Volume 56 - Issue 5

Waiting for Welcome

Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency in New Haven— how will it transform across the U.S.?

Dear readers,

Newness is a slippery concept. For fifty-seven years, The New Journal has found novel ways to tell stories with familiar themes—justice, resilience, tradition, and rupture. As the new board of The New Journal, we will uphold this magazine’s longstanding mission: to describe a world in flux with human nuance.

In Volume 56, Issue 5, we find the face of America shifting across generational lines. Two of our writers pay homage to local migrant communities. Our cover story, by Kylie Volavongsa, examines the national application of a New Haven-based refugee resettlement model, which places the future of resettlement in the hands of everyday Americans. Ingrid Rodríguez Vila glimpses home in the Puerto Rican diaspora of New Haven, where local teens aspire to lead their community in a cultural pageant.

In other pages, people defend their homes. Disgruntled neighbors organize into a tenants union; Yale and Connecticut’s Indigenous communities interrogate the University’s land acknowledgment; and a ragtag group of fishermen fight to preserve their waters.

As we release this issue, the war on Gaza and campus protests across the country continue. The day after our first weekend of editing, student protestors occupied Beinecke Plaza and demanded that Yale immediately disclose its endowment holdings and divest from military weapons manufacturing. One week later, on Monday, April 22nd, Yale police arrested forty-eight of the protesters, including forty-four Yale students. As we watch students gather at the plaza, in the streets, and on Cross Campus, we are reminded that putting words to the present is an increasingly important and fraught task.

In the year to come, we will remain committed to this task, writing stories that document history and generate change. We tuck this issue into The New Journal archive, and release it out to you–these stories, as Samantha Liu writes, may now “ripple into either memory or possibility.”

For now, Managing Board

Maggie, Chloe, Aanika, Sam

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club

The Hull Barrett Family Fund

Mark Badger Matthew Hamel

Neela Banerjee

Anson M. Beard

James Carney

Andrew Court

Romy Drucker

Jeffrey Foster

David Gerber

David Greenberg

Makiko Harunari

Laura Heymann

James Lowe

Chaitanya Mehra

Ben Mueller

Sarah Nutman

Peter Phleger

Adriane Quinlan

Elizabeth Sledge

Gabriel Snyder

Fred Strebeigh

Arya Sundaram

Stuart Weinzimer

Steven Weisman

Suzanne Wittebort

Editors-in-Chief

Maggie Grether

Chloe Nguyen

Executive Editor Aanika Eragam

Managing Editor Samantha Liu

Verse Editors

Ingrid Rodríguez Vila Etai Smotrich-Barr

Senior Editors

Jabez Choi Paola Santos

Viola Clune Kylie Volavongsa

Abbey Kim Anouk Yeh

Associate Editors

Chloe Budakian Tina Li

Ben Card

Sophia Liu

Koby Chen Hannah Mark

Ashley Choi Calista Oetama

Matias Guevara Ruales Josie Reich

Mia Rose Kohn Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Sophie Lamb

Copy Editors

Sara Cao

Sophie Molden

Lilly Chai Sasha Schoettler

Diego del Aguila

Victoria Siebor

Sophia Groff Vivian Wang

Podcast Editor Suraj Singareddy

Creative Director Chris de Santis

Design Editors

Tashroom Ahsan

Jane Park

Sarah Feng Cate Roser

Alicia Gan Jessica Sánchez

Angela Huo Daniela Woldenberg

Lily Lin Ashley Zheng

Photography

Nithya Guthikonda Ellie Park

Web Design

Makda Assefa

Serena Ulammandakh

Members & Directors: Emily Bazelon • Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby

Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley • Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • AnneMarie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel Letter from the editors

Jeffrey Pollock

From East Rock to the Olympic Marathon Trials, all roads lead to the New Haven Road Runners By Megan Kernis

The Reinas of New Haven

1,625 miles from the island of their heritage, New Haven teens aspire to become the city’s next Miss Puerto Rico. By Ingrid Rodríguez Vila

Waiting for Welcome

Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency in New Haven— how will it transform across the U.S.?

By Kylie Volavongsa

Connecticut fishermen become reluctant fighters to protect their waters against commercial fisheries. By Samantha Liu

Rent hikes and poor living conditions are driving tenants to unionize across New Haven, but the city remains ill-equipped for collective action.

Lazo Gitchos

Yale’s land acknowledgement promises to recognize the displaced Indigenous peoples of Connecticut, but not everyone is convinced. By Tashroom Ahsan

Love Line Cooks

Chesed Chap

Texas By Lucy Ton That

Fictions

Tony Potchernikov

Beneath the Tension Rods

Mia Rose Kohn

Spring By Sophie Lamb

Haq

crossword: Critter Jitters, page 47.

By Elizabeth Shvartz

Front Runners

From East Rock to the Olympic Marathon Trials, all roads lead to the New Haven Road Runners

In early February, Kidan Kidane YSN ’24 stood behind the line at the 2024 Women’s U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Orlando, Florida. She steeled herself for the 26.2 miles ahead, while New Haven runners gathered around their TVs to watch her on the race livestream.

Two years earlier, before moving to New Haven, Kidane thought she had given up competitive running. Born in Ethiopia and raised in the state of Georgia, Kidane had been running since high school. She received a track scholarship to Kennesaw State University to run the 5K and 10K, but she stopped running after graduation to pursue nursing. When she came to Yale for her master’s degree, Kidane discovered a robust running community that reignited her interest in the sport—this time at much longer distances.

Remarkably, Kidane was one of four runners from New Haven who competed in the Olympic trials. Just ten minutes before she lined up, Connor Rockett YSE ’24, Ben Decker SOM ’23, and John McGowan ’13 had begun running at the Men’s trials.

The Olympic Marathon Trials, one of the most prestigious competitions for runners, only occurs once every four years. The qualifying times––2:18 for men and 2:37 for women––are nearly a full hour faster than those of the Boston Marathon. Even so, New Haven runners have a surprisingly large presence in this exclusive race.

While New Haven locals form the base of the city’s running community, many runners are Yale affiliates, meaning the running community is highly transient. One might expect that such high turnover rates make it difficult for runners to create a lasting community beyond the confines of Yale. However, the city’s running community shatters this assumption, producing lifelong friendships and national accomplishments.

As Kidane recounted her running journey to me over a phone call a month after the trials, I could hear the hunger for the sport in her voice. “I go out hard and race aggressively,” she told me, confidence underscoring her words. “An experienced runner told me they didn’t think I could do it, so I thought to myself, ‘Watch me.’” She ran the Boston Marathon in 2:36:22, qualifying for the trials with thirty-eight seconds to spare—even after stopping to puke (“twice,” she added).

Kidane and her fellow Olympic trial qualifiers—Rockett, Decker, and McGowan—train with New Haven Road Runners (NHRR), the primary run club in New Haven. The group offers daily 6:30 a.m. runs and social night runs on Wednesdays open to anyone. Unlike most run clubs, the routes are designed by their coach, Jake Jayworth. Also the professional coach for the Fairfield University cross country team, Jayworth has a USA Track and Field Level 1 coaching certification and a master’s degree in Exercise Science. He works individually with runners and designs daily routes for NHRR

Since reinstating daily runs at the end of 2020, the club has amassed over three hundred members and beaten almost every previous club record. The Wednesday night social runs have become particularly popular, with nearly forty runners showing up for the conversational jog and post-run hangout at The Trinity Bar. Other seasoned NHRR runners have joined each other in running ultramarathons under the influence of psilocybin, also known as shrooms.

NHHR has also been a space for reflection. In 2023, NHRR runner Miche Palmer YSE ’17 founded a book club for the group. Popular titles include “Choosing to Run” by Des Linden and “Good for a Girl” by Lauren Fleshman, prompting discussion about the systemic inequalities in running, like the lack of recognition for female athletes. “[New Haven] is not

like New York where there’s a bunch of different run clubs. NHRR is trying to figure out how to be a club for a lot of different people,” explained Jayworth.

I ran my first marathon last year. After tumbling over the finish line, I told myself it would be my last. Much like Kidane, I fell out of competitive running before moving to New Haven. Kidane had graduated from college and was on her own working in Atlanta when she stopped racing, and I was in a small town with an even smaller population of runners. However, New Haven provided me with a community that reinvigorated my love for running. On one particularly rainy day, as I trudged through the mud in East Rock and rued my decision to run, I passed another runner. He cheered at our shared dedication, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation and enjoy it for what it was.

Though Yale Club Running foregrounds my running community here, my occasional interactions with NHRR have helped me reflect on my relationship with the sport. Even when I’m running alone, passing NHRR runners on the track or on local routes encourages me to keep going. On Strava, a social media app where runners connect online to share their runs, I’ve found an online community with members of NHRR like Kidane. Since the start of my collegiate career this past fall, I’ve run too many 5Ks and two marathons—despite having “retired” last year.

Earlier this month, as I stood at the start line of my most recent marathon, the excitement from the past few months of running in New Haven surged through me. My confidence was high knowing that the friends I’d spent tens of hours running with were all around me, gearing up for the same race. That day, I set my own personal record and set my sights on the next race. ∎

Megan Kernis is a first-year in Ezra Stiles College.

Tears Beneath the Tension Rods

Today my closet fell down and I cried. How does a closet fall down? the inquisitive reader might wonder. The truth is that I have no closet––I have two tension rods. Many months ago, when I was a tension rod virgin and the world was beautiful, I arrived at my humble Old Campus suite after my roommate. She got the desk next to the window and the singular closet bar. I got the empty, bar-less side of our L-shaped “closet.” Amazon tension rods it was. (Was this my mistake? My tears a punishment for lazy participation in late-stage capitalism?)

I placed the silver rods as so: one higher and farther back in the cavity and the other lower and in front. I called them Rodrigo (no, not Olivia––I am not a fan. Repetitive themes and lacking lyrics) and Mitt Rodney (also not a fan). They began level. Days passed, and Rodney’s right arm slipped an inch. Slipped two. Rodrigo

followed. On one fateful day, Rodrigo and Rodney lost their pathetic grip on the stucco walls and crashed to the cold floor. I cried. I contemplated extricating the plastic hangers and beloved dress straps and jacket sleeves and heavy coats. I elected, instead, to pick out items one by one, day by day, like a guilty ferret with her slowly dwindling stash. Eventually, the rods were emptied and reinstalled anew.

This cycle has repeated for nine months, culminating always in Rodrigo and Rodney’s special time of strife (come to think of it, we might be synced). And of course, the deluge of fabric coincides with the Worst. Day. Ever. Terrible French exam. Crash. Mother on FaceTime squints at the spreading acne on my chin. Crash. International Holocaust Remembrance Day (my grandmother’s a survivor). Crash. Today was different. Today my closet fell down, and, dear reader, something

wonderful happened: I did not cry for the dust-stained button-downs or gargantuan collection of black boots (can one have too many?) buried beneath the rubble. I cried for the French exam and acne-scarred chin and the Holocaust, for the people I miss and papers I need to write, for climate change and war and time. I did not let the clothes rest on the floor for a week, or two, or six (my current record). I picked them up, while I wept and wept and wept.

Sometimes you need to cry, and the tension rod gods bless you in a dorm room closet.

—Mia Rose Kohn

Snapshot

The Reinas of New Haven

1,625 miles from the island of their heritage, New Haven teens aspire to become the city’s next Miss Puerto Rico.

