Statistics like these affect immigrants in more than one way, said the professor. For instance, he pointed out, crimes are going unreported, including domestic abuse.

According to S.B.4, authorities are not able to detain anybody if their sole reason of detention is they are “a victim of or witness to a criminal offense” or “reporting a criminal offense.”

However, the Senate Bill offers a loophole for law enforcement, in which authorities can ask for a victim or witness’ immigration status if deemed necessary to “investigate the offense.”

This doesn’t make immigrants feel better about reporting crimes, said the professor. In many cases, “the problem with persecution is so widespread that they are afraid it may happen to them,” he continued.

S.B 4’s overall intent is to allow any officer to inquire about a detainee’s immigration status, according to the bill, making it justifyingly frightening to any undocumented person, according to the professor.

Persecution is so extensive that even tenured professors like him are at risk of deportation, the professor said. His own status as a resident means he still runs the risk of being deported for various reasons, such as DUI.

“When I go out I don’t drink more than one drink,” said the professor, “for immigrants, a DUI can mean deportation,” because authorities are rounding up everybody they can, including “folks who had a DUI 10 years ago.”

Many questions remain unanswered, said the professor, such as the true scale of ICE operations in Austin and Austin’s fate as a sanctuary city.

“There is a big question mark on sanctuary cities,” he said, meaning that while they are still in question, police are not forced to cooperate with immigration officials.

The professor said he knows the struggle that uncertainties like these can cause in the immigrant community, but it doesn’t discourage them to learn their rights, he added.

“I see resilience in the immigrant community,” he said, “you see the resilience but also widespread fear.”

“There is very justified fear in the Latino community,” he said, “for everybody that doesn’t have their immigration in line, they have to be afraid.”

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