#socioeconomic reforms

[howdoesone]

How does one assess the impact of transitional justice mechanisms in post-genocide societies?

Transitional justice mechanisms play a crucial role in post-genocide societies by addressing past atrocities, promoting accountability, and fostering reconciliation. Assessing the impact of these mechanisms is essential to understand their effectiveness in healing divided communities and preventing future conflicts. This article explores how one can assess the impact of transitional justice…

[alwaysbewoke]

A new study by the education watchdog Available to All reveals that school attendance zones and selective admission policies in the U.S. often exclude students of color and low-income families from elite public schools, thereby reinstating levels of segregation reminiscent of 1968. The study criticizes the use of residential addresses for school assignments, which supports "educational redlining" that favors affluent families, leading to systemic inequalities in access to advanced educational programs. Available to All calls for legislative reforms to protect enrollment rights and recommends that school districts minimize the importance of geographical boundaries to combat segregation and improve school access for all. The resurgence of school segregation to levels seen in 1968 is a stark reminder of how deeply systemic inequality is entrenched in our education system. Policies that favor affluent families and perpetuate educational redlining deny many Black and low-income students the opportunity to access quality education.

but listen to the racists and coons, black people are just making shit up and "playing the victim/race card."

[tenth-sentence]

Until basic environmental conditions were equalized among all socioeconomic strata, reform eugenicists held, no one had any right to say that one stratum differed from another solely by the force of heredity.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[reformthesystem]

WAYS TO INCREASE SUPPORT FOR THE GOVERNMENT

Hi, this is my blog post on the need for the government to significantly improve and strengthen the people's socioeconomic status, in order to gain more support. If you like my articles and want to support my work, please consider subscribing to my blog. Thanks.

[loveamongdragons]

Don't you find it interesting that Yon Rha, a former commander of the Southern Raiders, presumably a relatively high position in the navy, was living a relatively poor life after he had retired? Now, it could be that his position wasn't as high as I imagine, but it also makes me think that the common people of the Fire nation don't see much of their country's supposed wealth and glory. That military service is not only a consequence of indoctrination and brain-washing, but also a way to escape poverty and experience socioeconomic security, at least for a while.

Which has interesting implications on internal Fire nation politics, the general perception of the regime, and the level of acceptance towards future reforms.

[ptseti]

MAURICE BISHOP’S MESSAGE TO AFRICANS IN THE UNITED STATES Today, the 13th of March, marks 45 years since the New JEWEL Movement ousted the corrupt dictatorship of Prime Minister Eric Gairy through a bloodless coup in Grenada. It is an excellent time to bring back the revolutionary prime minister, Maurice Bishop’s, address in New York about the danger Grenada’s revolution posed to the United States. The New JEWEL Movement—New Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation—swiftly established the People’s Revolutionary Government, ushering in a new era of socialist ideals. Under Bishop’s leadership, Grenada underwent a profound socioeconomic transformation marked by extensive reforms and initiatives to uplift the primarily poor population. By 1982, the following occurred: a literacy campaign, the construction of new schools, and the establishment of agricultural cooperatives that particularly benefitted unemployed youth in rural areas. Cuban aid bolstered these efforts, providing expertise in education, healthcare, and infrastructure development, notably constructing a modern international airport to replace the hazardous existing airstrip. Unemployment plummeted from 49 per cent to 14 per cent within four years. Symbolising the shift in priorities, vibrant billboards promoting education adorned the island, signalling a departure from those that had advertised cigarettes and alcohol. Grenada’s revolution sparked tangible social progress and economic development, leaving a lasting legacy of change and empowerment among its populace.

They HAD t o kill him ...SIGH #JewelMovement #Corrupt #Dictatorship #Grenada

[zvaigzdelasas]

At least three people have been killed in the worst unrest in New Caledonia in more than 30 years, as rioting continued and schools remained closed after France adopted controversial reforms to the Pacific territory’s voting rules.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday convened a defence and national security council meeting to discuss the riots, cancelling a scheduled trip to a French region.[...]

