Honduran Resistance and Migration: Conversation with CLR Faculty Fellow Dr. Jordan Levy

Interview conducted by Gigi Lara

Dr. Jordan Levy is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. His research interests include state formation, political culture, and transnational migration in Honduras. His work addresses issues to do with neoliberal reforms to the K–12 education system in Honduras, the evolving culture of resistance since the 2009 military coup, and Hondurans’ experiences with migration. He has conducted fieldwork in Tegucigalpa, southern Honduras, and among Hondurans living in Washington State.

In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Levy regularly serves as an expert witness on behalf of Hondurans who seek asylum abroad. Through this applied scholarship, Dr. Levy has worked with a range of immigrant rights organizations, immigration law firms, and law student asylum & human rights clinics. We discussed his most recent project for the CLR Faculty Fellowship, which consists of a book about the situation in Honduras since the 2009 coup.

I'm a sociocultural anthropologist, which means that I study contemporary societies and cultures. My area of expertise is Honduras. I have been going there doing NGO work since before grad school and wanting to be an anthropologist. I was there during the military coup in 2009 when the president [Manuel Zelaya] was ousted. Since then, I've studied governance, political culture, and state formation processes and the various reasons why people flee the country, seek asylum abroad, and migrate abroad.

This will be my 10th year since graduating from my PhD. I had tenure at a university in Washington state but with the pandemic, a lot of programs were shut down. Then I got a one-year job at the University of Connecticut and decided that wasn't really for me. I'm used to working with smaller groups of students at a liberal arts college. It's great to finally be able to find that at DePaul.

What are you hoping to achieve during your CLR faculty fellowship year?

I'm so excited about the CLR Fellowship. It's a great opportunity because there’s a lot of support for junior faculty. The fact that the Center for Latino Research exists, and the fact that the Migration Collaborative exists makes me feel like my areas of research are really desired and supported at DePaul.

My goal is to write a complete draft manuscript of my book. It’s going to be about the events since the military coup in Honduras and the evolving culture of resistance among Hondurans who have become active in this movement to reform and improve their society. At the same time, my book will analyze why people, for various reasons, need to flee the country and seek asylum abroad. It will do this by drawing upon ethnographic research, and follow-up projects about what Honduran migrants do once they're in the US, which I have been doing in Washington state since 2018. Mainly with former students, Latinx identified students, and Honduran-identified students, but also by myself last summer.

Dr. Jordan Levy

Given the current political moment, with migrants at the center of the electoral rhetoric, from your perspective, what is the best way to communicate and clarify the definition and status of asylum seekers for a general audience?

I think all US voters would do well to have a crash course in asylum and in law. The politicians on all sides of the spectrum talk about this in rather strange ways. It's not illegal to apply for asylum. In fact, the US is bound by international law based on the UN Convention following World War II to have this process in place. It could be that the applicant is denied asylum, but they have every right, legally, to go to another country and apply for asylum. I think that often gets lost in some of the electoral rhetoric because asylum is –by definition– a legal process. This is in no way a loophole. There was a New York Times op-ed a while back that really angered me because it said something like how Biden is closing the “asylum loophole.” This is a legal process that is lengthy precisely because the US government doesn't hire as many immigration judges as they need to, based on the demand. And the demand, of course, is a function of violence and climate change, and a series of things already happening in other countries of the world. As someone who does expert witness work, I know that from the time the person applies to when they get their hearing, it's usually over two years. There's a series of standards that must be met just to be eligible, such as a Credible Fear Interview (screening), in which the U.S. government says, “Yes, this is a credible fear, and you're likely to get asylum,” and police background checks done in the U.S. and Central America.

The assumption these are people who are somehow criminals or are going through some kind of loophole is objectively wrong. There's a series of opinions that could be voiced How do we improve this system? How can it be made more efficient? What is the ideal number [of migrants] that the U.S. should take in? What are the criteria? But that is not talked about in the mainstream media. The whole process is talked about in a way that doesn't reflect knowledge on how it actually works. And frankly, because most US-born people don't ever have to deal with immigration, they don't know about it because they don't have to.

Where are the migrant communities that you study housed? Do you see any parallels with the current migrant mission/crisis in Chicago?

