ASU's CAMP Scholars program invites prospective students and families to campus for first-ever daylong conference

Arizona has the eighth-largest migrant student population in the U.S. but only about 20 percent make it further than high school. The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at Arizona State University wants to see that deficit become history.

“If not for CAMP, I wouldn’t be here,” computer systems engineering freshman Wendy Lara said matter-of-factly.

Despite the success of its first year, ASU CAMP Scholars director Seline Szkupinski-Quiroga saw an opportunity for the program to reach more of those in need of the critical resources it provides.

“We just thought that this information needs to be getting to them before they get here,” Szkupinski-Quiroga said, “before they’re at the point of applying.”

So Friday at ASU’s Memorial Union, CAMP hosted its first-ever Migrant Family Conference, where junior and senior migrant high school students, along with their parents, spent the day at the university attending college-readiness workshops on topics like how to pay for college, admissions requirements and steps to being successful.

Video by Ken Fagan/ASU Now

Alejandro Villalobos attended with his son Alex, a senior at Queen Creek High School interested in studying software engineering. The elder Villalobos came to the U.S. at the age of 5 and later worked as a member of the United Farm Workers of America. He never attended a four-year university himself, so he was appreciative of the information and resources the conference offered.

“There's programs out there that people don't know about, and if you don't ask, then you're not going to know,” he said. “It's a lot of good information out there that people don't know about, and ASU is doing a good job at it.”

Rogelio Ruiz, student recruitment and family engagement coordinator at the School of Transborder Studies, said “It was important for us to involve the parents as well, because they play a significant role in their child’s education.”

It also presented another challenge: The conference would need to be language-accessible for those parents who speak only Spanish.

Ruiz and Szkupinski-Quiroga worked with Access ASU and other units to create Spanish-language flyers and messaging to help spread the word, and presentations on the day of the conference were given in Spanish.

Access ASU also helped train current CAMP Scholars to share their personal stories with the high school students via SPARKS, a student-led service organization whose members visit K-12 students throughout the Valley to inspire them to pursue and succeed in higher education.

“What SPARKS does is train student ambassadors to tell their stories; how they got to college, the challenges they faced, how they overcame those challenges,” said Lorenzo Chavez, director of student and community initiatives at Access ASU.

“We find that the most impact we have is when we connect students with ‘near-peers,’ or individuals with similar backgrounds who they can look up to. Especially high school students, where if it’s not quick and easy, sometimes it’s hard to keep them engaged.”

The migrant high school students who attended Friday’s conference left the university that day with not just inspirational stories but having made actual progress toward becoming an ASU student. Part of the day’s activities included beginning the process of filling out their FAFSA and ASU admissions forms.

Others echoed Lara's experience with CAMP: Fellow ASU freshman and CAMP Scholar Martin Herrera said without CAMP, he’d be spinning his wheels at a community college. Sandra Savilla said without CAMP, her son Luis would probably be working for minimum wage somewhere like McDonald’s.

Instead, they’re pursuing four-year degrees at the nation’s most innovative public research university.

Savilla said she hopes her son, a freshman at ASU, can be an inspiration to his younger brother, a junior in high school. 

“Every time I bring him (Luis) here, I leave happy,” she said in Spanish. “Not sad because I am leaving him here — on the contrary, because I know my son will do great things here.”

In the small border town where she grew up, Nancy Godoy’s library lacked adequate services for Latinos and the Spanish-speaking community, so it wasn’t until she was an adult that she began to learn of the extensive history and influence of Latinos in Arizona.

Now an archivist at ASU Library, Godoy has worked tirelessly to grow its Chicano Research Collection and expand the library’s reach to the Latino community through public outreach that includes educational workshops on preservation of historic materials.

In recognition of that work, Godoy and her colleague Lorrie McAllister were recently awarded a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year project designed to build and expand community-driven collections, in an effort to preserve and improve Arizona’s archives and give voice to historically marginalized communities.

“The grant will allow us to continue our work with the Latino community and expand our reach to other historically marginalized communities,” Godoy said. “Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and the LGBT community share a collective memory and this history needs to be preserved collectively.”

