Featuring Angelica Salas, longtime executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) which she transformed into a mass membership immigrant led-organization that empowers immigrants to win local, state, and national policies, advancing their human, civil and labor rights.
What are commonalities in the undocumented experience? Is denial of access and punishment the chief purpose of U.S. immigration policy? How did California evolve from one of the most anti-immigrant states to be more welcoming and inclusive? Angelica Salas, executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and host Brenda Gazzar discuss the struggles undocumented immigrants face when it comes to health care, education and the social safety net.
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Angelica Salas, CHIRLA (courtesy of Angelica Salas)
The Fight for Immigration Reform, Health Care & Education
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today we’ll talk to an immigrant rights advocate about her journey to the U.S. and her fight for full access and health care for all.
Angelica Salas is the longtime executive director of CHIRLA, which she transformed into a mass membership immigrant led-organization that empowers immigrants to win local, state, and national policies, advancing their human, civil and labor rights.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Angelica.
Salas: Thank you for having me.
Q: So tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey to the U.S. as a girl, and how that impacts your mission as an immigrant rights activist today?
So I came to the United States when I was about four years old to be reunited with my father and my mother, who had come a couple years earlier. Both of them were undocumented workers so they came undocumented. Myself and a younger sister and then also, my uncle and aunt who were 14 and 16 at the time actually, we made the journey together so they were kids just the way we were.
We crossed the border, came to the United States. We were reunited with our parents. I grew up in my family where almost everybody was undocumented. My mom was a garment worker. My dad did different jobs but mostly, most of his life was construction, and then also experience in our family, worksite raids, including a worksite raid at my mom’s place of work, which impacted our entire home, and it also during that worksite raid my mom was picked up and deported, so were my aunts and my uncles who were working at the time. So I just have had the experience of what it means to live in the country undocumented, but then also, we were able to legalize our status after that worksite raid when my mom was finally able to come back in the trunk of a car, so I remember what that was about, you know, just hearing my mom tell the harrowing story of her journey back to us.
And then she was able to, with my father, figure out how we could stay in this country and legalize our status. And we were able to do so because I had a brother who had been born in the United States, and through him before the law changed in the late 70s, we were able to legalize through my brother for his own well being.
My aunts and uncles who had come with us later legalized in the amnesty of 1986, and I helped a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins fill out their paperwork. That was when I was 15 years old, I had a typewriter, probably the only working typewriter in the family. So I helped them at that time, fill out their paperwork.
Q: Oh wow. So how did you become an immigrant rights advocate?
It was when I was in college that it finally just all dawned on me that we weren’t the only family going through this but then it was a system that really denied a whole community, a whole group of people, the ability to come into this country legally that really closed access and then punished workers, immigrant workers like my parents, simply for working and trying to have a better life.
And so I got very involved in CHIRLA as a volunteer, in my early twenties, because this was right after Proposition 187 passed in California, which was a very punitive ballot initiative that denied access to education and access to safety net and health care to the undocumented, and began first volunteering in CHIRLA and then I started working there after college. And I was only going to, you know, do an internship and maybe, you know, one year there and then continue on with my education, get my Master’s — and ended up staying. You know now, this is my 25th year working at CHIRLA and in those 25 years I think we’ve made quite a difference in California, turning it from one of the most anti-immigrant states to one that seeks to be more welcoming and inclusive, but also engaging CHIRLA in the fight for immigration reform. Full citizenship for all, but also full access to the very benefits that immigrant tax dollars pay for including health care.
I grew up as a child, never having health care. I didn’t have health care until the first time I got health care in college because I had to sign up for that. And so what I knew about health care were the medicine women and men who took care of us. In Spanish, we call them remedios. We knew that it was big bills if you ever went to the hospital so you avoided it. And so it’s not until I was an adult, that I had access to health care. It wasn’t until I had my full-time job that I finally got health insurance, but I know what it means, not to have health care and so it’s one of those things. It’s really the fight for immigration reform it’s also a fight for full access to education and health care and just the safety net that protects us and keeps us whole.
Q: Thank you, Angelica.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen to Code WACK! at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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