Lauren Hines is the Central Ohio Movement Building Team Coordinator. She is organizing an immigration reform rally in her area this Sunday, to build local support for the upcoming March For America and get sign-ups for buses going to DC. Here is her story …
Lauren Hines (in green shirt) with a weekly English as a Second Language class she co-taught in Orrville, OH from 2005 to 2009.
I was born and live in Upper Arlington, Ohio and come from a family that has been in the United States for a really long time. Some have been here for centuries and others arrived as immigrants more recently.
One thing about me is that I really, really love meeting people. I started learning Spanish in high school and got a job at Baja Fresh. I worked at the restaurant during my senior year. I talked Spanish with colleagues and customers, and continued to work at the restaurant on breaks from college.
One of the other workers, a fun guy, taught me Mexican slang. I’d try it out and people would eventually correct me. We really bonded, I felt like he was my brother.
When my sophomore year of school began, he came to visit. I knew when to expect him and ran out to the main street on campus, waiting on the corner for him to drive by. In Wooster, Ohio, anyone who’s not white stands out. I soon saw a tall Mexican guy hunched over the steering wheel of a blue pickup truck approach where I was standing. Then my heart dropped — a police cruiser turned on its sirens behind him. My friend was pulled over in front of the college president’s house. He handed me a wad of cash to bail him out and asked me to call his mother.
He wasn’t deported, but the experience was a huge wakeup call for me. I knew people living in the shadows were suffering, but thought that if they took precautions to stay off the radar nothing could happen to them.
I had always wanted to go to Mexico to learn about social justice and grassroots efforts. Another friend from Baja Fresh asked me, “Why do you want to leave your country to learn about social justice when there are so many problems here you can fix?” My involvement with the campaign is a response to the challenge he posed me with.
What am I passionate about? I like meeting new people and making new friends. I work at a county government agency. A lot of phone calls come in in Spanish, and I’m the only one who can speak the language, so I meet a lot of people who don’t necessarily have access to a lot of services others are entitled to. This is what I live and breathe for — immigration reform and immigrant rights.
For fun, I listen to music, and I’m trying to improve my dancing with some of new RI4A friends.
Some members of my group have planned an event this Sunday on Columbus’s West Side, where a lot of undocumented Latino immigrants live. I’m going to share my “story of us and now”, and encourage others to share their own stories.
This Sunday’s event is a call to action for immigration reform. We’re getting everyone who comes to fill buses for the march and tell their friends and family to speak out and fight for this because we have the chance to make comprehensive immigration reform a reality and we can’t let it pass by. The rally was announced on the local radio station this morning. Volunteers and I were out until 1:30 a.m last Sunday talking with people at a Los Tigres del Norte concert and putting fliers on windshields about the call to action here.
I’m going to spread word about this call to action on the Reform Immigration for America Facebook page and Twitter — join us this Sunday if you can and come to Washington, DC on March 21st for a chance we can’t let pass by.
You can sign up for the March For America here.
Please share this story with your friends to help spread word about the march!
Categories: Action, March For America, Ohio, events, immigrant rights
