Food and the World – The Domesticated Goat – Migration, Family, Animals – by Elijah Ortega Trimble. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
Tag Archives: Mexico
Food and the World – Chiles en Nogada – Migration, Food, Ritual, Family – Itzayan Rocha. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
Food and the World – Chiles en Nogada – Migration, Food, Ritual, Family – Itzayan Rocha. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
[See: https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/c5342051-0800-4491-abaa-f6982b5ed722 ] Continue reading
Immigration Stories – Alternative Spring Break Arizona – by Megan Gonrowski. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
Immigration Stories – Alternative Spring Break Arizona – by Megan Gonrowski. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
(Our group with Bob, a Tucson Samaritan, on a hike in the desert and the border wall, March 2018)
U.S. Mexican Border – Asylum Seekers and Legal Aid – by Kathryn Marquis Hirsch. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
U.S. Mexican Border – Asylum Seekers and Legal Aid – by Kathryn Marquis Hirsch. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports
[Photo 1: The border fence between Brownsville, Texas, USA and Matamoros, Mexico. It’s very tall and hard to grasp but people still manage to scale it. It’s harder to get down than it is to get up, which leads to injuries.]
For one short week during my latest semester break, I was a law student volunteer with an organization that provides pro bono legal services to asylum seekers in South Texas, near the United States-Mexico border. Some of their clients are being held by the United States Department of Homeland Security in detention centers while a relative few are out on bond. Lawyers, legal assistants, and law students from The South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR) give presentations and meet with asylum seekers individually to help explain the application process and how to navigate the United States’ very complicated and often arbitrary system of immigration law.
It is important to note that under international and U.S. law, asylum seekers must enter American territory to begin the process; they cannot apply for asylum before entering the country. Detainees are not “illegal;” even people who are undocumented are not being held because they have committed any crime. Before they are given permission to stay in the United States, they are, however, subject to a rigorous application process that is very confusing and counter-intuitive.
The application process requires a person to explain why they cannot safely live in their home country and why they qualify for asylum in the U.S. based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and/or membership in a particular social group. (They may also be allowed to remain in the U.S. because of the Convention Against Torture.) These categories are broader than they might seem at first reading, so many applicants do not realize how they qualify. For example, a person being targeted for persecution because he or she is a member of a certain clan, sect, or gender, or someone who is not being protected from persecution by the authorities of their home country because of membership in an unfavored group, would meet the requirements. Including evidence of the conditions in one’s home country also helps, but country conditions alone won’t convince a court. Showing that violence is high or that minority groups are being targeted can reinforce someone’s claim but isn’t enough; the government’s policy isn’t to simply give asylum to everyone from a country even if that country is in a state of chaos. Applicants must show that they are especially at risk and have a credible fear for their safety should they return to their country.
[Photo 2: The international border crossing in Brownsville, Texas is located right at a major intersection in the heart of downtown.]
One of the most important ways ProBAR can help an applicant is with writing a supplement to their application that explains why they felt forced to leave their home country and undertake a long, harrowing journey to the United States. This is a hard task even for native English speakers with some legal training. The process requires putting one’s story into a legalistic, sequential format that includes all pertinent information while also being brief and to the point. This is not how human memory works, especially not when thinking about terrible events, but any inconsistencies or omissions may undermine an asylum seeker’s credibility in the view of a court.
Consider the hypothetical of telling someone about something that happened the first day of the week. If they ask specifically, you might tell someone that it happened on a Monday without really drawing upon memory. If you then find some document that shows the event in question actually occurred on a Tuesday, that might prompt you to recall that it was actually the first day back to work or school after a three-day holiday weekend so it felt like a Monday, and that’s how you remembered it before you scrutinized the details. This is not a matter of being dishonest or even a sign of a faulty memory, it’s just how human memory works. People leave out or remember different details depending on what questions they’re asked, what order they discuss events in, and so on. Add trauma, time, and an unfamiliar language to the equation and it’s not hard to see how people need help to tell their histories in a linear, matter-of-fact way. Much of our work as volunteers was to interview applicants and review their information carefully to make sure that they understood what was being asked of them and that their answers matched the questions.
