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Page 10 / Monday, January 8, 2018
Yazmin
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time I got my DACA, ironically, (it) was November of 2016, right around the elections. I remember opening (it and the) feeling when it finally came in. I was like, ‘I finally exist in this system, I finally exist.’ And then the elections happened, and I was like, ‘Well that’s worth nothing now.’” After Irazoqui finished her second year of medical school in December of 2016, she took a leave of absence to volunteer for the Dream Team. “I went crawling back to the Dream Team, and I told them what
Jazmin
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new Mexico daily lobo
can I do, ‘I’ll volunteer for you, I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but let me be a part of this fight that we have coming,’” Irazoqui said. “I figured that if there was a time to join the fight full on, it was going to be during the first year of the Trump administration. And they did, and they took me back this past year and I’ve been working as a community organizer. I was the central New Mexico field organizer.” The Dream Team showed Irazoqui the fight and struggle it was to win something like DACA and the affect
DACA has. “I had no idea of the work that had gone into achieving something like DACA to get relief for almost 1 million people, and then I kind of stumbled into the Dream Team, and I learned about all of these things like antiracism and about community organizing and leadership development, which was a whole new world to me,” she said. When it comes to DACA recipients, “it doesn’t matter if you’re in school, it doesn’t matter if you’re working in construction, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make
you any less worthy or worthier — we are all human. And they want to strip us of that aspect of ourselves,” Irazoqui said. By volunteering for the Dream Team, Irazoqui found a sense of community and embraces new aspects of herself, she said. “I identify more with community, and so I’m very connected to my community and to my people. And I realized that my accomplishments are not just my own accomplishments; there have been a lot of people (that have) come before me, my mother included,
who had sacrifices, who have fought so that I can I be in these spaces that are not meant for people like me, so I can be sitting in a lecture hall at the medical school, be loud and telling them I’m not the only one and I won’t be the last one to pass through these doors facing these struggles,” Irazoqui said.
It was not until Coronel entered her second year of law school that she really began to experience what her culture is — that was when she met the New Mexico Dream Team, she said. Receiving DACA for the first time came with conflicting feelings, Coronel said. “We live in this system that tells us that we don’t exist, that we’re not worthy, that we’re less than — and this stupid little nine-digit number that comes along with two years of deferred action is supposed to make it okay,” she said. Coronel is an activist in the immigration movement and said when she met the Dream Team and other organizations, she realized that her story means something. “It definitely steered me in the direction of being an advocate in
the immigrant rights movement and trying to voice all of the concerns of other immigrant youth that I know that have been saying for years things that people wont listen to,” Coronel said. “I know amazing individuals who have taught me a lot, but they are not sitting before you. They’re not sitting before KOAT or national Univision. Why? Because the media looks for these high ‘high-profile Dreamers’ when I feel like it has to be worth more.” For Coronel, the term, “Dreamer,” capitalizes on the 1 percent of immigrants who qualify for DACA and are considered assets to society, but it does not include the entirety of those who need to be addressed, such as parents, she said. “The term, ‘Dreamer,’ has a lot of social capital, and people
know what you mean when you say ‘a Dreamer,’” Coronel said. “So the mainstream media and a lot of politicians with agendas use ‘Dreamer’ to describe individuals who are over achieving probably the 1 percent of the immigrant rights movement. I may be one of those 1 percents — some people may describe me as one — and it angers me, because...there are other individuals who are far smarter than I am — far more resilient than I am — but were dealt a different deck of cards.” Others wanted to help her when they heard about her situation; however people do not often want to help other DACA recipients who are not in a professional degreeseeking program, she said. “When I think about the word, ‘Dreamer,’ I think about our parents,
because we wouldn’t be here without our parents if it weren’t because they had the forethought to dream for us... So it depends of who you’re asking. I’m not a fan of that term, but it gets used because of that social capital,” Coronel said. She still plans to use her finance background and currently works as an economic development manager at a nonprofit legal organization, where she focuses on consumer protection law and tax law and helps immigrants develop their businesses.
