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Harsh Life Revealed in Memoir Gives Way to Growth: Ruth Marimo Comes Out of Silence to Assert Her Voice

February 14, 2013 1 comment

The provocative cover of Ruth Marimo’s 2012 memoir, Freedom of An Illegal Immigrant, pictures her sitting nude, her legs drawn up to her chest and her arms crossed just below her knees, a hood covering her face and a GPS tracking device affixed, like a shackle, to one ankle.  It’s a powerful and unsettling image of bondage.  Beyond the metaphor and symbology, the image represents the reality that was Marimo’s life as an orphaned and undocumented immigrant from Zimbabwe who suffered through an abusive marriage with a man that did produce two beautiful children but that nearly cost her her life and her freedom.  Amidst all of that, she discovered and embraced her sexual identity as a lesbian.  As she describes in the article that follows, she went through hell and back before finding liberation and the life story she began writing in jail became a successful self-published memoir that’s sparked new opportunties for her as an author and inspirational speaker. My profile of Marimo will appear in a coming issue of The Reader (www.thereader.com).

 

 

 

 

Harsh Life Revealed in Memoir Gives Way to Growth: Ruth Marimo Comes Out of Silence to Assert Her Voice

©by Leo Adam Biga

Soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Four years ago Marimo sat in the Cass County Jail contemplating suicide. The mother of two and then-undocumented immigrant from Zimbabwe, Africa was there because her estranged husband, whom she says verbally and physically abused her, reported her to authorities.

In the space of 30 days behind bars she seemingly lost everything. Her children, her home, her job, her will to live. She feared deportation and never seeing her kids again. It was all too much for a woman whose mother committed suicide when Marimo was 5 and whose only sibling died as a toddler. With things at their darkest Marimo began writing. Amid tears of despair she put her story down with a pen on the back of jail activity forms. She filled up dozens of sheets.

“I just kept writing and the pages kept adding up,” she says. “It was almost like something pushed all of these words out of me.”

Flash forward to today, when Marimo’s 2012 memoir Freedom of An Illegal Immigrant is a self-published success story that’s propelled a new career as an author and inspirational speaker. Marimo, who fought court battles to win sole custody of her children, is recently returned from her most prestigious speaking appearance yet, a Feb. 8 address for the IvyQ Conference at Yale University. The gathering of students and scholars from all the Ivy League schools seeks to empower young people in owning their sexual identities.

Marimo, who came out as a lesbian in the aftermath of her failed marriage, is a LGBT activist often called on to speak at equal rights rallies. She’s also a popular spoken word artist at Verbal Gumbo, where a poem of hers she performs there, “Who Am I?,  asserts her complex identity.

She next shares her momentous personal journey Feb. 20 in the Nebraska Room of the Milo Bail Student Center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her Noon talk is free. A Q&A follows and Marimo will also sign copies of her book.

 

 

Ruth Marimo

 

 

The happy, confident woman who addresses audiences these days would not exist, she says, without the crucible of her tragedies and traumas.

“Those are the things that helped me become the person I am today. Even in those times I want to feel sorry for myself there’s so much I am grateful for.”

The memory of her past struggles, she says, “is what pushes me to speak, to be passionate, to even want better for my kids,” adding, “That’s where I think my drive, my activism comes from,. Everything I’m doing now is very purposeful because I can’t forget who’ve I’ve been and what I’ve been through.”

She’s pleased that her story inspires others. “I’ve heard from people all over the world saying that my story’s touched them.” If more women would leave abusive relationships because of her story she’d be pleased but she despairs most will choose to stay put. She empathizes.

“I think for a long time I was that person that stuck around in the wrong relationship.

I had this husband, I had these two beautiful kids, but I was so lonely and miserable. I knew I was in the wrong marriage, an abusive marriage. He would choke me and then we would be out holding hands and everybody would see this totally different picture. There are so many people stuck in abusive relationships and they don’t have the courage to take the next step. They don’t have that drive to be willing to get out and risk everything.

“Of course, there’s a thousand reasons why you stay. I could have easily stayed in my marriage but it would not have changed anything. Even though I went to hell and back and lost everything, the peace of mind I have to be able to freely express myself is so much worth it.”

She shutters to think how different her life would be if she hadn’t left the marriage.