Despite heavily armed security forces fanning out across the capital, Noumea, and the ordering of a night-time curfew, rioting continued overnight virtually unabated. The curfew has now been extended until Thursday night, said Butler.[...]

Anger has been simmering for weeks over plans in Paris to change the constitution to allow more people to vote in New Caledonia’s provincial elections.

Critics say the move would marginalise the Indigenous Kanak people, who make up about 40 percent of the population, by allowing more recent European arrivals to vote.[...]

Denise Fisher, a former Australian consul general in New Caledonia, said she was not surprised at the violence of the past few days and told Al Jazeera it showed “a real and fundamental breakdown in the way the territory is being managed”.The voting rules are part of the so-called Noumea Accord of 1998.

Under the deal, France agreed to cede the territory more political power and to limit voting in New Caledonia’s provincial and assembly elections to those who were residents of the island at the time.

About 40,000 French citizens have moved to New Caledonia since 1998, and the changes expand the electoral roll to include those who have lived in the territory for 10 years.[...]

On Wednesday, the main pro-independence Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) urged calm and condemned the violence, calling in a statement for the rioters to return home.

Socioeconomic marginalisation, land dispossession and disenfranchisement of the Kanaks have long been a source of violent civil unrest in New Caledonia.

15 May 24

[chicago-geniza]

Nobody come to the bookstore today I need to research Cincinnati in the 1870s-1880s, the American dry goods trade, Reconstruction socioeconomic reform, women's fashion, and the history of Jewish immigration to the Midwest for a Downton Abbey fanfiction

[hadesoftheladies]

Hades' Personal Reflections on Separatism and Power XD

so here's my current definition of separatism:

any deliberate action that women take to divest from men that simultaneously transfers energy, resources and other forms of investment to female community. it must be an exercise of women's autonomy and power that deliberately excludes, de-centers and disadvantages men while promoting, centering and including women.

this definition would hence designate the following as not separatism:

-religious or non-religious sex segregation (this is not an exercise of women's autonomy)

-religious celibacy (this is not done for the sake of female community and also invests in male hegemony by focusing on male religion)

-girl's night out where the conversation is predominantly about relationships with men (even parasocial ones) XD

-domestic scenarios women are forced into where they find themselves able to talk to each other (i.e. women in the kitchen during a family reunion)

-sex segregation in general (because separatism is organized by the oppressed and segregation is organized by the oppressor)

this definition would include:

-exclusively female social groups (clubs, meetings, etc) where resources such as information and even financial aid are shared between women (like grandma's wednesday knitting club)

-women deliberately refusing to marry, date or befriend men (or all three at once)

-consuming only female products or intellectual property

Criticisms:

Some say separatism is better off being simply described as women physically separating from men. After all, who is the oppressor here? It is men that pose a threat to women and it is relationships to men that disadvantage and drain women while advantaging and reviving men. It seems silly to say that a woman who dates and lives with a man but reads only female authors is somehow radical or a separatist (and we must remember that separatism is an expression of radical feminism hence must be aimed toward radical reformation of patriarchal social structures). It's practically an insult to separatism by trivializing the very thing it exists to eradicate (unlike other forms of activism): male supremacy in the interpersonal sphere.

If we were to try distinguish between these forms and call celibacy "radical separatism" and reading exclusively female authors "quasi-separatism" none of these terms would make sense because separatism is (or must be) itself radical action and de-centering men while reading is still a form of male exclusion, divesting from male hegemony and financial/social investment in female community.

So we're at an impasse: because separatism must always be radical and yet, things that don't seem very radical still re-structure power on some scale (thus fulfilling the basic requirements of the end-goal of separatism which is to reclaim power as women in the interpersonal sphere by excluding male access to us). A woman who divorces her husband but keeps her son is divesting from male power in a socioeconomically impactful way on one end, but not on the other.

And there's the problem: she may disadvantage and separate from her ex husband (separatism) but is also investing in and raising her son (not separatism). So what we're really asking here is: "if not dating or marrying men was separatism and radical, does doing other non-radical things cancel out said radical action?"