Amy Byres is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. She primarily writes profiles on DACA recipients. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo. com or on Twitter @amybyres12.
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Coronel said. Her success through the UNM law program came from not only herself but the people around her, she said. “I, by myself, wouldn’t be here. I had a lot of people help me get here. It’s been a journey, it’s only been three years since I’ve been in law school, but it feels like 10,” Coronel said. She and her twin sister, Yazmin Irazoqui, grew up not knowing they were undocumented; thus, the need to assimilate, to blend into a system that discriminates against them in retrospect was a pretty traumatizing experience, she said. “Often what it did would strip a lot of younger immigrant kids of their culture, and that’s something that I definitely did experience,” Coronel said.
Amy Byres is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. She primarily writes profiles on DACA recipients. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @amybyres12.
Researchers study impact of stress on pregnancy by tom Hanlon @tomHanlonNM A researcher at the University of New Mexico has found that offspring during and after gestation are physically affected by stress the mother experiences. Researchers tested their predictions using 719 studies across 21 mammal species ranging from rodents to ungulates to primates, according to research documents provided by UNM evolutionary anthropologist Dr. Andres Berghänel. The results were used to compare the effects of prenatal stress in the mammals. Berghänel is the lead author of a study in conjunction with the University of Göttingen and the German Primate Center that aims to learn about how prenatal stress affects babies during gestation. The study was published in November in the science journal, Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study found that prenatal maternal stress, or PREMS, affects offspring growth rates. The researchers proposed that because mothers undergoing adversity or stress are not able to invest as much energy in their offspring, the fetus’ growth would be stunted. Offspring that experience PREMS early in gestation undergo an accelerated pace of life and thus grow and mature faster to compensate for the lack of maternal investment, the study states. Berghänel said one of the reasons the study was conducted was to clear the confusion around prenatal stress. “The developmental origins of health and disease are a very important but also very confusing topic, and we wanted to clarify this by presenting and testing a new hypothesis,” Berghänel said. One of the researchers’ goals was to understand why there are highly variable patterns of growth rates in
disadvantaged mammal offspring. “Our comparative analysis across mammals brings order to previously ambiguous results on the effects that maternal stress has on the developing offspring,” Berghänel said. “Different studies, often on the same species, have reported that early adversity enhances, hampers or has no effect on offspring development and performance.” This study, in contrast to some previous studies, found that early adversity does physically affect offspring during gestation. The researchers found that PREMS late in gestation slowed offspring growth because of the mother’s reduced investment. Once the offspring reached the stage of nutritional independence, it grew at the same rate of offspring that did not experience PREMS. Whereas PREMS early in gestation resulted in offspring compensating for the lack of energy investment by the mother. “Stress during early gestation results in unaffected growth rates
during (nutritional) dependence but accelerated growth and increased size after weaning,” Berghänel said. The accelerated growth and increased size after weaning is an effect of PREMS early in gestation, according to the study. In short, this result explains why offspring that undergo early PREMS experience accelerated growth even after birth. Berghänel said that the study’s results could help in understanding why girls start their menstrual cycles earlier in impoverished neighborhoods. The researchers also noted that stress in early childhood can impact infant physiology and have effects that extend into adulthood. According to the Guttmacher Institute, pregnancies are highest among poor and low-income women. An article in Pediatrics and Child Health states that because pregnancies in poor areas are associated with single motherhood, methods such as visits by pediatricians to reduce the stress of the pregnancy are helpful. Kathleen Bickel, co-director of
Birthright of Albuquerque, a crisis pregnancy center, said helping a new or soon-to-be mother with stress, especially those from poor areas, is a priority when it comes to the well being of the child. “We try to get (mothers) into programs to try to assist her with being a good mother,” Bickel said. “We can alleviate her stress by at least getting her started with good prenatal care.” Berghänel’s study said that consideration of the timing of stress during gestation is crucial in understanding the effects of prenatal stress. The researchers indicated that their results will be helpful to the fields of biology, medicine and psychology in understanding the effects of PREMS. Tom Hanlon is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @TomHanlonNM.
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