By Ingrid Rodríguez Vila

¡Buenas tardes, New Haven!

In Wilbur Cross High School’s vast auditorium, the salsa music halts. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker steps up to the podium to share a few words. The family next to me exchange impatient whispers—clearly, he is not who they are here to see.

As the first pair of young women strut onto the stage, heralded by Daddy Yankee’s “BONITA,” the woman next to me shrieks and stands up to record. “Sorry,” she whispers sheepishly, as the duo takes their positions and poses at either end. Far upstage, a large banner features images of güiros, cuatros, and tambores in front of the Puerto Rican flag. The instruments coalesce around an insignia: PRU Presents Miss Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven 2024

The annual pageant, which traces its history in New Haven back to the nineteen-seventies, seeks to select a Miss and Junior Miss Puerto Rico to serve as role models for the city’s Puerto Rican youth and award them a scholarship prize. A dozen girls aged twelve to eighteen will each represent one of Puerto Rico’s

seventy-eight municipalities, with their chosen pueblos corresponding to their parents’ or grandparents’ hometowns on the island. As they dance their opening salsa in a swirl of red and blue leotards, I notice their sashes: Miss Cayey. Miss Peñuelas. Miss San Juan. The atmosphere awakens a deep nostalgia in me—the music that colored my childhood on the island, the ritual of religiously watching the Miss Universe Puerto Rico broadcast with my family every year.

Here, over a thousand miles away from the island, these New Haven girls forge a Puerto Rican identity that is meaningful and true to them.

“We’re not just building our next reinas,” stresses Joe Rodríguez, president of Puerto Ricans United, the organization that has run the pageant for the past two years. “We’re building our next cultural ambassadors.”

The Monday before the pageant, I sit in a crowded Lorenzo’s

Ristorante Italiano, enjoying a pre-pageant dinner alongside contestants and their families. 17-year-old Alanna tells me about her first time visiting Cayey, Puerto Rico this past summer. She recalls strolling through the central plaza’s colonial Spanish buildings, listening to her great-grandmother’s stories. She traced the steps of her family’s history across the city, as though she were following a ghost.

Like the streams Cayey is known for, Alanna’s voice is bubbly and clear. Last year, she was the pageant’s first runner-up—the First Princess. She lets this motivate her. “I did this last year, and I almost won, which means I’m definitely going to win this year,” she says, smiling.

Though its current iteration is only in its second year, the history of New Haven’s Miss Puerto Rico pageant stretches back much longer.

Waves of migation formed Puerto Rican communities across the state starting in the nineteen-fifties—a decade marked on the island by economic uncertainty and federal crackdowns on nationalism and cultural

Lysella displays her costume, a tribute to San Juan.

Alanna, in homage to the humans buried underneath Church Nuestra Señora de la Asunción of Cayey.

for Raine

because your off-key off-beat offsets the eighth rests demarcate mind the gap and next stop please because your calluses are legend in the map that is your palm that is our palms are a chalice and i can never be half empty because there is some constant some speck of constellation of comet dust integral we know nothing conditional; this love outlasts our limbs this limb is etching a boundary so far the gods break a sweat you can’t name gods so you sketch fourier squares and series and something tells me you will find someone always a way back

symbols. In 1964, Connecticut held its first official Puerto Rican Day Parade in Hartford, to celebrate a diasporic culture at a time when it was manifestly under attack.

By the nineteen-seventies, local Miss Puerto Rico pageants took place in New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, and more. The winners of each city’s pageant then competed for the state title, and for the honor of donning the crown and sash on their royal float at that year’s statewide parade.

But New Haven’s last pageant took place in 2008. And the last parade and festival on the New Haven Green took place just a year later. Magaly Cajigas, the former Miss Puerto Rico of New Haven 1992, explained to me that the volunteer-run statewide pageant had proven difficult to organize and fund. Many volunteers broke away to focus on their own city-level cultural programs. In New Haven, eventually, several community elders stepped down from their boards without leaving clear successors.

Almost a decade of dreadful silence elapsed before Puerto Ricans United was able to bring bomba and plena back to the New Haven Green in 2016. In 2022, Rodríguez approached Anika Russell and Samary Polnett, both mothers and former Miss Puerto Rico

of New Haven contestants, to gauge their interest in reviving the pageant for the following year. Eagerly, Russell and Polnett signed on as co-directors.

Russell tells me she credits the pageant with inspiring her back in high school. “I was going to school out of district, and there weren’t many Puerto Ricans at my school,” she recalls. “I was very shy, I was very reserved, and I felt like this pageant, as a teenager, instilled some self-confidence, some leadership skills. It got me involved in my community.”

Now, she hopes to bring that experience to a new generation of girls. For these girls, scattered across the Greater New Haven area, most have had little contact with Puerto Ricans beyond their family circles—which may themselves be multiethnic or generations removed from the island.

III.

At the Miss Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven pageant, each act is judged on “cultural relevance” alongside creativity and overall presentation. From the pageant’s talent component, I recognize “Preciosa” rendered on saxophone, and “La Borinqueña” drawn

—Elizabeth Shvartz

across cello strings. I’m thrilled to see Miss Cabo Rojo Johanelyz dance a bomba, a traditional Puerto Rican dance; like the petals of a hibiscus flower ruffled by the breeze, her layered skirt blooms and withers around her body as she spins.

For Alanna’s act, she performs “Carnaval del Barrio” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “In the Heights,” her alto reverberating through the auditorium. Though her mother was born in Cayey, Alanna’s father is Black and from Connecticut. As an Afro-Boricua, she understands that this pageant, on its face, asks her to embody just half of her identity.

“Based on whoever is looking at me, they either think I’m Black or Puerto Rican; I’m somewhere in between. I like to tell myself that my ancestors on both sides were both taken from Africa, just, the ships landed in different areas,” Alanna says. “When people think of Puerto Ricans, they don’t think of someone that looks like me. They think of a specific, stereotypical Boricua, typical Latina; with the dark hair, the pale skin, and the brown eyes.”

The presence of this idealized Puerto Rican Woman seems to loom over all the girls. She is fuzzy—a phantom—but easily distinguishable by her fluent Spanish, sun-kissed complexion,

and inborn ability to dance. She represents a woman who is unquestionably Puerto Rican—to whom Puerto Ricanness offers no resistance.

I do not know what it’s like to have this Puerto Rican Woman peering over my shoulder. I’ve spent my entire life on the island, and I have always, more or less, taken my Puerto Rican-ness for granted. It’s never something to be questioned or proven. However, for girls growing up in New Haven who may not know that such a woman does not even exist on the island, this beautiful phantom can be harder to dispel.

In the three months prior to the April pageant, volunteers dedicate themselves to helping the girls prepare. They practice modeling, etiquette, even financial literacy. On Tuesdays, at Viva! Dance Center in West Haven, the girls learn salsa, bomba, plena, and other Puerto Rican dances from a former pageant queen. On Thursdays, they trade their dance shoes for notebooks, studying the history of Puerto Rico and their family’s pueblos.

13-year-old Lysella, the reigning Junior Miss Puerto Rico of Connecticut 2023 who is representing San Juan in the pageant’s Junior Miss category, recalls being bogged down by pageant homework. But the work paid off, she tells me, beaming in a ruffled orange-red jumpsuit. Lysella has only ever visited San Juan—the city both her mother and I grew up in—once, and remembers little apart from the strikingly blue sixteenth-century cobblestones lining the Old City’s streets. Still, she has learned much more about her pueblo and Puerto Rico’s history. Insistently, she talked to me about la Ley de la Mordaza, the law that made it a crime to display the Puerto Rican flag during the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, and the billions of dollars in withheld federal aid to the island after 2017’s Hurricane María.

The pageant this year features a cultural costume component. Each dress transports the audience to one of the girls’ Puerto Rican pueblos: a ribbon-adorned fairy dress alludes to a famous Peñuelas legend; a shimmering leotard and lion mask pays homage to the carnivals of Ponce; a bedazzled boxer’s garb recalls that worn by Cabo Rojo’s Mayra Matos during her run as Miss Universe Puerto Rico 2009. Before the audience’s eyes, the white train on Lysella’s red dress morphs into

a giant seashell that frames her, Venuslike, as she spins around to reveal the design of San Juan’s crest on its back.

When Alanna steps on stage in a floor-length light blue dress, I notice the tiny model skeletons peeking out from between the folds of her tulle skirt. “Under Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, there’s three hundred to five hundred human remains,” Alanna had told me. In the auditorium, she turns around to reveal the face of the church, rendered in white and blue brushstrokes, before lifting her hands to the sky. They are bound in gold chains. An ode, I realize, to one of the deceased—a little Taíno girl, whose skull bears the green imprint of oxidized chains.

Miriam, the 2023 Miss Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven, glitters, her eyelids dusted with gold and her head

crowned with gems. Reflecting on the end of her reign, she’s nostalgic.

“There’s no better love than the love Boricuas can give you,” she tells me. Presenting herself as Miss Puerto Rico at cultural parades and festivals in New Haven and New York City showed her the vibrance of the wider Puerto Rican community, helping her to overcome her doubts about her ability to represent them.

“I was like, if I could speak Spanish, I know that I could really represent Puerto Ricans one hundred percent,” she recalled. “But then, that’s when I took that step back and I realized that, no, you can represent Puerto Ricans in so many other ways.” During her reign as Miss Puerto Rico, Miriam spoke at schools across the city, campaigned for autism awareness, and earned a spot on Connecticut’s Afro-Latino 30 Under 30. Miriam fondly recalls spending the summers with her family in Caguas, Puerto Rico. She insists I should visit Plaza Palmer and stop by their giant birdcage—which, though I drive through

IV.

Taina, during the cultural costume component.

Caguas frequently, I had never noticed. I ask her if she ever felt at home there. “It’s complicated,” she laughs. “Being there, I feel like it’s a part of where I’m supposed to be. But where I belong is in [New Haven], my city. That’s how I feel.”

Miriam is not the Puerto Rican Woman, that ethereal, fuzzy-edged figment. She is a true representative of her community, a young woman who embodies the particular struggles and strengths of New Haven’s Puerto Rican youth.

The point of the pageant is not to replicate an “authentic” Puerto Rican cultural experience—one that is indistinguishable from what exists on the island. Alanna, Lysella, and Miriam have grown up navigating cityscapes and braving Northeastern winters, not fanning themselves during heat waves and trying to sleep through coquí symphonies. The pageant is just as much about building a distinct New Haven Puerto Rican community as it is about connecting the girls to the roots common to Puerto Ricans all over the world.

Lysella takes pride in her newfound community. “I felt disconnected from my own people. Now I feel more connected, ‘cause…look who I’m around.”

Alanna describes Puerto Ricans United as a “large family,” and her fellow contestants as “sisters.” She loves how different they all are, and how fiercely they support one another. “Even on the day of the pageant, right before you go on stage everyone is like, ‘Good luck, you got this!’”

V.

In her sequined pink dress, Alanna walks gracefully. For someone who insisted that the evening gown was her least favorite part of the pageant, she’s doing a great job of hiding it. Her smile does not falter as she draws her final question from the box: “Why do you deserve this title?”

“I deserve this title because I’ve grown a lot in the past year. I’m not the same girl who was crowned First Princess last year, and I’ve learned through my mistakes and my failures to become a more poised, but also intellectual Miss Puerto Rico. As Miss Puerto Rico, I will—I intend to— create a different image of Puerto Rican women. That we don’t have to be fiery and extra, that we can be passionate, and

we can be precise, and we can be intellectual. We can be smart, and we can pursue studies.” The crowd erupts into a deafening rumble.