I'd say no. Which is why I find the vegan metaphor unfitting for this discussion. I find it more useful to define separatism and radical action through the lens of power: who is getting it, who is losing it and to what extent they are empowered/disempowered.

For example, exercising is healthy but drinking heavily is unhealthy. Me exercising will always be a healthy action regardless of what I do after. Me drinking excessively will always be unhealthy. Does it make sense to then call someone who both exercises and drinks "only healthy" or "only unhealthy"? Or is it better to discuss which of their actions are healthy or unhealthy rather than attach an identity to it?

That seems to be the heart of this disagreement. Half of us think drinking heavily excludes you from being a healthy person period. I say that exercising is still meaningful action that counts as being "healthy" or contributing to health. Not because it's necessarily "more right" but because it seems more productive to me. Separatist action will always be separatist action. Non-separatist behaviour will be non-separatist. Does that make women practicing separatism in one form and not practicing separatism in another separatists or not separatists?

I think it's not that important. Separatism (exercise) is still good to practice and as many women as possible should engage with it however or whenever they can. Exercise will always be healthy (no matter who does it) the same way divesting from men and investing in women in any form will be a form of beneficial separatism that absolutely challenges the male status quo. Non-separatist action (drinking) will still never be empowering or radical the same way partnering with men will never challenge the male status quo. I find it more productive to ask how one can take more radical action rather than whether one is or is not radical.

Because to talk about being a separatist or radical feminist as something one is or is not rather than something one does (radical/separatist action) or does not is to inevitably limit it to ideology, which limits it to the realm of history and appeals to authority (feminist theorists and academics).

Note: I use my definition of separatism because I think anything that excludes males in order to empower women is best described as separatism rather than anything else. I don't think it makes sense to call these transferrals of power under these feminist goals "not separatism."

[radicalitch]

being anti-birth control and pro-natalism-at-any-cost is so wild and bizarre imo. and it’s almost always men that are OBSESSED with reproduction and ‘continuing blood lines’ like we’re all gonna go extinct tomorrow if the woman they’re talking to doesn’t have a kid ASAP. and that’s not even a compelling alike, if humans have come to the point where the vast majority of people (women) aren’t interested in reproducing than it’s probably time for us to go and reach our natural end. and I’ve seen SO many conversations that, repeatedly, almost verbatim, between men and women, go:

“god wants you to multiply.”

“I don’t believe in god.”

“ok well NATURE and BIOLOGY want you to multiply.”

“well if that was true I’d have an innate desire to reproduce which I don’t, so you telling me to reproduce in spite of my natural, biological inclination seems pretty anti nature.”

pro-birth men are INSANE. if you want more people (women) to have children, work on creating a world better suited to child rearing (speaking from a usamerican perspective here)! but no, let’s just force women to do it, because that’s much more ethical than, like, (again, in the US) improving healthcare, education, maternity/paternity leave, cost of living, birthing safety (esp. for women of color), so on and so forth. and i know these tactics wouldn’t make all of the babies these lunatics want, bc women aren’t reproducing at super high rates in countries with these things in place. but I do think that in the US it would lead to at least some more people having kids, because I can personally think of half a dozen people who WANT kids but are choosing not to have them for socioeconomic reasons.

but even encouraging more women to have kids wouldn’t be enough for these maniacs, I don’t think. for some reason, they think the human population needs to GROW, not just retain itself, so they have an endless supply of laborers and soldiers to exploit, and have the idea in their head that their numerous descendants will inherit the earth or whatever. sorry dude, your sperm is mediocre at best and there’s nothing special about you that deserves to live on through a child, especially at the expense of a woman.

like, you’d think all of my suggestions for birth control and social reform would really make sense if the goal was just to have more babies/prevent abortion, but it’s 100000% about male control over reproduction.

baby, if your ‘god’ wanted you to control that, I think ‘he’ would’ve built us a little differently.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Here's the thing with Jane Austen-Elizabeth Gaskell comparisons:

I don't think the intuition that relates them in readers is wrong. Gaskell has read Austen and it shows. I'd even go as far as to say that Gaskell is writing within the same ethic-political framework as Austen -one that is concerned with human flourishing as stemming from an ideal of fulfilled humanity based on an assortment of intellectual and moral excellences, that is, a form of virtue ethics- and I am in fact attempting to write a dissertation on this! *clown shoes noises*.