“You wouldn’t know this Ruth, I wouldn’t have written a book, I would still have been stuck in that mundane, everyday life of pleasing the world and not pleasing myself and not facing who I really am.”

Freedom is in the title of her book for a reason.

“It was a very purposeful naming. For me it refers to the freedom of me actually accepting and owning up to who I am – an undocumented, gay, African woman

who was orphaned. All this stuff I was trying to hide is who I am.

“We have all of these layers of who we and society thinks we should be or how we should act. A very small number of people are lucky enough to strip away those layers at some point and reveal for themselves who they really are. That I think is where the freedom was coming from.”

Life is good for Marimo now. She’s content raising her kids. She has financial security from the cleaning business she owns and operates. She’s fulfilled by her speaking gigs and writing projects, including completed manuscripts for a children’s book entitled But What is Africa Really Like?, a teen book of African folk tales, a poetry volume and an adult erotica novel. Omaha artist Gerard Pefung is illustrating the children’s book. She eagerly awaits getting her Green Card so that she can travel abroad and participate in the international seminars she’s invited to.

One day she fully expects to return to Africa, but she says it will need to be cautiously as her gay and women’s activism makes her a target there. Nothing though will get her to remain silent again.

“Peace of mind and inner happiness I’ve discovered are more important than anything,” she says. “To me, if you’re unhappy you’re essentially dying a slow death and you’re the only one that knows it.”

 

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Categories: Authors/Literature, Books, Feminism, Freedom of An Illegal Immigrant, Immigration, Poetry/Spoken Word, Ruth Marimo, Social Justice, Writing Tags: , , , ,

Project Improve Aims to Make the Best of a Bad Situation with Illegal Immigrant Detainees

July 24, 2012 1 comment

 

No matter how you feel about the issue of illegal immigration in the U.S. you have to sympathize with parents whose only crime is living here without proper documentation who have the misfortune of being arrested and then detained in jail, all while awaiting deportation, and in the meantime finding themselves separated from family, including children.  We’re not talking about identity theives.  We’re talking about people holding down jobs and raising families and abiding by laws except for that murky no-man’s land called a border they breeched.  For years the nation looked the other way at what was essentially an open border but now it’s intent on closing that border and throwing back over it anyone who’s managed to cross it illegally, even those who’ve made productive lives for themselves and their families in America.  It’s cruel and unusual punishment that only adds to social disruption and incurs extra costs without really solving anything.  It’s purely a power play by the haves against the have-nots.  This is a story about a small program through the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha that offers Spanish-speaking detainees some educational support services during their incarceration and that tries to provide a platform for parents to connect with their children.

 

 

 

 

 

Project Improve Aims to Make the Best of a Bad Situation with Illegal Immigrant Detainees

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in El Perico

 

With immigration enforcement a national priority, jails are filled with individuals whose only crime is being in the U.S. illegally.

Out of sight, out of mind behind bars these civil offenders risk being lumped in with the habitually criminalized. Advocates say it’s all too easy to forget many detainees have been law-abiding, gainfully-employed residents. Many are parents. Once arrested and jailed they face separation from loved ones and home.

Being severed from family while the legal process drags on poses challenges the criminal justice and penal system are not necessarily well prepared to address without expert intervention.

With no programs serving its growing population of Spanish-speaking detainees, Douglas County Department of Correction officials asked the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for help in early 2009. OLLAS met with staff and detainees as a first step in creating a detainee-centered program.

Claudia Garcia, a UNO assistant professor of foreign languages, says she and university colleagues attended jail orientation and conducted two focus-groups with detainees in spring 2009 in order to assess concerns and needs.

“The situation of women, many terribly depressed because of being separated from their young children, was especially pressing for some jail authorities, who were sympathetic to these detainees’ situation,” says Garcia.

Beginning in the summer of 2009 OLLAS faculty launched Project Improve as a community service initiative at the Douglas County Correctional Center, 710 South 17th Street. The effort is focused on helping detainees discuss their predicament, connect with family and become empowered through education. The intent is to provide clients a non-punitive advocacy and support outlet.

Faculty engage detainees in writing, reading and discussion activities designed to promote introspection and self-expression. Garcia says on average 16 men and 11 women participate per session.