“I want to be a role model for young women,” Alanna finishes.

At the time, Alanna did not know whether she would win the title. She still cannot believe she can. “It’ll sink in later tonight,” she admits breathlessly. The massive crown atop her head has remained since it was placed there by Miriam. Lysella beams not too far behind, the Junior Miss Puerto Rico sash glittering against her red gown.

I don’t know exactly how the new Miss and Junior Miss Puerto Rico feel at this moment. But as I watch a colorful swarm of friends and family storm the stage, I can’t help but believe that, at the very least, we’re speaking the same language. ∎

Ingrid Rodríguez Vila is a sophomore in Branford College and a Verse Editor for The New Journal.

Alanna adjusts her crown.

A Home Overdue

Rent hikes and poor living conditions are driving tenants to unionize across New Haven, but the city remains ill-equipped for collective action.

By Lazo Gitchos

Through a soccer-ball-sized hole in Alex Kolokotronis’s bathroom floor, light shines up from the apartment below. The walls and ceiling are stripped to the studs. A layer of fine drywall dust coats every surface of the apartment. On an overstuffed living room bookshelf, “Every Tenant’s Legal Guide” rests atop Kropotkin’s “Direct Struggle Against Capital” and Godwin’s “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.”

Two months ago, a pipe burst in Emerson Apartments, sending water streaming through Kolokotronis’s light fixture, into his bathroom, and through the floor into the apartment below. The flooding forced Kolokotronis GRD ’23, who has lived in the building for seven years, and two other residents out of their units until repairs are finished. Without demolition permits, the landlord, Trinity Lutheran Church, located next door, partially gutted the unit to remove mold and water damage: the bathroom is currently stripped to the framing, and the downstairs unit is visible through the floor. No work has been done on the apartment, Kolokotronis says,

since the original demolition—and lack of proper permitting—led to a Stop Work order in early March.

After the pipe burst, property man ager Raymond Sola texted Kolokotronis’s downstairs neighbor James Blau. Blau has lived in Emerson for twelve years with his cat and his 17-year-old son, of whom he has half custody; since February 1st, Blau has been unable to live with his son. “Rent payments continue,” Sola wrote in the text, “as this is not a scheduled work [sic].” But Kolokotronis, who completed a doctoral degree at Yale focused on labor organizing and participated in a 2017 hunger strike in support of labor union Local

far outpacing wage increases. By 2023, 52 percent of renters in New Haven were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

The flooding forced Kolokotronis GRD ’23, who has lived in the building for seven years, and two other residents out of their units until repairs are finished.

33, knew this was illegal. He contacted the New Haven Fair Rent Commission—the municipal board that processes and investigates tenant complaints regarding unfair rent practices—which affirmed his right to cease rent payments while displaced. Still, fed up with inconsistent communication from the landlord, he roused his neighbors to form the Emerson Tenants Union.

Over the last few years, landlords and city officials in New Haven have learned that there is a limit to what renters will tolerate. Between 2019 and 2023, rent in the city went up by an estimated 33 percent,

In the face of climbing rents and increasingly dangerous and illegal living conditions, New Haven tenants have arrived at their own solution: unionization. Emerson Tenants Union is among five tenant unions to emerge in the city since the 2022 formation of the Blake Street Tenants Union. The Emerson union is the only union of the five that has formed in a property not owned by mega-landlord Ocean Management. Unionization beyond corporate landlords, which have been accused of slumlord practices, reflects tenants’ deeper needs for recognition and recourse.

Though this groundswell of tenant unionization seems to have momentum, the city’s bureaucracy has been unable to keep up. City agencies, like the Fair Rent Commission and the Liveable Cityies Initiative, are designed to process individual complaints and cannot handle cases brought collectively by tenant unions. A local ordinance passed two years ago bars landlords from retaliating against organizers over unionization, but there is no local, state, or federal requirement for property owners to bargain with a tenants

and unions negotiate lease terms without the power imbalance that exists between corporations and individuals—but they may need additional legislative support to make this happen.

When New Haven’s Board of Alders unanimously voted to formally recognize tenant unions in 2022, it named the Fair Rent Commission (FRC) the mediator between the unions, the city, and landlords. This meant tenants unions must file with the FRC to gain official recognition. That same year, Connecticut legislature passed a law requiring towns larger than twenty-five thousand people to create their own fair rent commissions, many of which look to New Haven’s model as a successful blueprint.

New Haven’s FRC is made up of nine board members and two permanent employees. It has the authority to strike down rent increases which it deems “harsh and unconscionable,” as well as to license inspections, issue subpoenas, and order landlords to take action to resolve issues regarding housing conditions.

unchanged since it was incorporated in 1970. Meanwhile, the needs of tenants, the conditions of the buildings they inhabit, and the economics of the housing market may not be the same. In 2022, the FRC added a second full-time employee in response to a rising case count: since 2019, complaints have risen from a few dozen to several hundred every year. Bermudez attributes the increase to more tenants learning about redress processes, but the rise could also indicate deteriorating renting conditions across the city.

At Emerson Apartments, conditions and communication with the landlord have deteriorated. “We let things go because we thought we had this… intimate or personal relationship with our landlord, the church,” Kolokotronis said. But tenants’ personal connections to the church disintegrated last summer following the death of a beloved church administrator, and any remaining trust evaporated after the pipe burst. When residents of the building, many of whom have lived there for at least a decade, started talking to one

tion. “The lack of communication [from the landlord] is ridiculous,” said Yvonne Byrd-Griffin, one of the building’s tenants and a member of the labor union Local 34. “There’s so much nonsense going on.” Fellow tenant Kenneth Naito MUS ’24 didn’t know many of his neighbors until Kolokotronis made an online group chat for the building, encouraging his neighbors to form a union. From there it took just twenty-seven hours, Kolokotronis said, to sign on a supermajority of residents. Later that week, the city of New Haven certified the Emerson Tenants Union.

Kolokotronis and others told me they feel that within its limited scope, the New Haven FRC is doing its job well, managing the often-tense relationship between landlord and individual tenant. Members of the Emerson Tenants Union relied on the FRC to get a response from their landlord, who did acknowledge that taking rent while the apartments were uninhabitable violated state law. Still, the FRC is currently only able to address complaints

brought by an individual, and the protections it provides for unions is limited. Statewide tenant organization

Connecticut Tenants Union President Hannah Srajer GRD ’25 told me that if FRCs were sufficient to resolve the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, “We [the union] would not exist.”

Even after forming a union, Emerson tenants face logistical hurdles. To move forward with a Fair Rent Commission complaint, Kolokotronis needed an inspection report from the city’s housing code inspection authority, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). LCI was much less responsive than the FRC, and reached no resolution. An inspection report filed February 12th––nearly two weeks after pipes began to leak––notified property manager Sola that immediate repairs would be required. Getting a copy of this report took Kolokotronis nearly six weeks. The report specified that the landlord should address the leak within seven hours. Still, it is unclear whether LCI, which has recently been criticized for inefficient and ineffective responses, followed up with the landlord. LCI staff members referred all questions to Lenny Speiller, Director of Communications for the Mayor. Speiller said that through LCI and the FRC, the City is “using all the tools in its enforcement toolkit” to address the situation at the Emerson Apartments.

On April 22nd, Sola served Kolokotronis and Blau with Notices to Quit, the first step in the eviction process. According to the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch, such notices must be formally served, but Kolokotronis and Blau only learned of their eviction when neighbors spotted notices taped to the doors of

their uninhabitable apartments. The news, they both said, was completely unexpected. Speiller told me via text that the FRC “has been in contact with the tenants and [is] reviewing the matter.” He added that it was the responsibility of the landlord to demonstrate that the notice was appropriate, and that a judge in housing court would make the final determination.

Apparently retaliatory action by landlords is nothing new. But recourse through a union in the City’s systems is. The future of rental policy will be revealed in New Haven’s response to cases like this, and the toolkit will be pushed to its limit.

The Emerson Tenants Union has struggled to bring Trinity Lutheran Church to the negotiating table. Just one of New Haven’s tenant organizations, the Blake Street Tenants Union, has reached a formal negotiation agreement with its landlord. Unlike labor unions, tenants unions have no legal provisions requiring that their landlords recognize them as bargaining units or engage in collective bargaining—negotiating leases as a group instead of as individuals. When asked about collective bargaining guarantees

for tenants, State Senator Martin Looney said, “That’s what we want to move toward,” adding, “We’ll probably need state enabling legislation.”

Apparently retaliatory action by landlords is nothing new. But recourse through a union in the City’s systems is.

Labor organizations benefit from a long history of hard-won legal protections. When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, it posited collective bargaining as a right, not a privilege. The statute is premised on the notion that strikes demanding greater rights and protections for labor unions had disrupted the flow of commerce; to limit the power of employers, the government needed a

strong case for protecting the public good. Nearly one hundred years later, the process of making those demands on behalf of tenants, instead of workers, is just beginning. But the precedent exists, and many— including Senator Looney—are keen to draw the parallel.

Kolokotronis spent portions of his childhood in New York City facing housing insecurity. When he was a teenager, he saw firsthand the conditions rent hikes create: shortly after his father passed away, his family’s landlord doubled their rent, forcing him to move into an unsafe and unstable living situation.

Now, months after unionizing, members of Emerson Tenants Union wonder what comes next. Union members and around three dozen others rallied outside city hall on April 13th, seventy-one days after Kolokotronis and Blau were forced to move into temporary accommodation. Kolokotronis, Blau, and the other displaced tenant still don’t have a livable home to return to.

“What’s the point of forming a union if no one at city hall will meet with us as a union?” Blau asked the crowd at the rally.

On March 21st, three weeks after issuing the Stop Work order, the City of New Haven Building Department issued a building permit to Trinity Lutheran Church to begin repairs on the damaged units. As of April 13th, repairs had not yet begun. Speiller said that the building

department had placed a lien on the property, which will be lifted only when repairs are made and inspected. The landlord has not provided tenants with any information regarding a timeline for repairs. Sola and attorney Che Tiernan did not respond to requests for comment.

At the City Hall rally, union members carried signs and a megaphone. Organizers from Hartford, Hamden, and other cities were present in solidarity with the group’s demand: to meet with city leaders, including Mayor Elicker and Alders, to resolve the stagnation. No city officials were present.

Signs show that the City may be responding to tenant unions’ evolving needs, if slowly. Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration, beginning April 22nd, contracted former mayoral candidate Liam Brennan as a consultant to help overhaul LCI. It’s a clear response to public demand—what Brennan describes as a need to establish tenants’’ rights in the face of commodification. Housing becomes commodified, he explained, when property is used primarily to build wealth and capital rather than to serve a need for shelter. He added that alternate structures like tenant unions will likely continue to drive policy “from the

bottom up,” forcing broader legislative action over time.

Where labor unions are strong, research finds that non-union wages go up too. Tenant unions in acutely commodified housing might raise the standard landlords must meet, even for non-unionized tenants—if organizers can compel city bureaucracy to afford tenant unions the same protections as labor unions.

