Volume 56 - Issue 5

May 2024

The Magazine About Yale and New Haven

Waiting for Welcome Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency in New Haven— how will it transform across the U.S.?

Volume 56, Issue 5

Letter from the editors

Masthead

Dear readers, Newness is a slippery concept. For fifty-seven years, The New Journal has found novel ways to tell stories with familiar themes—justice, resilience, tradition, and rupture. As the new board of The New Journal, we will uphold this magazine’s longstanding mission: to describe a world in flux with human nuance.

In Volume 56, Issue 5, we find the face of America shifting across generational lines. Two of our writers pay homage to local migrant communities. Our cover story, by Kylie Volavongsa, examines the national application of a New Haven-based refugee resettlement model, which places the future of resettlement in the hands of everyday Americans. Ingrid Rodríguez Vila glimpses home in the Puerto Rican diaspora of New Haven, where local teens aspire to lead their community in a cultural pageant.

In other pages, people defend their homes. Disgruntled neighbors organize into a tenants union; Yale and Connecticut’s Indigenous communities interrogate the University’s land acknowledgment; and a ragtag group of fishermen fight to preserve their waters.

As we release this issue, the war on Gaza and campus protests across the country continue. The day after our first weekend of editing, student protestors occupied Beinecke Plaza and demanded that Yale immediately disclose its endowment holdings and divest from military weapons manufacturing. One week later, on Monday, April 22nd, Yale police arrested forty-eight of the protesters, including forty-four Yale students. As we watch students gather at the plaza, in the streets, and on Cross Campus, we are reminded that putting words to the present is an increasingly important and fraught task.

In the year to come, we will remain committed to this task, writing stories that document history and generate change. We tuck this issue into The New Journal archive, and release it out to you–these stories, as Samantha Liu writes, may now “ripple into either memory or possibility.”

For now, Managing Board Maggie, Chloe, Aanika, Sam

Mark Badger Neela Banerjee Anson M. Beard James Carney Andrew Court Romy Drucker Jeffrey Foster David Gerber David Greenberg 2

Executive Editor Managing Editor

Verse Editors

Ingrid Rodríguez Vila Senior Editors

Jabez Choi Viola Clune Abbey Kim

Chloe Nguyen Aanika Eragam Samantha Liu

Etai Smotrich-Barr Paola Santos Kylie Volavongsa Anouk Yeh

Associate Editors Chloe Budakian Tina Li Ben Card Sophia Liu Koby Chen Hannah Mark Ashley Choi Calista Oetama Matias Guevara Ruales Josie Reich Mia Rose Kohn Jack Rodriquez-Vars Sophie Lamb Copy Editors

Sara Cao Lilly Chai Diego del Aguila Sophia Groff

Sophie Molden Sasha Schoettler Victoria Siebor Vivian Wang

Podcast Editor

Suraj Singareddy

Creative Director

Chris de Santis

Design Editors

Tashroom Ahsan Sarah Feng Alicia Gan Angela Huo Lily Lin

Jane Park Cate Roser Jessica Sánchez Daniela Woldenberg Ashley Zheng

Nithya Guthikonda Ellie Park

Photography

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club

Editors-in-Chief Maggie Grether

Web Design

The Hull Barrett Family Fund

Matthew Hamel Makiko Harunari Laura Heymann James Lowe Chaitanya Mehra Ben Mueller Sarah Nutman Peter Phleger Jeffrey Pollock

Adriane Quinlan Elizabeth Sledge Gabriel Snyder Fred Strebeigh Arya Sundaram Stuart Weinzimer Steven Weisman Suzanne Wittebort thenewjournalatyale.com

Makda Assefa Serena Ulammandakh

Members & Directors: Emily Bazelon • Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby

Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley • Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • AnneMarie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel

TheNewJournal

Contents

The Reinas of New Haven

6

snapshot 1,625 miles from the island of their heritage, New Haven teens aspire to become the city’s next Miss Puerto Rico.

By Ingrid Rodríguez Vila

16

Waiting for Welcome cover story Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency in New Haven— how will it transform across the U.S.?

By Kylie Volavongsa

personal essays

point of departure

4 Front Runners

From East Rock to the Olympic Marathon Trials, all roads lead to the New Haven Road Runners

By Megan Kernis

24 Gone Fishing Connecticut fishermen become reluctant fighters to protect their waters against commercial fisheries.

By Samantha Liu

photo essay

38 Flash Fictions

By Tony Potchernikov

5 Tears Beneath the Tension Rods

12 A Home Overdue

Rent hikes and poor living conditions are driving tenants to unionize across New Haven, but the city remains ill-equipped for collective action.

By Lazo Gitchos

30 Writing Up the Land Yale’s land acknowledgement promises to recognize the displaced Indigenous peoples of Connecticut, but not everyone is convinced.

By Tashroom Ahsan

May 2024

44 Pearland, Texas

asides

criticals

By Elizabeth Shvartz

By Chesed Chap

By Lucy Ton That

snapshot

8 poem +C

36 I Love Line Cooks

By Mia Rose Kohn

33 This Spring

By Sophie Lamb

endnote

46 From an Orchid Nursery

By Zoya Haq

crossword: Critter Jitters, page 47.

image credits: Chris de Santis (Cover, Bottom); Etai Smotrich-Barr (Top)

3

Points of Departure

While New Haven locals form like New York where there’s a bunch of the base of the city’s running commu- different run clubs. NHRR is trying to fignity, many runners are Yale affiliates, ure out how to be a club for a lot of difmeaning the running community is ferent people,” explained Jayworth. highly transient. One might expect I ran my first marathon last year. that such high turnover rates make it After tumbling over the finish line, I difficult for runners to create a last- told myself it would be my last. Much ing community beyond the confines like Kidane, I fell out of competitive of Yale. However, the city’s running running before moving to New Haven. community shatters this assumption, Kidane had graduated from college and producing lifelong friendships and was on her own working in Atlanta national accomplishments. when she stopped racing, and I was in a As Kidane recounted her run- small town with an even smaller popuning journey to me over a phone call a lation of runners. However, New Haven month after the trials, I could hear the provided me with a community that hunger for the sport in her voice. “I go reinvigorated my love for running. On out hard and race aggressively,” she told one particularly rainy day, as I trudged me, confidence underscoring her words. through the mud in East Rock and rued “An experienced runner told me they my decision to run, I passed another didn’t think I could do it, so I thought runner. He cheered at our shared dedFrom East Rock to the Olympic Marathon to myself, ‘Watch me.’” She ran the ication, and I couldn’t help but laugh at Trials, all roads lead to the New Haven Boston Marathon in 2:36:22, qualifying the absurdity of the situation and enjoy Road Runners for the trials with thirty-eight seconds it for what it was. to spare—even after stopping to puke Though Yale Club Running foren early February, Kidan Kidane (“twice,” she added). grounds my running community here, YSN ’24 stood behind the line at Kidane and her fellow Olympic my occasional interactions with NHRR the 2024 Women’s U.S. Olympic trial qualifiers—Rockett, Decker, and have helped me reflect on my relationMarathon Trials in Orlando, Florida. McGowan—train with New Haven ship with the sport. Even when I’m runShe steeled herself for the 26.2 miles Road Runners (NHRR), the primary run ning alone, passing NHRR runners on the ahead, while New Haven runners club in New Haven. The group offers track or on local routes encourages me gathered around their TVs to watch daily 6:30 a.m. runs and social night to keep going. On Strava, a social media her on the race livestream. runs on Wednesdays open to anyone. app where runners connect online to Two years earlier, before moving to Unlike most run clubs, the routes are share their runs, I’ve found an online New Haven, Kidane thought she had designed by their coach, Jake Jayworth. community with members of NHRR like given up competitive running. Born Also the professional coach for the Kidane. Since the start of my collegiate in Ethiopia and raised in the state Fairfield University cross country team, career this past fall, I’ve run too many of Georgia, Kidane had been run- Jayworth has a USA Track and Field 5Ks and two marathons—despite having ning since high school. She received a Level 1 coaching certification and a “retired” last year. track scholarship to Kennesaw State master’s degree in Exercise Science. He Earlier this month, as I stood at University to run the 5K and 10K, but works individually with runners and the start line of my most recent marshe stopped running after graduation to designs daily routes for NHRR. athon, the excitement from the past pursue nursing. When she came to Yale Since reinstating daily runs at the few months of running in New Haven for her master’s degree, Kidane discov- end of 2020, the club has amassed over surged through me. My confidence was ered a robust running community that three hundred members and beaten high knowing that the friends I’d spent reignited her interest in the sport—this almost every previous club record. The tens of hours running with were all time at much longer distances.

Wednesday night social runs have around me, gearing up for the same race.

Remarkably, Kidane was one of four become particularly popular, with nearly That day, I set my own personal record runners from New Haven who com- forty runners showing up for the con- and set my sights on the next race. ∎ peted in the Olympic trials. Just ten versational jog and post-run hangout at minutes before she lined up, Connor The Trinity Bar. Other seasoned NHRR Rockett YSE ’24, Ben Decker SOM ’23, runners have joined each other in runMegan Kernis is a first-year in and John McGowan ’13 had begun run- ning ultramarathons under the influence Ezra Stiles College. ning at the Men’s trials. of psilocybin, also known as shrooms.

The Olympic Marathon Trials, one NHHR has also been a space for reflecof the most prestigious competitions tion. In 2023, NHRR runner Miche Palmer for runners, only occurs once every four YSE ’17 founded a book club for the years. The qualifying times––2:18 for group. Popular titles include “Choosing men and 2:37 for women––are nearly a to Run” by Des Linden and “Good for full hour faster than those of the Boston a Girl” by Lauren Fleshman, prompting Marathon. Even so, New Haven run- discussion about the systemic inequalities ners have a surprisingly large presence in running, like the lack of recognition in this exclusive race. for female athletes. “[New Haven] is not

Front Runners

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May 2024 TheNewJournal

Aside

Tears Beneath the Tension Rods Today my closet fell down and I cried.

How does a closet fall down? the inquisitive reader might wonder. The truth is that I have no closet––I have two tension rods.

Many months ago, when I was a tension rod virgin and the world was beautiful, I arrived at my humble Old Campus suite after my roommate. She got the desk next to the window and the singular closet bar. I got the empty, bar-less side of our L-shaped “closet.” Amazon tension rods it was. (Was this my mistake? My tears a punishment for lazy participation in late-stage capitalism?)

I placed the silver rods as so: one higher and farther back in the cavity and the other lower and in front. I called them Rodrigo (no, not Olivia––I am not a fan.

Repetitive themes and lacking lyrics) and Mitt Rodney (also not a fan). They began level. Days passed, and Rodney’s right arm slipped an inch. Slipped two. Rodrigo

Illustration by Chris de Santis

followed. On one fateful day, Rodrigo and Rodney lost their pathetic grip on the stucco walls and crashed to the cold floor. I cried. I contemplated extricating the plastic hangers and beloved dress straps and jacket sleeves and heavy coats. I elected, instead, to pick out items one by one, day by day, like a guilty ferret with her slowly dwindling stash. Eventually, the rods were emptied and reinstalled anew.

This cycle has repeated for nine months, culminating always in Rodrigo and Rodney’s special time of strife (come to think of it, we might be synced). And of course, the deluge of fabric coincides with the Worst. Day. Ever. Terrible French exam.

Crash. Mother on FaceTime squints at the spreading acne on my chin. Crash.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day (my grandmother’s a survivor). Crash.

Today was different. Today my closet fell down, and, dear reader, something

wonderful happened: I did not cry for the dust-stained button-downs or gargantuan collection of black boots (can one have too many?) buried beneath the rubble. I cried for the French exam and acne-scarred chin and the Holocaust, for the people I miss and papers I need to write, for climate change and war and time. I did not let the clothes rest on the floor for a week, or two, or six (my current record). I picked them up, while I wept and wept and wept.

