Internship Experiences

UMass Sociology student Rosalie Miller is currently interning with Border Angels in San Diego.

This past week with Border Angels was spent mostly in the office trying to get things squared away. Last weekend we worked the Lila Downs concert and did really good selling merchandise and getting signatures at the show! We were able to go backstage and meet with Lila which was pretty cool, and is yet another perk of traveling with an established organization.
As of yet we haven’t been the best about maintaining a presence at the office, since so much of the work can be done from elsewhere, and in fact can not be done at the office, so this week we tried to focus on establishing office hours and a presence so that we can start attracting more business on a walk in basis.
On Saturday myself and the other Border Angels student staff member Sofia led a day labor outreach trip, so we prepared about 100 burritos in the morning and went out to a few Home Depots around town to give out food and water and check in on the men there. Day labor outreach is a really rewarding experience as the men are always really grateful and appreciative on emotional as well as physical material levels. Its gets tricky though because we never want to make them feel like recipients of charity, its important not to hurt peoples pride, so we try to just be very friendly and casual when we go to the sites. It also gets tricky logistically, as we dont want to put them in vulnerable legal situations by bringing attention to the fact that they are receiving aid, or hurt their chances of getting work, so we have to make sure to stay off of Home Depot property when we visit, and make sure to not interrupt if it looks like someone is seeking out workers. Its really crazy to consider the reasons why someone ends up in a position like a day laborer. For the most part the laborers are latino immigrants, undocumented or not, but sometimes there are white or black Americans standing with them looking for work, as a result of the economic situation. Even within the migrants, some are young and look like they could be college students or artists, and some are older and very clean cut and look like they could be working professionals back home. Its sad to consider that most of them have left families back in Mexico or Guatemala, or wherever. We got a lot of bags of donated clothes of all sorts to give out to the day laborers, and my first inclination was to have them look through all of it because i figured they could take womens and childrens clothing home to their families- but then I remembered that most of them have left their families behind, and often live in small apartments or hotel rooms with lots of other men in the same situation.
Today Enrique went out to the desert with a school group from Ohio, who will be doing outreach with us on Friday. Tomorrow im going to be going with pam and some professors from the university to take part in an oral history project recording the story of the first successful desegregation case in the nation, involving the mexican american community of Lemon Grove, CA (in San Diego county) in 1931. Then on Thursday we begin the 10 day long Latino Film Festival, where we will be maintaining a presence everyday. We are definately about to get busy!
Hope all is well
Rose

To read more about Rose’s internship, see previous posts here and here.

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