When Blau texted property manager Sola to ask whether he could be refunded for rent during the period in which he was forced to move out, Sola responded, “Life is not fair. That’s what insurance is for.” And while the FRC was able to nudge the landlord into following the law, it has so far failed to create a long-term resolution to the situation at Emerson Apartments. The members of the Emerson Tenants Union know that life isn’t fair. But, they believe, that’s what a union is for. ∎

Lazo Gitchos is a senior in Trumbull College.

Waiting for Welcome

By Kylie Volavongsa

Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency’s in New Haven—how will it transform across the U.S.?

Last december, Yazan Al Doumani received an email he’d been waiting thirteen years for. He was at an office desk in West Hartford during what had been an unassuming workday at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). But that afternoon, an office director sent a staff-wide message announcing the launch of a public initiative that could allow Yazan to see his family finally.

Yazan immediately opened the homepage of the Welcome Corps, a national program that launched in January 2023. It allows ordinary U.S. citizens to voluntarily sponsor refugee families and assist them toward self-sufficiency in the States. Have you watched the news unfolding around the world, read an earlier version of the website, and wished there was something you could do? Yazan thought of his mother, Abir, his brothers, Ghaith and Yaman, and his sister, Joudi. The four are still currently 5,633 miles away in Jordan, where they have been since their displacement at the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war.

“I had a feeling inside that—oh my god—my family could actually come soon to [this] country and I can reunite with them here,” Yazan would later tell me. He began his application to become a Welcome Corps sponsor. He began to hope for the best.

Yazan is 22 years old, an assistant of IRIS’ Housing & Donations team, and a student at Central Connecticut State. He has a penchant for Premier League soccer and—“it’s gonna sound weird,” he warned me—teeth. He’s studying pre-dentistry, and tells me that tooth enamel is stronger than rocks.

Yazan was born in the U.S., but his family moved to Syria soon after, where they lived until

the beginning of the war. He was 8 when he moved back to the States as a U.S. citizen. Yazan was joined only by his father, Mohamed, whose visa had been approved by the Department of State. Meanwhile, the visa applications of Yazan’s mother, brothers, and sister had all been denied.

In 2011, the year Yazan’s family was separated, Mohamed filed their family’s claims with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). If approved, the rest of the family could join them by UNHCR referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), first instituted by the Refugee Act of 1980. In the meantime, both sides of the family had to build something of a new life—living, working, waiting for reunion. Yazan calls his mother and siblings on FaceTime almost daily, but it’s been two years since he last saw them when he visited Jordan. Thirteen years have passed since they were separated, with no update on the status of their refugee claims.

As a Welcome Corps sponsor, Yazan can provide what may become a crucial means for diasporic communities across the U.S. to reunite with their loved ones. As of this year, about six hundred fifty-four thousand Syrians in Jordan are officially registered as refugees with the UNHCR , and over one-third of them have been separated from their families. This statistic still doesn’t account for the 1.3 million displaced Syrians in Jordan who either haven’t registered for legal refugee status or still await approval.

With a grassroots approach towards refugee resettlement in the U.S., the Welcome Corps pushes the boundaries of a field long dominated by professional resettlement agencies and

Yazan (far right) and his family

mostly white, faith-based service organizations. Conventionally, these agencies sponsored families approved by the UNHCR and referred to the USRAP; however, these groups had little say in who they sponsored. When the Welcome Corps first launched, it paired refugees and sponsor groups the same way. Nearly a year later, in December 2023, the Welcome Corps opened a means of sponsorship never before seen in the U.S. It allowed sponsors to identify specific refugees they wanted to resettle, so long as they have already been registered as a refugee or asylum seeker by the UNHCR or the government of the country they’re currently located in.

Through the Welcome Corps, Yazan and his family may finally have the chance to be together soon, and for good.

Setting Up Sponsorship

The Biden administration Describes the Welcome Corps as an effort to expand the U.S.’ capacity to resettle refugee families and modernize current refugee resettlement programs. It launched the Welcome Corps amid a series of international crises, including the fall of Kabul in 2021 and the escalation of conflict between Ukraine and Russia in 2022. The program is also a response to historically low refugee admissions ceilings during Donald Trump’s presidency, which saw an 86 percent drop in U.S. refugee admissions over the course of his term.

To expand and update the U.S.’ refugee resettlement capacity, the Biden administration turned to a resettlement model known as community co-sponsorship, where an official agency approves and trains community organizations to sponsor refugees on its behalf. Though an iteration of this model was pioneered in Canada, the administration looked to New Haven—where the nation’s leading example of the co-sponsorship model grew from the offices of IRIS , a nonprofit nestled in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood.

“For many, many years, there was an assumption that [refugee resettlement] is a really specialized technical work that requires a lot of experienced case managers and it cannot be done by a ragtag group of volunteers,” Chris George, former Executive Director of IRIS, told me over the phone. “Well, you’re wrong.”

Yazan (far left) and his siblings as children

George, who directed IRIS for eighteen years, saw community co-sponsorship as his most important project at the agency. He was spurred by the need to assist growing populations of displaced people, along with the heightened visibility of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015—what the UNHCR still calls the largest refugee crisis in the world. George and other IRIS leaders then established their own community co-sponsorship program, pushing a number of public information sessions to recruit what would eventually grow a state-wide network of over fifty co-sponsorship groups.

Historically, refugee resettlement has operated through a case management model, in which a case manager or social worker is assigned to a refugee family to provide assistance. This limits participation to trained professionals, often with bachelor’s degrees and a few years of experience in social work. Public involvement, at most, took the form of donations or lower-commitment volunteer roles like providing transportation for families or tutoring English. But around 2015, community leaders across New Haven and Connecticut approached George, wishing to do more.

“There was a distant memory of church or faith-based co-sponsorship,” George told me, referencing what he called an “informal network” of co-sponsorship from the nineteen-eighties. This was the original version, created to accommodate waves of Southeast Asian displacement after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Secret War in Laos. Often, these co-sponsors were local church groups working in collaboration with the USRAP

With its board, George combined IRIS’ organizational team structure with the everyday, informal volunteer force of those faith-based sponsors. They expanded co-sponsorship, both in capacity and demographic, by allowing any group of people to become sponsors, so long as their group was or became an established legal entity and had enough dedicated volunteers—typically upwards of twenty. Groups also needed proof that they could provide financial, cultural, and other practical assistance to a refugee family for at least one year.

This ragtag model had undeniable successes. In 2016, IRIS ’ first full year of community co-sponsorship, the agency and its co-sponsors welcomed 530 refugees—“more than double any previous year,” according to IRIS ’ website. These numbers were considerably larger than Connecticut’s other two major resettlement agencies the same year. Hartford Catholic Charities, which lacks a report for the 2016 fiscal year, was estimated by the Archdiocese of Hartford to have resettled 360. The Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants ( CIRI) resettled 127 (though CIRI does focus on providing its families up to five years of assistance).

IRIS’ growth with community sponsorship is still going strong. The agency has gone from a pre-2016 annual average of two hundred resettlement cases to one thousand, expanding from cases

of refugee resettlement to cases of asylum seekers and some immigrants. This success soon attracted national attention, bringing the IRIS agency to the center of the Welcome Corps itself. The agency’s role in the Welcome Corps: to support and provide information sessions to Welcome Corps applicants across the country as they build their own scaled-down versions of the New Haven co-sponsorship model.

“There is a pressure from the United States public, for us to open up to democratize refugee resettlement,” George told me. “Peace Corps invited ordinary people to participate in foreign policy, right? This is a foreign policy program that operates in our own backyard, but we were not allowing public citizens [to participate] in a significant way. And now we are.”

The Welcome Corps is meant to supplement— not replace—the USRAP, where UNHCR-approved refugees are sponsored by a network of ten national volunteer agencies and smaller professional affiliates like IRIS. Welcome Corps sponsors work in small Private Sponsorship Groups (PSG s) of at least five U.S. citizens. While the Welcome Corps adds onto the U.S.’ capacity to resettle refugees, sponsor groups are still responsible for providing the same services as existing agencies: greeting families at the airport, finding and furnishing housing, seeking employment, and serving as guides to local communities and American culture.

PSG s have two options to welcome a refugee family. The first is Matching, the random pairing of a sponsor group with a refugee family. When the Welcome Corps first launched, this was the only option available in the program’s first phase. Then, in December 2023, the second phase of the Welcome Corps introduced the Naming program— also called Sponsor a Refugee You Know—where PSG s could apply to sponsor a specific refugee living abroad. This development expanded the scope of who could sponsor a refugee family and who could be sponsored.

Yazan first stumbled upon the Welcome Corps website when it was still in the first phase. At this time, Yazan hadn’t started employment at IRIS and was working with an immigration lawyer in New Haven, looking for ways to get his family to the States sooner. The Welcome Corps wasn’t yet what he’d needed, but the idea stuck with him.

When Yazan had opened the Phase 2 launch email in December, he left work early to assemble his own PSG. He drove straight to his uncle’s house in Farmington, and later that night, to a friend’s house in New Britain. Yazan’s father would have joined, Yazan told me, but he doesn’t yet have full citizenship. “I told them about Welcome Corps, explained everything to them,” Yazan told me, “and they were like, ‘Yeah. We’ll do it.’” Eventually, all five of them— Yazan, his uncle, his uncle’s wife, and two friends— gathered to sign off the forms for their background checks, committing them as private sponsors.

With over sixty-five thousand approved sponsors in the Welcome Corps and another eleven

thousand applications currently in progress, the desire among everyday people—and burgeoning diasporic communities—to open their doors is clear. And as the Welcome Corps adapts IRIS’ co-sponsorship model for smaller volunteer groups and diffuses it across the nation, both supporters and critics wonder: will this expansion really work on a national scale?

Make No Assumptions

Jean silk lit a candle on her windowsill and prayed: God, I’m gonna find that woman

It was February 2016, Silk’s third month in charge of the Jewish Community Alliance for Refugee Resettlement (JCARR), a role she’d taken on after decades of work in international education and social action. “I’m not tired, and I’m not retired,” she’d later tell me.

JCARR , a partnership of five local synagogues and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, was established in December 2015 as an IRIS community co-sponsor. Only a month after its inception, JCARR welcomed its first refugee family: three siblings in their 20s from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Silk was looking for Marie, who was married to the eldest brother of the family. The last to arrive in the U.S., Marie and their 2-year-old son had been sent to Indianapolis and were supposed to take a bus from there to New York. She’d then meet with her husband and a volunteer from JCARR , and they’d all take the Metro North back to New Haven together. When it was time for Marie to

arrive at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the volunteer called Silk. Marie and her son were missing. Oh my god, Silk had thought. “I never asked if she spoke English. I never asked if she had a cell phone. I never asked if she was wearing a sign that says ‘I’m going to New Haven, send me to Jean Silk.’”

In New Haven, Silk spent the next five hours poring over bus routes, calling police officers from small-town stops in Pennsylvania, all the way to Port Authority. She thought about taking the late-night train to New York to find Marie herself. “But there were a lot of angels working that night,” she said. Around midnight, a Port Authority baggage employee called Silk’s phone, saying he was with Marie and her son. An officer also called from Port Authority, informing Silk that he deals with women and children—often victims of human trafficking. That officer took Marie and her son to Grand Central Station, where they boarded the train to New Haven. Accompanied by a “Good Samaritan” on the Metro North, Marie and her son finally arrived at Union Station at 2 a.m., where Silk and Marie’s husband were waiting for them.

