Community Organizing, Precarity, and a New Approach with Day Laborers and Immigrant Workers

By Lexi Kilbane and Sam Colvett

As the sun is setting on a Thursday night, cars are pulling up to a parking lot of a church in Aurora, Colorado. People are climbing out and walking to an open door off to the side. On the wall there is a taped sign that reads “El Centro Plática” beckoning people inside, and just in the doorway stand Mayra Juárez-Denis and Marina Cruz, chatting animatedly in Spanish to everyone entering. Inside there is the buzz of chatter and rustle of tinfoil as people gather in the back filling their paper plates with fried tacos topped with sour cream, lettuce, tomatoes, and homemade salsa. Soon after, Marina shouts over the chatter, “Buenas tardes, ya vamos a empezar”, and the second El Centro Listening Session begins.

El Centro Humanitario is Denver’s only day labor center promoting the rights and well-being of day laborers and domestic workers. Using education programs, job skills training, leadership development, and advocacy, El Centro works alongside workers to build agency and community. Yet like most of the world, El Centro has gone through quite a few changes within the past few years. Much of their focus shifted during the pandemic to providing direct cash assistance to immigrant workers through the Left Behind Workers Fund (LBWF).[1] They recently closed their downtown location leaving their organization without a home base. And this past summer, they welcomed a new executive director (ED), Maya Juárez-Denis.

Tasked with rebuilding El Centro post-COVID and reconnecting with the day laborer community in the Denver metro area, Mayra has spent this fall conducting community listening sessions. “I learned that the first step, in order to get into a community, [is that] you have to listen to them,” she told us during an interview. These listening sessions have been an opportunity to really understand the challenges that the community is currently facing. From this point of understanding, Mayra plans to build next year’s programming to best address those worries. Mayra wants this ‘2023 Vision’ to focus on the members of El Centro, and listening to what they need, as defined by themselves, is the only way to start. In a classroom-based qualitative research project that parallels Mayra’s participatory outlook through a critical use of ethnographic research methods, our four-student research team has had the privilege of learning from and alongside El Centro stakeholders to contribute a set of our own conclusions about the organization’s path forward.

Building Community Power

Mayra’s method isn’t exactly typical of a non-profit ED. Putting the organization’s programming plans on pause for data collection seems almost counter-intuitive to fulfilling its mission to address the critical – and immediate – needs of its membership. After all, redefining an organization’s course of action can be painstakingly slow work.

However, this method has a successful precedent and adopts a lens that Mayra stands by. The listening sessions are inspired by the organizing tactic of the “house meeting”, which was popularized by the late organizer Fred Ross and incorporated as a strategy by the powerhouse organizing network, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) (Thompson 2016a). The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to build broad-based organizing projects, which creates new capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action, and relationships across the lines that often divide our communities. This method is effective through its recognition and mobilization of people’s closest networks of friends and family in an approachable and familiar setting. The house meeting also disperses responsibility to organize by placing the appointed root of the network as the agent of organizing and frees more capacity for other leadership to organize or otherwise mobilize.

This approach is further bolstered by a method Mayra calls “institutional organizing”, which seeks to put the efforts of organizing in a community structure that can bear the weight of change-making and more effectively influence existing institutions. As a result, if one motivated person or group of people has to take a step back from their organizing work for one reason or another, there is still an organizing movement that exists to continue their work. This intentionally cyclical nature of leadership is characteristic of community-based and institutional organizing, as it spurns new faces to the front of the movement while seasoned leaders are able to focus on recruitment into the fore.

The listening sessions provided a perfect forum to begin this process. Throughout the listening sessions, facilitators encouraged participants to share their ‘preocupaciones’ (worries) and offered time to discuss these challenges in smaller groups. Based on Ross’ premise that group meetings such as these are small enough to feel personal yet big enough to feel momentous, Mayra and Marina focused on creating agency in the community by forming connections among members and inspiring them to take steps towards change together. This tactic is invaluable for uncovering, then solidifying, solidarity among members and strengthening the overall political power of a worker center.

Focusing on worker empowerment marks a significant change from charity, according to Mayra. “I’m not here so that you all applaud,” she said at the first listening session we attended. Fully ascribing to the idiom “give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats forever,” (a phrase she repeated in Spanish), she sees her job as an organizer to build leadership capacity in the community to achieve its own goals. This way, El Centro can be sure that the pressure the coalition sets on institutions will be worth the effort for the members and can be sustained by new leadership energized by issues of their own choosing.