Overall, my research isn't on the specifics of the municipal government or housing. My research focuses on Tacoma, WA, and other smaller towns between Tacoma and Seattle. There's a growing Central American community and for the most part, people are housed. In Western Washington, most of the people I interviewed found community in churches that gave services in Spanish and that tried to help migrants find a job and housing. The whole idea of sanctuary has a long tradition with churches saying, “We're going to provide a place for people. We're going to make this a space where the government or ICE can't come in here.” I think a parallel with Chicago is that we see nongovernmental entities step in to do what they can, whether they're activist groups, migrant rights advocacy groups, or church based.

For me and in the book that I'm writing, I'm going to try to push back on the rhetoric of a “migration crisis”, because I think it's better phrased as a (fabricated) crisis for migrants. The U.S. is creating this moment of crisis by saying “ no more migrants”, but the numbers aren't super extraordinary. Honduras is a country of 10 million people, and there have always been people coming and leaving the country. And yes, there are these moments of extreme violence where people are now fleeing. There's a certain exodus, but the “crisis” is made by the receiving countries –by not adequately dealing with it.

Your previous research focused on resistance and neoliberalism in Honduras after the 2009 coup. Can you tell us about your main takeaways from this project? Do you see any parallels in these patterns in the US?

Absolutely. We live in this neoliberal moment where government services that were previously provided by the state –whether we're talking about healthcare, education, infrastructure, or basic utilities– are becoming less provided by the government, and more privatized.

In the case of Honduras, my research was focused on the K-12 education system. After the military coup that illegally ousted the democratically-elected progressive president, we see this resurgence of neoliberal policies. So, schools throughout the country, that were previously funded by the Ministry of Education, in Tegucigalpa, got their budgets slashed.

The research focuses on how teachers saw connections between the military coup, neoliberal policies, and this eroding of the social contract between people and the government. The Honduran state has always paid for education, and now they're saying “ go find your own way of dealing with this.” Teachers reluctantly had to go about asking rich people for money. At the same time, they had to ask parents to pay tuition and fees where they didn't have to before. In the context of poverty, that meant that many families wouldn't be able to send their kids to school, and a lot of kids dropped out of school. Teachers correctly predicted this was going to create more social problems, such as gang violence, school dropouts, and many young people not having any opportunities after they graduated, if they even graduated from high school.

At the same time, the research is about how Hondurans are organizing and resisting these kinds of policies. Teachers are often leaders in the communities where they work. They're public intellectuals who will rally people up around a certain cause, organize marches and protests, and educate the population about how they ought to think about current events in the country, making the kind of connections that aren't always obvious. Lots of these policies continue presently, even with Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, a progressive female President, who inherited the country after 13 years of dictatorship. You can't expect any administration to change the country overnight. I get asked a lot about this sort of thing, by the Department of Homeland Security (who are the prosecuting attorneys for ICE). They say, “Honduras now has a progressive government. Can't people just go back?” And the answer is no, because of gang violence, gender-based violence, the erosion of Indigenous rights, and the erosion of worker’s rights. All these issues still exist. Police, military, and government corruption are endemic because of these broader structural processes that were put in place largely because of the military coup.

What will eventually happen is we will look back and say: there is no more public education system in Honduras. That's a parallel with the U.S. in that the levels of government funding for education are dwindling. Yet, there's money for ICE, Border Patrol, military, and police. Similarly, Honduras has the largest armed forces in Central America. It doesn't make sense because there is no civil or regional war going on. There's this bloated budget for the military. Even with a portion of that, they could fund education with no problem. It's not a question of there not being money, it's a question of priority. Any budget reflects priorities and values.

What has your experience been teaching at DePaul? How has it been different from previous institutions where you have taught?

What’s different about DePaul is that my students are very well-informed. They’re very politically aware and aware of social injustices, global issues, and potential solutions, or at least steps in the right direction. They know what needs to happen to, for example, end a war or genocide. They know who's to blame for certain policies. And in many ways, they're informing me of the specifics. Sometimes I feel like, well, who's in charge in this classroom? –because every day I learn so much from my students, that I come out of every class just really energized. It’s a pleasure to teach and to work with students who are so informed on global issues.

To finalize, what has your vibe been this summer? Is there a particular song or artist or playlist that you've had on repeat?

I've got a five-year-old, so we listen to a lot of Pinkfong in my house. A lot of Baby Shark. What about myself? Probably Pearl Jam and music from the 1990s. I am a bit nostalgic. I miss Seattle to an extent. But I also know that I'm able to freely visit. So, it reminds me too, of the fact that there are plenty of Honduran migrants who miss home and aren't able to just go visit.