“Undocu-Life” may be over for now, but the fight for DACA continues
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Hola Cultura’s podcast, “Undocu-Life,” aired its final episode last week.
Listening to these interviews, there were moments I wanted to cry, laugh, smile, and cheer on the five D.C. immigrants who shared their raw and intimate stories with us. I hope listeners felt the same and gained a better understanding of the human dimensions of immigration that go way beyond politics.
Highlighting their experiences migrating to and growing up in the United States, the podcast’s narrators — Brenda, Gerson, Carla, Maria and Jacinto — spoke in depth about early childhoods in their native countries, their journeys to the U.S., and how they learned to adapt to their new environments and fight injustices they encountered growing up. Our five narrators were vulnerable during their interviews and allowed us to take a deep look into their lives in order to gain perspective on what it’s like being an undocumented immigrant living in the United States. “Undocu-Life” emphasized these human lives and how they were affected by immigration policies.
Working on this project was heartening because of the stories we shared. It was a beautiful project to be a part of. There were lots of late nights and early mornings of writing, editing, scheduling interviews, but everyone on our team worked really hard.
I enjoyed collaborating with co-hosts Jose Luis Mendoza and Lucía Matamoros as well as former Hola Cultura intern Norma Sorto, who came back to help us edit the podcast. Also instrumental to the podcast’s success were Noelle Norris, Thomas Bravo, and Alessandra Marino, my interns this fall on the Society and Culture team that’s part of Hola Cultura’s SPEL storytelling program. This project would not have been possible without so many other people at Hola Cultura, including SPEL’s Design and Social Media team that helped us promote the episodes online, and, of course, our five narrators and the D.C. Oral History Collaborative that provided a grant that helped fund this podcast.
You can still listen to the episodes on our website or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcripts of the original interviews in both English and Spanish are also stored here.
“Undocu-Life” is over for now, but we may be back with a second season once there is more news about the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which has provided hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including some of our narrators, with work authorization and protection from deportation.
As we’ve learned throughout the first season of “Undocu-Life,” DACA is under threat. If DACA is terminated, nearly 600,000 undocumented immigrants will lose their work authorizations and become unprotected. As of Oct. 31, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will continue to accept DACA renewals for current DACA recipients only. Although the current USCIS policy is meant to preserve and fortify DACA, the agency that oversees “lawful immigration” into the United States is not processing or approving new applications, leaving first-time applicants in limbo after a judge in Texas ruled DACA “illegal” on July 16, 2021.
Given the possibility that DACA will be terminated, immigration advocacy groups such as CASA and United We Dream are urging congress to take action. Gustavo Torres, the executive director of CASA, sent out an email earlier this month telling supporters that “unless Congress takes action before the end of the year, DACA will end on their watch.”
In the mass email urging people to send a letter to congress demanding a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients, Torres concluded: “Although our elected officials have decided to stay silent, they will not silence us.”
–by Claudia Peralta Torres
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