The problem is when influence and fundamental agreement is treated or understood as imitation, or worse, pastiche. "North and South is Pride and Prejudice + [insert Victorian element here]" is a fun joke, because comedy so often relies on exaggeration, but as an actual description it isn't quite right. North and South pays its homage to P&P with some elements, but it is not an AU retelling. The themes, character arcs and motivations are very different. There is a referentiality, but it is the referentiality of conversation.

Gaskell says "I see Darcy, and I see the ideal Darcy represents in the context of his community of practice (rural, pre-industrial England), as The Gentleman. He has power and he has authority. But how do we make sense of a similar figure of power and authority, but dissimilar in everything else in the context of his own community of practice (urban, industrial England)? What constitutes the ideal of The Man?" It isn't Thornton's points of coincidence with Darcy but their points of drastic contrast that motivate the socio-psycho-moral study of the character. And so on and so forth for other elements of the narrative.

Something similar happens with Wives and Daughters and Mansfield Park. Gaskell says "I understand the point about how a bad early education can fix a character in such a way as to make moral growth or reform impossible through example or exhortation. But what do we do when that person remains intimately connected to us?" Cynthia resembles Mary Crawford, but the angle of approach is different because the question is different (and the environment of transplant is different as well).

There are of course other works of Gaskell where the conversation is tenuous or completely absent. There's no romance plot in Cranford, but we do kind of see in the Cranford amazons the gossips of Highbury. There's no Emma here, no Mr Knightley, no magnanimous rich neighbor to help. The question is how do they manage to live the same virtues of generosity, patience, forgiveness, etc, between themselves.

Austen's novels are mostly occupied with the directly moral: it is about the concrete individuals and their close connections in society, and how virtues and vices in this or that person affect themselves and those around them. The communities of practice, and therefore the ideals of fulfilled humanity remain more or less the same (with some variations, of course). In Gaskell the scope is political, if anything because of Gaskell's unfamiliarity with Austen's socioeconomic environment, and familiarity with completely different ones. So she's taking Austen's general framework, and investigating in which ways the differences in the communities make for different ideals of human flourishing that still relate to the same core virtues.

[thesirencult]

THE PLUTO IN CAPRICORN GENERATION'S ATTITUDE IS THE PROOF THAT WE ARE GOING THROUGH A PARADIGM SHIFT

The average 4 year old spends more than 3 hours each day in front of a screen. Isolated, with no human interaction and their ability to read human emotions and perform complex cognitive functions declining constantly.

The Pluto in Capricorn generation holds a direct mirror to our socioeconomic and technological structures.

Pluto = breaking, transforming, war, power games, death, metamorphosis

Capricorn = socio-economic structures and organization, careers, institutions

After the 2008 crisis and COVID-19 AND the current silent depression we are moving through, looking at the way children of that generation behave, shows us where our societal constructions failed. So here are some observations :

- Many Pluto in Capricorn kids want to pursue a career path out of the norm. They want to be influencers or own online businesses. Very few of them are interested in traditional paths of wealth like banking and finance.

- They don't have respect for school and education because they feel like it doesn't teach them enough. Most of the kids also went through 2 years of online school and they missed out on the social perks the schooling experience provides.

- Violence. This generation is mad at the system. They quiet quit. They hate supervisors and "gurus" and they are also looking for extremely masculine figures, like Andrew Tate. A few days ago I stumbled upon the Candace Owens talk with Andrew Tate and he appeared a bit "reformed". Guess what? The young men in the comment section did not like his slightly changed views on marriage and women.