Sometimes you need to cry, and the tension rod gods bless you in a dorm room closet.

—Mia Rose Kohn

TheNewJournal May 2024

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Snapshot

The Reinas of New Haven 1,625 miles from the island of their heritage, New Haven teens aspire to become the city’s next Miss Puerto Rico.

By Ingrid Rodríguez Vila

¡Buenas tardes, New Haven! n Wilbur Cross High School’s INew vast auditorium, the salsa music halts.

Haven Mayor Justin Elicker steps

up to the podium to share a few words.

The family next to me exchange impatient whispers—clearly, he is not who they are here to see.

As the first pair of young women strut onto the stage, heralded by Daddy Yankee’s “BONITA,” the woman next to me shrieks and stands up to record.

“Sorry,” she whispers sheepishly, as the duo takes their positions and poses at either end. Far upstage, a large banner features images of güiros, cuatros, and tambores in front of the Puerto Rican flag. The instruments coalesce around an insignia: PRU Presents Miss Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven 2024.

The annual pageant, which traces its history in New Haven back to the nineteen-seventies, seeks to select a Miss and Junior Miss Puerto Rico to serve as role models for the city’s Puerto Rican youth and award them a scholarship prize. A dozen girls aged twelve to eighteen will each represent one of Puerto Rico’s 6

May 2024 TheNewJournal

Ristorante Italiano, enjoying a pre-pageant dinner alongside contestants and their families. 17-year-old Alanna tells me about her first time visiting Cayey, Puerto Rico this past summer. She recalls strolling through the central plaza’s colonial Spanish buildings, listening to her great-grandmother’s stories. She traced the steps of her family’s history across the city, as though she were following a ghost.

Like the streams Cayey is known for, Alanna’s voice is bubbly and clear.

Last year, she was the pageant’s first runner-up—the First Princess. She lets this motivate her. “I did this last year, and I almost won, which means I’m definitely going to win this year,” she says, smiling.

Though its current iteration is only in its second year, the history of New Haven’s Miss Puerto Rico pageant stretches back much longer.

Waves of migation formed Puerto Rican communities across the state II. starting in the nineteen-fifties—a decade marked on the island by ecohe Monday before the pag- nomic uncertainty and federal crackeant, I sit in a crowded Lorenzo’s downs on nationalism and cultural

seventy-eight municipalities, with their chosen pueblos corresponding to their parents’ or grandparents’ hometowns on the island. As they dance their opening salsa in a swirl of red and blue leotards, I notice their sashes: Miss Cayey. Miss Peñuelas. Miss San Juan. The atmosphere awakens a deep nostalgia in me—the music that colored my childhood on the island, the ritual of religiously watching the Miss Universe Puerto Rico broadcast with my family every year.

Here, over a thousand miles away from the island, these New Haven girls forge a Puerto Rican identity that is meaningful and true to them.

“We’re not just building our next reinas,” stresses Joe Rodríguez, president of Puerto Ricans United, the organization that has run the pageant for the past two years. “We’re building our next cultural ambassadors.”

T

layout design by Chris de Santis

Lysella displays her costume, a tribute to San Juan.

Alanna, in homage to the humans buried underneath Church Nuestra Señora de la Asunción of Cayey.

Photography by Etai Smotrich-Barr

TheNewJournal May 2024

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The Reinas of New Haven

+C for Raine because your off-key off-beat offsets the eighth rests demarcate mind the gap and next stop please because your calluses are legend in the map that is your palm that is our palms are a chalice and i can never be half empty because there is some constant some speck of constellation of comet dust integral we know nothing conditional; this love outlasts our limbs this limb is etching a boundary so far the gods break a sweat you can’t name gods so you sketch fourier squares and series and something tells me you will find someone always a way back

—Elizabeth Shvartz

symbols. In 1964, Connecticut held its first official Puerto Rican Day Parade in Hartford, to celebrate a diasporic culture at a time when it was manifestly under attack.

By the nineteen-seventies, local Miss Puerto Rico pageants took place in New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, and more. The winners of each city’s pageant then competed for the state title, and for the honor of donning the crown and sash on their royal float at that year’s statewide parade.

But New Haven’s last pageant took place in 2008. And the last parade and festival on the New Haven Green took place just a year later. Magaly Cajigas, the former Miss Puerto Rico of New Haven 1992, explained to me that the volunteer-run statewide pageant had proven difficult to organize and fund.

Many volunteers broke away to focus on their own city-level cultural programs. In New Haven, eventually, several community elders stepped down from their boards without leaving clear successors.

Almost a decade of dreadful silence elapsed before Puerto Ricans United was able to bring bomba and plena back to the New Haven Green in 2016.

In 2022, Rodríguez approached Anika Russell and Samary Polnett, both mothers and former Miss Puerto Rico 8

May 2024 TheNewJournal

of New Haven contestants, to gauge across cello strings. I’m thrilled to their interest in reviving the pageant see Miss Cabo Rojo Johanelyz dance for the following year. Eagerly, Russell a bomba, a traditional Puerto Rican dance; like the petals of a hibiscus and Polnett signed on as co-directors.

Russell tells me she credits the flower ruffled by the breeze, her layered pageant with inspiring her back in skirt blooms and withers around her high school. “I was going to school body as she spins.

For Alanna’s act, she performs out of district, and there weren’t many Puerto Ricans at my school,” “Carnaval del Barrio” from Lin-Manuel she recalls. “I was very shy, I was very Miranda’s musical “In the Heights,” her reserved, and I felt like this pageant, alto reverberating through the audias a teenager, instilled some self-con- torium. Though her mother was born fidence, some leadership skills. It got in Cayey, Alanna’s father is Black and from Connecticut. As an Afro-Boricua, me involved in my community.”

Now, she hopes to bring that expe- she understands that this pageant, on rience to a new generation of girls. For its face, asks her to embody just half of these girls, scattered across the Greater her identity.

“Based on whoever is looking at me, New Haven area, most have had little contact with Puerto Ricans beyond they either think I’m Black or Puerto their family circles—which may them- Rican; I’m somewhere in between. I selves be multiethnic or generations like to tell myself that my ancestors on both sides were both taken from Africa, removed from the island. just, the ships landed in different areas,” Alanna says. “When people think of Puerto Ricans, they don’t think of III. someone that looks like me. They think of a specific, stereotypical Boricua, typt the Miss Puerto Rico of Greater ical Latina; with the dark hair, the pale New Haven pageant, each act is skin, and the brown eyes.” judged on “cultural relevance” alongThe presence of this idealized side creativity and overall presentation. Puerto Rican Woman seems to loom From the pageant’s talent component, over all the girls. She is fuzzy—a phanI recognize “Preciosa” rendered on sax- tom—but easily distinguishable by her ophone, and “La Borinqueña” drawn fluent Spanish, sun-kissed complexion,

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The Reinas of New Haven

and inborn ability to dance. She represents a woman who is unquestionably Puerto Rican—to whom Puerto Ricanness offers no resistance.

I do not know what it’s like to have this Puerto Rican Woman peering over my shoulder. I’ve spent my entire life on the island, and I have always, more or less, taken my Puerto Rican-ness for granted. It’s never something to be questioned or proven. However, for girls growing up in New Haven who may not know that such a woman does not even exist on the island, this beautiful phantom can be harder to dispel.

In the three months prior to the April pageant, volunteers dedicate themselves to helping the girls prepare. They practice modeling, etiquette, even financial literacy. On Tuesdays, at Viva! Dance Center in West Haven, the girls learn salsa, bomba, plena, and other Puerto Rican dances from a former pageant queen. On Thursdays, they trade their dance shoes for notebooks, studying the history of Puerto Rico and their family’s pueblos.

13-year-old Lysella, the reigning Junior Miss Puerto Rico of Connecticut 2023 who is representing San Juan in the pageant’s Junior Miss category, recalls being bogged down by pageant homework. But the work paid off, she tells me, beaming in a ruffled orange-red jumpsuit. Lysella has only ever visited San Juan—the city both her mother and I grew up in—once, and remembers little apart from the strikingly blue sixteenth-century cobblestones lining the Old City’s streets.

Still, she has learned much more about her pueblo and Puerto Rico’s history.

Insistently, she talked to me about la Ley de la Mordaza, the law that made it a crime to display the Puerto Rican flag during the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, and the billions of dollars in withheld federal aid to the island after 2017’s Hurricane María.

The pageant this year features a cultural costume component. Each dress transports the audience to one of the girls’ Puerto Rican pueblos: a ribbon-adorned fairy dress alludes to a famous Peñuelas legend; a shimmering leotard and lion mask pays homage to the carnivals of Ponce; a bedazzled boxer’s garb recalls that worn by Cabo Rojo’s Mayra Matos during her run as Miss Universe Puerto Rico 2009.

Before the audience’s eyes, the white train on Lysella’s red dress morphs into

a giant seashell that frames her, Venuslike, as she spins around to reveal the design of San Juan’s crest on its back.

When Alanna steps on stage in a floor-length light blue dress, I notice the tiny model skeletons peeking out from between the folds of her tulle skirt. “Under Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, there’s three hundred to five hundred human remains,” Alanna had told me. In the auditorium, she turns around to reveal the face of the church, rendered in white and blue brushstrokes, before lifting her hands to the sky. They are bound in gold chains. An ode, I realize, to one of the deceased—a little Taíno girl, whose skull bears the green imprint of oxidized chains.

IV. iriam, the 2023 Miss Puerto Rico M of Greater New Haven, glitters, her eyelids dusted with gold and her head

crowned with gems. Reflecting on the end of her reign, she’s nostalgic.

“There’s no better love than the love Boricuas can give you,” she tells me.

Presenting herself as Miss Puerto Rico at cultural parades and festivals in New Haven and New York City showed her the vibrance of the wider Puerto Rican community, helping her to overcome her doubts about her ability to represent them.

“I was like, if I could speak Spanish, I know that I could really represent Puerto Ricans one hundred percent,” she recalled. “But then, that’s when I took that step back and I realized that, no, you can represent Puerto Ricans in so many other ways.” During her reign as Miss Puerto Rico, Miriam spoke at schools across the city, campaigned for autism awareness, and earned a spot on Connecticut’s Afro-Latino 30 Under 30.

Miriam fondly recalls spending the summers with her family in Caguas, Puerto Rico. She insists I should visit Plaza Palmer and stop by their giant birdcage—which, though I drive through

Taina, during the cultural costume component.

TheNewJournal May 2024

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The Reinas of New Haven

Caguas frequently, I had never noticed. I ask her if she ever felt at home there. “It’s complicated,” she laughs. “Being there, I feel like it’s a part of where I’m supposed to be. But where I belong is in [New Haven], my city. That’s how I feel.”

Miriam is not the Puerto Rican Woman, that ethereal, fuzzy-edged figment. She is a true representative of her community, a young woman who embodies the particular struggles and strengths of New Haven’s Puerto Rican youth.

The point of the pageant is not to replicate an “authentic” Puerto Rican cultural experience—one that is indistinguishable from what exists on the island. Alanna, Lysella, and Miriam have grown up navigating cityscapes and braving Northeastern winters, not fanning themselves during heat waves and trying to sleep through coquí symphonies. The pageant is just as much about building a distinct New Haven Puerto Rican community as it is about connecting the girls to the roots common to Puerto Ricans all over the world.

Lysella takes pride in her newfound community. “I felt disconnected from my own people. Now I feel more connected, ‘cause…look who I’m around.”

Alanna describes Puerto Ricans United as a “large family,” and her fellow contestants as “sisters.” She loves how different they all are, and how fiercely they support one another.

“Even on the day of the pageant, right before you go on stage everyone is like, ‘Good luck, you got this!’”

V. n her sequined pink dress, Alanna Iinsisted walks gracefully. For someone who that the evening gown was her

least favorite part of the pageant, she’s doing a great job of hiding it. Her smile does not falter as she draws her final question from the box: “Why do you deserve this title?”

