Latino Racial Justice Circle and COVID-19: An Interview with Felipe Amin Filomeno
In this series, Abby Rampone interviews CTA members and affiliates about their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Listen to Felipe Amin Filomeno discuss his work with the Latino Racial Justice Circle in Baltimore, Maryland. The Latino Racial Justice Circle is a program of Call To Action Maryland. It is fundraising to support Latino families in Baltimore that have been economically impacted by COVID-19.
Note: this interview was conducted on April 8, 2020. As of May 28, LRJC has raised over $43,994 and made 162 distributions of aid to families.
Contribute to the COVID-19 Latino Racial Justice Circle Humanitarian Fund here.
Transcript
Abby: Okay, so Felipe, could provide a little bit of background and introduction to yourself?
Felipe: Yes. I am originally from Brazil and I grew up as a Catholic. I was raised Catholic, went to Jesuit middle school and high school in Brazil. I moved to the states in 2007 for grad school, ended up getting married and went back to Brazil for a couple years after I finished my PhD, came back to the states to work in Baltimore as a professor. I teach political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and I have been a volunteer at the Latino Racial Justice Circle for about three years now.
Abby: Okay, awesome. Thanks for that background, Felipe. So could you tell us a little bit about what the Latino Racial Justice Circle is and what it has been doing for the past… four years since it’s been around?
Felipe: Yes, pretty much. So in 2015, there was a conference on immigration affairs in the Baltimore area that I think was organized by Call To Action Maryland and Ryan Sattler, who was one of the organizers of this conference, met with Giuliana Valencia-Banks and they decided to start the Latino Racial Justice Circle. Call To Action Maryland had already been working with the Racial Justice Circle as a program of Call To Action Maryland and that is a group of volunteers that had been focusing on the standing of African Americans in the Catholic Church and how the work of the Catholic Church and Catholic Social Teaching connect with issues of race. So Ryan and Giuliana, after that conference on immigration, decided to start a group focusing on the Latino community and the discrimination and the racism and the other problems that Latino immigrants face, with a focus here in the Baltimore area. So the group was officially launched in 2015.
It’s a faith-based group and all volunteer-run, and as of now we have about fifteen active volunteers. We have several programs. One is the legal assistance program, in which we partner with some immigration attorneys to offer lower cost immigration counseling to immigrant families who otherwise could not afford that kind of service. We offer some financial assistance and connect them with immigration attorneys that we trust, so that’s our legal assistance program. We also have an educational program in which we provide small scholarships for Latino youth. We have a partnership with the Hispanic Student Club of the Baltimore City Community College, so in the beginning of every semester we receive applications for scholarships for them to buy textbooks. We also have a program of faith community dialogues on immigration in which we partner with faith communities, so far Catholic communities but we want to expand beyond Catholic denominations. It’s a program that brings together immigrants and non-immigrants in the context of faith communities to reflect about immigration, build mutual understanding, and eventually collaborate across those differences. Last, we have an advocacy program in which every monthly meeting that we have we talk about immigration policy, the immigration policy changes that have happened in the previous month, what is coming up, and how we could make an impact on that by contacting legislators, making phone calls, writing letters, so that’s what we do in terms of advocacy. Those are our programs so far.
Abby: Great, wow, sounds like you’re doing a lot of important work. Thanks for sharing about that background. I was actually wondering because you mentioned that this organization started in connection with Call To Action but that it’s an ecumenical organization. Could you talk a little bit about how that comes into play?
Felipe: Yeah, so we’re open to people of all faiths and we have a few members who actually do not identify as religious, but religion ends up always being present in our work. We always start our meetings with a prayer and we close our meetings with a prayer. Sometimes our prayers are clearly Catholic, sometimes they’re more ecumenical, but that way has worked well and I think that everyone feels comfortable in the circle.
Abby: Awesome. Awesome, thanks. Yeah, so could you talk a little bit about how the work with the Circle has shifted in light of the coronavirus crisis? How have you been responding as an organization?
Felipe: Right, so there have been major changes. So first of all, our legal assistance program has basically been halted. We don’t have any demand now because most government agencies and courts are closed to the public. Our education program now, we also don’t have demand because we are in the end of an academic semester, so we would be receiving requests for scholarships only around August or September. And our faith community dialogues are also not, we are also not implementing them in the spring. We had plans to have at least one dialogue program now this spring, but because of COVID we cannot have those in-person meetings.