- This kids consider Facebook and Instagram "old". They like crypto and decentralised platforms. They are simultaneously very street smart but not that interested in formal education.

- It feels like these kids had to grow up very fast in a world that seems unforgiving and harsh. They may be more unemotional and less empathetic, especially if personal placements support that.

[mightymizora]

A theme in my Manva and Enver dynamic that I haven’t spoken about here is religious reform and it’s a really core one. I may do a longer post when I’m not so busy on this but basically:

Manva’s control, precision, her killing with her hands, her plain presentation, is all linked to her reform of the Temple of Bhaal in the pursuit of the True Death. Whereas the old requirements of the temple were based in money and tithe from people expecting protection, assassination contracts, extravagant kills, she is taking it to a new era of reverence for the blood, and the pursuit of a True Death of all of Toril. This makes her extremely unpopular with some members of the temple, including those who support Orin, and those who were acolytes of the last chosen Torlin.

Gortash is also in the process of reforming the cult of Bane, but in a more responsive way to the changing socioeconomic principles of the sword coast. We are seeing the advent of the press, of landlords and industrial tycoons, and he is angling to make the church of the tyrant appealing to this new captain of industry class, a wealthy club that allows real privileges to its members. In some ways he is borrowing from the “secret society” model that many prominent Bhaalists pursued of having an outlet for their desires, as Manva is making the Bhaalists more puritanical.

[haggishlyhagging]

By the end of the second millennium, the religious thinkers of Mesopotamia saw the cosmos as controlled and regulated by male gods, with only Ishtar maintaining a position of power. When we see such a pattern of theological change, we must ask whether the religious imagery is leading society, or whether it is following socioeconomic development? Was the supplanting of goddesses in Sumerian religious texts an inner theological development that resulted purely from the tendency to view the world of the gods on the model of an imperial state in which women paid no real political role? Or does it follow in the wake of sociological change, of the development of what might be called "patriarchy"? And if the latter is true, is the change in the world of the gods contemporary to the changes in human society, or does it lag behind it by hundreds of years? To these questions we really have no answer. The general impression that we get from Sumerian texts is that at least some women had a more prominent role than was possible in the succeeding Babylonian and Assyrian periods of Mesopotamian history. But developments within the 600-year period covered by Sumerian literature are more difficult to detect. One slight clue might (very hesitantly) be furnished by a royal document called the Reforms of Uruinimgina." Uruinimgina (whose name is read Urukagina in earlier scholarly literature) was a king of Lagash around 2350 B.C.E. As a nondynastic successor to the throne, he had to justify his power, and wrote a "reform" text in which he related how bad matters were before he became king and described the new reforms that he instituted in order to pursue social justice. Among them we read, "the women of the former days used to take two husbands, but the women of today (if they attempt to do this) are stoned with the stones inscribed with their evil intent." Polyandry (if it ever really existed) has been supplanted by monogamy and occasional polygyny.

In early Sumer, royal women had considerable power. In early Lagash, the wives of the governors managed the large temple estates. The dynasty of Kish was founded by Enmebaragesi, a contemporary of Gilgamesh, who it now appears may have been a woman; later, another woman, Kubaba the tavern lady, became ruler of Kish and founded a dynasty that lasted a hundred years. We do not know how important politically the position of En priestess of Ur was, but it was a high position, occupied by royal women at least from the time of Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon (circa 2300 B.C.E.), and through the time of the sister of Warad-Sin and Rim-Sin of Larsa in the second millennium. The prominence of individual royal women continued throughout the third dynasty of Ur. By contrast, women have very little role to play in the latter half of the second millennium; and in first millennium texts, as in those of the Assyrian period, they are practically invisible.

