Immigration Is a Black Issue

BY JEFF DINGLER M.F.A. ’22

Patrice Lawrence ’11 knows what life is like for the more than half a million undocumented Black immigrants in the United States—she’s one of them. Also, as the cofounder and codirector of the immigrant’s rights nonprofit UndocuBlack Network, Lawrence understands all too well how difficult it can be existing in the immigration shadows of modernday America, of constantly fearing detention or deportation.

“I’ve learned now that there’s very little autonomy in adjusting your status in the United States,” said Lawrence. “I have missed out on so many funerals, weddings, both my brothers’ graduations from high school and university, caring for my parents after accidents, saying final goodbyes to multiple loved ones. I no longer feel free, nor am I free, to travel as I wish.”

Only a few years ago, however, Lawrence’s life looked totally different. Born and raised in Kingston and St. Andrew, Jamaica, Lawrence flew to Roanoke in 2007 after earning a scholarship to Hollins. Just 18 years old at the time, with a temporary student visa, Lawrence chose to study political science and philosophy and had a bit of an awakening. “I love Hollins,” said Lawrence, “I was involved in some political things when I was in Jamaica, but my foundation at Hollins, my classes with Jong Ra, Jon Bohland, Edward Lynch, and Jeanette Barbieri, helped me to get an understanding of what policy is, and where my ideals come from, and what politics UndocuBlack wants to have as its own.”

After graduating with honors, Lawrence moved to Washington, D.C. to work for an arm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She had hoped this organization would sponsor her to acquire a work visa. However, this prospect fell through, and when Lawrence’s student visa expired soon after, she decided against the odds to remain in the country. “I figured it would be an easy fix,” said the Hollins alumna. “I thought the system would work out for me and I could get a green card.” But Lawrence’s life changed dramatically. She lost her health insurance, lost her right to vote, and even lost eligibility to get a driver’s license in most states. These conditions forced her into the margins of society, performing low-wage jobs oftentimes for cash.

This is the reality for most undocumented people in America today. Just like Lawrence, nearly half of the almost 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. are people who came to this country legally but overstayed a visa. And of that population, around 630,000 are Black, many of them forgotten in an immigration narrative that largely focuses on Latinos and Central Americans, who make up the largest portion of the undocumented population.

For years, Lawrence lived in the shadows, fearful of being detained or deported yet at the same time desperate to make ends meet, working odd jobs from Michigan to Ohio and New York as a tutor, a home health aide, and a live-in nanny. She also made numerous attempts to change her immigration status, including talking to and paying numerous lawyers. She was accepted into law schools twice. None of it worked. “When I became undocumented, I wanted to assimilate,” said Lawrence. “I wanted to hide so I wouldn’t be targeted.”

Lawrence felt largely hopeless until 2014 when she befriended a fellow undocumented Jamaican, who was having discussions about creating a convening of Black people in the U.S. who had lost legal status. It was a radical, albeit risky, idea. “I thought it was interesting—and I thought probably we

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Lawrence

When I became undocumented, I wanted to assimilate. I wanted to hide so I wouldn’t be targeted. ”

don’t need it,” said Lawrence about revealing her status to others. “I was really scared. I thought it would put a target on our backs. I thought we would be really stigmatized.”

Nonetheless, these discussions between Lawrence and others from across the country eventually became the Undocumented and Black Convening, a first-of-its-kind national conference of around 70 undocumented Black people held in Miami, Florida, from January 15-17, 2016. The three-day event featured facilitated workshops, strategizing sessions, intersectional caucus spaces, and healing spaces. “That was the first time I told a group of other people about my status,” recalled Lawrence. “And after I left, I said ‘this is really necessary.’ It was so freeing to be in a space where I could use my own accent again. I could talk about who I was and feel secure doing so.”

The Undocumented and Black Convening, cofounded by five Black

Danyeli Rodriguez Del Orbe- UndocuBlack Network Creative Specialist

It gave me a space where I could truly be myself, have my ideas, speak the truth, influence media, and possibly change my life and other people’s lives. That was a freedom I didn’t have, and that’s the beauty of UndocuBlack and the beauty of our organization and our membership. ”

migrants, turned out to be the official beginning of the UndocuBlack Network, which Lawrence cocreated immediately after with the original coconveners. Lawrence defines the organization as a “multi-generational Black organization of currently and formerly undocumented people that represents Black people from all across the diaspora.” “Immigration Is a Black Issue” is the motto and philosophy of the UndocuBlack Network, which facilitates access to immigration resources and fights to transform the realities of undocumented Black migrants.

The nonprofit has been a game changer for many, including Lawrence. “Forming UndocuBlack Network forced me to stop hiding who I was,” said the Jamaican native, who in April 2016 went public with her status at an immigration conference. “It gave me a space where I could truly be myself, have my ideas, speak the truth, influence media, and possibly change my life and other people’s lives. That was a freedom I didn’t have, and that’s the beauty of UndocuBlack and the beauty of our organization and our membership.”

Since its inception six years ago, the UndocuBlack Network has done a little bit of everything, from successfully freeing people from detention to helping individuals with their immigration cases to stay in the U.S., and even sponsoring and helping to pass a major piece of legislation, the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness program, which allowed Liberian nationals who’ve been living in the United States since 2014 to apply to become Lawful Permanent Residents. “This bill had been written in different ways for almost 20 years, and we did the work to get it across the finish line,” said Lawrence. “I’m very proud of this bill and I’ve learned so much from having done that. It’s fueled us to believe that it is possible to pass mass legalization for many folks. In Jamaica, we have a saying: If you have raw meat, you seek fire. Those of us who have that raw meat, we really seek the fire!”