That night, Silk told me, she learned a crucial lesson about the work of refugee resettlement: “Make no assumptions.” Helping Marie and her family had been Silk’s first resettlement case, and she had assumed that Marie had everything she needed to get to New Haven—despite traveling with an infant in an unfamiliar country.

In an attempt to “expect the unexpected,” as Silk had put it, the process of becoming an approved community co-sponsorship group with IRIS is a rigorous one. IRIS requires each volunteer to complete a background check, register for liability insurance, read a thirty-page co-sponsor program manual, and complete a six-hour training session on their new responsibilities. IRIS also recommends that co-sponsor groups raise $4,000 to $10,000—enough to provide three to six months of financial assistance, mostly with rent.

Eight years since the Port Authority incident, Silk and JCARR have resettled eight families and are currently working with their ninth—the most of any community co-sponsorship group that IRIS has worked with. But with the initial vetting and preparation that JCARR had gone through, and this near-decade of experience, Silk has found that maxim—make no assumptions—to be consistently true. The commitment to resettling a refugee family can easily become more than the community and goodwill that well-intentioned sponsors may have bargained for.

“I always say this,” Silk told me, “Refugee resettlement is not romantic. It’s really hard work. Those phone calls come at any hour of the day or night, and you don’t always know the answer, but you feel like you need to come up with one.”

In a more extreme case, Silk recalls an instance of domestic violence within one of the families JCARR had sponsored. She wasn’t sure how to

handle it and hadn’t expected the difficulty, pain, and potential danger that could arise from this kind of volunteer work. Both the man and woman had come to her for help.

“It’s hard, when you don’t know how to help people,” Silk said. She remembered how her daughter, a social worker, raised this concern too: “‘Mom, you’re not trained. You can’t solve this problem.’”

The refugee woman eventually obtained a restraining order, and is now safely raising her children. But it was after helping this family that Silk noticed the emotional toll this work could take on her. She’s since stepped back from directly working with refugees, now focusing more heavily on JCARR’s administrative affairs and organizing its volunteers. Silk has faith in the expansion of refugee resettlement, but perhaps not for the everyday volunteer— at least, not without sufficient support. “I would love to be wrong,” she said of the Welcome Corps, “but I believe that they’re probably naive.”

How Much Is Enough?

Welcome corps Groups only have to be accountable as sponsors for ninety days—the Department of State’s minimum for all resettlement agencies. According to the Center for Migration Studies, this timeline isn’t enough to assist many families as they integrate into what is often an incredibly different way of living and with little to their name. In Connecticut, established resettlement agencies and longtime community co-sponsors have also expressed concern over the ninety day requirement, and whether these voluntary groups are prepared for the realities of this commitment.

“So far, the people that have shown interest in the program have the means financially, but not the knowledge of how to access the services needed during the ninety-day period of resettlement,” Marenid Carattini, CIRI’s Director of Refugee Services, told me.

Most agencies provide their services for much longer: IRIS community co-sponsors must commit to assisting families for at least one year (JCARR helps for two to three), and CIRI has a five-year resettlement assistance program. Hartford Catholic Charities stopped accepting new refugee cases in 2019 but was still contractually obligated to help families for five years. Meanwhile, Carattini also noted that the extra time is crucial in handling longterm struggles, both predictable and unpredictable, like sudden employment, a loss of benefits, or assistance with the naturalization process.

The Welcome Corps must walk a delicate line: ensure its program is accessible enough that it can fulfill its promise of democratizing resettlement, but keep the requirements rigorous enough to ensure that sponsors are equipped to properly resettle families. In the process, however, this creates a barrier for a newer demographic of sponsors from diasporic communities—often the ones with the most at stake to become a sponsor.

In Yazan’s group, he took on the role of Coordinator, a designated member responsible for submitting the application and being the point of contact between Welcome Corps representatives and their PSG. He also took on as many sponsorship requirements as he could by himself—even though most PSGs work through them collectively. “I guess I didn’t want to bother them,” he said, concerned about his uncle and aunt’s own busy lives.

Yazan completed the application, which included a list of questions prompting him for information on where sponsorees may find accessible healthcare, language services, and other public benefits. Then, he took a free four-hour online course covering the “Sponsorship Essentials” of the Welcome Corps— another requirement that only Coordinators are obligated to complete.

He then had to raise at least $9,700, a total of $2,425 per family member he hoped to sponsor. This minimum is based on the same amount that the Department of State currently provides to refugee resettlement agencies. To prevent misappropriation of government funds, it must be raised by sponsors alone. For Yazan, finding a place to put these funds—and prove there were enough—was the most difficult requirement, taking him two weeks to finish. He needed a bank statement from an account that listed the official name of his PSG.

“I went to three different banks,” he says. “It was hard for me…I spent a whole week just trying to figure out how I’m going to show them that I’m financially stable.”

Yazan finally turned to GoFundMe at another IRIS staffer’s advice. Then, he needed to raise at least 60 percent of his required funds before his group could be eligible for approval. After a couple of months of outreach at local mosques, Yazan has since raised $7,920—82 percent of his minimum goal.

In the Meantime

Yazan’s group was approved as a certified Naming group three months after he had met each sponsorship requirement.

“Once a group gets certified as a Naming Group, then a referral has been made to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” IRIS Director of Sponsorship Ann O’Brien told me, “[USRAP] still has to go and talk to the specific individual to see if the refugee claim can be accepted for the program. So we don’t know yet how long it will take for that process to happen.”

All that’s left is to wait.

I asked Yazan if he knew anything about the timeline ahead for his sponsorship group, or when his family might be approved for resettlement. “They don’t really tell us,” he said. “[But] I’ve asked around and they told me anywhere between six months and two years.”

The Welcome Corps has been around for less than two years, and its Naming program for about half that time. This jump in U.S. refugee resettlement, drawn from the old guard of nineteen-eighties

co-sponsors and a New Haven agency’s statewide successes, is a bold one. But things are still early, still uncertain. Despite these uncertainties, Yazan can at least have some direct hand in bringing his family over far sooner, perhaps, than the fourteen years that his immigration lawyer had estimated before applying to the Welcome Corps. “It feels weird waiting,” he said, but he has hope.

Yazan dreams of taking his mother to New York City. “She likes crowded places,” he said, “can’t go wrong with New York.”

A little after our call, he will cook for Iftar to break his Ramadan fast. He tells me he’s not sure what he’ll make yet—maybe something with chicken. After that, perhaps some nighttime soccer. He will go to school the next day, and he will go to work to help IRIS with its intake of furniture for other refugees’ new homes. He will return to his own home, and so will his father. They will talk about their days and dial his mother, Ghaith, Yaman, and Joudi. He’ll talk with them, too. For now, impatiently, Yazan waits. ∎

Kylie Volavongsa is a junior in Silliman College and former Managing Editor of The New Journal.

Gone Fishing

Connecticut fishermen become reluctant fighters to protect their waters against commercial fisheries.

Snapshot

By Samantha Liu

Ray Potkay knows how to trick a fish.

“It’s all about patience,” he tells me, reeling in the line with a learned slowness. He teaches me to pull up twice: once to yank the lure forward, again to pull it sideways, so that the striped bass thinks the fake fish is injured.

Potkay’s not a big talker. What he lacks in verbosity he compensates for in spunk: he has pierced ears, silver glasses, and a trim beard. He smokes a cigar while he fishes. He won’t call himself the best, but he does call himself “The Fabulous Fisherman” on Facebook, where he’s achieved microcelebrity status within Connecticut fishing circles.

“Don’t write about where we are, or else it’ll get blown up by everybody,” he tells me with dead seriousness. I’m trudging behind his rubber-booted footsteps down a winding forest path. In the parking lot behind us are his SUV, my handbag, and an array of crushed bottles. And before us, the Housatonic River unfurls into crystalline silver.

There’s something Whitmanesque about fishing, and it’s more than the stars and stripes emblazoned on Potkay’s pliers as he retwists the hook on his lure. Out on the water, it’s every man for himself. It’s tough. It’s American. It’s disproportionately dominated by middle-aged white guys posting pictures of themselves dangling giant mackerels on Facebook.

“It’s the greatest sport in the world,” says Pete DeGregorio, owner of Dee’s Bait & Tackle, a beloved New Haven fixture since 1954.

Potkay and DeGregorio are two among a dozen-something local fishermen whom I talked to over the past month. An almost-fanatical community, for decades, these individuals have called Connecticut’s nearly six thousand miles of shoreline, rivers, and streams home. They go fishing before dawn and past midnight; they chase wraithlike herring and savage bluefish; they spend months finding the best places to fish, and the rest of their lives keeping them secret from other fishermen.

“I mean, it’s just a euphoric time,” says Randy Boyer, a DJ-turned-fisherman

who runs his own lure-making business. “When you’re fishing, the world kind of melts away.”

Like many fishermen, Boyer learned angling—fishing with a rod and line— from his parents growing up. But today, a tangle of bureaucracy, legislation, and commercialization threatens the very spirit of recreational fishing and the local communities who sustain it. Massive Atlantic fisheries encroach on fishermen’s catches, driving once-abundant fish species to historic lows in Connecticut’s rivers. Angling—which has attracted intrepid fishermen to New England’s shores since the sixteen hundreds—now faces an uncertain future. And the latest generation of anglers must reckon with what’s worth fighting for and what legacy is worth preserving.

the Branford Supply Pond into the Atlantic. Come fall, adult herring will migrate back in droves to the pond to spawn again. They serve as prey for striped bass, the “king of all fish,” according to DeGregorio, which are coveted all across the Atlantic.

But today, the fishway sits empty. In the past ten years, the dense herring runs of Job’s childhood have all but disappeared. Job estimates that there were ten thousand herring in this very fishway in 2013. So far, this year, the dam’s fish-counter has recorded twenty-three.

“This is literally my job to look for these [fish]. I go out at night, and I struggle to find them,” Job says. “It sucks. Like it’s really, really frustrating.”

Gwas the “fish

kid.” When he was six, he saw a fly fisher returning from the sea-scuffed shore, holding a fat striper in his hands. This fly fisher taught Job the art of striped bass fishing: to throw the lure into a school of herring, to watch the herring scatter and the bass lunge for the lure instead.

Hook, line, and sinker, Job fell for fishing. With almost religious fervor, he searched for the best herring spots, the best time of day to fish them, and the best season for fishing. He attended the University of Connecticut to study fisheries—there, he cut class and skipped sleep to fish more. Spring became his “happy time,” when runs and runs of silvery herring splashed through the rivers.

“People would go on vacations with their family, and all I did was fish,” Job tells me, stretching out the all like taffy. Twenty years later, sporting sunglasses, blue flannel, and a slight surfer’s drawl, the 34-year-old Job works as a fisheries biologist for the CT Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). He’s eased better into the fishkid persona.

We’re standing atop a seventeen-foot dam, talking over the roar of a waterfall. Here, a fishway guides newly spawned river herring—alewives in the fall, and blueback herring months later—from the quietude of

Over the past four decades, blueback herring populations in the Connecticut River have decreased from six hundred twenty-three thousand to just over two thousand. Once-fanatical fishermen are reckoning with the disappearance of their favorite species. For Riefe Tietjen—a self-proclaimed “one-trick pony,” who spent thirty years perfecting the art of hunting infamously vicious bluefish—this meant finding new species to chase when bluefish “were just no longer around,” ten years ago.

61-year-old Dave LaFrance also recalls catching the bluefish which had swarmed the waters of Lighthouse Point since he was a 14-year-old boy. “Then three years ago, they vanished,” LaFrance told me.

