Chicago activist Jorge Mújica speaks on workers’ rights at César Chávez lecture
Photo from Elmhurst.edu
Jorge Mújica from Arise Chicago, a faith-based workers’ rights organization, spoke at this year’s virtual César Chávez lecture on Sept. 23.
Elmhurst University Spanish Professor Dr. Christopher Travis introduced the lecture by lauding Mújica for his achievements in the Chicagoan Spanish-speaking community and reflected on the treatment of immigrant workers in the United States.
“The big question is: are low wage immigrant workers who process our meat, assemble our televisions, sanitize buildings, take care of our children, essential? Or, are they being treated as expendable?” asked Travis.
The lecture, titled “Noticing Immigrants Just Because of COVID” began with Mújica pointing out the incongruity in the labeling of migrant workers preceding and during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic has brought to us… this apparent contradiction between being undesirable and being essential at the same time,” he said.
“For the last four years, we have been listening to official discourses about immigrants who want to come to the United States to get benefits, to live out of food stamps… we hear about illegal workers,” Mújica, who ran for U.S. Congress in 2009 and for 25th ward alderman in 2015, continued. “And then 2020, COVID hits… we started listening to another new, fancy word: essential worker.”
“Essential workers have to become visible… essential workers have to be legal workers. Essential workers have to be respected,” emphasized Mújica.
Mújica illustrated the continuous tangible threat of deportation for migrant workers by reading aloud immigration news headlines from recent years. One read, “Immigration raids conducted in Mississippi restaurants,” and another, “ICE raids meatpacking plant in rural Tennessee; 97 immigrants arrested.”
“Every one of these operations stopped people at workplaces,” noted Mújica.
Mújica stated that African American and Latino blue-collar workers have been disproportionately impacted by the consequences of the ongoing pandemic. “Latinos in the United States are only about 15% of the population, but nowadays they are 39% of the cases of COVID,” he said.
Despite the often unsafe on-site conditions, these workers do not have the option of completing their jobs remotely and are at risk of falling victim to workplace outbreaks.
“60% of Latino workers could not work remotely because they are essential,” explained Mújica. “At Arise Chicago, we started getting these messages… ‘My coworker got sick, my coworker died… if we go home, we will die of starvation.’”
In response to the crisis, Arise Chicago has provided multilingual services for workers who believe they received unfair treatment from their employers.
During the follow-up Q&A session, students expressed interest in the actions the university can take to safeguard immigrant students’ rights, particularly by instituting a sanctuary resolution. “Sanctuary campus has no meaning other than political,” President Troy VanAken responded.
“We [Elmhurst University] operate in many ways as a sanctuary campus. We don’t require social security numbers. We would not release any student’s information,” said VanAken.
Troy also spoke briefly on establishing federally-funded TRIO grants at EU for students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. “Unfortunately, that grant window is not open right now… when that opens back up, we’re going to participate in it,” he said.