And at the same time, we realized that the Latino community would be hit very hard by the pandemic, mostly because of the industries where Latinos often work: hotels, restaurants, everything that has been shutting down, the first businesses to be shut down under the pandemic. And we started to feel that impact very directly a few weeks ago when one of our volunteers who is a Latina woman in Baltimore told us that she had lost her job because of the pandemic. So we offered her some assistance, and we decided that well, you know, this will only get bigger, this problem, and we should start something to help the community address that challenge.
So we created the Latino Racial Justice Circle Humanitarian Fund for COVID-19 to help people, immigrant families basically that have lost income because of the pandemic. Since there was lower demand for our other programs, we’ve shifted some resources from those programs for this emergency fund, and we also launched an online fundraiser that within about two weeks has raised over $3,000. [As of May 28, an online fundraiser for the LRJC has raised $43,994.] That has been great. We are working with a small group of local nonprofit service providers and local Catholic faith leaders that are in direct touch with the community on a daily basis and they are referring to us families that are in need, that have lost their jobs because of COVID-19 and that are unlikely to get assistance, let’s say from a school food pantry or their own church. So they are being referred to us and we are giving $200 of assistance for families that are referred to us and they can reapply after two weeks. It’s a small amount, so it’s really humanitarian help for people to be able to pay for shelter, to not fall behind on rent, to pay for groceries. We have helped ten families so far and we have more coming along the way, the line is increasing. [As of May 25, LRJC has made 162 distributions to families in need.]
Abby: Wow.
Felipe: Yeah, I know a story besides that one volunteer that was the first one to receive assistance and she was the reason why we decided to start this program: there is one family that I know that is from Ecuador, a mother, father, and three children. The children were born here in the United States and they have lived in Baltimore for a long time, father and mother work at restaurants. The father was able to keep his job because he has more seniority in the restaurant and as the restaurant switched to carryout only, he was able to keep his job, but that was not the mother’s case, and now with the schools closed, she has to stay at home anyway taking care of the children, right. So when we offered her the $200 of assistance, she actually gave half of that to her brother who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and also lost his job. It’s really like Jesus multiplying the bread and they are using the resources for groceries, so it’s really humanitarian.
Abby: Right, yeah. Thanks. I think that the way that you’ve articulated the economic impact on Latino communities is something that I hadn’t specifically thought of. I’ve been hearing a lot about the racialized health disparities in terms of access to health care, is that something that the community’s also experiencing in your area?
Felipe: Yeah, so we have some service providers in the Baltimore area, especially Johns Hopkins Bayview, they have a Center for Latino Health and the Esperanza Center, which is of Catholic Charities, they provide some health services for immigrants, but I’m not sure how far those services go. I do know that when it comes to mental health, which is a challenge under this pandemic and with people losing their jobs and all the financial stress that comes with that, that is a need that has not been met here in Baltimore by culturally-sensitive mental health care for immigrants.
Abby: Right. Right, yeah. So many interconnected issues.
Felipe: Right.
Abby: Yeah, so my third and final question for you is, how does your Catholic identity inform your response to both the coronavirus crisis and social injustice beyond this specific crisis – and the intersection between those two things?
Felipe: Right, so as I said before, the Latino Racial Justice Circle has members of several faith traditions, but we are strongly influenced by Catholic Social Teaching and by what the Church says about immigration, so broad principles like love thy neighbor, welcome the stranger. The Catholic Church has been very active in immigrant affairs with a pro-immigrant position and we follow that approach, we think that it’s in line with Catholicism.
And personally, under the pandemic I have relied on God as a source of calm, compassion, and courage. I’ve been referring to that as the “three c’s” that I mention in prayer. I think we need calm to make good decisions, to make prudent decisions, but then we also need compassion so that we are moved to act in favor of those that are most vulnerable now, and that includes marginalized immigrants. Jesus said that it’s among the most vulnerable that we can find God because vulnerable people more than anyone rely on God, and we should be God’s hands, especially in times like this. And to be that, to do that, we need courage. Helping others does not happen without some sacrifice. I’m staying home and doing most of my volunteer work from a distance, mostly administrative work, but I do have fellow volunteers who are directly working in the community, handing those $200 to people, and even though they take all the necessary precautions and maintain the physical distance, the risk is never zero, right, so they need courage as well. So I’ve been praying for calm, for compassion, and for courage.
As a group we have also been praying, we share prayer requests on our email list. A couple weeks ago, maybe less than a week, less than two weeks, we had one member, one volunteer of the group, a young girl, Latina, she’s in college, and she was admitted to the hospital with suspicion of COVID-19, with COVID-19 symptoms, got tested, came out negative, thankfully, but you know, we had an online prayer circle for her case and now she’s recovering at home. So it’s something that is affecting volunteers of our group in many different ways.