“I deserve this title because I’ve grown a lot in the past year. I’m not the same girl who was crowned First Princess last year, and I’ve learned through my mistakes and my failures to become a more poised, but also intellectual Miss Puerto Rico. As Miss Puerto Rico, I will—I intend to— create a different image of Puerto Rican women. That we don’t have to be fiery and extra, that we can be passionate, and 10

May 2024 TheNewJournal

we can be precise, and we can be intellectual. We can be smart, and we can pursue studies.” The crowd erupts into a deafening rumble.

“I want to be a role model for young women,” Alanna finishes.

At the time, Alanna did not know whether she would win the title. She still cannot believe she can. “It’ll sink in later tonight,” she admits breathlessly. The massive crown atop her head has remained since it was placed there

by Miriam. Lysella beams not too far behind, the Junior Miss Puerto Rico sash glittering against her red gown.

I don’t know exactly how the new Miss and Junior Miss Puerto Rico feel at this moment. But as I watch a colorful swarm of friends and family storm the stage, I can’t help but believe that, at the very least, we’re speaking the same language. ∎

Ingrid Rodríguez Vila is a sophomore in Branford College and a Verse Editor for The New Journal.

Alanna adjusts her crown.

TheNewJournal May 2024

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Critical

A Home Overdue Rent hikes and poor living conditions are driving tenants to unionize across New Haven, but the city remains ill-equipped for collective action.

By Lazo Gitchos

hrough a soccer-ball-sized hole since the original demolition—and lack T in Alex Kolokotronis’s bathroom of proper permitting—led to a Stop Work floor, light shines up from the apartment order in early March.

below. The walls and ceiling are stripped After the pipe burst, property manto the studs. A layer of fine drywall dust ager Raymond Sola texted Kolokotronis’s coats every surface of the apartment. On downstairs neighbor James Blau. Blau has an overstuffed living room bookshelf, lived in Emerson for twelve years with “Every Tenant’s Legal Guide” rests atop his cat and his 17-year-old son, of whom Kropotkin’s “Direct Struggle Against he has half custody; since February 1st, Capital” and Godwin’s “An Enquiry Blau has been unable to live with his son.

Concerning Political Justice.”

“Rent payments continue,” Sola wrote in Two months ago, a pipe burst in the text, “as this is not a scheduled work Emerson Apartments, sending water [sic].” But Kolokotronis, who completed streaming through Kolokotronis’s light a doctoral degree at Yale focused on labor fixture, into his bathroom, and through the organizing and participated in a 2017 hunfloor into the apartment below. The flood- ger strike in support of labor union Local ing forced Kolokotronis GRD ’23, who has lived in the building for seven years, and two other residents out of their units until The flooding forced repairs are finished. Without demolition Kolokotronis GRD ’23, permits, the landlord, Trinity Lutheran Church, located next door, partially gutted who has lived in the the unit to remove mold and water dambuilding for seven years, age: the bathroom is currently stripped to the framing, and the downstairs unit is visand two other residents ible through the floor. No work has been out of their units until done on the apartment, Kolokotronis says,

repairs are finished.

33, knew this was illegal. He contacted the New Haven Fair Rent Commission—the municipal board that processes and investigates tenant complaints regarding unfair rent practices—which affirmed his right to cease rent payments while displaced. Still, fed up with inconsistent communication from the landlord, he roused his neighbors to form the Emerson Tenants Union.

Over the last few years, landlords and city officials in New Haven have learned that there is a limit to what renters will tolerate. Between 2019 and 2023, rent in the city went up by an estimated 33 percent, 12

May 2024 TheNewJournal

far outpacing wage increases. By 2023, 52 percent of renters in New Haven were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

In the face of climbing rents and increasingly dangerous and illegal living conditions, New Haven tenants have arrived at their own solution: unionization. Emerson Tenants Union is among five tenant unions to emerge in the city since the 2022 formation of the Blake Street Tenants Union. The Emerson union is the only union of the five that has formed in a property not owned by mega-landlord Ocean Management.

Unionization beyond corporate landlords, which have been accused of slumlord practices, reflects tenants’ deeper needs for recognition and recourse.

Though this groundswell of tenant unionization seems to have momentum, the city’s bureaucracy has been unable to keep up. City agencies, like the Fair Rent Commission and the Liveable Cityies Initiative, are designed to process individual complaints and cannot handle cases brought collectively by tenant unions. A local ordinance passed two years ago bars landlords from retaliating against organizers over unionization, but there is no local, state, or federal requirement for property owners to bargain with a tenants layout design by Lily Lin

union. Kolokotronis and other tenants imagine a near future where landlords and unions negotiate lease terms without the power imbalance that exists between corporations and individuals—but they may need additional legislative support to make this happen.

When New Haven’s Board of Alders unanimously voted to formally recognize tenant unions in 2022, it named the Fair Rent Commission (FRC) the mediator between the unions, the city, and landlords. This meant tenants unions must file with the FRC to gain official recognition.

That same year, Connecticut legislature passed a law requiring towns larger than twenty-five thousand people to create their own fair rent commissions, many of which look to New Haven’s model as a successful blueprint.

New Haven’s FRC is made up of nine board members and two permanent employees. It has the authority to strike down rent increases which it deems “harsh and unconscionable,” as well as to license inspections, issue subpoenas, and order landlords to take action to resolve issues regarding housing conditions.

Photography by Ellie Park

Executive Director Wildaliz Bermudez says the FRC’s mission has remained unchanged since it was incorporated in 1970. Meanwhile, the needs of tenants, the conditions of the buildings they inhabit, and the economics of the housing market may not be the same. In 2022, the FRC added a second full-time employee in response to a rising case count: since 2019, complaints have risen from a few dozen to several hundred every year. Bermudez attributes the increase to more tenants learning about redress processes, but the rise could also indicate deteriorating renting conditions across the city.

At Emerson Apartments, conditions and communication with the landlord have deteriorated. “We let things go because we thought we had this… intimate or personal relationship with our landlord, the church,” Kolokotronis said.

But tenants’ personal connections to the church disintegrated last summer following the death of a beloved church administrator, and any remaining trust evaporated after the pipe burst. When residents of the building, many of whom have lived there for at least a decade, started talking to one

Illustration by Daniela Woldenberg

another, they realized they all had similar frustrations with landlord communication. “The lack of communication [from the landlord] is ridiculous,” said Yvonne Byrd-Griffin, one of the building’s tenants and a member of the labor union Local 34. “There’s so much nonsense going on.” Fellow tenant Kenneth Naito MUS ’24 didn’t know many of his neighbors until Kolokotronis made an online group chat for the building, encouraging his neighbors to form a union. From there it took just twenty-seven hours, Kolokotronis said, to sign on a supermajority of residents. Later that week, the city of New Haven certified the Emerson Tenants Union.

Kolokotronis and others told me they feel that within its limited scope, the New Haven FRC is doing its job well, managing the often-tense relationship between landlord and individual tenant. Members of the Emerson Tenants Union relied on the FRC to get a response from their landlord, who did acknowledge that taking rent while the apartments were uninhabitable violated state law. Still, the FRC is currently only able to address complaints TheNewJournal May 2024

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A Home Overdue

brought by an individual, and the protections it provides for unions is limited. Statewide tenant organization Connecticut Tenants Union President Hannah Srajer GRD ’25 told me that if FRCs were sufficient to resolve the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, “We [the union] would not exist.”

Even after forming a union, Emerson tenants face logistical hurdles. To move forward with a Fair Rent Commission complaint, Kolokotronis needed an inspection report from the city’s housing code inspection authority, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). LCI was much less responsive than the FRC, and reached no resolution. An inspection report filed February 12th––nearly two weeks after pipes began to leak––notified property manager Sola that immediate repairs would be required. Getting a copy of this report took Kolokotronis nearly six weeks. The report specified that the landlord should address the leak within seven hours. Still, it is unclear whether LCI, which has recently been criticized for inefficient and ineffective responses, followed up with the landlord. LCI staff members referred all questions to Lenny Speiller, Director of Communications for the Mayor. Speiller said that through LCI and the FRC, the City is “using all the tools in its enforcement toolkit” to address the situation at the Emerson Apartments.

On April 22nd, Sola served Kolokotronis and Blau with Notices to Quit, the first step in the eviction process.

According to the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch, such notices must be formally served, but Kolokotronis and Blau only learned of their eviction when neighbors spotted notices taped to the doors of

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their uninhabitable apartments. The news, they both said, was completely unexpected.

Speiller told me via text that the FRC “has been in contact with the tenants and [is] reviewing the matter.” He added that it was the responsibility of the landlord to demonstrate that the notice was appropriate, and that a judge in housing court would make the final determination.

Apparently retaliatory action by landlords is nothing new. But recourse through a union in the City’s systems is. The future of rental policy will be revealed in New Haven’s response to cases like this, and the toolkit will be pushed to its limit.

The Emerson Tenants Union has struggled to bring Trinity Lutheran Church to the negotiating table. Just one of New Haven’s tenant organizations, the Blake Street Tenants Union, has reached a formal negotiation agreement with its landlord. Unlike labor unions, tenants unions have no legal provisions requiring that their landlords recognize them as bargaining units or engage in collective bargaining—negotiating leases as a group instead of as individuals. When asked about collective bargaining guarantees

for tenants, State Senator Martin Looney said, “That’s what we want to move toward,” adding, “We’ll probably need state enabling legislation.”

Apparently retaliatory action by landlords is nothing new. But recourse through a union in the City’s systems is.

Labor organizations benefit from a long history of hard-won legal protections. When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, it posited collective bargaining as a right, not a privilege. The statute is premised on the notion that strikes demanding greater rights and protections for labor unions had disrupted the flow of commerce; to limit the power of employers, the government needed a

A Home Overdue

strong case for protecting the public good.

Nearly one hundred years later, the process of making those demands on behalf of tenants, instead of workers, is just beginning. But the precedent exists, and many— including Senator Looney—are keen to draw the parallel.

Kolokotronis spent portions of his childhood in New York City facing housing insecurity. When he was a teenager, he saw firsthand the conditions rent hikes create: shortly after his father passed away, his family’s landlord doubled their rent, forcing him to move into an unsafe and unstable living situation.

Now, months after unionizing, members of Emerson Tenants Union wonder what comes next. Union members and around three dozen others rallied outside city hall on April 13th, seventy-one days after Kolokotronis and Blau were forced to move into temporary accommodation. Kolokotronis, Blau, and the other displaced tenant still don’t have a livable home to return to.

“What’s the point of forming a union if no one at city hall will meet with us as a union?” Blau asked the crowd at the rally.

On March 21st, three weeks after issuing the Stop Work order, the City of New Haven Building Department issued a building permit to Trinity Lutheran Church to begin repairs on the damaged units. As of April 13th, repairs had not yet begun. Speiller said that the building

department had placed a lien on the property, which will be lifted only when repairs are made and inspected. The landlord has not provided tenants with any information regarding a timeline for repairs. Sola and attorney Che Tiernan did not respond to requests for comment.

At the City Hall rally, union members carried signs and a megaphone.

Organizers from Hartford, Hamden, and other cities were present in solidarity with the group’s demand: to meet with city leaders, including Mayor Elicker and Alders, to resolve the stagnation. No city officials were present.

Signs show that the City may be responding to tenant unions’ evolving needs, if slowly. Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration, beginning April 22nd, contracted former mayoral candidate Liam Brennan as a consultant to help overhaul LCI. It’s a clear response to public demand—what Brennan describes as a need to establish tenants’’ rights in the face of commodification. Housing becomes commodified, he explained, when property is used primarily to build wealth and capital rather than to serve a need for shelter. He added that alternate structures like tenant unions will likely continue to drive policy “from the

bottom up,” forcing broader legislative action over time.

Where labor unions are strong, research finds that non-union wages go up too. Tenant unions in acutely commodified housing might raise the standard landlords must meet, even for non-unionized tenants—if organizers can compel city bureaucracy to afford tenant unions the same protections as labor unions.

