Afternoon at UCSB

Today our day was a mix of Latino, Arab and African. I had the chance to visit Casa De La Raza or House of the people, a community center established to help the Latino and other immigrant communities, meet an Arab-American lecturer and talk-show host and attend the production of a live show discussing the news of Third World countries.


Casa De La Raza was built n the 60’s during the civil rights movements. The center is located in a Latino neighborhood and it combines all forms of art such as theatre and music. It also provides the Latino community and other non-Latino with legal, housing, employment and medical services. Not to mention the after school programs, cultural programs and dance competitions. Casa De La Raza was similar to the refugee centers in Cairo however; they were more funded, bigger in size and offered more facilities. The classes in the refugee centers in Egypt are usually overcrowded, not very clean and they don’t have many school tools. The classes here are big and because of the small number of students, there is better interaction with the teachers. After a tour around the center, I met Marisela Marquez, a Mexican-American professor at UCSB and one of the directors of Casa De La Raza. Marquez is a second-generation immigrant who worked hard to get to where she is now and is working hard to help other Latino immigrants through her work with Casa De La Raza and the center for Chicano studies. The conversation with Marquez made me reconsider the exact definition I had for “immigrant”. Most of the Mexican immigrants in America are here for economic reasons. In other words, they were forced to leave their country to search for better living conditions. They are simply forced immigrants. You don’t have to leave a war zone to be “forced” out of your country. You can be forced out by poverty, famine or even drought. Their reasons might be different from the refugees in Cairo but they are both forced. It's interesting how a group of people living in different continents might have similar experiences.


I also found the diverse programs offered for immigrants here interesting. For example, the ART Reach program where they educate high school students about their culture through art. I thought it was a great idea to educate the youth through creative means. It made me think about the children born to refugee parents in Cairo who know nothing about their country. They are so close to it yet they are so distanced. Some of them have parents who lived through the war there, were hurt or had a family member killed. They don’t have good memories of it so talking about it to their chidren is out of the question. one can't help but think about the positive impacts this program will have on young refugee here.
My day kept getting more interesting. I had the opportunity to meet Elizabeth Robinson, a third generation Arab-American of Lebanese descent who is the director of the KCSB radio station at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the presenter and producer of Third World News Review. Robinson was an intellectual feminist and anti-racism activist. She is a proud Arab who is as American as you can get. She is very outspoken especially about the hate acts and xenophobia towards Muslims and Arabs in America. Robinson made me feel very comfortable talking to her and she related to some of the issues I had to say such as discrimination.I told her about my experience as an African in the Middle East and she shared her experience as an Arab in America. I asked about the political involvement of UCSB students and the strong activist groups here. She told me that there are a few politically involved students but I just had to see for myself. Walking around UCSB, one couldn’t help but notice the posters and the graffiti that screams “Stop the war in Iraq” , “anti-war”, “hunger strike for the Lebanon war”. Students cared about other people who are a day plane journey away. Iraq and Lebanon are not the only countries on the minds of the students there; the “Save Darfur” t-shirts can be seen too. When I saw a girl wearing the green Save Darfur t-shirt, it just reassured me that the American civil society cares about what’s happening in the world.
Robinson told us a bit about her public access tv talk show but hopefully, we were able to be there, watch her present and watch the directors and others do their job. The content of the show was interesting for me. It was about Nigeria, a country I was reading a book about, racism in France and anti-Muslims attacks in Britain. Every topic meant something to me and I was glad that they were informing the American public about topics that should be significant to everyone.