“Personally, what strikes me the most about the Latino detainees, especially the women, is their strength and good attitude, and also their ability to give each other support,” Garcia says. “I think we provide a space that allows them to reflect, process and articulate their personal journeys.”

OLLAS director Lourdes Gouevia says, “The inmates express their stories through various media and record messages and stories for their children.” UNO assistant professor of education Evangelina “Gigi” Brignoni  says participants appreciate the opportunity to respectfully own their own experience: “This is a time for them to have an avenue to be themselves. They’ve told us we treat them with dignity, we treat them like human beings, we don’t look at them like they’re incarcerated.”

The experience has made an impression on the academics.

“It’s been a very intense and enriching learning process,” says Garcia, adding that it’s “one thing is to have an intellectual knowledge” of these issues “but it’s very different to talk, interact and become emotionally affected by the individuals going through these hard times. For me, the big eye-opener is the definition of criminal. Many detainees we work with have violated immigration law, but they are certainly not dangerous criminals. Most are just mothers and fathers who have tried their best to give their families a better life, and have been working without proper documentation.

“Most who come to our sessions are really engaged in a process of self-growth, using this time in jail to re-visit their own lives. They appreciate the opportunity to learn and be better people when they get out. It’s really a very moving experience.”

Brignoni says “it saddens us” that most of the detainees are presumably awaiting deportation. “We get a new group all the time because they don’t stay there.”

After a prolonged break, the project is presuming monthly sessions in December,

Garcia is impressed by DCDC’s embrace of Project Improve.

“It’s been a very welcoming institution. DCDC understands the importance of educational and support programs for their detainee population, and are very proud to have a diversity of volunteers go there and share time and knowledge with the detainees. The officers in charge of educational programs are very helpful and very clear.”

Related articles
Categories: Crime, Education, Immigration, Latino/Hispanic, OLLAS (Office of Latino and Latin American Studies), Social Justice, UNO (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Writing Tags: , , , , , ,

Justice for Our Neighbors: Treating the Immigrant as Neighbor

July 22, 2012 Leave a comment

 

As long as immigrants are viewed as The Other and thus seen as apart from rather than as a part of there will be a need for programs like Justice for Our Neighbors, a faith-based response to the extra challenges immigrants face in a nation that’s not always immigrant-friendly despite being built by immigrants.  This is a story about some of the efforts of the Justice for Our Neighbors-Nebraska office led by Emiliano Lerda.

 

©tulipanagroup.com

 

 

Justice for Our Neighbors: Treating the Immigrant as Neighbor

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published iin El Perico

 

Welcoming the stranger in our midst is the mandate of Justice for Our Neighbors-Nebraska, a small nonprofit that holds monthly clinics for low income immigrants in need of legal counsel. The organization’s largely new staff held a March 25 open house.

The clinics, offered in both Omaha and Columbus Neb., provide a friendly, safe haven for individuals, couples and families stressed by uncertain legal status. For some, it may be their only recourse to try and avoid deportation. Potential complications are many. Cases can drag on for years.

Situations in which there’s abuse, illness, or poverty present, for example, make the need for action more urgent.

JFON staff offer free legal services, education and advocacy to help guide clients through the complex immigration maze. Its in-house attorney and legal assistants provide consultation. Referrals are made to community service providers as needed to address health care or employment or economic issues, for example.

Volunteers facilitate the clinics and extend the welcome mat by variously conducting the intake process, acting as interpreters, supervising children and serving food.

The agency’s part of the national Justice for Our Neighbors network the United Methodist Church on Relief Committee launched in 1999 in response to ever more complicated and stringent immigration laws. JFON clinics operate cooperatively with local churches. The Omaha clinic’s held at Grace United Methodist Church, 2418 E St., next door to the JFON-Nebraska office, 2414 E St.

The Nebraska chapter’s recently undergone a major turnover. Emiliano Lerda came on as JFON-Nebraska executive director in January. Charles “Shane” Ellison joined as lead attorney in February. The other two full-time staffers are also relatively new — office manager/legal assistant Darling Handlos and paralegal Shaun Downey.

