Immigration and Women This Week: Mixed Emotions

Ed. note: This is a guest post by Juliana Britto Schwartz. By day, Juliana is a student at University of California, Santa Cruz. By night, she is a Latina feminist blogger at Julianabritto.com, where she writes about reproductive health justice, immigration, and feminist movements in Latin America.

In case you missed it, the news on what it was like to be an immigrant woman this week:

Something to Inspire You

Yesterday the Rally for Citizenship marched on the Capitol in Washington D.C., drawing thousands of protesters and calling for comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. The rally had a diverse array of participants: organizations for Arab immigrants, African immigrants, allies and undocumented as well.

Something To Make You Angry:

The new immigration reform bill might exclude newly documented citizens from Obamacare, leaving them with extremely limited healthcare options. This would cast them as only partial citizens, discrimination which Latinas are already familiar with, considering that 45% of Latinas do not have health insurance.

The same bill is unlikely to include LGBTQ couples within family reunification visas, meaning that certain families continue to be shattered through the immigration and detention system.

Something To Make You Puke in Your Mouth:

Mexican Barbie Comes with a Passport. Because you know, most Mexicans are “illegal” and Mattel wanted to be sure to point out that Mexican Barbie is a “good” immigrant.

Something to Make You Laugh

 This lady knows how to win her way into conservative hearts.

 Something to Make You Cry

This music video, “The Ice” speaks to the constant fear of deportation that so many immigrants live with each day, unsure if they whether they will wake up with their loved ones or not. The chorus goes “ICE is loose in the streets, we never know when it will be our turn.”

The actors in the video are almost all undocumented themselves, and two of them (Erika Andiola and Isaac Barrera) are prominent immigrant rights activists.

Something To Do About All This Sh*t

 Want to help in the push for humane immigration reform? Change.org has got some great petitions going that you can support!

Join the conversation about the rights of undocumented women by tweeting #4immigrantwomen.