It cannot be overemphasized how complicated the process is– there is the basic process which is tricky enough plus different rules for different circumstances related to a person’s particular nationality, their parents’ nationality, whether they fit under an assortment of time-limited provisions, and on and on. Most people have a very strong case but don’t know how to convey this to a judge. Applicants who represent themselves without any sort of legal assistance have a statistically low chance of succeeding, while those who have even a bit of legal training and guidance are more likely than not to succeed.
Traveling great distances (often for months across thousands of miles) at great expense and risk and leaving one’s home country behind, never to return, is not entered into lightly. In the abstract, it’s easy to think about immigration as a policy problem to be solved, or in grandiose terms of huddled masses. From either a positive or negative standpoint, immigration is not a sea of humanity. It is important to look at the magnitude of the effects unrest in the world has on humanity as a whole while keeping in mind that immigration concerns the well-being of real children, women, and men.
Kathryn Marquis Hirsch serves as managing editor of The North Star Reports.
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Please contact Professor Liang if you wish to write for The North Star Reports — HLIANG (at) css.edu
See also, our Facebook page with curated news articles at http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports
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The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy (http://NorthStarReports.org) is a student edited and student authored open access publication centered around the themes of global and historical connections. Our abiding philosophy is that those of us who are fortunate enough to receive an education and to travel our planet are ethically bound to share our knowledge with those who cannot afford to do so. Therefore, creating virtual and actual communities of learning between college and K-12 classes are integral to our mission. In five semesters we have published 200 articles covering all habitable continents and a variety of topics ranging from history and politics, food and popular culture, to global inequities to complex identities. These articles are read by K-12 and college students. Our student editors and writers come from all parts of the campus, from Nursing to Biology, Physical Therapy to Business, and remarkably, many of our student editors and writers have long graduated from college. We also have writers and editors from other colleges and universities. In addition to our main site, we also curate a Facebook page dedicated to annotated news articles selected by our student editors (http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports). This is done by an all volunteer staff. We have a frugal cash budget, and we donate much of our time and talent to this project. We are sponsored by St. Scholastica’s Department of History and Politics and by the scholarly Middle Ground Journal: World History and Global Studies (http://theMiddleGroundJournal.org).
For a brief summary, please see the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History, at: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Opening-The-Middle-Ground-Journal.cfm
Hong-Ming Liang, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, The North Star Reports; Chief Editor, The Middle Ground Journal; Associate Professor of History and Politics, The College of St. Scholastica.
Kathryn Marquis Hirsch, Managing Editor, The North Star Reports.
(c) 2012-present The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy http://NorthStarReports.org ISSN: 2377-908X The NSR is sponsored and published by Professor Hong-Ming Liang, NSR Student Editors and Writers, The Department of History and Politics of The College of St. Scholastica, and the scholarly Middle Ground Journal. See Masthead for our not-for-profit educational open- access policy. K-12 teachers, if you are using these reports for your classes, please contact editor-in-chief Professor Liang at HLIANG (at) css.edu
Tulum, Mexico: City of the Dawn — The North Star Reports – by Tayler Boelk. Sponsored by The College of St. Scholastica and The Middle Ground Journal
Tulum, Mexico: City of the Dawn — The North Star Reports – by Tayler Boelk. Sponsored by The College of St. Scholastica and The Middle Ground Journal
Along the east coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on the Caribbean Sea lie the Mayan ruins of Tulum. Located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, Tulum was one of the last cities built and inhabited by the Mayans. The Maya civilization was one of the most dominant indigenous societies in Mesoamerica, excelling in agriculture, hieroglyphic writing, pottery, mathematics, and calendar-making.
Tulum, which means “fence” or “wall” in the Yucatan Mayan language, is named after the large stone wall that surrounds the city. However, it did not always have this name. It is believed that Tulum was previously known as Zama, meaning “City of the Dawn”, because it faces the sunrise. This particular location was an important pre-Columbian trade site as it had access to both land and sea trade routes. Archaeological evidence suggests that the city of Tulum traded with areas all over the Yucatan Peninsula, Central Mexico, Central America, and sometimes beyond. Now, it is the most popular Mayan tourist site in the Yucatan and the third most visited archeological site in Mexico.
