International Programs

Immigrants must cross two barriers when entering the United States, the physical border and a cultural border created by a set of exclusive cultural values and profits-before- people economic ethics. Immigrants, coerced by unstable and desperate economic situations, risk their lives and leave behind their families to cross the physical border in search of something better for their children. After replanting themselves in a strange land they are faced with the second, cultural border. This border manifests in the lives of immigrants as oppression and exploitation. Language, in the form of pieles de palabras, delimits immigrants by alienating and criminalizing their identities. Our economic system and our own participation in the exploitation and oppression of this community hide immigrants from our consciousness, placing a metaphoric tinted window between immigrants and our consciousness.
Despite alienation and blatant discrimination, immigrants build lives, families and communities. The push and pull between the immigrants' culture of origin and the mainstream American culture leaves the immigrants in a unique placeless space coined by Gloria Anzaldúa "the borderlands." This psychological space is a space of great oppression, but because normal cultural rules do not apply in the borderlands, it can be a place of great opportunity. The borderlands create a space where language and culture can be reinvented and a new inclusive consciousness can be carved, in which the tinted glass is shattered and the piel de palabras is permeated.