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The CMSC is honored to invite you to the premier of our play in collaboration with the CSULB CalRep and Theatre Arts Department.
Devised by Andrea Caban And Julie Granata Hunicutt
A California Repertory Production
February 16 – 25, 2018
CSULB Studio Theatre: 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90840
The Dreamers are college students and adults without legal status who were brought into America by their parents as children. The story of their journeys and their fight to call America home is told in this production devised in collaboration with the California-Mexico Studies Center. Featuring testimonials and interviews from DACA students and community members, these stories of personal struggle invite the question: who gets to dream the American Dream?
Andrea Caban is a Voice and Speech professor at CSU Long Beach and the creator of several one woman shows that have been performed all over the country. Julie Granata-Hunicutt is a MFA Acting/Performance Pedagogy student at CSU Long Beach and a faculty member at Steppenwolf West. The Dreamers: Aquí y Allá is the second production in the Devising Democracy Series. Created in partnership with the California-Mexico Studies Center, a non-profit devoted to bringing educational institutions from California and Mexico together.
The California-Mexico Studies Center offered 160 Dreamers the opportunity to return to Mexico and re-enter legally into the U.S., through 6 California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad programs from March 2014 to August 2017. Each participant was required to write a reflection paper on the ethnographic research they conducted on their experience and their family’s origins and migration. Unfortunately, the program was eliminated on September 5, 2017 when the Trump administration announced the rescinding of DACA, and cancellation of the Advance Parole provision that allowed the California-Mexico Studies Center to offer this life-changing experience. This play is based on the human stories written by the participants of this study abroad program, recounting their experience, and their attained identity as Mexicans rooted on both sides of the border:
Somos de Aquí y de Allá ! ~ We are from here and from there!
The California-Mexico Studies Center (CMSC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to research, develop, promote, and establish policies and programs between higher educational institutions and cultural organizations that will enhance the teaching, mobility and exchange of faculty, students, and professionals between California and the U.S. with Mexico and other nations in the Western Hemisphere. California-Mexico Studies Center was founded by California State University Long Beach professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos in 2010, as an extension of the California-Mexico Project that he has led since 1998 at the CSULB Chicano and Latino Studies department.
Schedule of performances:
Thursday, Feb. 15 (Preview) ~ 8:00 pm
Friday, Feb. 16 – Opening Night ~ 8:00 pm
Saturday Feb. 17 ~ 2:00 pm
Saturday Feb. 17 ~ 8:00 pm
Tuesday February 20 ~ 8:00 pm
Wednesday, Feb. 21 ~ 8:00 pm
Thursday, Feb. 22 ~ 7:00 pm (with pre-show conversation)
Friday, Feb. 23 ~ 8:00 pm
Saturday, Feb. 24 – CMSC’s Sponsors Special Performance ~ 2pm
Saturday Feb. 24 ~ 8:00 pm
Sunday, Feb. 25 ~ 2:00 pm
~~~ To buy tickets click here. ~~~
~~~ For additional information visit our website here ~~~
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Undocumented immigrant youth want a Clean Dream Act Now!
Sen. Kamala Harris meets with Dreamers at the Russell Senate Office Building | Photo by: Fernando Hernández
Last week, hundreds of undocumented youth, allies and activists from across the country, including some of our California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program participants, traveled to Washington D.C. to pressure congress to include and pass a Clean Dream Act as part of the short-term spending bill by Friday, January 19th.
Even though the Dream Act was not included in the short-term spending bill, these undocumented activists had an important role in challenging house representatives and senators from both parties to stand up for immigrants and vote no on a spending bill that did not include a clean Dream Act.
These young undocumented immigrants took a week off from work, school, and from their everyday responsibilities to advocate for a clean Dream Act on behalf of immigrants across the country. For Lidieth Arevalo, a DACA recipient from El Salvador and the CMSC’s multimedia & communications director, it was her first time going to Washington D.C. and the first time joining a national movement for immigrant rights.
This is her testimony about her experience:
If there is something I learned after spending a week advocating and mobilizing in Washington D.C., is that we have people power, that there is power in the people united. When we come together as one, as one voice, as one community; we have a lot of power, and if we use that power strategically and diligently, we can create change.
It was powerful to witness how over 80 brothers and sisters from the Jewish community came together in love and defiance for, and with, the immigrant community. Hearing them sing so peacefully and seeing how they held each other strongly until each one of them was arrested for civil disobedience, was incredibly powerful! I felt their love; I felt their energy. It showed me that this movement is about ALL OF US. And that we are ONE, and that, we must rise up as one, in love and in good faith. We must support one another and to build one another for out of resistance comes strength!
I decided to come to Washington because activists before me, fought for and paved the way to make DACA happen, now is my turn, along a new generation of immigrant youth, to advocate for and pass a clean Dream Act now. We can no longer sit and wait, if it is not us making the change, who will do it for us? This is not a time to wait for others to do it, it is a time for us to stand up and get moving! We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
I want to thank United We Dream and the Arizona Dream Act Coalition for giving me the opportunity to be part of history and of change.”
~ Lidieth Arevalo, CMSC Staff
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DACA Student Denied Advance Parole and Watches Father’s Funeral via Cell Phone
Mayra Garibo, an undergraduate student at California State University, Dominguez Hills was accepted into the California-Mexico Dreamers’ Study Abroad Program and scheduled to spend December 2017 conducting ethnographic research on her family history and origins. This unique study abroad opportunity for DACA students was a prayer answered for Mayra who longed to see her father in Mexico.
On September 5th, 2017, when the Trump administration announced its termination of DACA and Advance Parole for DACA recipients, the world was turned upside-down for Mayra. The Winter 2017 California-Mexico Dreamer Study Abroad Program was canceled, leaving Mayra and 75 other students with pending Advance Parole applications in the USCIS processing center.
Last Sunday, Mayra’s father died in Mexico, and Mayra was left with no other choice but to watch her father’s funeral through livestream on her cell phone. Now, Mayra’s grandfather has cancer, and she is attempting one more time, along with the assistance of the California-Mexico Studies Center to request consideration for Advance Parole.
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