When Blau texted property manager Sola to ask whether he could be refunded for rent during the period in which he was forced to move out, Sola responded, “Life is not fair. That’s what insurance is for.”

And while the FRC was able to nudge the landlord into following the law, it has so far failed to create a long-term resolution to the situation at Emerson Apartments. The members of the Emerson Tenants Union know that life isn’t fair. But, they believe, that’s what a union is for. ∎ Lazo Gitchos is a senior in Trumbull College.

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Illustrations by Chris de Santis

TheNewJournal

By Kylie Volavongsa Last year, the Biden administration launched a national refugee sponsorship program modeled after a resettlement agency’s in New Haven—how will it transform across the U.S.?

May 2024

layout design BY ALICIA GAN And Chris de Santis TheNewJournal May 2024

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Yazan (far right) and his family

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ast december, Yazan Al Doumani received an email he’d been waiting thirteen years for. He was at an office desk in West Hartford during what had been an unassuming workday at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). But that afternoon, an office director sent a staff-wide message announcing the launch of a public initiative that could allow Yazan to see his family finally.

Yazan immediately opened the homepage of the Welcome Corps, a national program that launched in January 2023. It allows ordinary U.S. citizens to voluntarily sponsor refugee families and assist them toward self-sufficiency in the States.

Have you watched the news unfolding around the world, read an earlier version of the website, and wished there was something you could do? Yazan thought of his mother, Abir, his brothers, Ghaith and Yaman, and his sister, Joudi. The four are still currently 5,633 miles away in Jordan, where they have been since their displacement at the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war.

“I had a feeling inside that—oh my god—my family could actually come soon to [this] country and I can reunite with them here,” Yazan would later tell me. He began his application to become a Welcome Corps sponsor. He began to hope for the best.

Yazan is 22 years old, an assistant of IRIS’ Housing & Donations team, and a student at Central Connecticut State. He has a penchant for Premier League soccer and—“it’s gonna sound weird,” he warned me—teeth. He’s studying pre-dentistry, and tells me that tooth enamel is stronger than rocks.

Yazan was born in the U.S., but his family moved to Syria soon after, where they lived until

the beginning of the war. He was 8 when he moved back to the States as a U.S. citizen. Yazan was joined only by his father, Mohamed, whose visa had been approved by the Department of State. Meanwhile, the visa applications of Yazan’s mother, brothers, and sister had all been denied.

In 2011, the year Yazan’s family was separated, Mohamed filed their family’s claims with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). If approved, the rest of the family could join them by UNHCR referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), first instituted by the Refugee Act of 1980. In the meantime, both sides of the family had to build something of a new life—living, working, waiting for reunion.

Yazan calls his mother and siblings on FaceTime almost daily, but it’s been two years since he last saw them when he visited Jordan. Thirteen years have passed since they were separated, with no update on the status of their refugee claims.

As a Welcome Corps sponsor, Yazan can provide what may become a crucial means for diasporic communities across the U.S. to reunite with their loved ones. As of this year, about six hundred fifty-four thousand Syrians in Jordan are officially registered as refugees with the UNHCR, and over one-third of them have been separated from their families. This statistic still doesn’t account for the 1.3 million displaced Syrians in Jordan who either haven’t registered for legal refugee status or still await approval.

With a grassroots approach towards refugee resettlement in the U.S., the Welcome Corps pushes the boundaries of a field long dominated by professional resettlement agencies and

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mostly white, faith-based service organizations.

Conventionally, these agencies sponsored families approved by the UNHCR and referred to the USRAP; however, these groups had little say in who they sponsored. When the Welcome Corps first launched, it paired refugees and sponsor groups the same way. Nearly a year later, in December 2023, the Welcome Corps opened a means of sponsorship never before seen in the U.S. It allowed sponsors to identify specific refugees they wanted to resettle, so long as they have already been registered as a refugee or asylum seeker by the UNHCR or the government of the country they’re currently located in.

Through the Welcome Corps, Yazan and his family may finally have the chance to be together soon, and for good.

Setting Up Sponsorship he Biden administration Describes the Tcapacity Welcome Corps as an effort to expand the U.S.’ to resettle refugee families and mod-

Yazan (far left) and his siblings as children

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ernize current refugee resettlement programs. It launched the Welcome Corps amid a series of international crises, including the fall of Kabul in 2021 and the escalation of conflict between Ukraine and Russia in 2022. The program is also a response to historically low refugee admissions ceilings during Donald Trump’s presidency, which saw an 86 percent drop in U.S. refugee admissions over the course of his term.

To expand and update the U.S.’ refugee resettlement capacity, the Biden administration turned to a resettlement model known as community co-sponsorship, where an official agency approves and trains community organizations to sponsor refugees on its behalf.

Though an iteration of this model was pioneered in Canada, the administration looked to New Haven—where the nation’s leading example of the co-sponsorship model grew from the offices of IRIS, a nonprofit nestled in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood.

“For many, many years, there was an assumption that [refugee resettlement] is a really specialized technical work that requires a lot of experienced case managers and it cannot be done by a ragtag group of volunteers,” Chris George, former Executive Director of IRIS, told me over the phone. “Well, you’re wrong.”

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George, who directed IRIS for eighteen years, saw community co-sponsorship as his most important project at the agency. He was spurred by the need to assist growing populations of displaced people, along with the heightened visibility of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015—what the UNHCR still calls the largest refugee crisis in the world. George and other IRIS leaders then established their own community co-sponsorship program, pushing a number of public information sessions to recruit what would eventually grow a state-wide network of over fifty co-sponsorship groups.

Historically, refugee resettlement has operated through a case management model, in which a case manager or social worker is assigned to a refugee family to provide assistance. This limits participation to trained professionals, often with bachelor’s degrees and a few years of experience in social work. Public involvement, at most, took the form of donations or lower-commitment volunteer roles like providing transportation for families or tutoring English. But around 2015, community leaders across New Haven and Connecticut approached George, wishing to do more.

“There was a distant memory of church or faith-based co-sponsorship,” George told me, referencing what he called an “informal network” of co-sponsorship from the nineteen-eighties.

This was the original version, created to accommodate waves of Southeast Asian displacement after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Secret War in Laos. Often, these co-sponsors were local church groups working in collaboration with the USRAP. With its board, George combined IRIS’ organizational team structure with the everyday, informal volunteer force of those faith-based sponsors.

They expanded co-sponsorship, both in capacity and demographic, by allowing any group of people to become sponsors, so long as their group was or became an established legal entity and had enough dedicated volunteers—typically upwards of twenty.

Groups also needed proof that they could provide financial, cultural, and other practical assistance to a refugee family for at least one year.

This ragtag model had undeniable successes. In 2016, IRIS’ first full year of community co-sponsorship, the agency and its co-sponsors welcomed 530 refugees—“more than double any previous year,” according to IRIS’ website.

These numbers were considerably larger than Connecticut’s other two major resettlement agencies the same year. Hartford Catholic Charities, which lacks a report for the 2016 fiscal year, was estimated by the Archdiocese of Hartford to have resettled 360. The Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) resettled 127 (though CIRI does focus on providing its families up to five years of assistance).

IRIS’ growth with community sponsorship is still going strong. The agency has gone from a pre-2016 annual average of two hundred resettlement cases to one thousand, expanding from cases

of refugee resettlement to cases of asylum seekers and some immigrants. This success soon attracted national attention, bringing the IRIS agency to the center of the Welcome Corps itself. The agency’s role in the Welcome Corps: to support and provide information sessions to Welcome Corps applicants across the country as they build their own scaled-down versions of the New Haven co-sponsorship model.

“There is a pressure from the United States public, for us to open up to democratize refugee resettlement,” George told me. “Peace Corps invited ordinary people to participate in foreign policy, right? This is a foreign policy program that operates in our own backyard, but we were not allowing public citizens [to participate] in a significant way. And now we are.”

The Welcome Corps is meant to supplement— not replace—the USRAP, where UNHCR-approved refugees are sponsored by a network of ten national volunteer agencies and smaller professional affiliates like IRIS. Welcome Corps sponsors work in small Private Sponsorship Groups (PSGs) of at least five U.S. citizens. While the Welcome Corps adds onto the U.S.’ capacity to resettle refugees, sponsor groups are still responsible for providing the same services as existing agencies: greeting families at the airport, finding and furnishing housing, seeking employment, and serving as guides to local communities and American culture.

PSGs have two options to welcome a refugee family. The first is Matching, the random pairing of a sponsor group with a refugee family. When the Welcome Corps first launched, this was the only option available in the program’s first phase.

Then, in December 2023, the second phase of the Welcome Corps introduced the Naming program— also called Sponsor a Refugee You Know—where PSGs could apply to sponsor a specific refugee living abroad. This development expanded the scope of who could sponsor a refugee family and who could be sponsored.

Yazan first stumbled upon the Welcome Corps website when it was still in the first phase. At this time, Yazan hadn’t started employment at IRIS and was working with an immigration lawyer in New Haven, looking for ways to get his family to the States sooner. The Welcome Corps wasn’t yet what he’d needed, but the idea stuck with him.

When Yazan had opened the Phase 2 launch email in December, he left work early to assemble his own PSG. He drove straight to his uncle’s house in Farmington, and later that night, to a friend’s house in New Britain. Yazan’s father would have joined, Yazan told me, but he doesn’t yet have full citizenship. “I told them about Welcome Corps, explained everything to them,” Yazan told me, “and they were like, ‘Yeah. We’ll do it.’” Eventually, all five of them— Yazan, his uncle, his uncle’s wife, and two friends— gathered to sign off the forms for their background checks, committing them as private sponsors.

With over sixty-five thousand approved sponsors in the Welcome Corps and another eleven

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arrive at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the volunteer called Silk. Marie and her son were missing.

Oh my god, Silk had thought. “I never asked if she spoke English. I never asked if she had a cell phone. I never asked if she was wearing a sign that says ‘I’m going to New Haven, send me to Jean Silk.’”

In New Haven, Silk spent the next five hours poring over bus routes, calling police officers from small-town stops in Pennsylvania, all the way to Port Authority. She thought about taking the late-night train to New York to find Marie herself.

“But there were a lot of angels working that night,” she said. Around midnight, a Port Authority baggage employee called Silk’s phone, saying he was with Marie and her son. An officer also called from Port Authority, informing Silk that he deals with women and children—often victims of human trafficking. That officer took Marie and her son to Grand Central Station, where they boarded the train to New Haven. Accompanied by a “Good Samaritan” on the Metro North, Marie and her son finally arrived at Union Station at 2 a.m., where Silk and Marie’s husband were waiting for them.

That night, Silk told me, she learned a crucial lesson about the work of refugee resettlement: “Make no assumptions.” Helping Marie and her thousand applications currently in progress, the family had been Silk’s first resettlement case, and desire among everyday people—and burgeon- she had assumed that Marie had everything she ing diasporic communities—to open their doors needed to get to New Haven—despite traveling is clear. And as the Welcome Corps adapts IRIS’ with an infant in an unfamiliar country. co-sponsorship model for smaller volunteer groups In an attempt to “expect the unexpected,” and diffuses it across the nation, both supporters as Silk had put it, the process of becoming an and critics wonder: will this expansion really work approved community co-sponsorship group with on a national scale?

