COALITION OF AFRICAN, ASIAN, EUROPEAN
AND LATINO IMMIGRANTS OF ILLINOIS Chicago, Illinois
Story and Photos By Mary Jo McConahay

In l996, the effects of the federal Welfare Reform Act began to rain down on immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago, frightening newcomers and restricting access to services. More than a dozen community groups speaking a medley of languages banded together, constructing a first line of defense with education, shaping local leaders, citizenship classes and mutual solidarity. When the wave of immigrant bashing hit after 9/11, the Coalition of African, Asian, European and Latino Immigrants of Illinois decided to change the way citizenship classes were taught, emphasizing links to constitutional rights and community participation, and successfully began to push for immigration reform. Today, partner groups cherish homeland memories while combating isolation among immigrants. It helps them build a feeling of ownership of their new communities, paving the way for social change.

A gleaming glass wall awaits etching with names of those who starved or were brutalized to death in the Cambodian genocide of the l970s. Sawdust peppers the floor. Workmen just finished installing the pipes for water which will flow over the glass, carrying along the names in a persistent river of memory, names of relatives of survivors who fled to this city for refuge. Not far from the building, unemployed 62-year old Neang Chem passes time in a cluttered two-room apartment above a cheap restaurant whose smells seep through an open window, among walls purposefully cheered with old calendars and advertising fliers. Chem waits for his wife to return from the dishwashing job she works every day of the month for $150 a week. The cramped apartment and the airy Cambodian Association a few miles away are the two poles of Neang Chem’s life.

“I grew up in the countryside, my mother a farmer, and I always felt I would be in Cambodia forever,” said Chem, whose father died when he was eight years old. He twists a cup of tea on the plastic tablecloth before him. In understated language that only hints at the horror behind his words, Chem recalls that by the time he and his siblings had their own families, the civil war had left no-one untouched. Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese fighters passed through in waves and appropriated whatever food the fields and animals produced. Chem’s ten-year old son died. Families scattered in the havoc. Chem heard from a passing villager who had glimpsed Chen’s mother in a far-off place, rapidly aged and starving, on the move. Weakened, stumbling, Chem joined an exodus that led thousands on foot to camps in Thailand, then some to the Philippines, and many to America. “Before I came, there was a reason for coming,” says Chem quietly.

At the Cambodian Association building, a social and educational center, an ex-Buddhist monk has insisted on creating the crystal memory wall in silent tribute to “the unspeakable” genocide that eventually, under the Khmer Rouge, took the lives of 2.5 million persons in a crazed attempt to create a rural utopia. The wall, indeed the center itself, is one way of moving those still stunned into silence to open up and engage themselves in their new communities. There are classes in English and computer skills, home visits for the elderly, after-school tutoring not just for Cambodian kids but others from the neighborhood too. Chem does not like to talk of the past, and says he feels he is “too old” and unteachable for more English lessons and new skills, but the center acted as matchmaker after Chem’s first wife died in l999. “’You’re old, you could be there for each other,’ they said.”

Across town in a Puerto Rican neighborhood where Spanish-speakers from other countries are drawn, carpenter Victor Martinez, 35, pores over blueprints of a small commercial building he dreams of building in his Mexican hometown. His father before him spent half his life separated from his family, working at a Chicago foundry, but Victor said he will do things differently, keeping his wife and young children with him in their small flat until all might “someday” return to a more familiar life in Mexico. He is the only Latino at his workplace. “There is discrimination here, and it won’t end soon – it’s not my country, I think so often, not our language,” he insists. Yet a teacher at Erie House, a neighborhood service association where Victor took citizenship classes, says her student was just the kind of questioning, involved pupil who makes for a smart voter and potential community advocate.

It’s not likely Neang Chem or his new wife, a widow, will ever return to Cambodia. And Victor Martinez may or may not return his family someday to Mexico – his American-born children formed by school and every other influence in the U.S.A. surely will bring their own weight to that decision. What is clear is that with support from CAAELII partner groups like the Cambodian Association and Erie House, both immigrants have put down roots here, becoming U.S. citizens, taking classes in history, government and the arduous English lessons, passing the tests, taking the oaths, because one has to “be prepared,” as Victor said. “My classmates were Indians, Poles, and others who don’t want to be left behind.”

There is a dark side to the desire to belong here officially, born of uncertainty and the eruption of hate crimes against the foreign-born, especially immigrants of color, since the 2001 terror events. “I see the change in the desperation to get their citizenship since 9/11,” said Janet Nieves, a veteran instructor at Erie House, one night as a summer storm broke outside. “It’s like they’re walking on eggshells.”

Residents say Chicago is the most segregated city in America, by ethnicity. Indeed, drive around town for an afternoon and your head swirls with neighborhoods separately saturated with the colors and languages of disparate homelands: blocks where Puerto Rican flags are painted onto flower pots while tropical music erupts from open windows; nearby sectors where Polish reigns; in one neighborhood a resident recalls the Tastee Freeze owner delighted families in her childhood with weekly Indian movies projected on a wall, but today so many stores and services catering to Indians have sprung up a newcomer from Delhi might be forgiven for thinking she never left home. In a northside section where most signs are in Arabic, you can spot one for fast food in English: “Shwarma…Kebab…Atkins Diet.”

“This isn’t what America looks like, “ puzzled Dale Asis when he arrived in the Albany Park neighborhood as a young boy from the Philippines. “It’s brown.”

Today Asis calls the civil rights movement the “inspiration for change” that might move immigrants from the margins to the social mainstream in this city, America’s third largest. As Director of CAAELII, he frames the mission of classes in citizenship and English as a Second Language and other engagement efforts by partner organizations as a way of teaching newcomers to “connect the dots” between their experience, the constitution, and community advocacy. “During the civil rights movement the citizenship schools in the South didn’t just aim to register voters, but raised critical consciousness about what the vote meant – they created the atmosphere for the growth of leaders,” he says. At another moment, Asis muses over his own humiliating post-9/11 experience, being pulled from a line of 150 passengers waiting to board a commuter flight, and questioned with a dozen others – Japanese Americans, African Americans, only people of color -- before being allowed to board last. Above his desk is a photo of Rosa Parks, with the answer she gave when asked why she refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man on that famous day in 1955, overturning convention and marking a signal moment in U.S. history: “I wanted to be treated as a human being,” she said.

That is how Neang Chem feels too. He mustered the nerve to speak out at a local meeting with dozens of newcomers and the federal Citizenship and Immigration Ombudsman, an office created by Congress in 2003 after CAAELII documented over 1000 cases of abuse and immigration delays and demanded reform. “I took the chance to send a message to Washington,” said Chem, who complained of how long it was taking to process his wife’s papers. Chem remains shy, but he may one day submit the names of his family members who died in the Cambodian nightmare to the ex-Buddhist monk at the Cambodian Association, so they can be etched into the crystal wall, and he can visit them there, and see them bathed in cool water.