Hartford's Low-Income Latino Immigrants

Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2013 Accessing Human Rights Through Faith-based Social Justice and Cultural Citizenship: Hartford's Low-income Latino Immigrants. Sarah C. Kacevich Trinity College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the Social Welfare Commons Recommended Citation Kacevich, Sarah C., "Accessing Human Rights Through Faith-based Social Justice and Cultural Citizenship: Hartford's Low-income Latino Immigrants.". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2013. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/322 Kacevich 1 "Accessing Human Rights Through Faith-based Social Justice and Cultural Citizenship: Hartford's Low-income Latino Immigrants" A Senior Thesis presented by: Sarah Kacevich to: The Human Rights Studies Program, Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) April 2013 Readers: Professor Janet Bauer and Professor Dario Euraque In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the major in Human Rights Studies Kacevich 2 Abstract: Many low-income Latino immigrants in Hartford lack access to the human rights to education, economic security, and mental health. The U.S. government’s attitude is that immigrants should be responsible for their own resettlement. Catholic Social Teaching establishes needs related to resettlement as basic human rights. How do Jubilee House and Our Lady of Sorrows, both Catholic faith-based organizations in Hartford, Connecticut, fill in the gaps between state-provided services and the norms of human rights? What are the implications of immigrant accommodation via faith-based social justice for the human rights discourse on citizenship and cultural relevance? A formal, exploratory case study of each of these FBOs, over a 3-month period, provide us with some answers to these questions. My project’s found that that the FBOs contribute to the human rights to education, economic security, and mental health by: a) directly providing services, and b) facilitating and utilizing family and friendship networks to connect individuals to resources. They accomplish a) and b) by using cultural resources as the basis for a holistic sense of citizenship and access to rights. In the Conclusion, I note how faith- based social justice in the Hartford Latino community is a culturally relevant form of human rights advocacy. Acknowledgements: A special thanks to the following people: To the staff and students at Jubilee House, and to the staff and parishioners at Our Lady of Sorrows, for welcoming me into their communities like a daughter. To my thesis reader and adviser, Professor Janet Bauer, for her incredible dedication to and knowledge of the immigrant community in Hartford, as well as for teaching me the importance of ethnography in human rights research. To Professor Dario Euraque, Professor Laura Holt, Professor Sonia Cardenas, Professor Andrea Dyrness, Professor David Cruz-Uribe, Professor Judy Dworin, Professor Alta Lash, Carlos Espinosa, YukShan Li, and Anna Seidner for their deep support of my studies, their advice, and their friendship. To Professor Silvina Persino, Mercedes Sánchez, and Federico Nola for teaching me Spanish. To the staff of ISEDET library in Buenos Aires for their kindness and assistance in my research. To my family and friends for their encouragement and interest in my thesis. Finally, to the patrons of Trinfo Café and the residents of Parkville for teaching me about Latino life in Hartford. Kacevich 3 Table of Contents: Introduction 4-10 Chapter One: “Methods for Investigating Human Rights in the Context of Immigration” 11-22 Chapter Two: Chapter 2: “How the Latino Catholic commitment to social justice informs faith-based efforts in Hartford” 23-40 Chapter Three: “Faith-based Case Studies: Spanning the Continuum of Charity, Service, and Justice” 41-50 Chapter Four: “Navigating the human rights to education, economic security, and mental health in Hartford” 51-66 Chapter Five: “Case Studies: How Jubilee House and Our Lady of Sorrows Directly Contribute to Rights” 67-90 Chapter Six: “The Network of Access to Human Rights” 91-100 Chapter Seven: “Redefining citizenship for the Latino immigrant in Hartford” 101-111 Conclusion 112-116 Appendix 117-209 Bibliography 210-214 Kacevich 4 Introduction Driving or walking the streets of Hartford, one sees a series of signs on brick buildings that have seen better days: “¡Dios salva!” (“God saves!”), “Iglesia la nueva dimensión” (New Dimension Church), “Todos bienvenidos, una vida mejor te espera” (“All are welcome, a better life awaits you”). At times, one hears a man’s voice echoing in Spanish through a microphone on a sidewalk, a crowd gathered around him to clap and shout in support of his message about God. Then, there are other signs of the melding of Latino urban life and Christianity in Hartford— obvious ones, like the presence of stately, well-established Catholic and Protestant