Originally from Argentina, Lerda, 30, knows the immigrant experience first-hand. Now a U.S, citizen, he was drawn to America’s Midwest because its agricultural environment reminded him of his native Cordoba province. At the University of Northern Iowa he became the first international student elected student body president. After obtaining his law degree from Drake Law School he worked as government relations manager for the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

“When I got here what really grabbed me is the fact this community here has very similar values to the community I grew up in,” he says. “I love working with farmers and I hope at some point in the future I will have the chance again to work with farmers.”

He says JFON-Nebraska allows him to remain in the Midwest while serving the community of newcomers he feels a deep connection to.

“I’m an immigrant myself. I went through the process. I know how difficult it is. I received a lot in life through people that helped me without any self-interest. For years now I have been passionate about giving back to the community. I could not ignore the needs of people that are here in similar shoes that I wore, that are new to this community, that are far away from their family and friends.

“God gave me the talents and skills and the background, and so I thought it was a great fit for me to continue to make a difference by helping people that want to be a part of this community, that want to contribute to this community but cannot because their illegal status is stopping them.”

 

 

 

Lerda

Emiliano Lerda

 

 

 

At its core the JFON-Nebraska mission is to help undocumented immigrants comply with the law and become legal residents, says Lerda.

“Some people may be living in constant fear because their status is not legal,” he says.

Many are separated from family members.

Not everyone has a case though, Lerda stresses.

“Immigration provides very few doors for people to come through, and if you don’t fit within those doors, I don’t care how hard a worker you are or how much you want to do the right thing, you’re just not going to be able to.”

Limited staffing restricts the number of clients served per clinic to 10. Clients are seen on an appointment-only basis.

Lerda’s frustrated that the demand for immigration legal services far outstrips JFON resources. However, JFON does refer to two sister agencies — Catholic Charities and Lutheran Family Services — that provide similar services at a nominal fee.

He says his agency is currently cleaning out a large backlog of old cases to better focus on new cases. JFON annually handles 300 cases. By year’s end he hopes to pass the bar or receive accreditation as an immigration law attorney.

The polarizing issue of immigration, he says, is best addressed by education, including JFON-Nebraska workshops for service providers and others in the community. To him, educating people about the benefits of being legal is both practical and neighborly.

“If we don’t help people that can be helped to be here legally, so they can go to school and they can make a contribution economically or civically, then I think I’m failing to do my part. That’s why I feel like God gave me this opportunity and I have to do it.”

For a clinic appointment, call 402-898-1349 the first day of the month.

 

Related articles
Categories: Immigration, Justice for Our Neighbors, Latino/Hispanic, Law, Omaha Grace United Methodist Church, Social Justice, South Omaha, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

Artist Claudia Alvarez’s New Exhibition Considers Immigration

March 23, 2012 3 comments

I met and profiled artist Terry Rosenberg a few years ago but I never got to meet his life partner and fellow artist, Claudia Alvarez, until quite recently.  Years apart, each came to Omaha for a Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts residency – he in 1982 and she in 2005 – and each found the city to be a nurturing place for their work.  Terry made Omaha his second home, commuting between here and New York City.  Then Claudia came and the two found each other.  They reside in New York City now but keep a place in the Old Market in Omaha and get back enough to maintain a strong presence here.  My profile of Claudia below keys off a new exhibit of her work dealing with immigration.  She and Terry are among the many artists and creatives from elsewhere who have infused Omaha with talent and energy.  You can find my profile of Terry and his work on this blog as well.  You’ll also find a story I did on the Bemis Center.  Look for a coming depth story on Bemis founders Ree (Schonlau) Kaneko and her superstar artist husband Jun Kaneko and a much shorter, sampler story about the Kanekos.  Their “Open Space for Your Mind” organization, KANEKO, and the multimedia Portals project that premiered there is the subject of yet another story.

 

 

 

 

Artist Claudia Alvarez’s New Exhibition Considers Immigration

©by Leo Adam Biga

Published in El Perico

For years Claudia Alvarez has created ceramic figures of beleaguered children as a metaphor for exploring social themes of poverty and violence. For a new solo exhibition in Omaha she uses childlike images to examine the experience of immigration and migration she knows first-hand..