IRIS is a rigorous one. IRIS requires each volunteer to complete a background check, register for liability insurance, read a thirty-page co-sponsor Make No Assumptions program manual, and complete a six-hour training session on their new responsibilities. IRIS also recean silk lit a candle on her windowsill and ommends that co-sponsor groups raise $4,000 to prayed: God, I’m gonna find that woman. $10,000—enough to provide three to six months of It was February 2016, Silk’s third month in financial assistance, mostly with rent. charge of the Jewish Community Alliance for Eight years since the Port Authority incident, Refugee Resettlement (JCARR), a role she’d taken Silk and JCARR have resettled eight families and on after decades of work in international educa- are currently working with their ninth—the most tion and social action. “I’m not tired, and I’m not of any community co-sponsorship group that IRIS retired,” she’d later tell me. has worked with. But with the initial vetting and JCARR, a partnership of five local synagogues preparation that JCARR had gone through, and this and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, near-decade of experience, Silk has found that was established in December 2015 as an IRIS com- maxim—make no assumptions—to be consistently munity co-sponsor. Only a month after its incep- true. The commitment to resettling a refugee famtion, JCARR welcomed its first refugee family: three ily can easily become more than the community and siblings in their 20s from the Democratic Republic goodwill that well-intentioned sponsors may have of Congo. bargained for.

Silk was looking for Marie, who was mar“I always say this,” Silk told me, “Refugee ried to the eldest brother of the family. The last to resettlement is not romantic. It’s really hard work. arrive in the U.S., Marie and their 2-year-old son Those phone calls come at any hour of the day or had been sent to Indianapolis and were supposed night, and you don’t always know the answer, but to take a bus from there to New York. She’d then you feel like you need to come up with one.” meet with her husband and a volunteer from JCARR, In a more extreme case, Silk recalls an instance and they’d all take the Metro North back to New of domestic violence within one of the famiHaven together. When it was time for Marie to lies JCARR had sponsored. She wasn’t sure how to

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handle it and hadn’t expected the difficulty, pain, In Yazan’s group, he took on the role of and potential danger that could arise from this kind Coordinator, a designated member responsible for of volunteer work. Both the man and woman had submitting the application and being the point of come to her for help. contact between Welcome Corps representatives “It’s hard, when you don’t know how to help and their PSG. He also took on as many sponsorship people,” Silk said. She remembered how her daugh- requirements as he could by himself—even though ter, a social worker, raised this concern too: “‘Mom, most PSGs work through them collectively. “I guess you’re not trained. You can’t solve this problem.’”

I didn’t want to bother them,” he said, concerned The refugee woman eventually obtained a about his uncle and aunt’s own busy lives. restraining order, and is now safely raising her chilYazan completed the application, which included dren. But it was after helping this family that Silk a list of questions prompting him for information noticed the emotional toll this work could take on on where sponsorees may find accessible healthcare, her. She’s since stepped back from directly working language services, and other public benefits. Then, with refugees, now focusing more heavily on JCARR’s he took a free four-hour online course covering the administrative affairs and organizing its volunteers. “Sponsorship Essentials” of the Welcome Corps— Silk has faith in the expansion of refugee resettle- another requirement that only Coordinators are ment, but perhaps not for the everyday volunteer— obligated to complete. at least, not without sufficient support. “I would love He then had to raise at least $9,700, a total of to be wrong,” she said of the Welcome Corps, “but I $2,425 per family member he hoped to sponsor. This believe that they’re probably naive.” minimum is based on the same amount that the Department of State currently provides to refugee resettlement agencies. To prevent misappropriation How Much Is Enough? of government funds, it must be raised by sponsors alone. For Yazan, finding a place to put these elcome corps Groups only have to be funds—and prove there were enough—was the accountable as sponsors for ninety days—the most difficult requirement, taking him two weeks to Department of State’s minimum for all resettlement finish. He needed a bank statement from an account agencies. According to the Center for Migration that listed the official name of his PSG. Studies, this timeline isn’t enough to assist many “I went to three different banks,” he says. “It was families as they integrate into what is often an hard for me…I spent a whole week just trying to incredibly different way of living and with little to figure out how I’m going to show them that I’m their name. In Connecticut, established resettlement financially stable.” agencies and longtime community co-sponsors have Yazan finally turned to GoFundMe at another also expressed concern over the ninety day require- IRIS staffer’s advice. Then, he needed to raise at ment, and whether these voluntary groups are pre- least 60 percent of his required funds before his pared for the realities of this commitment. group could be eligible for approval. After a couple “So far, the people that have shown interest in the of months of outreach at local mosques, Yazan has program have the means financially, but not the knowl- since raised $7,920—82 percent of his minimum goal. edge of how to access the services needed during the ninety-day period of resettlement,” Marenid Carattini, CIRI’s Director of Refugee Services, told me.

In the Meantime Most agencies provide their services for much longer: IRIS community co-sponsors must commit azan’s group was approved as a certified to assisting families for at least one year (JCARR Naming group three months after he had met each helps for two to three), and CIRI has a five-year sponsorship requirement. resettlement assistance program. Hartford Catholic “Once a group gets certified as a Naming Charities stopped accepting new refugee cases in Group, then a referral has been made to the U.S. 2019 but was still contractually obligated to help Refugee Admissions Program,” IRIS Director of families for five years. Meanwhile, Carattini also Sponsorship Ann O’Brien told me, “[USRAP] still noted that the extra time is crucial in handling long- has to go and talk to the specific individual to see if term struggles, both predictable and unpredictable, the refugee claim can be accepted for the program. like sudden employment, a loss of benefits, or assis- So we don’t know yet how long it will take for that process to happen.” tance with the naturalization process.

The Welcome Corps must walk a delicate All that’s left is to wait. line: ensure its program is accessible enough I asked Yazan if he knew anything about the that it can fulfill its promise of democratiz- timeline ahead for his sponsorship group, or when his ing resettlement, but keep the requirements family might be approved for resettlement. “They don’t rigorous enough to ensure that sponsors are really tell us,” he said. “[But] I’ve asked around and they equipped to properly resettle families. In the told me anywhere between six months and two years.” process, however, this creates a barrier for a The Welcome Corps has been around for less newer demographic of sponsors from diasporic than two years, and its Naming program for about communities—often the ones with the most at half that time. This jump in U.S. refugee resettlement, stake to become a sponsor. drawn from the old guard of nineteen-eighties

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A little after our call, he will cook for Iftar to break his Ramadan fast. He tells me he’s not sure what he’ll make yet—maybe something with chicken. After that, perhaps some nighttime soccer. He will go to school the next day, and he will co-sponsors and a New Haven agency’s statewide go to work to help IRIS with its intake of furnisuccesses, is a bold one. But things are still early, still ture for other refugees’ new homes. He will return uncertain. Despite these uncertainties, Yazan can at to his own home, and so will his father. They will least have some direct hand in bringing his family talk about their days and dial his mother, Ghaith, over far sooner, perhaps, than the fourteen years that Yaman, and Joudi. He’ll talk with them, too. his immigration lawyer had estimated before applyFor now, impatiently, Yazan waits. ∎ ing to the Welcome Corps. “It feels weird waiting,” he said, but he has hope.

Yazan dreams of taking his mother to New York

Kylie Volavongsa is a junior in City. “She likes crowded places,” he said, “can’t go Silliman College and former Managing wrong with New York.”

Editor of The New Journal.

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Snapshot

Gone Fishing Connecticut fishermen become reluctant fighters to protect their waters against commercial fisheries.

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layout design by Chris de Santis

who runs his own lure-making business. the Branford Supply Pond into the “When you’re fishing, the world kind of Atlantic. Come fall, adult herring will migrate back in droves to the pond

By Samantha Liu melts away.”

Like many fishermen, Boyer learned to spawn again. They serve as prey angling—fishing with a rod and line— for striped bass, the “king of all fish,” from his parents growing up. But today, according to DeGregorio, which are ay Potkay knows how to trick a fish. a tangle of bureaucracy, legislation, coveted all across the Atlantic.

“It’s all about patience,” he tells and commercialization threatens the But today, the fishway sits empty. me, reeling in the line with a learned very spirit of recreational fishing and In the past ten years, the dense herring slowness. He teaches me to pull up twice: the local communities who sustain it. runs of Job’s childhood have all but disonce to yank the lure forward, again to Massive Atlantic fisheries encroach on appeared. Job estimates that there were pull it sideways, so that the striped bass fishermen’s catches, driving once-abun- ten thousand herring in this very fishthinks the fake fish is injured. dant fish species to historic lows in way in 2013. So far, this year, the dam’s Potkay’s not a big talker. What he Connecticut’s rivers. Angling—which fish-counter has recorded twenty-three. lacks in verbosity he compensates for has attracted intrepid fishermen to New “This is literally my job to look for in spunk: he has pierced ears, silver England’s shores since the sixteen hun- these [fish]. I go out at night, and I glasses, and a trim beard. He smokes dreds—now faces an uncertain future. struggle to find them,” Job says. “It sucks. a cigar while he fishes. He won’t call And the latest generation of anglers Like it’s really, really frustrating.” himself the best, but he does call him- must reckon with what’s worth fighting Over the past four decades, blueback self “The Fabulous Fisherman” on for and what legacy is worth preserving. herring populations in the Connecticut Facebook, where he’s achieved microRiver have decreased from six hundred celebrity status within Connecticut twenty-three thousand to just over two fishing circles. thousand. Once-fanatical fishermen are “Don’t write about where we are, or reckoning with the disappearance of their else it’ll get blown up by everybody,” favorite species. For Riefe Tietjen—a he tells me with dead seriousness. I’m self-proclaimed “one-trick pony,” who trudging behind his rubber-booted spent thirty years perfecting the art rowing up, Kevin Job was the “fish of hunting infamously vicious bluefootsteps down a winding forest path. In kid.” When he was six, he saw a fly fish—this meant finding new species to the parking lot behind us are his SUV, my handbag, and an array of crushed fisher returning from the sea-scuffed chase when bluefish “were just no longer bottles. And before us, the Housatonic shore, holding a fat striper in his hands. around,” ten years ago.

This fly fisher taught Job the art of River unfurls into crystalline silver.

61-year-old Dave LaFrance also There’s something Whitmanesque striped bass fishing: to throw the lure recalls catching the bluefish which had about fishing, and it’s more than into a school of herring, to watch the swarmed the waters of Lighthouse the stars and stripes emblazoned on herring scatter and the bass lunge for Point since he was a 14-year-old boy.

Potkay’s pliers as he retwists the hook the lure instead.

“Then three years ago, they vanished,” Hook, line, and sinker, Job fell for LaFrance told me. on his lure. Out on the water, it’s every man for himself. It’s tough. It’s fishing. With almost religious fervor, he He’s not the only one missing their American. It’s disproportionately dom- searched for the best herring spots, the favorite catch. As Job and I talk, an inated by middle-aged white guys post- best time of day to fish them, and the osprey dives down from the tree, then ing pictures of themselves dangling best season for fishing. He attended the swerves up, talons empty.

University of Connecticut to study fishgiant mackerels on Facebook.

“In theory, he should have a nice sil“It’s the greatest sport in the world,” eries—there, he cut class and skipped ver fish in his talons,” Job says, craning says Pete DeGregorio, owner of Dee’s sleep to fish more. Spring became his his neck to watch the bird dip back into Bait & Tackle, a beloved New Haven “happy time,” when runs and runs of sil- the horizon. If he’s lucky, Job explains, very herring splashed through the rivers. he might resurface with a pre-hatched fixture since 1954.

“People would go on vacations with trout placed in the pond by the state. But Potkay and DeGregorio are two among a dozen-something local fish- their family, and all I did was fish,” Job there’s no herring on the menu today. ermen whom I talked to over the past tells me, stretching out the all like taffy.

The heyday of Connecticut’s fishmonth. An almost-fanatical commu- Twenty years later, sporting sunglasses, ing was in the nineteen-seventies and nity, for decades, these individuals blue flannel, and a slight surfer’s drawl, eighties, I’m told again and again, when have called Connecticut’s nearly six the 34-year-old Job works as a fisher- anglers chased fish freely and plentily. thousand miles of shoreline, rivers, ies biologist for the CT Department of Now, the most dedicated fishermen and streams home. They go fishing Energy and Environmental Protection on the shoreline are getting older. The before dawn and past midnight; they (DEEP). He’s eased better into the fish- generational gap haunts younger people chase wraithlike herring and savage kid persona. growing up on the water, many of whom We’re standing atop a seven- have never seen a migration of hundreds bluefish; they spend months finding the best places to fish, and the rest of teen-foot dam, talking over the roar of herring, or know it existed at all. Job their lives keeping them secret from of a waterfall. Here, a fishway guides acknowledges his own 34-year-old age as newly spawned river herring—ale- a bit of an anomaly. other fishermen.

