Cristina Jiménez Moreta  moved to the United States  from Ecuador at five years-old with her family. At seventeen, she became a youth organizer in the movement for immigrant/migrant rights. She is a founding member of United We Dream and was instrumental in getting the DACA act passed in 2012, the first major immigration policy victory in over 25 years.

Anneke Campbell: In your memoir, Dreaming of Home, you describe your inner journey moving from fear and shame about being undocumented to speaking out and recognizing migration as a story of love and courage. 

Cristina Jiminéz Moreta: I grew up with a lot of fear that my family could be separated by ICE and that I could be deported, that my parents could be deported when they went to work. There was shame about migrating, shame about being Latina in the United States, being a person of color. Therefore, I never spoke about my undocumented status or my experience because I was living in hiding and in deep shame, that somehow my parents and I had done something wrong for coming here to seek a better life, because that’s what we are told.

After 9/11, as a kid growing up in New York City, this fear of deportation I lived with became even more imminent because I started seeing ICE agents in my neighborhood in Queens. Our country turned immigration into a conversation of threat to our national security. And when I started seeing people so close to me being deported, the fear wasn’t just a shadow over me, it became very real. 

That is when I met everyday Americans, immigrants and non-immigrant, who were fighting against these unjust deportations. Joining in their efforts led me to realize I wasn’t the only one, and that this was more about systems and laws we had no control over that impacted our family’s lives and had forced us to flee. And I experienced that in solidarity with others. Not only could I be protected because people would fight for me, but I also realized that I did not have to live in shame and fear. 

So this was the transformation for me, engaging with others in advocating for communities facing deportation and then having the experience that we could create change, we could win. In silence we lose. We could be deported and nobody would know. But in community, there would be people that have my back, that would try to find me in jail, try to get me released, and fight for my family to be able to stay.

Anneke: So much of what you’re saying resonates with all that’s going on today. How did you find the courage to come out as undocumented and proud?

Cristina: I still held a lot of fear, but courage is really about taking action in spite of your fear. So I remember meeting María Gonzalez, one of the first young people, a high schooler, who was facing deportation with her family to Costa Rica. She started publicly coming out in newspapers and engaging in advocacy with members of Congress, asking to stop her deportation and that of her family. I thought that could be me. And like María, there were many other young undocumented people across the country who shared their stories, thereby confronting the rest of us with what are we going to do? Keeping people in the shadows and in hiding through the fear of deportation contradicts the values of a country where all of us are supposed to be equal and free.

Anneke: So you were inspired by others and community solidarity made you feel at least the possibility of safety and power. That must be true today, right?

Cristina: This is what you see in Minneapolis and across the country. Silence does not protect us, community does. Masked ICE agents with weapons can kill people. Immigrants and non-Americans alike can disappear. But in community, we get to protect one another. I mean there’s thousands of stories of neighbors that protected students and parents and children and friends and colleagues and care workers and landscapers and construction workers.

So seeing people taking action and a sense that we are interconnected and can do more to care for one another has been such a huge inspiration, and a source of hope in this moment. Rene Good and Alex Pretti knew the profound value of being there with your neighbors, the value of bearing witness and recording what’s happening. That is what’s saved the country from being fully lied to by the administration as to the actual facts of these events. So from bearing witness to exercising our constitutional rights of recording what law enforcement and ICE or Border Patrol agents are doing, to defending and protecting and caring for one another, that is what we all can do. 

Anneke: Thanks for answering that question before I asked it! We have beautiful examples right in front of us that show us what to do. You’ve also said there’s never been a movement that hasn’t had young people at the front. How did you start organizing young people?

Cristina: There was a collective, and a generation of young undocumented people and our allies, many of them educators, many of them U.S. citizen friends, siblings, family members, labor organizers, and other social justice organizers who came together around fighting deportations. So we started building relationships with people in Florida, people in California, people in Texas, becoming not only friends, but really supporting each other in the different fights against deportations or for our right to pursue higher education, to follow our dreams. Young people who were ready to go to college were denied an education because their state barred them, even if they had done everything to be the strongest candidates.

We met through advocates that had been working on access to higher education and immigration reform, both at the state and the national level. Like Josh Bernstein, who’s a friend and huge ally, a lawyer who directed policy at the National Immigration Law Center and was one of the first drafters of the Dream Act in the early 2000. Many of us met at conferences and training programs hosted by UNIDOS, and by Community Change. Both of these national organizations have a rich history of training community organizers and developing leaders. They gave us the first set of tools to start doing things on our own.

They connected us with leaders from the civil rights movement, getting the exposure and skills that allowed us to gain confidence to lead campaigns. And this confidence and leadership growth enabled us to find our voice and start saying we need to play more of a role in the strategy. But many of the established organizations felt like maybe we were too young and inexperienced, so we started realizing that we needed our own space where we could make decisions. 

For instance we realized that the Dream Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented people as a standalone bill, could have a better chance of moving forward in Congress than a bigger, more complex package of immigration reforms. It wasn’t to say that we young people didn’t want comprehensive reforms, of course we did. But our assessment was that we just didn’t have the power to win that, so it made sense for us to focus on a more narrow set of options we could fight for. In that debate, we started having tension and disagreements with the older generation of leaders who had been in the game longer, and many of them professional advocates and lawyers, who had a different view about what the conventional wisdom believed possible.

