Linda Rivas
Linda Rivas is executive director at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a non-profit that provides legal aid to low-income immigrants, including asylum seekers, separated families, and victims of domestic violence. As a mother, the issues Linda deals with strike close to her heart. As a lawyer, Linda works against the odds to protect the rights of vulnerable people.
Being a mother, I fight a little harder. I can relate to clients in ways that make me a good advocate, even a better advocate. There’s things that make me really intuned with my mom-clients and there is a time when I have to take this hat off and care for my children, and put them first.
Gabriela Castaneda
Gabriela Castaneda, the director of communications at the Border Network for Human Rights, claims that when she first found out that undocumented immigrants have rights, she didn’t believe it. Neither did her husband; when she tried to convince him, he responded with a terse, “come on, we crossed the river. We don’t have any rights here.”
Gabriela married her high school sweetheart, and dreams of growing old with him. Her dreams however, have hit many roadblocks. Her husband has been deported several times, the most recent resulting in him serving three and a half years in prison before being sent to Mexico. Gabriela, who is in the process of applying for her green card, cannot visit him in Juarez where he lives because she would run the risk of not being able to return to the United States, where one of her sons receives regular medical care, that would be inaccessible in Mexico, for a heart condition. “I have been a single mother my whole life and not by choice,” says Gabriela. “I love my husband so much. Since I met him in high school I wanted to have kids and grow old with him. That continues to be my thought. But the border immigration policies separate and destroy families. He is now in Mexico struggling to pay his bills and live without us. He is missing so much of our children’s lives. I try to send them every weekend. But we both know that if he comes back to the U.S. he will go straight to jail and will have to serve 10 years.”
Despite her personal hardships, Gabriela continues to fight for the rights of other undocumented migrants. Through her work, she hopes to inform other people of their rights and do her part in repairing an immigration that is deeply broken.
Francisco Lopez
When Francisco was drafted to fight in Vietnam, he says, “I didn’t think twice about going. I wanted to do something to help this country since they adopted me as an immigrant.” After returning from war, he developed PTSD and was then deported after serving time for attempting to buy marijuana. Now, he has converted his house into a support bunker for other deported veterans. To him, “all of them are like family.”
Francisco says the two things that make him most proud are being a grandfather and a veteran. Inside the bunker, paintings of his daughter and granddaughter hang on the wall below a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe and between the American and Mexican flags. Because he isn’t allowed back into the United States to hold his granddaughter, he paints her.
Though he feels betrayed by the United States, he says that if he was asked to serve again, he would. He still feels like an American. He cried when he found out JFK was assassinated. When he dies, he will be allowed to return to the US to be buried on American soil. He hopes to be buried next to his mother, whose funeral he was not allowed to attend.
Dr. Yolanda Chavez Leyva
Born in Juarez, Mexico Yolanda Chavez Layvea immediately was given to her great aunt in El Paso, TX. Though her twin sister, Lisa, remained in Juarez with their grandmother. Lisa though due to the lack of medical care and proper water to mix formula Lisa did not survive. This guilt has stuck in Yolanda her whole life that she was an injustice. She knows it is no one’s fault but “it’s just the inequity between the two cities in the injustice of how she had to live in poverty and I didn’t.” Yolanda attributes her birth story to her entrance to social activism at the age of 19 and is now 62 still fighting for her community. She pursued a PhD in history at 30 to improve the foundation for her activism. Yolanda’s social activism comes before anything to her and despite what her colleges told her she continues to combine her work and the community. She emphasizes that she is not a savior giving “voices to the voiceless” but rather is creating a space where the people can be heard.
“I think a lot about when children on both sides of the border and how children in Juarez don’t have access to good water so how can it be after all these decades after my sister there’s still not access to water—access to good education. it’s happening on both sides of the border.”
