Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.
The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.
Ms. Umanzor, 26, was arrested in her home on Maple Street in Conneaut, Ohio, on Oct. 26 and was released 11 days later on orders of Julie L. Myers, the head of the immigration agency. While in detention, Ms. Umanzor did not see her daughter Brittney, who had been fed only breast milk before her mother’s arrest. Ms. Umanzor remains under house arrest with Brittney and her two other children in Conneaut, 70 miles east of Cleveland, under an order for deportation. Her lawyer, David W. Leopold, has asked that her deportation be delayed on humanitarian grounds.

“….Just thinking that I was going to leave my little girl, I began to feel sick,” Ms. Umanzor said of the baby. “I had a pain in my heart.”
Ms. Umanzor turned over her daughters to social workers from the Ashtabula County Children Services Board, who had been summoned by the immigration authorities. In all, the social workers took in six children who lived in the Maple Street house, including Ms. Umanzor’s oldest child, a son born in Honduras. They also included three children of Ms. Umanzor’s sister, an illegal immigrant who was at work that day. Four of the children were born in the United States.
In jail and with her nursing abruptly halted, Ms. Umanzor’s breasts become painfully engorged. With the help of Veronica Dahlberg, director of a Hispanic women’s group in Ashtabula County, a breast pump was delivered on her third day in jail. Brittney, meanwhile, did not eat for three days, refusing to take formula from a bottle, Ms. Dahlberg said.

Story continues at New York Times

By Rosalinda Fregoso

Piedad’s father was a border crosser who died the year she turned 15. She was watching television on the morning her uncles appeared with news of his death, and much later she would be tormented by the day of his return. “My father’s corpse arrived in a cardboard package tied with plastic bands, like a large addressed mail package.” He was one of those pilgrims Eduardo Galeano writes about, “shipwrecked by globalization,” who left because he couldn’t make a living in Mexico. After years of crisscrossing the U.S.-Mexico border the “dangerous way,” led by human smugglers in the hike across the perilous Sonora desert, he slipped and drowned in four feet of water, near Escondido, Calif.

Ten years after her father died in 1996, I traveled to the colonial city of Queretaro (in central Mexico) to see the Colectivo Malaleche’s latest project, “Muerte X Agua” (literally “Death by Water”), an installation on display at the Museo de la Ciudad, the city’s museum. Piedad is a member of Malaleche, a collective of women artists who design memorials to denounce the explosion of violence and human rights violations against women, migrants and other vulnerable groups in Mexico…

A memorial to celebrate the life of pioneer Latina lesbian activist and beloved MALCS historian Yolanda Retter Vargas will be held at Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood on September 29th.

Yolanda passed away from cancer at her home in Los Angeles on August 18, 2007, after a short illness which stunned family and friends.

An activist and scholar, Yolanda was a major force in the early L.A. lesbian movement as a fierce advocate for lesbians of color. In her last two decades Yolanda became a highly-educated and much sought after librarian, archivist and editor.

[Read more…] about Rest in Peace, Yolanda Retter

The intellectual independence and integrity of higher education’s classroom faculty have been under attack for some time—by the press, by conservative commentators, and by politicians. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is convinced that it is time to take back the classroom on behalf of academic freedom. In a clear and carefully reasoned historic new report, we counter these attacks and lay out the principles of responsible college pedagogy. The full report, Freedom in the Classroom, is available in the September–October issue of Academe , our journal of record, and online.

The report differentiates instruction from indoctrination. It addresses demands for “balance” in the classroom and offers a very specific and limited disciplinary rationale for the relevance of balance. It argues forcefully that college instructors have the right—and, some would argue, the responsibility—to challenge their students’ most cherished beliefs. [Read more…] about AAUP report on academic freedom in the classroom