“I mean, it’s just a euphoric time,” wives in the fall, and blueback herring “How can you protect something if says Randy Boyer, a DJ-turned-fisherman months later—from the quietude of you don’t know it exists?” Job asked.

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(LEFT) illustration by Cate Roser

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Gone Fishing

Ray Potkay, who goes by “The Fabulous Fisherman,” fishes for striped bass on the Housatonic River.

ince New England anglers first Sulations sounded the alarm on herring popin the nineteen-nineties, the

state has invested tens of millions of dollars into environmental cleanup and fishways connecting the river herring to freshwater sanctuaries. A complete ban on river herring fishing was instituted in 2002. Three years ago, the state even sponsored DEEP, where Job works, to place nine thousand prespawned fish into the Shetucket River in Eastern Connecticut.

But each time, the outcome is the same. Nine thousand fish come in to spawn. Nine thousand fish swim out to the ocean. And then the fish never return.

The culprit, lying just a couple miles away from shore, seems obvious to most private anglers. Enormously obvious. Massive commercial boats, towing miles-long nets along the Atlantic

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seafloor, snag river herring as bycatch— unintentionally caught wildlife—in their operations. Even though they target Atlantic herring and mackerel, any fish ensnared by their nets can be killed and sold for profit. Other times, when they’re over the poundage limit, they’ll toss smaller dead fish by the hundreds back into the ocean. In a four-year period, these trawls have caught an estimated 6.6 million alewives as bycatch in Southern New England.

“For every five thousand pounds of butterfish they caught, they swept over ten thousand pounds of bycatch,” DeGregorio says, shaking his head. “The slaughter is crazy.”

Eighteen years ago, DeGregorio inherited Dee’s Bait & Tackle’s brickand-mortar storefront and loyal clientele from his father. A self-proclaimed family man and U.S. history buff, DeGregorio has been running this store like a relic of Melville’s America. He doesn’t use email or voicemail. He keeps a battered box of IOUs from customers to whom he’s lent supplies or money. Early customers get his attention by banging on the outside window (he responds by

Gone Fishing

hollering back that they open at noon).

As one customer told me, “It doesn’t get more grassroots than Dee’s.”

DeGregorio tells me the pilgrims came to America in response to two injustices: religious persecution, and that only the rich could fish the king’s waters.

While commercial fisheries, thanks to major lobbying clout, get off the hook with overfishing and bycatch, recreational fishing licenses are getting more expensive. Anglers need to purchase saltwater licenses, in addition to freshwater licenses, in addition to trout management stamps, in addition to government-issued rulebooks which lay out all of this. One of these rulebooks sits bound on DeGregorio’s counter at Dee’s Bait & Tackle, which he gestures to frequently and impatiently throughout our conversation. Over fifty pages of printed graphs, tables, and legends, the book describes the state’s response to declines in herring and striper populations, which includes new regulations on the size, place, time, number, and species recreational fishermen can catch.

Everyone I talked to had something to say about the extensive rule changes.

They deter new families from picking up fishing, while the old guard is exhausted.

Some are even deserting—one man I talked to cited fishing as one among a variety of reasons he was moving to Florida. Statewide, recreational fishing participation has declined by over fifty percent in the past three decades, from one hundred and fifty thousand people in 1990 to only one hundred thousand in 2021, according to the Census Bureau.

What’s lost is not just people who fish: it’s the collective memories—taking their kids down to the coast, witnessing an ecosystem run vibrant with wildlife, sharing fresh catch and conversation with neighbors over dinner.

“I lost my culture,” Job said. “I mean, it’s gone. You have to work really hard to recreate what I used to be able to do when I was ten.”

Located on Clay Street in New Haven, Dee’s Bait & Tackle has become a community fixture for avid anglers across Connecticut.

Photos across Dee’s wall show fishermen and their catch across generations.

ob doesn’t think the problems will Jmercial go away until regulations around comfishing change. But Toby Lapinski, lifelong angler and editor-in-chief of the national magazine Fishing Tackle Retailer,

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Gone Fishing

doesn’t think regulations will change until recreational fishermen go out and protest.

Lapinski recalled two January 2024 hearings by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, where he was one of two appointed representatives for recreational fishermen. At the hearings, they discussed striped bass quotas after a severe population decline in the species. Of over one hundred thousand private anglers residing in Connecticut, just over fifty submitted written comments. Forty-one came to the in-person hearings; only nine of them were recreational fishermen.

Many of the fishermen I talked to were fast to complain about overregulation, but few had the time or desire to fight it.

On one visit to Dee’s, I met a 70-something-year-old angler in a grey tracksuit. I asked him if he was interested in talking about issues in fishing.

“Nah, not really,” he said. The drive to New Haven was too far. I told him I could call him over the phone if he didn’t want to come down.

“Nah,” he said again. “Most of the time, if I’m at home, I’m fishing.”

That was hard to argue with.

“I’ve never been a fan of the ‘throw up your hands and walk away; it is what it is,’” Lapinski said. “But the private anglers definitely fall that way.”

DeGregorio recalled unsuccessful attempts from years ago to rally anglers statewide to attend town meetings— after weeks of planning, only four people showed up. Today, DeGregorio is tired. He tells me he’s been meaning to write to the commissioner expressing his grievances, but the store is always overrun with customers, and he hates using email.

For the fishermen on Connecticut’s shores today, their passions lie out on the water, not inside committee rooms.

Meanwhile, the new generation is too young to remember the heritage they have lost.

“You have to remember something to appreciate it,” Job said. “I’m trying to put things out there, to get volunteers involved again, to try and have them remember these fish exist.”

Job is hopeful about Amendment 10 of the Atlantic Herring Fishery Management Plan, an upcoming negotiation on catch caps and limits on Right: “Fish Wedding,” A cartoon drawn by fisherman Peter Graves

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The only refuge these fishermen have is in each other.

“If I get a hook stuck in my finger, you’d have to help me pull it out,” Potkay warns me.

He hasn’t caught any fish today. Maybe there are fewer stripers in the river. Maybe it’s too windy. Potkay isn’t concerned about the former. For now, there are still fish in the ocean, and as long as they are there, I’m realizing, there are also avid surfcasters smart enough to catch them.

And still, Potkay fights to preserve fishing in his own way. I watch him wave for a younger fisherman to join aist-deep in water, Potkay casts him. The two of them stand shoulout his line. It whips over the river der-to-shoulder in the water, wind with a magnificent swoosh. Lure bag against their backs, throwing their reels slung over one shoulder, orange fish- toward the horizon together. hooker clipped to his chest, rod extended By the time we reach the parking lot, and arms unmoving, he stands still like a Potkay is noticeably more relaxed and talkative. He buys me a coffee. When my lighthouse under the squinting sun.

Out here, I can understand why ride home is delayed, without hesitation, Boyer believes in karma. Fishing is man he starts clearing out the backseat of his versus nature: Potkay says he’s been car, where I sit for the next twenty mindragged down by the tide several times utes sandwiched between crates of fishing now, and someone else told me about equipment on the way back to New Haven.

It’s strange to watch him, an their near-death ice-fishing experience. commercial fisheries. He’s relying on anglers to use their voices, but has also turned to birders, photographers, ecologists, long-time residents, and anyone who has a story from the water.

“It’s our inherent nature, as hunter-gatherers,” DeGregorio said. “Fishing is tradition. It’s a primordial instinct.”

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Gone Fishing

ordinary person behind the wheel, without his enormous rubber boots, camouflage waders, and larger-thanlife mythos. But if fishing is a kind of heritage, this, too, is it—to offer lifts to college students, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder bearing the same water.

fter Job takes off in his pickup A truck, carting a green oxygen tank behind him, to continue his fish-search-

ing, I meet a lone fisherman on the bridge. His hook nose is flushed red with cold, glasses fogged up. His name is Peter Graves. He lives across the river.

He caught his first pickerel in 1952. He has a PhD in microbiology and spent decades in virus and disease research.

Maybe this makes sense because he thinks fishing is an exercise in intellect.

“You gotta fool a fish, right?” he tells me. “You gotta be as smart as they are!”

When he tells me this, he pats me on the shoulder and lets out a laugh like a gently-rusted door hinge.

Immediately, I decide I like him. We exchange names, then fish stories, then emails, and a promise to stay in touch.

I walk back to the dam and stand over the pooling water. I stare hard at how it passes through the fishway: turbulent on top, calm underneath. I imagine everything Graves and Job have told me, picturing runs of alewives thick like ribbons, flashing silver, and cerulean beneath my feet. In a moment so sharp I almost believe it, I see something twist beneath the water.

Momentarily, it flashes, before it ripples into either memory or possibility. ∎ Samantha Liu is a sophomore in Grace Hopper College and Managing Editor of The New Journal.

Peter Graves holds a walleye caught from Lake Saltonstall in Branford.

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Critical

Writing Up the Land Yale’s land acknowledgement promises to recognize the displaced Indigenous peoples of Connecticut, but not everyone is convinced.

By Tashroom Ahsan

“By ignoring Yale’s active harm against “honor and respect” them, apart from Native people, [the statement] goes sometimes reading their names aloud? into erasure.”

Yale adopted their current land II. acknowledgment in October 2019. Out of the three Indigenous professors and six Indigenous students I talked to, none of them knew how or why the drive past the Quinnipiac River, statement was drafted. None of the six past Sachem’s Head, past North University administrators, each a part Guilford, past Old Saybrook—all of the secretary office that issued the letters on a green sign beside the statement, returned my emails asking I-95 tarmac—and find myself at the for more information. On the website Mashantucket Pequot Museum and he first time she heard Yale’s land of the Office of the Secretary and Vice Research Center. acknowledgment, Nyché Andrew President for Student Life, where the Each of these names means some’25, a Yup’ik and Inupiaq student from statement is published, there is no spe- thing else to Connor Smith.

Alaska, felt confused. She was attend- cific policy about where it ought to be Smith’s wife and stepchildren ing an online first-year orientation recited; the website simply notes that are Mashantucket Pequot, and he meeting about how Yale students could the statement is “approved university spends his days as an educator workbe respectful residents of New Haven. language” that may be used at events. ing under the huge pine and oak trees While several students and pro- of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.

Nyché felt the statement lacked any sort of urgency and wondered if other fessors I spoke with pointed to the Raised in Branford and New Haven, students were even paying attention. importance of land acknowledgments Smith grew up on soil cared for by the As she heard the acknowledgment read as a practice, many feel that Yale’s cur- Quinnipiac. I knew the Quinnipiac again at various Yale events, her con- rent statement falls short of meaning- people lived in Southern Connecticut fusion sharpened to frustration. “The ful action. For Nyché, Yale’s statement before British colonists arrived in New syntax, by using ‘has stewarded,’ refuses raises more questions than it answers. Haven—Yale’s current land acknowlto be more present about Native peo- How have these people stewarded the edgment states as much. But Smith ples’ relation to land today,’’ she tells me. land? Do they still? And how does Yale tells me that “much of what people

“ Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut.

We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”

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layout design by Chris de Santis

From a forest north of the Mashantucket Pequot reservation.

Photography by TashRoom Ahsan

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know about the Quinnipiac is misunder- “close friend,” a being that he continually stood.” He grins, pulls up a map of New spends time with, one that frustrates him, Haven on his phone, and proceeds to tell one that partners with him through life. me some history.

