Latino Justice Interview

[00:00:01]

Hi and welcome to the Great Charities podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to shine a light on organizations that we think are very effective and are doing a great job to make this planet a better place. And we want to explain what these charities do in a way that is easy to understand for everyone. And today, I’m happy to be here with Deanna Madinah, who is chief development officer at Latino Justice. And Latina Justice has recently been given a grant from the Open Philanthropy Project of four hundred thousand dollars. I think that is correct. And that is a stamp that they are a very effective organization. And today, I’m so curious to find out why why this organization is so effective. But let’s back up a little bit. Diana, if you were to describe what Latina justice do and the problem you’re facing to someone who is not aware of your costs, how would you do that?

[00:01:15]

Thank you. Meal Latino Justice is a nearly 50 year old civil rights organization. We’re a nonprofit. We are our sole existence really is about defending the constitutional and civil rights of Latinos living and working in the United States. This can translate to a number of things protecting voting rights, defending immigrants who have been who have encountered discrimination or who are being attacked in a hate climate. It can take on the the expression of protecting Latino laborers or workers who have been exploited because they are Latino, because they seem to be without agency. More recently and more directly related to the open philanthropy grant, we started about 2 three years ago, a criminal justice reform platform and quite simply the platform is about addressing the broken and in many, in many ways very harmful policies, criminal justice policies in this country that are impacting Latinos exponentially. And beyond what other communities are seeing, so I’m sure that we’ve all heard a whole lot about how African-Americans and Latinos in this country are targeted more harshly by law enforcement.

[00:02:49]

The US could have stopped a little bit short course. And I want to get into the ground to go to front of a front row project. Absolutely. So I’m from Sweden and in Sweden.

[00:03:01]

When you say voting rights, for example, it might be difficult to think of a system where not everyone has equal voting rights. So it’s not happening them in the U.S..

[00:03:15]

That is indeed happening. I think what? To describe it a little bit in the United States, there is very much still a race problem. There’s a. And it’s very directly tied to the idea of power in this country. What more weight? What easier way to attack power than going through than limiting the vote? And so while our laws would sensibly protect the vote of every citizen in this country, there has been a lot of legislation, a lot of policy making, both state wide and even federal that limits the vote for a lot of communities, while there are many protections in place. They’re not off. They’re not always utilized. And so to give you an example, right before the 2008 presidential elections, when then President Obama or then-Senator Obama was running, we encountered a problem in Florida where thousands of Latino voters were taken off the voting rolls because they had names that were the same names as people who were immigrants and who were not talk or not citizens of the country. So if you can imagine in Florida, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of Latinos living, many of them from Puerto Rico, which is, of course, a United States commonwealth. And where they are citizens. Someone named Joseph Perez or Maria Vasquez could easily be from Puerto Rico, from Mexico, from Colombia, from battle, from any of those countries. And so knocking Maria Vasquez off the voting rolls simply because her name is Maria Vasquez. And on the premise that she may be undocumented is very much illegal. But if no one fights back, then you can limit that voting power. And so if you can imagine a presidential election where Latinos in a particular state might actually turn the tide on the Electoral College, which here has a whole lot to do with how we elect our presidents, that can be catastrophic. And not only that, it absolutely disenfranchises thousands and in some cases millions of people throughout the country. And so our work is very much targeted toward redressing those wrongs.

[00:05:45]

That makes it a lot clearer. I think most of our listeners are going to be able to follow that and see why that is important. Have a fair system.

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So what else are you involved with? Is voting rights your main question or your main course or are you doing many different things?

[00:06:06]

We have six different pillars. One, voting rights is one of them. We do a lot of work to help Puerto Ricans, both here in the United States and on the island. So after Hurricane Maria, when many Puerto Ricans came to this country, to Florida, to New York, to Pennsylvania, we helped them with housing. We helped we helped we helped them with legal advocacy so that they could get housing, for example, so that they could tap licensing, that they needed to be able to work in this country while Puerto Rico was under recovery. One of the big things that we did and after Maria was to litigate against FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in what or.

