Brittany Peterson
TOP LEFT: The first class (2007) joins FCB director Adriana Cortes. BOTTOM LEFT: A market in Guanajuato. ABOVE: A church in the town of El Gusano.
started in 2007 by students who participated in the APPLES course in collaboration with Nourish International, a student organization that addresses global poverty. Thanks to a partnership between the Latino Migration Project and Fundación Comunitaria del Bajio (FCB), a nonprofit in Mexico, UNC undergraduate and graduate students spend about six weeks each summer in Guanajuato, working in rural communities with high levels of emigration to the U.S. Last year, students helped teach English, recreation, arts and dance classes at local elementary and high schools, and they lived with local families. Guile Contreras ’14, whose parents are from El Salvador, grew up in Siler City, N.C. He participated in Project Guanajuato the summer after his first year at Carolina and became a trip leader the following summer. “Students who go through Project Guanajuato get a new image of Mexico,” says Contreras. “In the long term, they have a better understanding of immigrants and why people emigrate, beyond [just] talking about it in class.” Gill says that Guanajuato programs
“educate and train students to be able to understand the complexities of migration which are usually glossed over in the public context.” Students are gaining the skills they need to deal with demographic changes in their community, she adds. More than half of the students who have participated in the program since 2007 are firstor second-generation immigrants or minorities. “The course gives them the skills and training to understand the social and historical context for their own personal experience,” Gill says. Gill wants to empower students to become leaders in North Carolina. “I want students who are underrepresented in leadership throughout the state to be able to advocate for themselves and have the same opportunities as everyone else.” The impact of Guanajuato programs on students’ professional lives is significant. About 70 percent of the program’s alumni work in a field affected by migration — the majority in K-12 education, public health or law. “This program helps them think about how they can apply their own personal interests, and even their own migration stories, to a career in this field,” says Gill. “It strengthens relationships between North Carolina and Guanajuato.” • ONLINE EXTRAS:
Learn more at migration.unc.edu.
A CAREER IN PUBLIC INTEREST LAW Guanajuato Connections helped define Sarah Plastino’s career path. “Hannah’s mentorship and my experiences with immigrants in North Carolina and Guanajuato motivated me to continue with immigration advocacy work after college,” says Plastino ’07, a public interest attorney in Newark, N.J. “I provide free legal services to lowincome immigrants facing deportation,” she said. “At present, my clients are all children.” Plastino cites the huge unmet need for legal services in deportation proceedings. She wants to ensure that more immigrants have legal representation so that they understand their rights and get a fair hearing. “In the summer after my junior year, I traveled with Hannah to Mexico to do my own research,” says Plastino. Her research was supported by a Burch Fellowship from UNC [see page 20]. “I interviewed family members of people who had emigrated to Chapel Hill and also returned migrants who had lived and worked in Chapel Hill so I could understand the effect of U.S. immigration policy on them.” That experience was so powerful that Plastino and Gill added a travel component to the Latin American Immigrant Perspectives course Gill was teaching. Plastino served as the student leader for the course’s first spring break trip in 2007. “The trip engages students in service related to immigration, but it also gives them a better understanding of the cross-border and local/global aspects of immigration,” says Plastino. “There is a tendency to focus purely on the U.S. side of the equation.” “We were going into communities where every other household had somebody in Chapel Hill,” Plastino adds. “I met the wife and children of a man I knew who worked in the kitchen of Top of the Hill on Franklin Street when I was a hostess there.” Plastino says those experiences helped her understand the human side of immigration. “It’s very important to understand that fundamentally this is a human story.” •
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2013 • COLLEGE.UNC.EDU • 17