My tour guide, Gus, was very passionate about de-bunking common myths and misconceptions about the Maya. For example, one Mayan myth is that they performed ceremonial sacrifices, the most popular story being the human sacrifice of a virgin. Gus explained that these “sacrifices” were most likely public executions of criminals and that there is no way to discover if those killed were virgins or non. While they did have some interesting practices, such as making a small cut to the hand as a blood sacrifice, most of these savage and primitive rumors surrounding the Mayan people were the product of their Spanish conquerors (or “conquistadors”).
The Spanish conquerors, bringing with them weapons and disease, caused a rapid decline of the Mayan people.
However, by the time the Spanish Conquistadors arrived, the Maya were already weakening. In fact, many large Mayan sites had already been abandoned. Recent discoveries show evidence that drought, deforestation, and the decline of large game animals contributed to the Maya’s collapse of empire. While there were many reasons for the decline, the central cause was that the Maya’s cities grew beyond the capacity of the land. This phenomenon forced the Maya to separate into smaller villages, which made it much easier to conquer them.
As the Spanish pursued their quest of discovering and extracting gold and silver, they learned more about the Mayan people. Mayan warfare, as Gus explained, was somewhat like a game of chess. If the warring state injured or killed the opposing forces’ King, they were considered victorious and both sides put down their weapons. It is believed that the Spanish took advantage of this tradition as they conquered different Mayan communities by targeting the respective leaders.
Despite their numerous militaristic advantages , it took the Spanish 170 years to finally subjugate the Maya peoples. Their Mayan pursuit took significantly longer than their battles with the Aztecs and Incas, and they never found the riches they were seeking. The survivors were forced into slavery and were expected to convert to Christianity. Those who refused were often arrested and tortured. To further discourage pantheistic practices, religious texts and artifacts produced by the Maya were actively destroyed.
Gus emphasized that it was the Spanish who created the Mayan stereotype of “the stupid Indians” when, in fact, the Maya were far more advanced than the rest of the world in both in mathematics and astronomy. This stereotype was reinforced as the Spanish suppressed the surviving Mayans into slavery and deprived them of an education. This is one of many examples supporting the saying: “History is decided by the winner.” Fortunately, a great deal of Mayan history has survived to date, and an adapted version of the Mayan language and some of the culture’s practices have been recovered. Today, Mayan descendants continue to live in the Yucatan Peninsula and other parts of Central America and strive to keep their rich heritage alive and vibrant.
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Please contact Professor Liang if you wish to write for The North Star Reports — HLIANG (at) css.edu
See also, our Facebook page with curated news articles at http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports
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The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, The College of St. Scholastica and the scholarly Middle Ground Journal’s online learning community and outreach program with undergraduate and K-12 classes around the world. For a brief summary, please see the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History, at:
http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Opening-The-Middle-Ground-Journal.cfm
The North Star Reports publishes edited essays from our students, particularly from those who are currently stationed, or will soon be stationed abroad. Students have reported from Mongolia, Southern China, Shanghai, Norway, northeastern China, Micronesia, The Netherlands, Tanzania, Ireland, England, Finland, Russia, and Haiti. We also have students developing reviews of books, documentaries, and films, and analysis of current events from around the world. We will post their dispatches, and report on their interactions with the North Star Reports students and teachers. We thank The Department of History and Politics and the School of Arts and Letters of The College of St. Scholastica for their generous financial support for The North Star Reports and The Middle Ground Journal.
Hong-Ming Liang, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, The North Star Reports; Chief Editor, The Middle Ground Journal; Associate Professor of History and Politics, The College of St. Scholastica.
Kathryn Marquis Hirsch, Managing Editor, The North Star Reports.
(c) 2012-present The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy http://NorthStarReports.org ISSN: 2377-908X The NSR is sponsored by The College of St. Scholastica and the scholarly Middle Ground Journal. See Masthead for our not-for-profit educational open- access policy. K-12 teachers, if you are using these reports for your classes, please contact editor-in-chief Professor Liang at HLIANG (at) css.edu
The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy 