A year ago, the Valley lost one of its most active immigrant rights organizers when Hampshire College student and Pioneer Valley Workers Center associate Eduardo Samaniego was deported to Mexico.
He was undocumented and did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program because he had arrived in the U.S. at age 16. I caught up with Samaniego the other day by WhatsApp, and asked him what his life looks like now. (Disclosure: He was a guest speaker in my UMass classes in the past, and I have donated to a charitable organization in lieu of paying him.)
Samaniego now divides his time between his grandparents’ house in his hometown of San Lorenzo, Zacatecas, where he helps with farming, and Mexico City, where he spends his time reading, studying and trying to figure out how to handle the most recent upheaval in his life. He’s deeply ambivalent about continuing his involvement with community organizing.
“I’m very disconnected from any movement now. I use my social media sometimes to highlight some of the issues with immigration. I’ve been attending some of the marches here in Mexico, but I have not been participating in organizing a campaign directly,” Samaniego says. “I feel like I have learned to live a life inside a movement, inside of always taking action on behalf of others, but now it’s like, ‘Whoa. I have all this time!’ And so it’s about creating my own reality now.”
He’s just not sure what that reality will look like.
“What I’m thinking of right now is, what is my identity? How do I identify myself after living in Mexico for 16 years and in the United States for 10 years, where I had life-changing experiences? My head says, ‘You are binational. You are someone who has lived in two different places and you live in both cultures and traditions, but you’re also a deportee, someone who was deported from the place where you had constructed a home, where you had found friends, family, and everything you needed to succeed in life,’” he says.
Leaving behind activism will not come easy to someone who’s known no other path for most of his adult life. Of the three months Samaniego spent in ICE detention after he was arrested in Georgia, one month was spent in solitary confinement which he says he “earned” by forcefully advocating for the rights of his fellow detainees.
“During the detention, what was in my head was, ‘How can I help and support the people that are around me? For example, there was Miguel. He didn’t know how to read the documents that they were giving him every day. He didn’t have a lawyer. He didn’t speak any English. There was Mickey from Ukraine, who also didn’t speak English, but spoke a little bit of Spanish, and who also didn’t have a translator,” Samaniego recounts.
He continues, “What was also happening inside the prison was people were literally eating mold with their food because they didn’t want to complain. So I complained a lot about those things. I complained a lot about someone not having the proper care because their feet were bleeding. I spent a lot of time arguing about what was happening to the people around me. There was something wrong that they needed to fix and they couldn’t, and so they would take me away and put me away from all the issues and all the people that I could help, and that could also help me. Solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane things that we could be doing to someone who goes to prison.”
Whether he’ll ease back into full-time activism or not, the skills he has acquired organizing for immigration justice in America are allowing him to sustain himself in this confusing transition period. He is now consulting for various nonprofit organizations in Mexico who need their materials translated into English and who want to connect with fellow American activists.
Coming back to America is not an option at this time. He has a 10-year ban on entering the country, but he hopes to have that removed.
“I was able to file an appeal saying that the way in which my deportation was carried out was inhumane. I’m hoping that a judge will bring us some justice and say, ‘You know what, your deportation was carried out in a very punitive way. I will bring you back so you can start a process of fixing your immigration status,’” Samaniego says.
He argues he has earned his place in America by giving his community everything he was able to give, by coming out as an undocumented immigrant and “advocating for the rights of others on the streets of Georgia, of Massachusetts, of Washington D.C., and of New York.”
As for who has a right to live in America, his stance is simple: “Nobody can be ‘legal’ on stolen land. Everyone is in the process of earning their place — perhaps not in terms of citizenship as we know it, but simply the right to become a good human being in a place where you want to grow your family, where you want to belong, and where you want to set down your roots.”
I ask him to reflect on his life so far. What has it taught him about himself?
“I learned hard work from my family from a young age,” he says. “In the United States, my experience has been a tragic one, but one that has been made easier by the hard work I learned to do in Mexico. Also, (it was) an experience that has made me more conscious of all the injustices in this world. I think there’s nothing more awakening than going through some hard reality yourself. You can do everything better once you endure challenges.”
Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration and incarceration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu.