Through a questioning of migration, a mechanism of movement, and its criminalization from the states through the establishment of citizenry, I aim to declare autonomy, and seek a dissection of what it means to criminalize, to establish, render a community as other.
Hasta mañana is a prayer to my parents’ bodies,
to bodies crossing the border,
to bodies displaced,
to bodies that never made it,
to bodies dug up,
buried,
Chained,
Hurting,
Aging,
to bodies I feel and see.
Beginning in 2011, California’s most recent drought has brought four years of some of the warmest and driest seasons on record. Mendota, California in the San Joaquin Valley is a microcosm of the struggles many agriculture communities face when water resources are scarce. Known as the “cantaloupe capital of the world,” agriculture represents over half of Mendota’s economy, making unemployment one of the many challenges they face. However, community members are working to move forward and preserve the place they call home.
Medota has a population of about eleven thousand people with over 96 percent of them being Hispanic. The stories of elected officials, field workers, farmers, police, school leaders and local business owners give testament to a mounting fear for future water allocation. But their voices also give way to a shared belief—the community’s resilience will persevere through California’s drought. Mendota is presented through a multi-media piece that uses photos, videos and descriptive articles to showcase both their hardship and hope.
With recent reports indicating that there is a relatively low number of pregnant people vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States (~30% per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, October, 2021), this study aims to understand the reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among the pregnant population in the state of Arizona. Using a mixed-methods approach, this cross-sectional study employs both semi-structured qualitative interviews (n = 40) and a quantitative survey instrument (n = 400) to better understand the reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among pregnant people, with data collected over the course of a few months. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression are employed to analyze the quantitative data and the semi-structured interviews are inductively coded to analyze themes across participant interviews. The results from this study are not only able to help better address disparities in COVID-19 vaccinations among pregnant people, but they also provide implications for vaccine hesitancy overall in order to develop interventions to address vaccine hesitancy. Future research is warranted to better understand regional differences in vaccine hesitancy and differences across populations.
Attaining educational equity had been one of the immigration related barriers faced by undocumented immigrants in the State of Arizona since the early 2000s. In 2006, Arizona voters passed Proposition 300 which prohibited anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident from receiving instate tuition and additional state-funded assistance for educational costs in Arizona (Prop 300 Legislative Analysis). In 2018, the Arizona Supreme Court deemed students under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program ineligible for instate tuition and state financial aid. But it sparked a momentum IN 2018 from Aliento, a non- profit community based organization in Arizona. Their mission was to attain access to instate tuition and state-funded scholarships for all regardless of immigration status. The main goals of this study are to highlight how the historical win of Proposition 308 was made possible, through an analysis of the extensive strategies utilized by Aliento to get it on the midterm ballot and secondly, to inform potential beneficiaries. This study provides a descriptive analysis of the tactics utilized throughout Aliento’s instate tuition campaigns to get Proposition 308 on the midterm ballot and its successful win in the November 8, 2022 midterm election. Specifically, it will apply the Community Power Building Approach to analyze three main tactics utilized by Aliento to pass Prop 308. This study demonstrates how undocumented and DACAmented people in Arizona, who cannot vote or participate in the electoral process, mobilized and got Prop 308 on the ballot. Their tactics were successful in attaining educational equity in the State of Arizona.