The Feministing Five: Sayu Bhojwani

Sayu Bhojwani is the Founding Director of the New American Leaders Project, and organization that trains immigrants to run for elected office. Before founding NALP, Bhojwani was New York City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, a post she used to increase immigrants’ access to city services and to ensure that the immigration status of those seeking city services is kept confidential. Bhojwani has been working with immigrants for over fifteen years; in the mid-nineties she founded South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!), an organization that works to develop youth leaders in immigrant communities in New York City.

NALP, then, is a natural extension of Bhojwani’s work. NALP recruits recognized community leaders and trains them to run for office at all levels of the US government. This, they believe, will ensure political representation for immigrant communities, who represent 13% of America’s population and whose American-born children account for twice that proportion. NALP aims to get more foreign-born citizens elected, and also to engage the communities they lead in the political process. “Not everyone can run for office,” she told me, “but they can help out with campaigns, and certainly the idea of an elected official who shares your cultural background resonates with people.” As a result of that resonance, Bhojwani and NALP hope that they’ll be able to mobilize voters to cast ballots for those candidates who represent their interests.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Sayu Bhojwani.

Chloe Angyal: What led you to start the New American Leaders Project?

Sayu Bhojwani: I had this idea a couple of years ago, just before the presidential election. I was with some other folks who have worked on immigrant issues for a long time, and we were strategizing how to work on getting sixty votes in the Senate to try to pass immigration reform, and really it was being in one more of those conversations that made me realize that unless we actually changed the face of leadership, we were always going to be on the outside, asking for help and support from the inside. The strategy of the New American Leaders Project is an outsider-insider strategy, getting folks who have often felt marginalized by policy to be the policy makers, and while everyone’s not going to run, it also works with people from immigrant communities, teaching them how to engage with those insiders and hold them accountable and support them.

So I got involved because I had the idea, and I couldn’t find anyone else crazy enough to quit their job and make it happen.

I love that we are preparing for the future, while also working on an issue of the present. By training candidates to run for local and state offices, we’re also building a pipeline for the future leadership in Congress. I love that it can engage people on lots of different levels. Not everyone can run for office, but they can help out with campaigns, and certainly the idea of an elected official who shares your cultural background resonates with people, and we expect that we’re going to be able to mobilize lots of voters as a function of having candidates who represent their interests.

The goal of the organization is to increase the number of elected officials with immigrant backgrounds across the country, at the local, state and national level. We are particularly concerned about state legislatures, because that is the place in which legislation and policy is made that has a great impact on immigrant communities. So the real focus of the pipeline development is at the state level. We intend to work very closely with existing candidate training programs, as well as community organizations that already develop immigrant leadership and serve immigrant communities, so that we’re recruiting folks who already come from a certain kind of sensibility about how to have community interests at the center of policy making.

CA: Who are your favorite fictional heroines, and who are your heroines in real life?

SB: There are a lot of female authors that I love; Isabella Allende, Jamaica Kincaid. I like heroines who are strong and who find creative ways to negotiate all the things that women have to juggle. I have difficulty coming up with a single fictional heroine.

At the moment I would say that my real-life heroine is my four-and-a-half year-old daughter. She is just so unburdened by expectations and norms and is capable of expressing as pure a truth as possible about the way that she’s feeling and what she’s thinking and what she wants to wear. I think that’s an amazing gift that she and other young girls have, and that girls lose during adolescence and have to work very hard to reclaim. So in this particular moment of my life, she is my heroine and my role model for being responsive to my truest desires.

CA: What recent news story made you want to scream?

SB: There are many, many stories right now that are making me feel that way but the one that I really can’t get my head around is the outrage about the Park 51 cultural center in New York. I think the reason it’s been so difficult is that all the work that I’ve done over the years, I feel it’s been possible because I believe so strongly in the core American value of freedom of expression. Park 51 was planned in the place I consider my city and the place I consider my neighborhood, and it just really brought home for me the worst aspects of being an “outsider” in the United States. And while I don’t think it’s representative of our country, because it was happening in my own community and affected so many people with whom I feel close, it was a very disturbing new story for me. It made me want to scream because of the irrationality and misinformation that kept being perpetuated in public discourse.

CA: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?

SB: I think the biggest challenge is defining, or redefining, what it means in today’s world, and doing that in a way that honors the interests, first and foremost, of women and girls, but that also accounts for the challenges that boys and men are facing. Similarly, I would say that it’s doing that definition or redefinition in a way that incorporates the diversity of our country. There is a tradition of feminism in other parts of the world, and I think it has been a challenge for women of color to fully adopt the traditional definition of feminism. I would say that the challenge is to making the word “feminism” mean something that is about creating alliances rather than creating opposition.

CA: You’re going to a desert island, and you’re allowed to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you pick?

SB: Popcorn, vodka tonics, and Gail Collins.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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