Under her leadership, the project — titled “Engaging, Educating, and Empowering: Developing Community-Driven Archival Collections” — will implement Archives and Preservation Workshops and Digitization and Oral History Days, as well as digitize and make publicly accessible existing archival collections from ASU Library’s Chicano/a Research Collection and Greater Arizona Collection.

In 2012, the Arizona Archives Matrix Project, a statewide initiative to gather data about local archives, identified several historically marginalized communities in Arizona, including LGBT, Asian-American, African-American and the Latino community, which makes up 30 percent of Arizona’s population but is represented in less than 2 percent of known archival collections.

ASU Now sat down with Godoy to get a more candid take on her views about preserving the history of marginalized communities.

Nancy Godoy talks about various items in the Chicano Research Collection at ASU Library. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU Now

Question: How did you get into archival work?

Answer: I’ve worked in libraries and archives throughout the state as a student and professional since 2003. I grew up in Yuma, Arizona, and come from a farmworker background. My hometown, at that point in time, didn’t provide adequate library services for Latinos or the Spanish-speaking community so I wasn’t exposed to this world until I was an adult. I received my bachelor’s in history at Northern Arizona University and master’s in library science at University of Arizona. Inspired by Chicano/a history and archival internships, I realized that knowledge transforms lives and everyone should have access to information. Today, as the archivist of the Chicano/a Research Collection at ASU Library, I have dedicated my career to addressing inequities and discrimination within the archive and library field. 

Q: What is unique about the work you do for ASU?

A: I love to introduce people to archives, make collections accessible and see communities interact with history. I jokingly refer to this feeling as my “archive glow.” Throughout my career, I have intentionally embedded myself into local communities in order to build the relationships and trust needed to add diverse voices to the archival record. I’ve also used social media, bilingual exhibits and marketing materials, and workshops to reach a larger audience.

Q: Why is this work important?

A: It’s important to note that the Latino community is not fairly represented in mainstream media and history. When we share local history and collections with the public, it allows marginalized communities to reflect and see themselves in a positive way. Multiple perspectives and narratives are needed in order to get an accurate understanding of Arizona history. Marginalized communities have the right to preserve their own archives and should feel invested in ongoing efforts to preserve a more complete representation of local history.

Q: What are some of your favorite items in the collections at ASU Library?

A: I’ve had my dream job the last six years. Each day I come into work, I find something amazing, so it’s not easy to pick one collection or item. The Chicano/a Research Collection is Arizona’s largest repository for Latino history, so we have material on different subjects (civil rights, politics, education, labor, culture and art). Since 1970, we’ve acquired a distinguished collection of manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, ephemera and artifacts. For example, we have the Ocampo Family Papers and Photographs, which highlight the life and customs of a Latino family from 1863 to the present. It’s important to remember that Latinos have deep roots in Arizona and helped build the state’s economy in the mines, fields and ranches.

Q: Do you have any tips for people looking to preserve family historical items? 

Immigration Law and Policy Clinic addresses vacuum in Arizona through collaboration

Lawyers are often forced to deal with mixed families, deportations, conflicting laws and personal issues that aren’t easily categorized.

Yet the director of Arizona State University's Immigration Law and Policy Clinic has a positive outlook on the challenges of the field.

“I often say I’m in the business of making lemonade,” said Evelyn Cruz, founder and director of the clinic. “You cannot be a pessimist if you do immigration.”

Housed in ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law since 2006, the clinic seeks to address the current vacuum of immigration services in Arizona. It does so by collaborating with nonprofits, governmental agencies, other ASU departments, community advocates and funders to identify and develop projects that address Arizona’s immigration challenges.

According to Cruz, the state has unique and big challenges in this arena.

“Arizona is where California was about 20 years ago, and they’re still not on the other side yet,” Cruz said. “What makes Arizona a lightning rod is we have this Wild West mentality of ‘We’ll deal with our own problems,’ and that has led to lawsuits.”

The problems are plentiful: Arizona is home to more than 914,000 foreign-born residents with about a third lacking immigration status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Most immigrants live in what demographers called mixed families, where some family members are citizens while others are either permanent lawful residents or lack immigration status.

The complexity of immigrant families and language barriers makes it difficult for them to navigate public services and the immigration process, often leaving families unable to obtain basic information and legal representation.

Cruz said immigration laws are constantly in flux and have a profoundly disruptive effect on peoples’ lives. Her approach is not to try fix immigration laws but to work within the system to help solve problems.

“I never tell my students what’s wrong with the system,” Cruz said. “I just tell them, ‘This is what we’ve got, this is how it works, and this is how this person ended up here. What can be done to help?'”

Cruz is quick to point out that the clinic is a teaching and learning environment, not a legal service. Therefore, the clinic is there to help students become ethical and professional lawyers, not to maximize representation of clients. As such, the clinic picks only a handful of students each semester and handles a few select cases, mostly representing immigrant children in foster care.

Students under Cruz’s tutelage learn administrative court trial techniques and procedures; provide immigration law advice at community outreach events; and draft motions, briefs, legal correspondence, closing statements and direct examination questions. The latter is mostly achieved through moot-court exercises Cruz performs three times a week inside the J. Grant Woods courtroom in the Beus Center for Law and Society on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus.

“These are skills the students can use in the real world once they graduate," Cruz said. “So while the short-term impact of a semester’s caseload is small, the lasting skills the students leave with means that they will be a force multiplier in the future.”

Sitting behind a wooden bench and sporting a black judge’s robe, Cruz held a moot-court exercise Sept. 13 with four of her students. The two-hour exercise covered decorum, legal procedures and maneuvers, and demonstrated how to plead and respond in a courtroom. For law student Haia Abdel, it was both a learning — and failing — opportunity.

“It was an enlightening experience because it made me realize I wasn’t really prepared,” said Abdel, whose father emigrated from Palestine in the 1980s. “But I’d rather fumble in front of my professor and colleagues than in front of attorneys and judges because the law community is very small. You never want to be that person who messes up and they end up talking about you.”

What motivates Daniel Chrisney, a third-year law student, are his wife’s family from Mexico and his “Dreamer” friends, who live in fear regarding their immigration status.

“It’s the everyday lack of certainty that motivates me to want to do this work,” he said. “To wake up every day in a country where you’ve decided to make your life, that’s something I can’t fathom. It must be sheer mental torture.”

Cruz said immigration law will continue moving in the same direction until it “addresses the human context and the realities of life.” She added, what is politically palpable is often what becomes law, not “what is economically, socially and culturally needed.”

“Inefficiencies have been created from a desire to become more tough, but it’s also become more bureaucratic,” Cruz said. “So, we’ll just keep making lemonade.”

Making lemonade often means trying to make life a little sweeter for those who can’t legally fend for themselves — mostly immigrant children.

Outside the class, students are asked to dedicate 135 hours during the semester to representing children in immigration court, handling cases for immigrant children in foster care and partaking in a community outreach project.

Not only is the clinic a teaching model for students, it’s catching on in other parts of the world. Cruz is setting up clinics in Mexico and Pakistan, having recently hosted more than 15 scholars from Mexico.

“We’re starting to plant seeds in other countries, and we should share our knowledge with other teachers,” Cruz said.

Cruz said the clinic teaches many things, but most importantly, that the law should be humane.

“The law is a service,” Cruz said. “As a law school that is embedded in this community, part of our goal is to instill in our students that they possess a wonderful skill to serve others.”

Historical treasures help tell the story of Mexican-Americans in Arizona; collections find a welcome home at ASU Library

“I didn’t want to open them until they had a good home,” she said.

•••

Laura Franco French surveyed the items laid out before her. A traditional "china poblana"-style Mexican skirt, shimmering with hundreds of painstakingly sewn sequins; a threadbare flag, the vibrant red, green and white stripes now faded and yellowed; a copy of the Spanish-language Phoenix newspaper El Sol, which stopped production in the 1980s. All of it Franco French found stowed away in her parents’ home after they’d passed.

“My mom saved everything,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me to keep all of this.”

•••

All of that and many more of the family treasures Hinojosa DeLugan and Franco French hold dear have finally found a home befitting their historical significance, among the archives in ASU Library’s Chicano/a Research Collection. Both women will be honored for their contributions at a public ceremony at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, in ASU’s Hayden Library on the Tempe campus.

“Everything [in their collections] is of historic importance because everything relates to the building of what we now call the Mexican community of Phoenix,” former ASU archivist Christine Marin said. Though now retired, Marin helped facilitate their donations.

“If we want to look at the history of Mexicanos, or Mexicans in Phoenix, we have to look at families, their contributions, their professions, the things that they did to bring people together.”

ASU Library archivist and curator of the Chicano/a Research Collection Nancy Godoy has spent over a year processing, preserving and making the items donated from the Hinojosa and Franco French families publicly available via ASU Library's online portal.

“Family collections, for me, personally, are very important because they tell so many different stories,” she said. “So that’s priority for us, to make these collections accessible to the community.”

Video by Deanna Dent/ASU Now

Godoy is an expert in the art of preservation. Photos are placed in special Mylar sheets, and items like clothing and newspapers are placed in acid-free boxes and folders.

“This material will be here probably longer than most of us,” Godoy said, referring to a group of university staff gathered to receive the latest donation from Franco French. “It has a life expectancy of 50 to 100 years if you properly monitor the material.”

That’s great news to Franco French and Hinojosa DeLugan. It’s clear they spent a lot of time considering whether to part with their family heirlooms, and they’re glad to know the items will be available for students, researchers and the public for years to come.

“I’m so proud of the legacy of Mexican-Americans in Arizona that I wanted [these items] to be accessible to everyone and to have people honor the rich heritage that we have,” Franco French said.

Their stories are different yet the same.

Hinojosa

Musician Fidencio Garcia Hinojosa (second from left) was known for popularizing jarocho music in the Phoenix area during the middle of the 20th century. This photo of him and his bandmates is part of the collection of memorabilita and family heirlooms being donated by his daughter to the Chicano/a Research Collection at ASU's Hayden Library.

Hinojosa DeLugan is the daughter of beloved Veracruz-born musician Fidencio Garcia Hinojosa, known for popularizing jarocho music in the Phoenix area. She describes jarocho as “a fusion of Afro-Cuban, indigenous and true Spanish music,” usually accompanied by zapateado, hard-heeled dancing that acts as additional instrumentation to keep the beat.

Ritchie Valens' 1958 smash hit “La Bamba” is probably the most well-known example of the style, she said.

Garcia Hinojosa crossed the border from Mexico into Texas as a young teen in the 1940s seeking a better life after playing the guitar in a traveling circus. He adopted the name Hinojosa from the migrant worker family that took him in there. Before that, he would spend his days waiting for tourists to throw money into the Rio Grande and dive into the river to collect it as a means of survival.

Eventually, Garcia Hinojosa made his way to Phoenix, where he continued playing music. At one point, he was approached by a group of businessmen who were opening a restaurant near Scottsdale and McDowell Roads. They wanted a house band and asked him to be the leader of a group.

One of the items Hinojosa DeLugan donated is a document from the U.S. Department of Immigration, which the businessmen petitioned to bring the other members of the group in from Mexico. It states that they were the only group of traditional jarocho musicians in existence in the U.S.

“This is a unique music history because it’s not just music in general, it’s jarocho music,” said Hinojosa DeLugan, a singer herself. “Most people, when they think of Mexican music, they automatically think of mariachi, the big hat, the charro outfit. That’s kind of the icon of Mexican music. … So I thought it would be good for Arizona to remember this.”

“A true jarocho has a way of singing their words,” she said. “It’s very different than what we know as colloquial Spanish. Even though I had never heard [my father] speak that way, it took him no time at all to go into singing his words.”

“It was nice to learn about where my father was from, and his people,” said Hinojosa DeLugan, who was born in Phoenix.

Garcia Hinojosa performed all over the Valley, at large public events like the Fiestas Patrias, Mexican Independence Day celebrations, as well as small, intimate gatherings. Sometimes, like when he played for the former Gov. Raul Castro’s campaign events, his daughter would accompany him.

“To be able to play the music that was so unique. … For the Hispanic culture, it’s part of what brings us together as a people, as a tribe, as a clan,” Hinojosa DeLugan said.