Anneke: Was it painful to disagree with these elders who had supported you?

Cristina: Yes, it was painful for me as a young person to hear folks say things like, young people don’t know what they’re doing, they lack sophistication, or they are just thinking about themselves. Some of them told us that it would be impossible to stop deportations, but then we did. And they would say it will be impossible for you to share your story and not be deported. And then we shared our stories and some of us were targeted, but others were not. So we were constantly testing our power. 

And we pushed DACA into law, which was a huge accomplishment. But there was the human complexity in the moment, which was that these older leaders were our mentors and supporters who had made it possible for young people like us to get training, to ensure that we were able to travel to D.C. So in retrospect, I wish we had had the tools and the emotional and spiritual capacity to navigate disagreement and conflict in a way that could have been more generative. That said, many of us have continued to do the work together over the years. 

The reason why I keep naming that you have never seen a successful movement where young people have not been at the center is that we question the conventional wisdom and always ask the question: why not fight now for what we need? You know, young people usually play this role of impatience and wanting change to happen fast. And I think that is such a positive force that helps propel movement and inspire people with the imagination of what’s possible.  

Anneke: You describe yourself as a strategist. What actually is a strategist? 

Cristina: I love this question, and I will start with the framework that I use to train new generations of strategists and movement leaders, along with my colleagues Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Liu at CUNY, at the State University of New York, and their book, Practical Radicals, which I highly recommend.

It starts with the vision. Let’s start from a place that you are able to name, how the world should be. And we anchor in that vision. Once the vision is clear, then we have to answer the question: how do we get there? And the answer is that the strategy is the bridge to get to your vision. And what makes a robust strategy is to have a sober analysis of conditions. Because what may be a good strategy today may not be a good strategy tomorrow. What were really good strategies, say, under the Obama administration as it relates to immigration work, are not going to be the same ones that make sense today, right? So a strategist is always attuned to how the conditions have shifted and the environment has shifted. And how does the current environment create openings for change? 

Then there’s the question of power and what is power. Often we are trained to think of power in just one form. People power is very important. But it’s not the only one. So part of what I have been working on in becoming a better strategist is to think about economic power, electoral and political power, people and community and solidarity power, spiritual power, collective care power. And if we think about all of those sources of power, then you can think if I have that vision and I need to develop a strategy, what are the different sources of power that I need to build and or flex to be able to get to my vision?

I always bring people back to the Montgomery bus boycott. As one of the best examples to think about all of these forms of power, the solidarity power that led black folks to be able to go without using the busses for over a year and still go to work and still move around town, the kind of collective care that they needed to not only give each other rides, but to make sure that people had food, to make sure that people had lawyers when they were targeted by police and by law enforcement or elected officials. The economic power of understanding that this town moves with our labor, and with our dollars, and being clear that withholding that was going to create a disruption and a weakening of their opposition, which led to many in the business class to start saying, we may have to change our minds. So I name this as an example because it’s such a good reminder that we need to think about all the different sources of power and leverage that we have. 

So in this moment, we need to flex our electoral power. We need to flex the power of taking care of one another, to show up for communities, to defend our neighbors. But we know that that’s not going to be enough, right? To stop the massive level of violence perpetrated by this administration and the deployment of thousands and thousands of agents that can go and target communities. And so we need other strategies, right? Economic power. There are these corporations and actors that are benefiting from detention and deportation money. How do we use our consumer power to stop that? To stop shopping at Home Depot or Target. And the more the people can experience their power in different ways, the closer that we can get to realizing our vision.

We don’t think enough about spiritual power, about how we are connecting with one another. And how joy and culture and belonging become such a critical ingredient for us to be able to keep up the fight.

Anneke: Like Bad Bunny’s half time show at the Superbowl? What an uplift!

Cristina: Yeah, that was incredible. Our artists in our communities and those thinking about spaces and experiences of joy, and belonging are just critical. In this moment of rising authoritarianism, actually, I think that the strongest antidote is the power of belonging in community together. And the cultural power that brings us joy, that strengthens our spirits to keep going.

Anneke: How do you stay resilient in these circumstances that have gotten so extreme?

Cristina: There’s no recipe that works for everybody. I tell people I have learned by making mistakes, by really working myself to the ground and feeling so depleted that I cannot give more. That’s not good for ourselves, or the work that we are doing. 

Also, now, as a mother, I need to spend quality time with my son. I also know that I don’t thrive in isolation, that I need to be in community and with friends. I need art in my life and culture. I have found that 3 or 4 times a month, if I go to a show, a theater performance, anything related to art, even a dance class, that works for me. I have to strive for that balance. But if I tell you that I’ve got it figured out, I wouldn’t be honest. Because when we go into a moment of crisis when a member of our community is facing deportation, let’s say, or has been disappeared or put in detention, you go all in. And you may miss meals and you may not sleep as much. But then what do you do the next day, or next week to care for yourself?

Anneke: I am so glad you will be at the Bioneers conference to share your wisdom and heart at this time when we all need to hear it.