In just a few years, the nonprofit has grown exponentially, with members in more than 30 states now and coverage by big media outlets like CNN, the Black News Channel, BBC, MSNBC, and more. The organization even had the ear of now Vice President Kamala Harris, getting the then-Senator to work with UndocuBlack on issues with Mauritanians whose asylum or Temporary Protected Status claims were being almost indiscriminately denied.

“I’ve met Kamala before in person when she was in the Senate,” said Lawrence. “She brought a member of the UndocuBlack Network (a Californian constituent) to her State of the Union in 2018. That’s how close a relationship we had with her office.”

However, even with an ally like Vice President Harris in the White House, movement on immigration reform is glacial at best. In spite of the UndocuBlack Network’s successes, Lawrence is still undocumented herself, even as she continues to grow the nonprofit and advocate for others. “Absolutely I’m a target,” said Lawrence. “But I’m also drawing attention to myself the opposite way in that if they come after me, I think I’ve made enough of an organizing impact that others will go and protest, so it will be harder to get rid of me. Am I risking my life every day? Absolutely. But am I safer now than a few years ago when no one knew who I was? Absolutely.”

Jeff Dingler is a current creative writing M.F.A. student and marketing intern.

Girlhood REVISITED

and REIMAGINED

BY MARIN HARRINGTON M.F.A. ’23

Julie Pfeiffer, professor of English and chair of the department of English and creative writing at Hollins, recently published her first book, Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence. Released on October 15 by University Press of Mississippi, Transforming Girls analyzes a variety of since-forgotten mid-19th-century bestsellers that were aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. To commemorate the book’s publication, Pfeiffer spoke with Marin Harrington M.F.A. ’23 about researching and writing Transforming Girls, along with the continued importance of studying children’s literature.

What assumptions about adolescent girls’ literature from this era are you hoping to challenge or reevaluate with your book?

There’s a critical assumption in the United States that adolescent fiction didn’t develop until the 1970s. Yet there are all these books written in the mid-1800s that are explicitly about adolescent girls and that talk about adolescence as a time of difficult transition. I realized that, in fact, there were 19th-century American girls’ books about adolescence and we had just forgotten about them.

How did you end up rediscovering these American novels in the first place?

It actually started with my sabbatical as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at JohannWolfgang University in Frankfurt, Germany. I was studying German girls’ books and initially thought they were different from American ones because American girls’ books are family stories or they’re about younger girls, while these German books were about adolescents. I thought I might write a book about the contrast between American and German girls’ books until I actually started reading best-selling American girls’ books from the 1800s and noticed their similarities.

There was a strong German presence in the U.S. in the 19th century. There were German printing presses, and German books were translated into English and vice versa. A cross-cultural exchange happened that was oriented around the idea that there is such a thing as adolescent girlhood, and these books treated female adolescence as a creative, transformative space, whereas we currently view adolescence as a time of alienation and angst.

Since this idea of “creative transformation” is so central to these novels, could you talk about what that concept looks like in these books?

The teenage girls in these 19th-century books tend to be awkward. They’re kind of a mess, and they’re loved despite that. The girls feel embarrassed, but the adult women around them acknowledge that becoming a woman is not an inevitable, natural process, but a construction that’s hard work. These female role models provide girls with a supportive environment where it’s okay to make mistakes. Today we expect the ideal teenage girl to be charming, and if she’s not, that’s a problem that needs to be solved. One of my chapters is called “The Romance of Othermothering” and it talks about how mothering happens outside of heterosexual marriage in these books. Even though the protagonists are usually expected to find a husband as soon as possible, they are often mothered by single aunts or teachers, and the girls are mothering each other as peers who take care of each other. There’s a sense of completion that happens in these novels when a girl learns how to nurture other girls and women.

Even though you point out lots of positive messages that these books can send to young girls who are in the throes of adolescence, do you still think that these books have a place with contemporary audiences, considering they also hold problematic views on gender and race?

Transforming Girls really developed from a question I started asking maybe 20 years ago, which was: Why do I read, teach, and study these classic girls’ books that are so clearly sexist and also reinforce white privilege? I say in my book that I don’t necessarily recommend giving these books to teenagers. I write instead about using the positive aspects of these novels to imagine a different vision of adolescence and reframe our ideas about how to support teenagers. I do believe that the things we read when we’re young, before we have structures for intellectual critique in place, can become deeply internalized. We absorb certain ideologies and maybe spend the rest of our lives sorting out which of those ideologies we actually wanted to absorb and which we didn’t. I think part of the importance of studying children’s literature is thinking about the kind of conversations we want to have with children who are reading.

What have you found most powerful about being able to reexamine the books that you read as a child through this new scholarly outlook?

There is something powerful about this notion of celebrating girlhood and saying that yes, being an adolescent girl is an experience worth writing about. It’s a concept that has just really resonated with me and is a reason why I want to keep reading, teaching, and critiquing these books. Taking on the womanly identity your culture expects of you is a kind of invisible labor, and these girls’ books make that labor visible. Now we have the opportunity to think about what we’re choosing to do and what we’re not—and maybe redefine the grumpy adolescent girl as someone who’s actually working really hard to make herself into a new person.

Marin Harrington is a current creative writing M.F.A. student and marketing intern.

New Look Online

Hollins.edu/magazine has a great new interactive look and feel. Go check out a backlog of some of our most recent issues as well as the online version of what you hold in your hand!

Beginning This Summer

Hollins magazine will begin a new quarterly tradition this summer, with four issues annually arriving in your mailbox. Each summer and winter, you will receive issues that include features, alumnae/i spotlights, and news from the Hollins campus. And each fall and spring— as alumnae/i are preparing to gather up for reunion—you will receive issues solely dedicated to class letters.

With this slightly altered approach, the class letters issues will be even more dependent on photos to brighten up your journey through the pages, so please share your selfies and ussies with Hollins!