As Fidencio Garcia Hinojosa went through the naturalization process, he meticulously saved every document: his naturalization papers, a copy of the Pledge of Allegiance, a novelty American flag. All of those items are now a part of the collection at Hayden Library.

She also remembers times in the Las Milpas home gathered around the table with her family after dinner, when her father would study to become a U.S. citizen.

“He’d study everything. Geography, everything to do with the U.S.,” she said.

As Garcia Hinojosa went through the naturalization process, he meticulously saved every document: his naturalization papers, a copy of the Pledge of Allegiance, a novelty American flag. All of those items are now a part of the collection at Hayden Library.

“To find all [of that] intact just showed me how much it meant to him” to be an American citizen, Hinojosa DeLugan said.

Her father also studied Mexican songbooks. He’d never spent a day in school and didn’t know how to read or write Spanish or English, so that was how he learned, she said. The songbooks also told the history of the music and what inspired it. Before he passed, he put all of them in a big, brown suitcase and gave them to his daughter.

“I opened it up, and there were 80-plus songbooks,” Hinojosa DeLugan said. They dated from the late 1940s through the 1990s. She has since added several more to the collection, dating as far back as 1914.

“These songbooks are a tremendous wealth to so many people,” she said, because they tell the story of the history of Mexico through lyrics.

And then there are the letters, nearly a decade's worth. Letters from her father to his family, from his family to her father. After he left Mexico, he only ever saw them once, for a brief visit in the 1970s. Hinojosa DeLugan had reservations about including the letters in the collection because they were so personal. She tells of reading her grandmother’s words and feeling the “angst, sadness and loneliness.”

After some reflection, she decided to include them “specifically because my father was just like so many other people. ... He was an immigrant. And so many immigrants face the exact same thing. The struggles of the loss of their families, the desire to want to be with them and they can’t. The desire to want to help and they can’t. … I want people to know that this is a true story for so many immigrants.

“This is the face of an immigrant who came [to the U.S.] … and achieved his goal [of becoming a citizen], and the truth of what it meant to him to be so proud of that.”

Hinojosa DeLugan said she wants people to know her father’s story because it shows that “you can love where you came from, you can love the culture, which he did, he was passionate about it, his identity was being a jarocho musician. You can have that, but you don’t have to lose it to become a U.S. citizen.”

“His life was straddling both borders,” she said. “We lived, breathed and sang Mexico, spoke Spanish, ate Mexican food, danced Mexican dances, sang songs from Veracruz. Yet, just as important was, ‘Don’t forget, it’s time to vote! This is your duty as a citizen.’”

She still performs with her band, Rhythm Express, two or three times a month at various spots around Phoenix. And she still thinks of her father every time.

“He was so much of what became my identity as a human being,” she said. “To this day, when I perform songs, I stand there singing and I’m thinking of my dad, of the songs we used to sing together.

“I’ll always be his jarochita.”

Franco French

An image of the Fiestas Patrias in Phoenix from the Franco French family collection being donated to the ASU Library. Laura Franco French's grandparents brought to Phoenix the tradition of Fiestas Patrias “queens,” a custom at the celebrations in Mexico.

Laura Franco French never met her grandparents but, she said, “It was as though I did because my mom kept them alive always” through stories and pieces of the past she kept.

“I remember my mom telling me how [my grandmother] found out about some fieldworkers who were in freezing conditions,” Franco French said. “So she organized the community to go out and get clothes, and used the medium of journalism to get that message out.”

It was hard enough at that time being a woman, but being a minority woman and doing all that she did, Franco French said, was brave and noteworthy.

Her grandfather also wrote for El Sol and served as the publisher. Copies of the newspaper are very hard to find nowadays because not many people saved them, and libraries at the time didn’t subscribe to Spanish-language newspapers. The ones Franco French was able to donate will help researchers looking for firsthand accounts of Mexican-American life in Arizona during the 1930s through 1980s, when El Sol was in production.

“Times were really difficult in the 1930s for Mexicans,” Franco French said. “It was a very segregated community, and people fought very hard to end that. So for people who didn’t grow up with that, we need to know that others fought for us and paved the way, and we have to honor that.”