He’s not the only one missing their favorite catch. As Job and I talk, an osprey dives down from the tree, then swerves up, talons empty.

“In theory, he should have a nice silver fish in his talons,” Job says, craning his neck to watch the bird dip back into the horizon. If he’s lucky, Job explains, he might resurface with a pre-hatched trout placed in the pond by the state. But there’s no herring on the menu today.

The heyday of Connecticut’s fishing was in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I’m told again and again, when anglers chased fish freely and plentily.

Now, the most dedicated fishermen on the shoreline are getting older. The generational gap haunts younger people growing up on the water, many of whom have never seen a migration of hundreds of herring, or know it existed at all. Job acknowledges his own 34-year-old age as a bit of an anomaly.

“How can you protect something if you don’t know it exists?” Job asked.

Since New England anglers first sounded the alarm on herring populations in the nineteen-nineties, the state has invested tens of millions of dollars into environmental cleanup and fishways connecting the river herring to freshwater sanctuaries. A complete ban on river herring fishing was instituted in 2002. Three years ago, the state even sponsored DEEP , where Job works, to place nine thousand prespawned fish into the Shetucket River in Eastern Connecticut.

But each time, the outcome is the same. Nine thousand fish come in to spawn. Nine thousand fish swim out to the ocean. And then the fish never return.

The culprit, lying just a couple miles away from shore, seems obvious to most private anglers. Enormously obvious. Massive commercial boats, towing miles-long nets along the Atlantic

seafloor, snag river herring as bycatch— unintentionally caught wildlife—in their operations. Even though they target Atlantic herring and mackerel, any fish ensnared by their nets can be killed and sold for profit. Other times, when they’re over the poundage limit, they’ll toss smaller dead fish by the hundreds back into the ocean. In a four-year period, these trawls have caught an estimated 6.6 million alewives as bycatch in Southern New England.

“For every five thousand pounds of butterfish they caught, they swept over ten thousand pounds of bycatch,” DeGregorio says, shaking his head. “The slaughter is crazy.”

Eighteen years ago, DeGregorio inherited Dee’s Bait & Tackle’s brickand-mortar storefront and loyal clientele from his father. A self-proclaimed family man and U.S. history buff, DeGregorio has been running this store like a relic of Melville’s America. He doesn’t use email or voicemail. He keeps a battered box of IOUs from customers to whom he’s lent supplies or money. Early customers get his attention by banging on the outside window (he responds by

Ray Potkay, who goes by “The Fabulous Fisherman,” fishes for striped bass on the Housatonic River.

hollering back that they open at noon). As one customer told me, “It doesn’t get more grassroots than Dee’s.”

DeGregorio tells me the pilgrims came to America in response to two injustices: religious persecution, and that only the rich could fish the king’s waters.

While commercial fisheries, thanks to major lobbying clout, get off the hook with overfishing and bycatch, recreational fishing licenses are getting more expensive. Anglers need to purchase saltwater licenses, in addition to freshwater licenses, in addition to trout management stamps, in addition to government-issued rulebooks which lay out all of this. One of these rulebooks sits bound on DeGregorio’s counter at Dee’s Bait & Tackle, which he gestures to frequently and impatiently throughout our conversation. Over fifty pages of printed graphs, tables, and legends, the book describes the state’s response to declines in herring and striper populations, which includes new regulations on the size, place, time, number, and species recreational fishermen can catch.

Everyone I talked to had something to say about the extensive rule changes. They deter new families from picking up fishing, while the old guard is exhausted. Some are even deserting—one man I talked to cited fishing as one among a variety of reasons he was moving to Florida. Statewide, recreational fishing participation has declined by over fifty percent in the past three decades, from one hundred and fifty thousand people in 1990 to only one hundred thousand in 2021, according to the Census Bureau. What’s lost is not just people who fish: it’s the collective memories—taking their kids down to the coast, witnessing an ecosystem run vibrant with wildlife, sharing fresh catch and conversation with neighbors over dinner.

“I lost my culture,” Job said. “I mean, it’s gone. You have to work really hard to recreate what I used to be able to do when I was ten.”

Job doesn’t think the problems will go away until regulations around commercial fishing change. But Toby Lapinski, lifelong angler and editor-in-chief of the national magazine Fishing Tackle Retailer,

Located on Clay Street in New Haven, Dee’s Bait & Tackle has become a community fixture for avid anglers across Connecticut.

Photos across Dee’s wall show fishermen and their catch across generations.

doesn’t think regulations will change until recreational fishermen go out and protest.

Lapinski recalled two January 2024 hearings by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, where he was one of two appointed representatives for recreational fishermen. At the hear ings, they discussed striped bass quotas after a severe population decline in the species. Of over one hundred thousand private anglers residing in Connecticut, just over fifty submitted written com ments. Forty-one came to the in-per son hearings; only nine of them were recreational fishermen.

Many of the fishermen I talked to were fast to complain about overregulation, but few had the time or desire to fight it.

commercial fisheries. He’s relying on anglers to use their voices, but has also turned to birders, photographers, ecologists, long-time residents, and anyone

The only refuge these fishermen have is in each other.

WOn one visit to Dee’s, I met a 70-something-year-old angler in a grey tracksuit. I asked him if he was interested in talking about issues in fishing.

“Nah, not really,” he said. The drive to New Haven was too far. I told him I could call him over the phone if he didn’t want to come down.

“Nah,” he said again. “Most of the time, if I’m at home, I’m fishing.”

That was hard to argue with.

“I’ve never been a fan of the ‘throw up your hands and walk away; it is what it is,’” Lapinski said. “But the private anglers definitely fall that way.”

DeGregorio recalled unsuccessful attempts from years ago to rally anglers statewide to attend town meetings— after weeks of planning, only four people showed up. Today, DeGregorio is tired. He tells me he’s been meaning to write to the commissioner expressing his grievances, but the store is always overrun with customers, and he hates using email.

For the fishermen on Connecticut’s shores today, their passions lie out on the water, not inside committee rooms. Meanwhile, the new generation is too young to remember the heritage they have lost.

“You have to remember something to appreciate it,” Job said. “I’m trying to put things out there, to get volunteers involved again, to try and have them remember these fish exist.”

Job is hopeful about Amendment 10 of the Atlantic Herring Fishery Management Plan, an upcoming negotiation on catch caps and limits on

out his line. It whips over the river with a magnificent swoosh. Lure bag slung over one shoulder, orange fishhooker clipped to his chest, rod extended and arms unmoving, he stands still like a lighthouse under the squinting sun.

Out here, I can understand why Boyer believes in karma. Fishing is man versus nature: Potkay says he’s been dragged down by the tide several times

“If I get a hook stuck in my finger, you’d have to help me pull it out,” Potkay warns me.

He hasn’t caught any fish today. Maybe there are fewer stripers in the river. Maybe it’s too windy. Potkay isn’t concerned about the former. For now, there are still fish in the ocean, and as long as they are there, I’m realizing, there are also avid surfcasters smart enough to catch them.

And still, Potkay fights to preserve fishing in his own way. I watch him wave for a younger fisherman to join him. The two of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the water, wind against their backs, throwing their reels toward the horizon together.

By the time we reach the parking lot, Potkay is noticeably more relaxed and talkative. He buys me a coffee. When my ride home is delayed, without hesitation, he starts clearing out the backseat of his car, where I sit for the next twenty minutes sandwiched between crates of fishing

Right: “Fish Wedding,” A cartoon drawn by fisherman Peter Graves

ordinary person behind the wheel, without his enormous rubber boots, camouflage waders, and larger-thanlife mythos. But if fishing is a kind of heritage, this, too, is it—to offer lifts to college students, to stand shoul-

ing, I meet a lone fisherman on the bridge. His hook nose is flushed red with cold, glasses fogged up. His name is Peter Graves. He lives across the river. He caught his first pickerel in 1952. He has a PhD in microbiology and spent decades in virus and disease research.

Maybe this makes sense because he thinks fishing is an exercise in intellect.

“You gotta fool a fish, right?” he tells me. “You gotta be as smart as they are!”

When he tells me this, he pats me on the shoulder and lets out a laugh like a gently-rusted door hinge. Immediately, I decide I like him. We exchange names, then fish stories, then emails, and a promise to stay in touch.

I walk back to the dam and stand over the pooling water. I stare hard at how it passes through the fishway: turbulent on top, calm underneath. I imagine everything Graves and Job have told me, picturing runs of alewives thick like ribbons, flashing silver, and cerulean beneath my feet. In a moment so sharp I almost believe it, I see something twist beneath the water. Momentarily, it flashes, before it ripples into either memory or possibility. ∎

Samantha Liu is a sophomore in Grace Hopper College and Managing Editor of The New Journal.

Peter Graves holds a walleye caught from Lake Saltonstall in Branford.

Writing Up the Land

Yale’s land acknowledgement promises to recognize the displaced Indigenous peoples of Connecticut, but not everyone is convinced.

By Tashroom Ahsan

“Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”

The first time she heard Yale’s land acknowledgment, Nyché Andrew ’25, a Yup’ik and Inupiaq student from Alaska, felt confused. She was attending an online first-year orientation meeting about how Yale students could be respectful residents of New Haven. Nyché felt the statement lacked any sort of urgency and wondered if other students were even paying attention. As she heard the acknowledgment read again at various Yale events, her confusion sharpened to frustration. “The syntax, by using ‘has stewarded,’ refuses to be more present about Native peoples’ relation to land today,’’ she tells me.

“By ignoring Yale’s active harm against Native people, [the statement] goes into erasure.”

Yale adopted their current land acknowledgment in October 2019. Out of the three Indigenous professors and six Indigenous students I talked to, none of them knew how or why the statement was drafted. None of the six University administrators, each a part of the secretary office that issued the statement, returned my emails asking for more information. On the website of the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for Student Life, where the statement is published, there is no specific policy about where it ought to be recited; the website simply notes that the statement is “approved university language” that may be used at events. While several students and professors I spoke with pointed to the importance of land acknowledgments as a practice, many feel that Yale’s current statement falls short of meaningful action. For Nyché, Yale’s statement raises more questions than it answers. How have these people stewarded the land? Do they still? And how does Yale

“honor and respect” them, apart from sometimes reading their names aloud?

Idrive past the Quinnipiac River, past Sachem’s Head, past North Guilford, past Old Saybrook—all letters on a green sign beside the I-95 tarmac—and find myself at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.

Each of these names means something else to Connor Smith.

Smith’s wife and stepchildren are Mashantucket Pequot, and he spends his days as an educator working under the huge pine and oak trees of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. Raised in Branford and New Haven, Smith grew up on soil cared for by the Quinnipiac. I knew the Quinnipiac people lived in Southern Connecticut before British colonists arrived in New Haven—Yale’s current land acknowledgment states as much. But Smith tells me that “much of what people

From a forest north of the Mashantucket Pequot reservation.

know about the Quinnipiac is misunderstood.” He grins, pulls up a map of New Haven on his phone, and proceeds to tell me some history.

The Quinnipiac land spanned much of what we now know as the New Haven area; interrelated bands inhabited neighboring villages in what is now East Haven, Branford, and the northern part of New Haven. After the British had established themselves as the politically dominant force in the area with the Treaty of Hartford, Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport—the English founders of New Haven—created the Momauguin Treaty. The 1638 Treaty ascribed total agency to the Quinnipiac principal sachem, Momauguin, to sell the land without consulting the sachems of other Native bands. The Quinnipiac were then pushed onto a 1,200-acre parcel, the only land where they could plant, hunt, or build without English permission—one of the first forms of a reservation in the United States.

Over time, colonists encroached upon the reservations as Quinnipiac people sold tracts and rights to pay for exorbitant petty crime fines, leading to recurrent conflicts over the boundaries of the reservation by the late seventeenth century. In 1731, nearly all of the Quinnipiac reservation had been bought by colonists, and most of the Quinnipiac emigrated to nearby Connecticut towns, far from the river they called home. Many Quinnipiac descendents, looking to preserve their sense of independence, joined the Brothertown movement later in the eighteenth century. They went west, converting to Christianity and settling in Wisconsin. Others joined different nearby tribes, including the Pequot. The Quinnipiac no longer exist as a recognized community though their descendants live on.

On his phone, Smith zooms in on Cross Campus, right by Harkness Hall. “If you’re talking about where Yale is, in the New Haven region, these were traditionally hunting grounds.” New Haven served as a shared land for the Quinnipiac bands, a living space for them to listen to the natural world.

Nakai Northup, the head educator at the museum and a member of the Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett tribes, sustains his connection to the land through far more than twenty seconds of a land acknowledgment. “The land is my therapist,” he says, patting the dirt beneath us. He refers to it as his

“close friend,” a being that he continually spends time with, one that frustrates him, one that partners with him through life.

“We’ve been here for two thousand-plus years, so that’s a long time to form a relationship,” Northup says. He can identify the plants around us by their Algonquian name. When he looks out, he sees details that I cannot. And that gaze was forged through time—his and the generations before him. He tells me about hunting for an animal, an act that Connecticut land sustained for thousands of years. “You can learn how [an animal] built a relationship with the land and the things that it relies on within the land and how the land relies on it for other things. And then you throw yourself in that mix. I guess that puts me in that cycle as well.” The kinship between the earth and Northup animates his stories.

( NACC ) and am greeted by the house staff, peer liaisons, and NACC Director and Assistant Dean of Yale College Matthew Makomenaw, all seated at a long table by the entrance. Bright colors surround them—construction paper, markers, candy wrappers, bowls, wall art. Each person is writing welcome letters to recently admitted Indigenous students. Their laughs and excitement flow into pages of kind words.

“First and foremost, we’re a student center, a place for Indigenous students to center themselves and find resources,” says Makomenaw, one of the Grand Traverse Bay Band of Ottawa and Chippewa people. “Even though we don’t all come from the same tribal nation or culture, we build a place where people are comfortable, and they have friendships, and they have mentorship, and they have a space that they can center themselves.”

When he looks out, he sees details that I cannot. And that gaze was forged through time—his and the generations before him.

Driving back, I turn on my GPS and return toward New Haven. The maps, trees, and signs grow richer than on my drive there. The Quinnipiac River was where they found their food. Sachem’s Head came from an old tale about a tribal conflict. And Saybrook was where the Pequot War culminated. Behind each of these names dwells a richness of the land, easy to overlook when driving, but clearer to see after talking with Northup and Smith.

Later that day, I speak with Naima Blanco-Norberg ’25, a Mexica Arts Liaison, sitting on a couch in the library, cradled by books, maps, and portraits of Henry Roe Cloud, the first recognized Indigenous Yale graduate. She nods to a large map on the wall which shows the layout of different nations in North America. “It’s little things like that,” she tells me, “the books and the art which make a tie to indigeneity centered in this space, even though it’s a community of so many different communities.” As we leave, I pass by an activities room. To the left, a long table stands, with thousands of beads in boxes beside. “We get funding for them every year, and it’s a good activity since it’s something so many of us share,” says Megan Blackwell ’25, a Chickasaw Peer Liaison. With beads, pow-wows, and conferences spanning back to the nineteen-eighties, the Indigenous community at Yale has forged their own traditions.

Yale’s current land acknowledgment makes a small gesture towards the existence of these living communities but fails to do more than name them. “A land acknowledgment isn’t just something you say,” Megan tells me. “It has to be something you commit to. You have to commit to teaching these histories.”

Back at Yale , I walk into the Native American Culture Center

What would it mean for the words in Yale’s land acknowledgment to signify anything more than

This Spring

There was a time when I knew everything.

I knew the migration patterns of sperm whales, why we carve into the skin of beech trees, and how to write sentences that crescendo. I knew I loved Spring. I knew when the cherry blossoms stuck to the sidewalks and the dirt of my mom’s herb garden stunk of mildew, carts of Italian ice would come to the street corners and days would stretch and glimmer like the spider web across my bedroom window.

The world fell into place at my fingertips. And I, with the ferocious determination of a 6-year-old, could tug at it, weave it, mold it till my palms were caked with its clay.

Is it possible to know nothing?

These days, I wander. I run circles around this new city, stopping at every tree to revel in the shock of its blossoms. I trip over words. I can’t remember why I ever wanted to write, or study trees, can’t recall where I am from, or why I’m here now, hurdling through hot Spring days.

In this new April sun, my hands are fat and pink.

just names? Discomfort is an essential part of a land acknowledgment, Tarren Andrews, assistant professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, says. “Commitments allow for institutional land acknowledgments to go beyond their affective potential,” she tells me. “Acknowledgments are a way to make institutions that care a lot about performance put money behind the performance.” An unsettling land acknowledgment can sow the seeds of discomfort to spur institutional action.

To Northup and Andrews, a land acknowledgment should spawn an

institutional relationship grounded in mutual care. Northup told me about other institutions, like the University of Connecticut, where administrators visited the Mashantucket Pequot museum and spoke with staff while drafting their land acknowledgement. Administrators and museum staff shared meals. Beyond writing their statement in dialogue with Indigenous educators, the University of Connecticut committed to hiring Indigenous faculty and partnered with the museum to create educational programs that centered Indigenous relationships to land.

Last year, Nyché presented a detailed proposal to the Yale College Council to support the creation of a Native and Indigenous Studies major, along with the development of more Indigenous studies courses and hiring of more Indigenous faculty. Megan and Andrews have each articulated the importance of all Yale College students learning the Indigenous history of this land, something embedded in the other land acknowledgments like those of the University of Colorado Boulder and Cornell University, which provide detailed educational resources about local Indigenous groups.

—Sophie Lamb

Several departments of Yale have created their own land acknowledgments or have begun their own relationships with Indigenous communities. The School of Architecture presents a map of Indigenous nations and recognizes Yale’s harm, albeit passively and in the past, by noting that Yale has “benefitted from lands gained through fulfilled and unfulfilled articles of agreement with Indigenous nations,” and commits to “imagine endless possibilities for architectures of reconciliation, reciprocity and transformation.” Northup told me that the students from the School of the Environment have visited the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, seeking to learn about Indigenous relationships with natural resources. To Northup and Andrews, these are the kinds of actions that a good land acknowledgment should spark.

Last year, Nyché, along with others in the NACC, wrote a new land acknowledgment. The first paragraph of the statement reads as follows:

Yale University is located on the lands of the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian peoples and nations, who steward the lands and waterways through generations and time immemorial. We acknowledge the strenuous history of land dispossession that Yale benefits from and the enduring relationship between these peoples, nations, and land from this history. We call upon all to be aware of the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories of the land you occupy by learning about the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim sovereignty and stewardship of their lands and communities. These original stewards are the past, present and future caretakers of the land and we want to honor them.

The statement asks for a new institutional and personal tradition. These words float around in the communities closest to the NACC, but Yale administration has yet to acknowledge it.

Tashroom Ahsan is a sophomore in Davenport College and a Design Editor of The New Journal.

Cross Campus in March.

Personal Essay

I Love Line Cooks

By Chesed Chap

If I had stayed at Alex’s house for longer than three hours, I would have married him. He had a pierced ear and a pierced nose and a shitty tattoo of a goat on his chest. He studied geography. He had a passion for imported foods. He loved the New Orleans episode of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” as ferociously as I did. He was, of course, a line cook.

Line cooks and I have always been wildly fond of each other. Never chefs. Chefs aspire to lead. Line cooks aspire to be led, satiated by the thrill of smoking American Spirits on break (after ripping off the filters) and working at divey brewery/grills called Copper Brothel Brewery or Culinary Dropout (real names). Anthony Bourdain is their god, even if they have no idea that he wrote books before hosting a TV show. Line cooks understand that they occupy the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy: a blessing in my eyes, because it means they lack a pseudo-macho attitude. They are sensitive to love and to finding a place of belonging, which they find in their kitchens and in their walk-in freezers, among their stock pots and meat cleavers, with sous-chefs breathing hot down their necks. The world tells them they’re in a dead-end job, but they’re proud to be there. Their misguided optimism rubs off on me.

My first line cook was Esteban. We were sophomores in high school. He was proud to sling chicken tenders in the fryer of a cowboy-themed restaurant, but wasn’t cognizant of food for its artistry or its cultural semiotics. He’d never eaten

bratwurst and never heard of Oktoberfest, a celebration oddly important to my Lithuanian-Mexican family. He needed to be enlightened—he came over after school one day to lose his bratwurst virginity. We ate the brats quietly while avoiding eye contact. Esteban didn’t want mustard or sauerkraut on his, just ketchup. The following spring, our teenage romance fizzled when he refused to prompose to me because he had a shift scheduled on prom night.

I graduated high school and went on a date with James, who I met on Tinder. James was a brief vice. “You’re overdressed,” was the first thing he said to me as I arrived for dinner. (We split some new-wave bruschetta with goat cheese and pepper jam and slobbered on chicken and steak skewers. He paid, but not without declaring “I want head.”) He hated his dad and high school. He loved “American Psycho,” but not as much as “Ratatouille.” He loved being a line cook at a nursing home. He was equal parts charming and alarming. I should have said no when he asked to drive me home, but his tender bravado was a siren song— where else would I have found a shrimpy boy in a fuzzy purple sweater who so proudly told me he had a Latina fetish? I got in his car. I had to hear all of his haphazard teenage cook monologue vomit.

Instead of driving me home, he cruised aimlessly down Miracle Mile, a street known for its abundance of prostitutes, and awkwardly attempted to hold my hand. Eventually he stopped at a McDonald’s so I could pee. When

I returned to his car from the bathroom he handed me an oblong black foam sleeve and muttered something about how its contents would make me “feel safer.” I unsheathed a machete. I kept the machete under my seat as he drove me home. Was he planning to kill me and then decided against it? I wasn’t sure. I kissed him anyway.

College was my rehab. I was surrounded by men primed for Congress and Goldman Sachs, not Peter Luger Steak House. But then I turned twenty, returned home to Arizona for the summer, and the trifecta was complete—I met Alex. Alex cemented my affection for the unruly, the cast iron, the line cook. We spent (probably even less than) three hours together. When I stepped in from his porch, he told me that he’d actually been to New Haven before (and had the pizza). He dumped his laundry basket on the floor of his bathroom and frantically pawed through the carnage for his Frank Pepe’s tee shirt. He tossed it to me, and while shoving socks and jeans back in the basket, warned me that it probably smelled gross and sweaty because he wore it to work that day—but then he glanced up to where, upon toss, I had already instinctively shoved my nose between the screen printed cotton folds. That night it was revealed that he too was a child of divorce, and grew up in the same town that hosted the Target parking lot my parents used as a weekend custody exchange spot. His bedroom was decorated with ticket stubs from my favorite local indie movie theater, and a poster

with 2020 tour dates from my favorite band, PUP—the exact same poster that hung on my bedroom wall, that I bought at their concert in Phoenix. He had been there, too. (Did we not hear each other’s voices over the rupture of sludgy bass lines and grating guitars? Was there a time when we were both in the Target parking lot, contained by the respective cars of our single parents? Were our Arizonan brains ever beside each other in a pizzeria in Connecticut, befuddled by clam as a topping? How had we not seen each other so many times before—how were we lucky enough to find each other now?)