“We’ve been here for two thouThe Quinnipiac land spanned much sand-plus years, so that’s a long time to of what we now know as the New form a relationship,” Northup says. He Haven area; interrelated bands inhab- can identify the plants around us by their ited neighboring villages in what is now Algonquian name. When he looks out, East Haven, Branford, and the northern he sees details that I cannot. And that part of New Haven. After the British gaze was forged through time—his and had established themselves as the politi- the generations before him. He tells me cally dominant force in the area with the about hunting for an animal, an act that Treaty of Hartford, Theophilus Eaton Connecticut land sustained for thousands and John Davenport—the English of years. “You can learn how [an animal] founders of New Haven—created the built a relationship with the land and the Momauguin Treaty. The 1638 Treaty things that it relies on within the land and ascribed total agency to the Quinnipiac how the land relies on it for other things. principal sachem, Momauguin, to sell And then you throw yourself in that the land without consulting the sachems mix. I guess that puts me in that cycle as of other Native bands. The Quinnipiac well.” The kinship between the earth and were then pushed onto a 1,200-acre par- Northup animates his stories. cel, the only land where they could plant, hunt, or build without English permission—one of the first forms of a reservation in the United States.

Over time, colonists encroached upon the reservations as Quinnipiac people sold tracts and rights to pay for exorbitant petty crime fines, leading to When he looks out, recurrent conflicts over the boundarhe sees details that I ies of the reservation by the late sevencannot. And that gaze teenth century. In 1731, nearly all of the Quinnipiac reservation had been bought was forged through by colonists, and most of the Quinnipiac time—his and the emigrated to nearby Connecticut towns, generations before him. far from the river they called home.

Many Quinnipiac descendents, looking to preserve their sense of independence, joined the Brothertown movement later in the eighteenth century. They went west, converting to Christianity and settling in Wisconsin. Others joined different nearby tribes, including the Pequot. The Quinnipiac no longer exist Driving back, I turn on my GPS and as a recognized community though their return toward New Haven. The maps, descendants live on. trees, and signs grow richer than on my On his phone, Smith zooms in on drive there. The Quinnipiac River was Cross Campus, right by Harkness Hall. where they found their food. Sachem’s “If you’re talking about where Yale is, Head came from an old tale about a tribal in the New Haven region, these were conflict. And Saybrook was where the traditionally hunting grounds.” New Pequot War culminated. Behind each of Haven served as a shared land for the these names dwells a richness of the land, Quinnipiac bands, a living space for easy to overlook when driving, but clearer them to listen to the natural world. to see after talking with Northup and Nakai Northup, the head educator Smith. at the museum and a member of the Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett tribes, sustains his connection to the III. land through far more than twenty seconds of a land acknowledgment. “The land is my therapist,” he says, patting Back at Yale, I walk into the the dirt beneath us. He refers to it as his Native American Culture Center 32

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(NACC) and am greeted by the house staff, peer liaisons, and NACC Director and Assistant Dean of Yale College Matthew Makomenaw, all seated at a long table by the entrance. Bright colors surround them—construction paper, markers, candy wrappers, bowls, wall art. Each person is writing welcome letters to recently admitted Indigenous students. Their laughs and excitement flow into pages of kind words.

“First and foremost, we’re a student center, a place for Indigenous students to center themselves and find resources,” says Makomenaw, one of the Grand Traverse Bay Band of Ottawa and Chippewa people. “Even though we don’t all come from the same tribal nation or culture, we build a place where people are comfortable, and they have friendships, and they have mentorship, and they have a space that they can center themselves.”

Later that day, I speak with Naima Blanco-Norberg ’25, a Mexica Arts Liaison, sitting on a couch in the library, cradled by books, maps, and portraits of Henry Roe Cloud, the first recognized Indigenous Yale graduate. She nods to a large map on the wall which shows the layout of different nations in North America. “It’s little things like that,” she tells me, “the books and the art which make a tie to indigeneity centered in this space, even though it’s a community of so many different communities.” As we leave, I pass by an activities room. To the left, a long table stands, with thousands of beads in boxes beside. “We get funding for them every year, and it’s a good activity since it’s something so many of us share,” says Megan Blackwell ’25, a Chickasaw Peer Liaison. With beads, pow-wows, and conferences spanning back to the nineteen-eighties, the Indigenous community at Yale has forged their own traditions.

Yale’s current land acknowledgment makes a small gesture towards the existence of these living communities but fails to do more than name them. “A land acknowledgment isn’t just something you say,” Megan tells me. “It has to be something you commit to. You have to commit to teaching these histories.”

What would it mean for the words in Yale’s land acknowledgment to signify anything more than

Writing Up the Land

This Spring

There was a time when I knew everything.

I knew the migration patterns of sperm whales, why we carve into the skin of beech trees, and how to write sentences that crescendo. I knew I loved Spring. I knew when the cherry blossoms stuck to the sidewalks and the dirt of my mom’s herb garden stunk of mildew, carts of Italian ice would come to the street corners and days would stretch and glimmer like the spider web across my bedroom window.

The world fell into place at my fingertips. And I, with the ferocious determination of a 6-year-old, could tug at it, weave it, mold it till my palms were caked with its clay.

Is it possible to know nothing?

These days, I wander. I run circles around this new city, stopping at every tree to revel in the shock of its blossoms. I trip over words. I can’t remember why I ever wanted to write, or study trees, can’t recall where I am from, or why I’m here now, hurdling through hot Spring days.

In this new April sun, my hands are fat and pink.

—Sophie Lamb

just names? Discomfort is an essential part of a land acknowledgment, Tarren Andrews, assistant professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, says. “Commitments allow for institutional land acknowledgments to go beyond their affective potential,” she tells me. “Acknowledgments are a way to make institutions that care a lot about performance put money behind the performance.” An unsettling land acknowledgment can sow the seeds of discomfort to spur institutional action.

To Northup and Andrews, a land acknowledgment should spawn an

institutional relationship grounded in mutual care. Northup told me about other institutions, like the University of Connecticut, where administrators visited the Mashantucket Pequot museum and spoke with staff while drafting their land acknowledgement. Administrators and museum staff shared meals.

Beyond writing their statement in dialogue with Indigenous educators, the University of Connecticut committed to hiring Indigenous faculty and partnered with the museum to create educational programs that centered Indigenous relationships to land.

Last year, Nyché presented a detailed proposal to the Yale College Council to support the creation of a Native and Indigenous Studies major, along with the development of more Indigenous studies courses and hiring of more Indigenous faculty. Megan and Andrews have each articulated the importance of all Yale College students learning the Indigenous history of this land, something embedded in the other land acknowledgments like those of the University of Colorado Boulder and Cornell University, which provide detailed educational resources about local Indigenous groups.

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Several departments of Yale have created their own land acknowledgments or have begun their own relationships with Indigenous communities. The School of Architecture presents a map of Indigenous nations and recognizes Yale’s harm, albeit passively and in the past, by noting that Yale has “benefitted from lands gained through fulfilled and unfulfilled articles of agreement with Indigenous nations,” and commits to “imagine endless possibilities for architectures of reconciliation, reciprocity and transformation.” Northup told me that the students from the School of the Environment have visited the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, seeking to learn about Indigenous relationships with natural resources. To Northup and Andrews, these are the kinds of actions that a good land acknowledgment should spark.

Last year, Nyché, along with others in the NACC, wrote a new land acknowledgment. The first paragraph of the statement reads as follows:

Yale University is located on the lands of the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian peoples and nations, who steward the lands and waterways through generations and time immemorial. We acknowledge the strenuous history of land dispossession that Yale benef its from and the enduring relationship between these peoples, nations, and land from this history. We call upon all to be aware of the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories of the land you occupy by learning about the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim sovereignty and stewardship of their lands and communities. These original stewards are the past, present and future caretakers of the land and we want to honor them.

The statement asks for a new institutional and personal tradition. These words float around in the communities closest to the NACC, but Yale administration has yet to acknowledge it. ∎ Tashroom Ahsan is a sophomore in Davenport College and a Design Editor of The New Journal.

Cross Campus in March.

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Writing Up the Land

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Personal Essay

I Love Line Cooks

By Chesed Chap

f I had stayed at Alex’s house for bratwurst and never heard of Oktoberfest, I returned to his car from the bathroom Imarried longer than three hours, I would have a celebration oddly important to my he handed me an oblong black foam him. He had a pierced ear and Lithuanian-Mexican family. He needed sleeve and muttered something about

a pierced nose and a shitty tattoo of a to be enlightened—he came over after goat on his chest. He studied geography. school one day to lose his bratwurst virHe had a passion for imported foods. ginity. We ate the brats quietly while He loved the New Orleans episode of avoiding eye contact. Esteban didn’t “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” as want mustard or sauerkraut on his, just ferociously as I did. He was, of course, a ketchup. The following spring, our teenline cook. age romance fizzled when he refused to Line cooks and I have always been prompose to me because he had a shift wildly fond of each other. Never chefs. scheduled on prom night.

Chefs aspire to lead. Line cooks aspire to I graduated high school and went be led, satiated by the thrill of smoking on a date with James, who I met on American Spirits on break (after ripping Tinder. James was a brief vice. “You’re off the filters) and working at divey brew- overdressed,” was the first thing he said ery/grills called Copper Brothel Brewery to me as I arrived for dinner. (We split or Culinary Dropout (real names). some new-wave bruschetta with goat Anthony Bourdain is their god, even if cheese and pepper jam and slobbered on they have no idea that he wrote books chicken and steak skewers. He paid, but before hosting a TV show. Line cooks not without declaring “I want head.”) He understand that they occupy the bottom hated his dad and high school. He loved of the kitchen hierarchy: a blessing in my “American Psycho,” but not as much as eyes, because it means they lack a pseu- “Ratatouille.” He loved being a line cook do-macho attitude. They are sensitive to at a nursing home. He was equal parts love and to finding a place of belonging, charming and alarming. I should have which they find in their kitchens and in said no when he asked to drive me home, their walk-in freezers, among their stock but his tender bravado was a siren song— pots and meat cleavers, with sous-chefs where else would I have found a shrimpy breathing hot down their necks. The boy in a fuzzy purple sweater who so world tells them they’re in a dead-end job, proudly told me he had a Latina fetish? I but they’re proud to be there. Their mis- got in his car. I had to hear all of his hapguided optimism rubs off on me. hazard teenage cook monologue vomit.

My first line cook was Esteban. We Instead of driving me home, he were sophomores in high school. He was cruised aimlessly down Miracle Mile, a proud to sling chicken tenders in the street known for its abundance of prosfryer of a cowboy-themed restaurant, but titutes, and awkwardly attempted to wasn’t cognizant of food for its artistry or hold my hand. Eventually he stopped its cultural semiotics. He’d never eaten at a McDonald’s so I could pee. When 36

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how its contents would make me “feel safer.” I unsheathed a machete. I kept the machete under my seat as he drove me home. Was he planning to kill me and then decided against it? I wasn’t sure. I kissed him anyway.

College was my rehab. I was surrounded by men primed for Congress and Goldman Sachs, not Peter Luger Steak House. But then I turned twenty, returned home to Arizona for the summer, and the trifecta was complete—I met Alex. Alex cemented my affection for the unruly, the cast iron, the line cook.

We spent (probably even less than) three hours together. When I stepped in from his porch, he told me that he’d actually been to New Haven before (and had the pizza). He dumped his laundry basket on the floor of his bathroom and frantically pawed through the carnage for his Frank Pepe’s tee shirt. He tossed it to me, and while shoving socks and jeans back in the basket, warned me that it probably smelled gross and sweaty because he wore it to work that day—but then he glanced up to where, upon toss, I had already instinctively shoved my nose between the screen printed cotton folds.

That night it was revealed that he too was a child of divorce, and grew up in the same town that hosted the Target parking lot my parents used as a weekend custody exchange spot. His bedroom was decorated with ticket stubs from my favorite local indie movie theater, and a poster layout design by Jessica Sánchez

with 2020 tour dates from my favorite band, PUP—the exact same poster that hung on my bedroom wall, that I bought at their concert in Phoenix. He had been there, too. (Did we not hear each other’s voices over the rupture of sludgy bass lines and grating guitars? Was there a time when we were both in the Target parking lot, contained by the respective cars of our single parents? Were our Arizonan brains ever beside each other in a pizzeria in Connecticut, befuddled by clam as a topping? How had we not seen each other so many times before—how were we lucky enough to find each other now?)