The Monterrey, Mexico native came to the States at age 3 with her mother and siblings. Her father preceded the family to America. She grew up in Calif., where she earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of California Davis and her master’s from California College of Arts. Working as an ambulance driver for UC Davis Medical Center, she transported seriously ill children and seniors,, who in turn inspired her ceramic figures that look old and tired, yet resilient.

A Bemis Center for Contemporary Art residency brought her to Omaha in 2005, where she met her life partner, artist Terry Rosenberg. The couple now reside in New York but they retain deep ties to Omaha, where they’ve been two of the brightest lights on the local art scene.

“We still have a place here in the Old Market and we come quite a bit and work here. There’s something about Omaha that brings us back,” says Alvarez, which is why she readily accepted an invitation to show her work at the new Gallery of Art and Design at Metropolitan Community College’s Elkhorn Valley Campus, 204th and West Dodge Road. Admission is free.

Her History of Immigration runs through April 9 and is part of a Metro residency she did. She’s previously exhibited at the Bemis and El Museo Latino in Omaha, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln and the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney.

“When I came to the Bemis Center it just dramatically changed my life. For the first time I had an infrastructure that really supported my work,” says Alvarez. “It was a life changing experience. Before that I was teaching at a university and when I got accepted by the Bemis I quit my job. I thought I would be staying three-four months and then move on. But I met Terry and that was it. Everything kind of worked out.”

©from Claudia Alvarez’s History of Immigration 

 

 

Living in New York and having strong connections to Nebraska and California makes Alvarez bicoastal and intercoastal. As a Mexico native with a great curiosity for the world, she’s a global citizen. She exhibits widely. She did a recent residency in Puerto Vallarta. Other residencies have taken her to France, Switzerland and China. She has shows opening in Mexico City, San Diego, Brooklyn and Miami.

Residing in the cultural melting pot of New York and being so well-traveled gives her a broader view of immigration as a universal human experience. Her Omaha exhibition uses sculpted children’s shoes and waif-like immigrant figures along with paintings of her and her family’s arrival in America to express the longing and struggle of people trekking from one land to another. Bound up in the work are notions of travel, escape, exhaustion, destination, assimilation, exile, refugee. The shoes bear the worn qualities of a journey made and a life lived.

“I’m really talking about immigration on a human universal level, so that hopefully different types of people can relate to this issue. We all have our journey. There’s a history, there’s the fingerprint. When I make the shoes I make them in porcelain and with my fingers I put the indentations where the toes and the sole are. I really work intuitively and try to make them very childlike, so they evoke emotions of innocence and memory. Each shoe has had its own history or past.”

©from Claudia Alvarez’s History of Immigration 

 

 

Her immigrants could be anywhere, anytime.

“One is a little girl squatting in red underwear, with about 50 shoes scattered and somehow moving in the same direction. Then there’s two standing figures that appear to be walking forward in a big open space. In the corner is a cowboy boot on its side, with holes underneath it. They all reference immigration in some way. Some of them reflect really personal things, like my own childhood memories.

“The two figures walking forward are a very subtle insinuation. It’s how the simple act of stepping forward can mean so many things. It means a lot, for example, to Mexicans, who step forward for a better life, and really to any group of people that need to step forward and move forward in some way.”

Alvarez’s two paintings are drawn from her own life. The self-portrait “Green Card” is based on a photo of herself as an American newcomer. The other is taken from a photo of her newly arrived immigrant family.

 

 

©”Green Card” by Claudia Alvarez, from her History of Immigration

 

 

Being in New York with its many vibrant, self-enclosed cultural enclaves has shown her that immigration doesn’t have to mean giving up one’s identity. As an immigrant herself she says it’s inevitable she dealt with the subject and she expects to explore the nature of ethnicity in future work.

“I’m really interested in the power of words and how one simple word like immigration is so loaded with meaning. It can bring out so many different reactions from people.”

She avoids overt images, preferring viewers to find their own meanings in her work.

“The more I simplify my work the more powerful it can be. It’s OK that people interpret it in different ways. It should evoke questions, reactions and dialogue.”

View Alvarez’s show during normal gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday Noon to 5 p.m. Visit her website at http://www.claudiaalvarez.org.

Related articles
Categories: Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Claudia Alvarez, Immigration, Latino/Hispanic, Omaha, Writing Tags: , , , , , ,
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