We met, ceremoniously. Without reuniting, we soon left for our respective study abroad programs. I went to Prague, where I was sickened by the thought of him drinking tequila and dancing with other girls in Oaxaca. We texted once since we both left Arizona, when I pathetically said Alejandro how is Mexico followed by This is Chesed btw idk if this sent from my czech number haha. My weak stomach was worsened by pork knuckles, cheap beer, pickled sausage, sour

bread—flavors that could only be brewed under the chokehold of late eighties communism. Bourdain said the Czech Republic had “obviously a long way to go to catch up with” the culinary prowess of its European neighbors. I didn’t care that the food was usually briny in taste and beige in color—I wanted to tell Alex all about it. Only he would understand the geopolitical significance of pickled meat.

I saw him everywhere in Prague: in cold slabs of meat (Alex was in charge of the charcuterie station at work), in the portrait of Gorbachev that was chiefly displayed at the end of the Museum of Communism (Alex owned a shot glass adorned with a picture of the perestroika prince), in a gorgeous Belarusian model named Alex who approached me outside a grisly biker bar (Alex’s name was Alex).

I had to do something else. I took a FlixBus during the penultimate weekend of my program. I spent nine hours searching for bratwurst in Berlin.

There were beer gardens, flea markets, the Berlin Wall, and not a single bratwurst in the supposed mecca of

bratwurst. At 11 p.m. I resigned to eating from a storefront plastered in a beachy sunset wallpaper—Sudanese street food. I ordered something with the German word for chicken in its description. It was a pita pocket with chili oil. It burned the absolute shit out of my throat.

I had never loved a food that hurt me so much.

For once, I ate something so wonderfully antagonistic I didn’t even think about telling Alex. It was just me, Berlin, and the chili oil battering my sinuses.

I never saw Alex again. Maybe I could think of him like my pita pocket— maybe I would end up at an international street food fair someday, and maybe I would crash into my pita pocket like an old friend, but I warmed to the likelihood that I would not, that I only had that night on the street with tears in my eyes and burnt lips. There are a billion meals I will love. There are a billion line cooks left to make them. ∎

Chesed Chap is a junior in Pauli Murray College.

Photo Essay

Flash Fictions

By Tony Potchernikov

This series serves as a prelude to a much larger set of photos exploring the tension between fiction and reality. But doing so with photos—which generally are used to showcase and evoke the real—creates a unique set of questions and challenges. The series lends itself to wondering: what does it mean to create fiction in photography?

Because for some reason, making fiction through photos made more sense to me than with words or

drawing. I think it is because blurring the line between fiction and reality in photos simultaneously began answering and asking questions I have been thinking about for some time: Are we building fictions from reality? Or realities from fiction?

Nevertheless, as you look through, consider the advice a mentor occasionally tells me. “Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.”

Pearland, Texas

By Lucy Ton That

I n this town, letters are scarce: billboards, neon signs. I only realize how thirsty I am when Ba asks me to clean out my grandfather’s cupboards of books. Take anything she says. An-y-thing . As I thumb through the words of a life, makeshift bookmarks fall from the pages. Quotidian things: unused tissues, grocery receipts, old photographs. I don’t tell Ba that her young photograph swims between the lines of an old poetry anthology. Instead, I kiss the individual receipts and bookstore invoices, making careful note that in 1999, my grandfather left the HEB with a tub of butter pecan and some gardening tools to bring home for his wife.

I spend time admiring the curve of Ba’s soft skull. She has a proud forehead, behind which she gathers wisps of hair into a knob of a ponytail. To the knob, she attaches a fake chignon of plastic hair. When she naps, her small head engulfed by the rectangular whiteness of the pillow, she leaves the hairpiece nearby as though it keeps her company. As she sleeps, I notice her tattooed eyebrows, ones which never wash off, ones which make her endlessly discerning.

I only have words as my aid to describe to you this scene. What’s real, and there’s not much of it, is overgrown and dilapidated. The largest abundance of color comes from the junkyard, where husks of cars and scraps of metal bloom different hues of rust on a thick carpet of tall grasses. The rest of it, the parking lots and big-box chains, arrived from elsewhere, I’m not sure where exactly, and perhaps all at once.

Today I drove the rental car to the town center only to discover that it’s an outdoor mall. I try making my way back on the six-lane highway, but bearded men in pickup trucks honk and cuss me out through the driver’s side window. SUVs as big as spaceships float by me without pity. In their cabins, climate-controlled and behind tinted panes of glass, suburban children gaze at the milieu of strip malls they must know only as landscape. There is not a tree in sight.

Even the air feels flat. Even the sky, just one giant blue plane, is flat. Only my Ba’s head is round. As we drive, she notes her favorite grocery store, pointing with her chin the way flowers do towards their sun. ∎

Lucy Ton That is a sophomore in Branford College.

From an Orchid Nursery

By Zoya Haq

Frizz. Everywhere. It’s the first thing I notice—or rather, feel—when I push open the slightly-jammed door to J&L Orchids. My hair balloons around my head. Such is the reality of life in a high-humidity greenhouse, the prime environment for the cultivation of the tropical forest-native orchidaceae family: the orchid flower.

Located in Easton, J&L Orchids is Connecticut’s only registered orchid nursery, according to owner Lucas Carreno. As I enter the shop, Carreno greets me with a wave.

Wandering through the shop with Carreno, it’s hard to believe I’m still in Connecticut. Floral presentations festoon the shop: flowers dangle from the wall, bloom from small rocks hung on racks, and line long wooden shelves. Large glass cases in the entry room display pots for sale. Past the propped-open door to the greenhouse itself, vines, stems, and buds weave together in variegated colors.

Orchids of all species and shades greet me with open faces. They are friendly. They are familiar. I take a deep breath in, and the intermingling fragrances of soil, wood, and pollen seep past my skin and into my memory.

As a child, I spent many warm weekend mornings kneeling in dewy grass with my dadi—my grandma—as we hunched over small mounds of earth. Though we knew the seeds would only bud maybe twenty percent of the time, it didn’t matter. As we toiled away in the March sun, digging up unhealthy stems yellowing at the edges, we planted new life into her little patch of home. The dry Dallas heat, we eventually realized, was not the ideal climate for growing a plant native to the tropics, but nevertheless we tried.

My dadi didn’t like to pick favorites, but I always thought that, of all the

flowers we planted, she loved orchids the best. “It’s like they have little faces,” she would tell me. “Little expressions.”

When my dad was a child, my dadi made the decision for our family to move from Pakistan to the U.S. Back in Pakistan, she loved the ritual of gardening; as a physician, her passion for tending to life extended past the human body and to the open earth. But the roots she found here didn’t lie in the terrestrial soil. Instead, they spread through the contours and crevices of her new home: the Al Markaz restaurant on LBJ Freeway; the knitting section of Michael’s on Midway; the “international spice” rack at Kroger.

“Orchids,” Carreno tells me, “are diasporic plants.” They are the second-largest family of flowering species in the world. While fragile, Carreno adds, orchids are self-sufficient and hardy, deriving energy and water from their own roots and environment, requiring little outside interference.

Carreno’s roots are in physics, not flowers. I ask him how his CalTech degree brought him to this tiny greenhouse in the middle of semi-rural Connecticut.

He chuckles. “Family.”

While the shop was originally opened in the late nineteen-sixties by

two chemists passionate about orchid cultivation, Carreno’s family bought J&L in 2017, searching for a change from their urban lifestyle in Washington, D.C.

J&L, Carreno explains, is a pioneer in the realm of not only orchid cultivation, but also hybridization. Within the greenhouse, the shop’s employees breed orchids to maximize presentability, color, and bud development. They intentionally pollinate certain seeds with predicted visual appeal before incubating them in small containers, such as strawberry tubs, to increase humidity and protect them from the cold.

“It’s select breeding,” Carreno explains. “Horticulturally, it’s somewhat like line breeding, where you take a family line and just continue that line.”

I left J&L with a new orchid of my own. It now sits on my nightstand. It’s beginning to bloom; its white face, speckled with violet, expands slowly towards my bed.

“Orchids are a great starter plant,” Carreno reassures me. “They don’t require much care, but they brighten the home.”

I look at my new orchid. It’s smiling up at me. ∎

Zoya Haq is a first-year in Saybrook College.

Critter Jitters

ACROSS

1 Wall-unit cooler

4 Shhhhh dont’t tell!

10 What flocks together

15 “Honk...mi mi mi mi mi”

16 and behold!

17 A place where grain is kept

18 Punctuates your student email

19 Separate

22 University of Norfolk, Virginia

23 Stinging plant that makes for good tea

25 White cow of Greek Mythology

26 Lennon’s former flame

27 Kids draw them like broccoli

28 SZA’s most recent album

30 Email response abbr.

31 To or not to ?

33 An insecticide banned in 1972 by the EPA

35 An exterminator’s rival

37 When one door closes, another

39 lang syne

41 Also known as a wild boar

42 that hurt!

43 and outs

44 Hit song of girl group NewJeans

47 The Carolina further from the Equator

48 If “slime” weren’t so trendy they would’ve called it

49 Probiotic Japanese drink

54 The Yale “and’s” evil twin

56 “I suppose there are other fish in the .”

58 Icy artic dwelling

59 A twinkling in the eye

60 The “I” in “TFTI”

64 From which Britain exited in 2020, for short

65 A bad boy’s Christmas present

67 Instead of

68 Chicken Masala

70 tones, the Sacremento-based metal band

71 Catch some!

DOWN

1 What honor-roll hopefuls avoid being

2 The 2012 dystopian

TO PREVIOUS (MARCH) PUZZLE

© The New Journal May 2024

novel featuring a cyborg Grimms’ fairytale.

3 Native people of New Zealand

4 Homophone of 56A

5 American videogame company headquartered in Redwood City, CA

6 Connecticut, if there were two

7 Nose jobs, for short

8 Slippery swimmers

9 Freshwater catches

11 Network devices

12 Medical practitioner, for short

13 Navy special ops

14 The Sunshine State, for short

20 Where they play: “The FitnessGram Pacer Test

is a multistage aerobic capacity test”

21 Spinning toy

24 For when you need a gnawing

29 Bowels without the “BE”

31 Marshy wetland

32 More than a single; less than an album

33 Department store shoe chain

34 Spoil or contaminate

36 Consume

38 “Nah to the ah to the to the”

40 Uni. with a ram mascot

44 Peasily

45 Tequila plant

46 Informational abbreviation

50 Is just a number

51 The purple character in Australian train safety game, Dumb Ways to Die

52 Teenage clothing retailer, abbr.

53 For love on a bridge in Paris

54 Athena’s favorite bird

55 fain, vive, visit

57 Italian oil giant

59 Useful battery side

61 form of female contraception

62 hand : finger : : foot :

63 The sixth letter

66 Neither bad nor good

69 It what it

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