The Currently Week of 9/1

 

I missed you all last week! I'm offended none of you asked where your newsletter was! lol. Life got in the way and i'm going through some transitions on the family front. 

This week we were inundated with images of Houston and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and the outpouring of support has been tremendous. I highly encourage you to give to support our brothers and sisters in Houston. Living in LA I am never not aware that we could be struck by an earthquake at any moment and if that were to happen we would need the generosity of others. 

A few charities and causes I recommend are RAICES an immigrant and refugee non-profit that is helping undocumented immigrants who are in fear of accessing resources, Texas Diaper Bank  is providing diapers for babies, and The Action Network is providing pads and tampons for homeless and underserved women. 

This week on The Currently Podcast I shared my conversation with Jennifer Lopez of Camila Creative and we talked about the crazy, fun world of public relations and influencer marketing but what struck me most was the story about her amazing grandfather and the town he founded in Oaxaca, Mexico. This is a moment where we all looking for heroes. We are desperately yearn for someone to give us solutions to some of the things we know are not working in our world anymore. If we look closely we can see the stories of heroism and survival are in our own families. They survived things that seemed impossible and so we must take that faith and believe we will too. Jennifer found strength to fulfill a dream in her grandfather, Camilo. It's a beautiful story that you can listen to here. 

Speaking of family, this week I made my debut in Mitu one the most popular sites for Latinx Millennials. In my piece, I talked about family and how we support one another to pursue our dreams. This piece was published in the context of the possibility of many young people losing the chance my sister so desperately wanted, the chance to attend a university, and so it is bittersweet to share this story. You can read the piece here. 

In the next few hours, we expect a formal announcement about the elimination of the program that allowed many young immigrants to pursue their dreams called DACA. The repercussions both physical and emotional of that would be devastating. The fact that we are being gaslighted and manipulated by this administration in a series of "will they or wont they" leaks, holds a lesson about how far respectability politics can actually take us. Every immigrant deserves dignity and honor not just those who attend college if we don't stick up for everyone, then in the end we all suffer.  

The world is crazy right now and so if we have privilege and choices we need to use it to lift everyone in our communities who doesn't. The time is now and I felt inspired by my guest this week who took a leap of faith and I encourage you all to do the same. 

Full list of links will be back next week!

 
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