El Centro Humanitario: Inclusivity and Community Building

Once everyone is settled in with their cafecito and introductions are made, Marina prompts us with, “¿Qué les inquieta en la noche?” “What bothers you at night?”. As we share our preocupaciones, or worries, two men walk in, possibly arriving just after work. With worn blue jeans and winter jackets, their quiet demeanor and fatigued eyes signal a long day of work. Marina addresses both men. When the older of the two speak, Marina pointedly tries to address the younger, at which point the older one states that his brother is deaf. Marina pauses to process this, then she tells the group that her daughter is deaf. She switches to American Sign Language, speaking in English as well, to communicate this to the man along with her gratitude for his presence and interest in the listening session. To this, he smiles and signs, “Thank you”.

This is but one story from the listening sessions we participated in this fall as a part of a ten-week qualitative research methods course at the University of Denver in collaboration with Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores. Mayra, the Executive Director of El Centro, and Marina, the Coordinator for Advocacy and Community Organizing for El Centro, held these listening sessions with the purpose of crafting their 2023 Vision and to build power among workers. Throughout this process, our four-person team utilized listening sessions and semi-structured interviews among other research methods to understand the needs of immigrant workers, how worker centers like El Centro can best address them, and how to advance the mission of community organizing.

We utilized methods like Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) outlined by Low and Merry Engle (2010) and Julia Janes (2016) as well as methods from Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger (2020) for a Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA). We adopted a CBPAR framework because it reconstitutes power relations as being “deeply contextual, inevitable, and uneven, not easily manipulated yet still dynamic,” which helped us keep in mind how our positionalities and power as university-student researchers play out with the community’s own positionalities. Through CBPAR, we worked to not only produce knowledge from our research but to also empower the immigrant workers we worked with. By synthesizing their community knowledge and experiences from the listening sessions, we produced community-informed recommendations to aid future organizing rather than making assumptions about how they should run their communities. We utilized the REA method, which helped us carry out meaningful, in-depth research despite our short 10-week time frame. This method emphasizes detail and depth to make up for the rapid time frame during which the assessment takes place. We rapidly assessed the complex social and structural factors affecting Centro’s work through in-depth qualitative analysis of participant observation of two listening sessions and four interviews.

The ethical implications of our research also influenced the way we interacted with our population sample since many domestic workers and day laborers are undocumented immigrants. This creates a power dynamic with us as student-researchers, who are all documented and attend a private university. Our identities, while unique within our group, not only influence the way we interact with others but also influence the way we are perceived by the participants of the listening sessions and interviews. By using CBPAR methods in our research, we attempted to counter these power dynamics by actively participating in the listening sessions and consciously engaging with our participants in asking for their input and advice - rather than extracting information for research purposes without getting to know the community.

Through these methods, we started to break down the inherent power dynamics that exist in our relations with others. Janes writes how we can use these methods to think not about “power emanating from dominant to subordinate knowers, but by a more complex sociality that explores how power might flow in both directions." Challenging power dynamics and the flow of power is a continuous process through self-reflection and conversations. These efforts necessitate supporting one another, challenging the inherent hierarchies and dominant structures in our society, and forming networks of support. These lessons apply to both organizing and activist research. As a group, we worked to respect the spaces and people we interacted with, giving them as much agency as possible. In one of our interviews, we pointed out that the work our interviewee does cleaning a factory is important work when he seemed to dismiss his work as the opposite. Supporting each other means breaking internalized ideas about one’s value to society. Within the listening sessions, we witnessed members connecting over shared struggles, which for some was the moment they realized they weren’t alone. Building networks of support and challenging societal expectations and power dynamics are just a few ways both academic research and community organizing can create lasting change.

Striving to decolonize our research process, we utilized Alonso Bejarano et al’s Undocumented Activist Theory, which originated from within the undocumented community and “restores agency to people for whom self-determination is denied” by encouraging collective action to demand dignity, respect, and their rights. We centered El Centro and their members as knowledge holders and supported their efforts to empower workers to drive changes in their community. This research, being classroom-based, did limit our work as we considered positionality, ethics, and the implications of our work. Unlike other research projects with different IRB approvals, we were limited in generalizing our work or applying it to a larger scale for ethical reasons. Considering the ethics of research requires examining the ways in which we conceptualize it. For example, why should we consider researchers as those who “produce knowledge”? Those with the most power have the most leverage to influence the production of knowledge. Oftentimes, accurate accounts of history and knowledge have been obscured through research, whether well-intended or not. We argue that research should be better conceptualized as a systematic way of learning and synthesizing the knowledge of others. Research and ethnography have a deep colonial history - it’s time for academia to evolve beyond this.