We do not know all the reasons for this decline. It would be tempting to attribute it to the new ideas brought in by new people with the mass immigration of the West Semites into Mesopotamia at the start of the second millennium. However, this cannot be the true origin. The city of Mari on the Euphrates in Syria around 1800 B.C.E. was a site inhabited to a great extent by West Semites. In the documents from this site, women (again, royal women) played a role in religion and politics that was not less than that played by Sumerian women of the Ur IlI period (2111-1950 B.C.E.). The causes for the change in women's position is not ethnically based. The dramatic decline of women's visibility does not take place until well into the Old Babylonian period (circa 1600 B.C.E.), and may be function of the change from city-states to larger nation-states and the changes in the social and economic systems that this entailed.

The eclipse of the goddesses was undoubtedly part of the same process that witnessed a decline in the public role of women, with both reflective of fundamental changes in society that we cannot yet specify. The existence and power of a goddess, particularly of Ishtar, is no indication or guarantee of a high status for human women. In Assyria, where Ishtar was so prominent, women were not. The texts rarely mention any individual women, and, according to the Middle Assyrian laws, married women were to be veiled, had no rights to their husband's property (even to movable goods), and could be struck or mutilated by their husbands at will. Ishtar, the female with the fundamental attributes of manhood, does not enable women to transcend their femaleness. In her being and her cult (where she changes men into women and women into men), she provides an outlet for strong feelings about gender, but in the final analysis, she is the supporter and maintainer of the gender order. The world by the end of the second millennium was a male's world, above and below; and the ancient goddesses have all but disappeared.

-Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

[fatehbaz]

Was Turkey and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, always the land of [sedentary villages and commercial agriculture]? [...] What kind of historical processes generated this socioeconomic, political, and environmental transformation in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey? [...] Gratien [...] [narrates] a hundred-year-long (1850s-1950s) clandestine history of state-led “agrarian conquest,” villagization, and commercialization of agriculture in the muddy but fertile lowland of Çukurova (historical Cilicia) and its mountainous hinterland in southern Anatolia. [...]

The frontier in Çukurova, Gratien argues, was a “frontier of the state,” “a settlement frontier,” and an “ecological frontier.” [...] [T]he Ottoman state and its varied practices of governmentality played an engineering role in remaking the rural world, while [...] forced sedentarization (iskan in Turkish) policies were imposed on the region’s pastoralists [...] whose livelihood depended on seasonal migration between the lowlands and highlands. [...] [A] mesh of old and new [...] “[...] forms of resource extraction, and environmental understandings” appeared “in tandem with the processes of state-building [...] and commercialization.” [...]

The mobility of people connected the lowland to the highland pastures, pastoralists to livestock, migrant laborers to cotton, merchants to global capitalism, Muslim refugees to trans-imperial warfare, mosquitos to dreadful malaria, the “rebels” to the mountains, and finally technocrats to the swampy Çukurova.

---

Transhumance migration, referring to seasonal migration between northern and southern pastures, is the first and perhaps one of the most common forms of mobility embedded in this region. [...] The fresh upland air, known as yayla in Turkish, was a green sanctuary for locals [...] during the hot summer months.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the dynamic of this seasonal relationship to lowland swamps shifted with the imposition of Ottoman modernist reform policies intended to turn Çukurova into a “second Egypt” through cotton production. As a result of provincial reforms and the growing centralization capacity of the empire thanks to the Tanzimat reforms (1839-76), the Ottoman state began to forcefully settle the local pastoralist communities that were seen as obstacles to state-led agricultural development projects in the region and as a potential labor reserve for the cultivation of cotton on the “fertile lands” of Cilicia.[5] Ottoman reformists viewed “settlement and cultivation” as “the only antitode of the malarial wastelands of the Ottoman countryside” (p. 58). Gratien chronicles widespread “malaria, cholera, and other diseases” as outcomes of resettlement and villagization and argues that from the 1850s onward these [...] resulted in "high mortality" [...].