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I’m sorry. There was a lot of complicated words there. So what is. I’ll start again. Yes.

[00:07:04]

Fema is a federal is a federal agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is called into play when we have natural catastrophes. So if there’s a hurricane, there’s an earthquake. FEMA comes in and helps the the the local recover. So there were several things that happened. FEMA would normally provide housing benefit to people who have been displaced from their homes. And these all of these Puerto Rican United States citizens were displaced not just from their homes, but from the very island in which they lived. And this FEMA agency unilaterally cut off funds to that would help the Puerto Rican citizens stay in motels while they were while their homes were being fixed, while they were finding new homes, et cetera. And, of course, there was the fact that the that FEMA did not, in fact, take in a whole lot of money to help the island recover. So that’s another set of issues. But self-regard.

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May I ask here?

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Mother, someone that isn’t too familiar with the history and the situation of your country. Why would a state agency make those decisions and not want to help out in that situation?

[00:08:29]

Sure. So this was a federal agency, actually, not a state agency. And it it’s part of the allocations that we have nationally to help our citizens. We again, just harkening back to the idea that in the United States, we do have a very big problem with race. And in many ways there are people in this country and there’s a current administration that has made it very clear that they see a two tier system in terms of who here is a citizen deserving of help and who is not. And so Puerto Ricans who have this strange sort of Commonwealth status but are, in fact, citizens. Are not always seen by some folks in the federal administration as fully worthy citizens of this country, and so they won’t. They can make decisions based on who they think they should help. So, for example, if there’s a hurricane in Texas, they may send more funds that way, they may extend the benefits for housing for the citizens for as long as it’s needed to help them recover. That’s what this fail safe is, therefore. But for Puerto Ricans, the decision was made very quickly to just cut them off and leave them without any kinds of funds or services to help them. It’s. It should be completely illegal, but of course, because the funding in is in some ways discretionary. It is up to the the people in power at that point to determine how long they’re going to provide services and funds.

[00:10:14]

Yes. So to summarize, my impression of your organization is very much what the name suggests. You look forwarders in justice for Latinos as you are working to fix them. [00:10:30]

I wish I had time to ask two hundred questions because I think this is so interesting. And also when I squeeze this into 20 minutes.

[00:10:36]

So let’s talk about the grant that you just got from Open Frontier Projects. How come they think you’re such a highly effective organization? Maybe more than giving mosquito nets to poor families in Africa. Why is this such an important cause?

[00:10:51]

Sure. Well, we first were so grateful for that support. And I I feel very comfortable that part of why we were chosen to receive that support and why they see us as having such important impact is because the way that we work, we work from an impact perspective. So while we may only serve, say, 10000 people directly in the year with because there are clients, because they utilize our services, because they’re named in a lawsuit that we bring.

[00:11:26]

We actually our work actually touches hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people every year. So. I’ll get to the criminal justice reform in a moment to give you an example. We have sued these we have sued state governments and cities and the federal government to ensure that Latinos have the same access that other ethnic communities have. So in New York City, for example, decades ago we sued the police department because they were they were initiating testing that was not fair to Latinos. That was, in essence, cutting out Latinos who could become police officers and to be able to get them access. We had a few plaintiffs. I think it was four at the time who when we won the lawsuit. But because those four named plaintiffs were part of this lawsuit, that was successful. Now thousands of Latinos in New York City could become police officers. So our impact is much greater than the day to day to work with criminal justice reform, which is the platform that open philanthropy is supporting the premises. This in this country, our criminal justice policies have been. Really broken for many decades, if you’ve seen some documentaries like 13th, for example, you would understand that until about the 1950s, 1960s, we had sort of similar, I think, incarceration rates as other countries around the 60s.

[00:13:11]

Our incarceration rates grew exponentially to the point where we have 300 million people in this country incarcerated on any given year, which is it’s I’m sorry, 8 million. Wait, let me let’s cut that stat because I have to check it. We have many hundreds of millions of people who who go through the system every day, and in this country there’s a very racial lens on incarceration and on law enforcement policies. So to give you an example, in New York City, we’ve had racial profiling problems with the police department for decades. We had a policy here that was colloquially known as stop and frisk. And so stop and frisk was simple. If you saw someone who was loitering, who looked like they might be getting in trouble, who looked like they might have some sort of criminal activity in mind in front of a building in New York City, that the police had the opportunity to stop talk, to talk to these people and possibly even frisk them to see, for example, they had drugs on them.