As these ideas of power and privilege impact us as student-researchers, they are also present within El Centro’s community. The experience with the deaf worker is but one example of this. Without Marina and the help of his brother, this man would have been limited in the ways he could participate within the listening session. Power dynamics exist within the El Centro community as workers come from different situations and positionalities themselves. Ability, language, and status are just a few factors that influence power. We noticed within the listening sessions that some participants were documented, and some were not. This creates a power dynamic influencing the institutions people can access, the services and rights they have, and the actions they can take without fear of retaliation or consequences. In the first listening session we attended, one man shared his concerns about his lack of power to confront wage theft because of his fear of retaliation from his employers based on his immigration status. This power differentiation arises due to immigration status and inhibits the workers' confidence and ability to organize and build power. Whereas for other workers, status may not be a barrier, and thus allows them to take more action.

Gender emerged as another dimension of power throughout our research. Most of the participants in the listening sessions were women, yet the majority of day laborers are men. This was seen in our community mapping sessions at various worker sites where all day laborers were men. Based on these demographics, El Centro could focus on reaching out to the predominantly male sector of day laborers to receive more opinions from the men in the immigrant worker community. This would help bridge the gap between the discrepancies regarding who is present at the listening sessions and who is not. However, there also needs to be greater intentionality of the inclusion of women as they are key actors to promote community organizing and cohesion. This was highlighted in America’s Social Arsonist where Thompson, writing about the community organizing methods of Fred Ross, highlights one of Ross’s arguments: Look for the women in the community as they play a key role in organizing efforts and in building momentum. Leveraging the influence and impact women have in their households and communities could strengthen El Centro’s organizing efforts for the future. For example, women in the listening sessions often vocalized concerns centered around their family's well-being and desire to provide a good future for their children. If, as Fred Ross and Marina would argue, successful organizing depends on people’s ability to see issues that affect others of their communities as salient in their own lives, this sort of communal-minded thinking might provoke a greater tendency for women to see agency in community organizing. Gender dynamics often shape key outcomes in organizing efforts, and this is no different with El Centro today.

As El Centro moves forward in its work, we conclude that being intentional about inclusivity is important for community building and worker power. One of El Centro’s members, for example, discussed how meeting people in a physical space is important because it helps include elderly people who might not navigate virtual spaces as easily. It is important to hold space for all abilities to bring a greater breadth of knowledge for community building and power. Being inclusive not only ensures a greater participation of different people, it also helps break down the inherent power dynamics that come from working with a diverse population. This will help build trust amongst workers and with El Centro employees and foster a stronger community. Trust is a key element for community organizing and relationship-building. It was essential for us as researchers to collaborate with the El Centro community, and similarly, trust is essential for all relationship-building that can bring communities together (Schensul et al. 2013, Singer 1999). In a previous class’s research on the Left Behind Workers Fund, an interviewee highlighted the importance of having connections and a history with workers and how those existing relationships helped foster greater trust and collaboration. Taken together, it becomes clear that inclusive measures can help ensure the involvement of excluded populations and expand their trust to work with others.

Thinking about the future, Marina, El Centro’s Coordinator of Advocacy and Community Organizing said she hopes El Centro continues to grow, “Que seamos más los que estemos unidos para hacer esos cambios,” “So that there are more of us in the future that are united to make changes.”Through inclusivity and expanding the El Centro community, there will be a greater concentration of power and unity to facilitate more change. Reaching out to the deaf man at the listening session and bringing him into the conversation was one way she and El Centro are meeting people where they are. Making those small connections and giving someone more power to be involved are exactly what needs to continue happening to trust one another and build El Centro’s community. By starting at the “ground level” and supporting the community at its roots, only then can El Centro begin to expand on its vision of future 2023 programming by creating community leaders and fostering community action on the issues that matter the most.