From a researcher’s perspective, the listening sessions were also invaluable for providing contextualized data about community needs. This organic focus group allowed us to also engage with individuals ‘where they were’ and obtain evocative themes and framings in the least extractive manner. Inductive, community-based research such as ours relies on participant input before any conclusions can be drawn as to the state of affairs and possible avenues of change. Decolonial community-based research prioritizes the Freirean notion that research participants are co-creators of knowledge within the pedagogy rather than the colonial research paradigm where researchers are presumed to hold knowledge that the participants benefit from. These shared values and understandings made Mayra’s approach to El Centro membership synergetic with our own.

The empowered and collaborative mode of action Mayra is employing lends itself well to decolonial power-building as well as research. This community of established and fledgling change-makers knows the power of their own agency and has shown they are willing to bring these problems into the consciousness of the broader public. This enabled us as student researchers to build on their knowledge to draw the following conclusions regarding social change in this setting.

Precarity and a Hierarchy of Needs

Institutional organizing is undeniably a powerful organizing tool, and Mayra is well-equipped to implement it in the Denver area after having organized for years in San Antonio, Texas. Nevertheless, there are undeniably barriers to organizing that exist in the immigrant worker community.

For example, the ‘preocupaciones’ discussed in the listening sessions indicate a great deal of precarity that exists in the community. People in insecure housing situations, experiencing violence in their communities, being unable to find adequate wages for their work, or being unable to access important resources due to a lack of documentation places them in situations where their efforts must be intentionally directed to ensure their survival. One worker in the first listening session mentioned this rather explicitly; after discussing his concerns about falling wages and a lack of work, he proceeded to say that he cared about creating community change but did not see much ability to do so given his work schedule.

As a result, our research uncovered that there is oftentimes a ‘hierarchy of needs in the immigrant worker community, where people might not see benefit to organizing because the bulk of their efforts must be placed towards other activities. Despite a desire to build power and create change, basic material needs necessarily take precedent. The hardships of the global pandemic have made this point more universally poignant, which should cause us to consider how best to mitigate this constraint.

Another major barrier to community organizing comes from a perceived lack of agency in the community to create change. Given that many members in the community lack formalized power in institutions to create the types of changes they would like to see, this perceived lack of agency has basis in reality. Adding to the pressure, however, is a view that issues affecting individual people or their families are unique to themselves, or rather insignificant to the community as a whole to warrant collective action. Falling short of a “critical mass” of people making change could decrease agency overall.

To Marina, this is the major issue to overcome. Her efforts in the listening sessions have been focused on building commonality between people, on creating conversations about the issues that are affecting the community and showing them that their actions together can create tangible change. From Marina’s assertion that she alone cannot do all of the work to Mayra’s inspiring recounting of how she helped her community build change with police forces in San Antonio, this theme emerged time and again in our research. We also took note that the listening sessions provided a setting for affirmation of and request for supplementary power-building tactics that El Centro has previously employed, like know-your-rights and worker safety trainings.

The Next Chapter

In the same way that El Centro and community organizers are enriched with freed capacity by dispersing responsibility, El Centro should seek to build collective capacity and informal power by sharing their knowledge and resources in collaboration with other institutions they create relationships with. In Mayra’s proclaimed pivot from charity to worker power, El Centro will move from more material resource dispersions necessitated by COVID-19 towards sharing intellectual, network, and community-building resources.

El Centro is already integrating feedback from the listening sessions into their organizational thinking. Marina’s building commonality approach is a strong foundation for community-building, as beginning from a place of solidarity is an authentic and powerful way to organize. In the words of El Centro staff, “El Centro is the people”. Therefore, when El Centro stakeholders share what they have among their base, they are strengthening their own network and empowering individuals to return on their investment, so to speak, by ‘giving back’ their time, community, or resources when their circumstances improve. Mutual aid based in worker power instead of charity and forging community through commonality will set El Centro apart from other organizations and allow them to better earn the trust and support of the population they are serving.

As we have observed in our study, there are serious barriers for El Centro to overcome in order to accomplish their worthwhile goals. However, their willingness to listen to the community demonstrates a sincere desire to improve for the betterment of their amazing vision. Given this eagerness to grow, their empowering new post-charity framing for their work, and their desire to achieve more through institutional organizing, we are confident that El Centro is already moving in the right direction, and we look forward to their continued success. The work that El Centro has put into collaborating with institutional partners like our project team and incorporating grassroots feedback from local stakeholders will compound over time to yield incredible, impactful, and generational gains for the community overall.

If you would like to learn more about El Centro’s work and how you can support it, please check out their website at www.centrohumanitario.org.

[1] El Centro was one of the non-profit partners enlisted by the LBWF to administer relief to undocumented workers who would otherwise have been ineligible to receive any form of pandemic assistance.