We met, ceremoniously. Without reuniting, we soon left for our respective study abroad programs. I went to Prague, where I was sickened by the thought of him drinking tequila and dancing with other girls in Oaxaca. We texted once since we both left Arizona, when I pathetically said Alejandro how is Mexico followed by This is Chesed btw idk if this sent from my czech number haha. My weak stomach was worsened by pork knuckles, cheap beer, pickled sausage, sour

Illustration by Sarah Feng

bread—flavors that could only be brewed under the chokehold of late eighties communism. Bourdain said the Czech Republic had “obviously a long way to go to catch up with” the culinary prowess of its European neighbors. I didn’t care that the food was usually briny in taste and beige in color—I wanted to tell Alex all about it. Only he would understand the geopolitical significance of pickled meat.

I saw him everywhere in Prague: in cold slabs of meat (Alex was in charge of the charcuterie station at work), in the portrait of Gorbachev that was chiefly displayed at the end of the Museum of Communism (Alex owned a shot glass adorned with a picture of the perestroika prince), in a gorgeous Belarusian model named Alex who approached me outside a grisly biker bar (Alex’s name was Alex).

I had to do something else. I took a FlixBus during the penultimate weekend of my program. I spent nine hours searching for bratwurst in Berlin.

There were beer gardens, flea markets, the Berlin Wall, and not a single bratwurst in the supposed mecca of

bratwurst. At 11 p.m. I resigned to eating from a storefront plastered in a beachy sunset wallpaper—Sudanese street food.

I ordered something with the German word for chicken in its description. It was a pita pocket with chili oil. It burned the absolute shit out of my throat.

I had never loved a food that hurt me so much.

For once, I ate something so wonderfully antagonistic I didn’t even think about telling Alex. It was just me, Berlin, and the chili oil battering my sinuses.

I never saw Alex again. Maybe I could think of him like my pita pocket— maybe I would end up at an international street food fair someday, and maybe I would crash into my pita pocket like an old friend, but I warmed to the likelihood that I would not, that I only had that night on the street with tears in my eyes and burnt lips. There are a billion meals I will love. There are a billion line cooks left to make them. ∎ Chesed Chap is a junior in Pauli Murray College.

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Photo Essay

Flash Fictions

By Tony Potchernikov This series serves as a prelude to a much larger set of photos exploring the tension between fiction and reality. But doing so with photos—which generally are used to showcase and evoke the real—creates a unique set of questions and challenges. The series lends itself to wondering: what does it mean to create fiction in photography?

Because for some reason, making fiction through photos made more sense to me than with words or

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drawing. I think it is because blurring the line between fiction and reality in photos simultaneously began answering and asking questions I have been thinking about for some time: Are we building fictions from reality? Or realities from fiction?

Nevertheless, as you look through, consider the advice a mentor occasionally tells me. “Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.”

layout design by Chris de Santis

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Flash Fictions

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Flash Fictions

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Flash Fictions

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Flash Fictions

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Personal Essay

Pearland, Texas

By Lucy Ton That

this town, letters are scarce: I only have words as my aid to Ihownbillboards, neon signs. I only realize describe to you this scene. What’s real, thirsty I am when Ba asks me to and there’s not much of it, is overgrown

clean out my grandfather’s cupboards of books. Take anything she says.

An-y-thing. As I thumb through the words of a life, makeshift bookmarks fall from the pages. Quotidian things: unused tissues, grocery receipts, old photographs. I don’t tell Ba that her young photograph swims between the lines of an old poetry anthology.

Instead, I kiss the individual receipts and bookstore invoices, making careful note that in 1999, my grandfather left the HEB with a tub of butter pecan and some gardening tools to bring home for his wife.

I spend time admiring the curve of Ba’s soft skull. She has a proud forehead, behind which she gathers wisps of hair into a knob of a ponytail. To the knob, she attaches a fake chignon of plastic hair. When she naps, her small head engulfed by the rectangular whiteness of the pillow, she leaves the hairpiece nearby as though it keeps her company. As she sleeps, I notice her tattooed eyebrows, ones which never wash off, ones which make her endlessly discerning.

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and dilapidated. The largest abundance of color comes from the junkyard, where husks of cars and scraps of metal bloom different hues of rust on a thick carpet of tall grasses. The rest of it, the parking lots and big-box chains, arrived from elsewhere, I’m not sure where exactly, and perhaps all at once.

Today I drove the rental car to the town center only to discover that it’s an outdoor mall. I try making my way back on the six-lane highway, but bearded men in pickup trucks honk and cuss me out through the driver’s side window. SUVs as big as spaceships float by me without pity. In their cabins, climate-controlled and behind tinted panes of glass, suburban children gaze at the milieu of strip malls they must know only as landscape.

There is not a tree in sight.

Even the air feels flat. Even the sky, just one giant blue plane, is flat. Only my Ba’s head is round. As we drive, she notes her favorite grocery store, pointing with her chin the way flowers do towards their sun. ∎ Lucy Ton That is a sophomore in Branford College.

layout design by Jessica Sánchez

Illustration by Ashley Zheng

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Endnote

From an Orchid Nursery

By Zoya Haq rizz. Everywhere. It’s the first F thing I notice—or rather, feel—when I push open the slightly-jammed door to

J&L Orchids. My hair balloons around my head. Such is the reality of life in a high-humidity greenhouse, the prime environment for the cultivation of the tropical forest-native orchidaceae family: the orchid flower.

Located in Easton, J&L Orchids is Connecticut’s only registered orchid nursery, according to owner Lucas Carreno. As I enter the shop, Carreno greets me with a wave.

Wandering through the shop with Carreno, it’s hard to believe I’m still in Connecticut. Floral presentations festoon the shop: flowers dangle from the wall, bloom from small rocks hung on racks, and line long wooden shelves. Large glass cases in the entry room display pots for sale. Past the propped-open door to the greenhouse itself, vines, stems, and buds weave together in variegated colors.

Orchids of all species and shades greet me with open faces. They are friendly. They are familiar. I take a deep breath in, and the intermingling fragrances of soil, wood, and pollen seep past my skin and into my memory.

As a child, I spent many warm weekend mornings kneeling in dewy grass with my dadi—my grandma—as we hunched over small mounds of earth. Though we knew the seeds would only bud maybe twenty percent of the time, it didn’t matter. As we toiled away in the March sun, digging up unhealthy stems yellowing at the edges, we planted new life into her little patch of home. The dry Dallas heat, we eventually realized, was not the ideal climate for growing a plant native to the tropics, but nevertheless we tried.

My dadi didn’t like to pick favorites, but I always thought that, of all the 46

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flowers we planted, she loved orchids the two chemists passionate about orchid best. “It’s like they have little faces,” she cultivation, Carreno’s family bought J&L would tell me. “Little expressions.” in 2017, searching for a change from their When my dad was a child, my urban lifestyle in Washington, D.C. dadi made the decision for our famJ&L, Carreno explains, is a pioneer ily to move from Pakistan to the U.S. in the realm of not only orchid cultivaBack in Pakistan, she loved the ritual tion, but also hybridization. Within the of gardening; as a physician, her pas- greenhouse, the shop’s employees breed sion for tending to life extended past orchids to maximize presentability, color, the human body and to the open earth. and bud development. They intentionBut the roots she found here didn’t lie in ally pollinate certain seeds with prethe terrestrial soil. Instead, they spread dicted visual appeal before incubating through the contours and crevices of her them in small containers, such as strawnew home: the Al Markaz restaurant berry tubs, to increase humidity and on LBJ Freeway; the knitting section of protect them from the cold.

Michael’s on Midway; the “international “It’s select breeding,” Carreno spice” rack at Kroger. explains. “Horticulturally, it’s some“Orchids,” Carreno tells me, “are what like line breeding, where you take diasporic plants.” They are the sec- a family line and just continue that line.” ond-largest family of flowering species I left J&L with a new orchid of in the world. While fragile, Carreno my own. It now sits on my nightstand. adds, orchids are self-sufficient and It’s beginning to bloom; its white face, hardy, deriving energy and water from speckled with violet, expands slowly their own roots and environment, towards my bed. requiring little outside interference.

“Orchids are a great starter plant,” Carreno’s roots are in physics, not Carreno reassures me. “They don’t require flowers. I ask him how his CalTech much care, but they brighten the home.” degree brought him to this tiny I look at my new orchid. It’s smilgreenhouse in the middle of semi-ru- ing up at me. ∎ ral Connecticut.

He chuckles. “Family.”

While the shop was originally Zoya Haq is a first-year opened in the late nineteen-sixties by in Saybrook College.

illustration by Angela huo

layout design by Jessica Sánchez

Critter Jitters ACROSS Wall-unit cooler 4 Shhhhh dont’t tell!

10 What flocks together 15 “Honk...mi mi mi mi mi” 16 and behold!

17 A place where grain is kept 18 Punctuates your student email 19 Separate 22 University of Norfolk, Virginia 23 Stinging plant that makes for good tea 25 White cow of Greek Mythology 26 Lennon’s former flame 27 Kids draw them like broccoli 28 SZA’s most recent album 30 Email response abbr.

31 To or not to ?

33 An insecticide banned in 1972 by the EPA 35 An exterminator’s rival 37 When one door closes, another 39 lang syne 41 Also known as a wild boar 42 that hurt!

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and outs Hit song of girl group NewJeans 47 The Carolina further from the Equator 48 If “slime” weren’t so trendy they would’ve called it 49 Probiotic Japanese drink 54 The Yale “and’s” evil twin 56 “I suppose there are other fish in the .”

58 Icy artic dwelling 59 A twinkling in the eye 60 The “I” in “TFTI” 64 From which Britain exited in 2020, for short 65 A bad boy’s Christmas present 67 Instead of 68 Chicken Masala 70 tones, the Sacremento-based metal band 71 Catch some!

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DOWN What honor-roll hopefuls avoid being 2 The 2012 dystopian 1

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS (MARCH) PUZZLE

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May 2024

is a multistage aerobic 51 The purple character in novel featuring a cyborg capacity test” Australian train safety Grimms’ fairytale. game, Dumb Ways to 3 Native people of New 21 Spinning toy Die. Zealand 24 For when you need a 52 Teenage clothing gnawing 4 Homophone of 56A retailer, abbr.

5 American 29 Bowels without the “BE” 53 For love on a bridge in videogame company 31 Marshy wetland Paris headquartered in 32 More than a single; less Redwood City, CA 54 Athena’s favorite bird than an album 6 Connecticut, if there 55 fain, vive, 33 Department store shoe were two visit chain 7 Nose jobs, for short 57 Italian oil giant 34 Spoil or contaminate 8 Slippery swimmers 59 Useful battery side 36 Consume 9 Freshwater catches 61 form of female 38 “Nah to the ah to the to contraception 11 Network devices the” 62 hand : finger : : foot : 12 Medical practitioner, 40 Uni. with a ram mascot for short 63 The sixth letter 44 Peasily 13 Navy special ops 66 Neither bad nor good 45 Tequila plant 14 The Sunshine State, for 69 It what it 46 Informational short abbreviation PLAY MORE TNJ 20 Where they play: “The CROSSWORDS ON 50 Is just a number FitnessGram Pacer Test OUR WEBSITE!

The New Journal was founded in 1967, under the following mission statement: “This university has once again reached that stage in history when people are talking about the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new. Wishing to share in this modernity, we have chosen The New Journal as the name for our publication.

Besides, things seemed slow around here.”

Today, The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. One thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community. The New Journal is printed by TCI Press, Seekonk, Massachusetts; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Office Address: P.O. Box 3311, New Haven, CT 06515.

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