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And what this frisk me looked to them.

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So it’s patting them down, checking their pockets, et cetera, to see if they had drugs on their person. With stop and frisk in New York City, the police had a quota to meet and this was all documented and proven. And the quota very closely matched where black and brown people in America live in the city live. And so they would be able to go to these communities that were largely African-American and Latino and just unilaterally go ahead and stop pat down and check young people in front of their buildings for drugs in. I think it was in 2014 that there were about 7000 of these stops.

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Almost almost all of them were of black and brown people.

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And yet the number of drugs that they found on these people or actual criminal activity was minimal. There was just no correlation between what they were finding and the tactics that they were using.

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And then add the further stats that in in this city, in particular, their rates of drug use among African-Americans and Latinos is comparable to white people in this in this city. And yet those folks weren’t being stopped when they were stopped. They were more likely to have drugs on them. And so that’s one again.

[00:15:51]

Yeah, I see the unfairness and the frustration for your community that once. Quick question before I start to wrap this up, two quick questions, actually. Would you say the injustice problem you’re facing? Is it getting better or worse?

[00:16:11]

In general in the U.S.? I think it’s getting. I think that’s a tricky question. I think it’s getting better on some fronts where we’re seeing more wins. We’re seeing more awareness. And part of what we’re trying to do is build awareness. Right. We’re actually gathering data. So in this country, the criminal justice data show who’s being arrested for what is very much measured in a black, white binary. So if you are a Latino and you present as a black person, they’ll count you was black. If you’re a Latino and you present as a white person or count you as white. So we don’t see what the real problem is because we’re not seeing how Latinos are targeted. So part of what we’re doing is gathering the data in gathering the data and sharing that with the community and then getting their opinions about what’s happening. We’re starting to move the needle, the dial on what the public narrative and understanding is about the problem in this country and how we should fix it. So we’re very much making progress on that, on that.

[00:17:13]

And on the other end of it, we have a federal administration that has conflated immigrants, criminality, Latinos. Bad brought it altogether.

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And in a sense has made it a little bit harder because now more people are being targeted very openly. So while we’re making progress, we’re also facing harder times with an administration that is see is seeing Latinos as a criminal element.

[00:17:48]

I see. I think that paints a very clear picture and I wish we had more time.

[00:17:53]

Like a campaign is, it’s still here. So many things I would like to get to know. And at the same time, I want to keep this in under 20 minutes.

[00:18:01]

And I’m sure someone listening to this might be as fired up as I am right now. And if they want to somehow help your costs get involved, what would you say is a good place to start?

[00:18:14]

I would love for people to really understand what with the work that we’re doing is like, you know. Visit our Web site. Call us up. Talk to us. But but more than that, the best place to start is, is to really educate yourselves about what the problems that Latinos are facing. What is a race problem in America? Right. And break it down, because it’s not just Latinos. We work on behalf of Latinos, but our work does impact all people in this country because all people in this country have a right to live free, happy without without discrimination. And so if people can become a little bit more aware about what the real issues are. Start with organizations like like ours. Visit other organizations like ours. Read a little bit. Watch documentaries like 13. Understand what the harms are. And let’s not ignore it because I think that sometimes we get into this. Oh, my gosh, that is a terrible problem. But there’s not much I can do about it. So I just don’t want to face it today. So let’s face it, let’s confront it. And then from there, call up and or write us or email us and let us know that you’re interested to learn more.

[00:19:30]

We’ll share with send a link in the description below. And Diana, thank you so much for participating here.

[00:19:38]

Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you. Likewise.

[00:19:41]

Yes. And good luck with your work and your calls.

[00:19:44]

Thank you. See you.

[00:19:46]

See you. Bye bye.