---

Though the Ottomans’ forced sedentarization policy toward pastoralists and resettlement [programs] [...] were both designed to increase the commercialization of agriculture in Çukurova, they operated differently as instruments of the imperial state. Sedentarization included state-perpetrated violence in the form of massive military campaigns. Resettlement of refugees involved the strategic settlement of new loyal citizens among indigenous communities of the region whose own loyalty to the empire was seen as suspicious. [...] During the early twentieth century, [...] hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed during the Adana massacre in 1909 and then the Armenian genocide in 1915. With the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from their historical homelands into Syrian deserts for “putative security concerns,” Çukurova’s fertile lands, villages, and towns in Adana province were instead “permanently settled” with [...] [those] who were identified as “Turks” by the nationalist government (p. 143). This was the second wave of an Ottoman demographic engineering project that started in the 1860s [...] in a region once heavily inhabited by Ottoman Armenians and Muslim pastoralists. [...]

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Gratien carefully investigates state-led violence against pastoralists instrumentalized by the massive military campaigns of the Fırka-i Islahiye (Reform Division). [...] By consistently incorporating folk songs, laments, and oral accounts, Gratien not only eloquently displays pastoralists’ forms of resistance and resilience against the Ottoman reform movement in Çukurova but also masterfully narrates perceptions and worldviews that have been silenced in the state archive. [...]

---

Text by: Zozan Pehlivan. "Review of Gratien, Chris. The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier". H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. August 2023. URL: h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58142. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[robfinancialtip]

Join Paul Tally in a captivating conversation with Luz Castro, a passionate policy advocate based in Bell Gardens, California, dedicated to championing the rights of undocumented and newly arrived immigrants. Luz's journey is deeply inspired by her mother, an undocumented domestic helper who tirelessly supported her family.

Luz takes us through her educational path, from high school to college, where her interests in labor organizing and environmental justice blossomed. She delves into the disparities in resource access across different socioeconomic groups, with a particular focus on education and employment.

Furthermore, Luz shares her experiences working in Washington, D.C., where she tirelessly represents the voices of immigrants in federal policymaking. The interviewer underscores the vital role she plays in bridging resource gaps and highlighting the concerns of immigrant communities. Luz highlights a critical issue: the unequal access to instructors and resources for test preparation, a factor that can significantly impact success in various trades and careers. The conversation shifts to Luz's role as a field deputy for a member of Congress. She discusses her responsibilities, including staying abreast of local politics and events and representing the Congresswoman at meetings when needed. Community outreach efforts are also part of her mandate.

Next, the discussion centers on Luz's policy efforts, particularly in immigration. She elaborates on her involvement in crafting legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Luz underscores the importance of research, collaboration, and consultation with those directly affected by immigration regulations. She emphasizes the urgent need for updated immigration policies, citing the lack of meaningful reform since 1986.

Luz addresses the challenges undocumented immigrants face in the U.S. and advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, especially for those who have lived there for many years without a clear path to citizenship.

Expressing concern about the large number of unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers, Luz points out the outdated nature of the immigration system, making it cumbersome to navigate. She recommends leveraging existing rules, such as the immigration registry, to provide relief to long-term immigrants.

Luz also highlights the legality of street vending in Los Angeles County, where there are no specific prohibited vending zones. She discusses the potential conflicts between street vendors and brick-and-mortar businesses, emphasizing the importance of understanding the legal rights and complexities involved in balancing their interests.

In this engaging conversation, Luz emphasizes the value of internships for aspiring advocates, lawyers, and public servants. She encourages students to seek internships aligned with their passions, as these experiences offer valuable insights into professionals' daily work in their fields. Moreover, she notes the positive trend of paid internships, which can be invaluable when transitioning into full-time employment after college.

Luz advises students to tap into the resources provided by their college's career centers, cultural centers, and relevant departments. Seeking guidance from mentors is equally important, as they can offer support and insights into the interview process and professional growth. In summary, this conversation is a powerful reminder to actively pursue opportunities, seek assistance when needed, and gain real-world experience through internships and mentorship to prepare for a fulfilling career in advocacy and related disciplines.

DISCLAIMER: The following program contains material, situations, and/or themes that may disturb some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

A National CORE Production supporting the Hope Through Housing Foundation. Join us to uncover the art of turning dreams into reality.