churches all around the city. On the signs outside their steps, some offer a welcome written in Spanish, and still others promise some kind of step towards a better life. Then there are the more subtle, yet perhaps equally pervasive, representations of some kind of link between Christianity and social justice: like Jubilee House in the South End, an adult education center managed by Catholic sisters. For three years, as a student at Trinity College, I noticed these surface-level signals connecting social justice, Christianity, and Latinos in Hartford, and wondered if it had any significant meaning for my field of study—human rights. After I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from July-December 2011, I re-encountered my interest in Latin American liberation theology. Considering the role that liberation theology had in Latin American fights for human rights during the decades of authoritarian regimes, I began to wonder how these philosophies may or may not be present in some form in the United States. I was not interested so much in the big-picture history of international relations, but rather how the Catholic-inspired quest for social justice plays out in the what is arguably the most pressing current social crisis in the United Kacevich 5 Sates: the poverty and human rights abuses that Latino immigrants face in urban settings like Hartford. At 43.4% of Hartford’s population, Latinos make up nearly half of the small capitol city, and are largely dominated by Puerto Ricans (33.7% of Hartford Latinos, or 41,995 people), followed by Mexicans (2,272 people), a burgeoning Peruvian community (1,200 in the city and 1,800 in the suburbs) (Neagle 2005), as well as several other smaller Latino nationality groups (U.S. Census 2010). For the purposes of this project, I use the words “Hispanic” and “Latino” interchangeably. Among Harford’s Hispanics of all nationalities, 32.1% live below the poverty line (U.S. Census 2010). These statistics, which highlight the widespread poverty among a large portion of Hartford residents, elucidate why one should pay attention to the socio-economic systems that Latino immigrants encounter in Hartford. With 32.5% of its residents of all ethnic backgrounds living below the poverty line in 2010 (Hartfordinfo.org, 2010), poverty is not unique to the Latino community, or to the foreign- born population (20% of the city) alone (Hartfordinfo.org, 2010). Yet, Latinos immigrants in Hartford experience unique cultural barriers to rights, which we investigate in this study. Among the challenges they face are factors like English-language ability and low education levels before entering the U.S. (Pew Hispanic Center 2007). Legal difficulties in accessing social needs (such as “food stamps” or a driver’s license) are of concern for members of some Latino nationality groups if he or she does not have documented and/or full citizenship status in the U.S. However, as Puerto Ricans, who have U.S. citizenship, make up over one-third of Hartford’s Latinos (U.S. Census 2010), legal barriers are perhaps not as urgent as they are in other metropolitan areas with large concentrations of non-Puerto Rican Hispanics. In fact, only 26% of all Latinos in Connecticut are foreign-born (U.S. Census 2010), a statistic that does not include Puerto Ricans, Kacevich 6 yet highlights their large presence. Finally, the Pew Hispanic Center (2007) reports that 68% of all Latinos in the U.S. call themselves Catholic, a figure that indicates the strong connection between Latinos and Catholic identity. The U.S. social services system—at the federal, state, and city level—is built around a notion of citizenship that makes them “aliens” in their new homes. Government structures make education, healthcare, employment, and other forms of economic stability difficult for these individuals to access. The systems are not culturally relevant, are fragmented and precarious, and are otherwise too limited or inaccessible. In wealth-stratified Hartford—one of the nation’s poorest cities within the wealthiest state—the gaps between services and those who need them are only exacerbated. Therefore, the human rights of this population are of urgent need for attention and study in Hartford. In particular, I chose to focus on education, economic stability, and mental health, as those rights not only are most relevant to the work of the FBOs in my case studies, but also are the rights that form the core of an inclusive sense of citizenship and stability for an immigrant in a new home nation. As a student of Human Rights Studies, my mind is always questioning how and why the norms for treatment of each individual play out in real life—on those street corners of cities like Hartford, Connecticut, so ethnically diverse and economically challenged. A statement by Eleanor Roosevelt always commands my attention: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.

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