How Immigrants Are Creating a New World in the Shell of the Old

This article is written with the considerable research assistance of Ann Philbin, who conducted the initial interviews and wrote the first draft.

In the United States, we are living in very frightening and enraging times. This fear explains why some people included in this article are identified only by their first names.

Contrary to media portrayals, immigrants are often agents of transformation. Such is the case with immigrants actively involved in two community-based organizations in Greater Boston. One of these, which I helped found and where I currently serve as general coordinator, is the Center for Cooperative Development and Solidarity (CCDS) in East Boston. Another is Comunidades Enraizadas (Rooted Communities) Community Land Trust (CECLT), in nearby Chelsea.

There is an untold story of immigrants in the United States. In East Boston and Chelsea, it centers on connection and commitment to others.

Origin Stories

CCDS and CECLT have their origins in responding to traumatic external economic events. For CECLT, that was the wave of foreclosures that took place during the Great Recession; for CCDS, it was the gentrification and displacement that followed.

In both periods, neighbors were turned out of their homes, lost jobs, and struggled to feed their families. Immigrants in East Boston and Chelsea worked to help one another, to share what we had, and to send the message that we were not alone, that we needed each other not just to survive but to create a world where we all can have dignified and happy lives.

There is an untold story of immigrants in the United States [that] centers on connection and commitment to others.

The response was inspired by our experience of cooperativism and the solidarity economy system in Latin America—an economic and social vision that puts people, life, and the environment before profits. This offered us a pathway to replace a system based on oppression, exploitation, and greed with one focused on liberation, happiness, love, and equity.

My colleague Suyapa Perez, a founder of CECLT, told NPQ that her initial motivation was to make housing more accessible and affordable in Chelsea. In the face of astronomically high rent for people who worked two to three jobs just to make ends meet, Perez and others in Chelsea were watching their neighbors be displaced.

“The bomb of foreclosure happened; people lost their homes,” she recalled. “We formed human chains around homes that were being auctioned. It was very painful to see families cry over losing their homes.”

For CCDS, the story is similar. Most immigrants involved in our cooperative ecosystem today have experienced the consequences of being uprooted from our home communities, often by force due to political, economic, and social distress. But sometimes a sense of dislocation can be the basis for successful community organizing.

Crisis, as I have often noted, creates an opportunity to organize, cooperate, and create new ways to live and flourish.

Leading with Love

Each organization contains people, a vision, and a community. At CCDS, we are rooted in an ethos of cooperative values such as mutual support, respect for community, solidarity, equity, and the profound commitment to leave a better world for the new generations. We aim to create a path that is led by love.

What does “leading with love” mean? For us, it means that the pain and needs of one are the pain and needs of us all. That is reflected in the way we treat one another and look for solutions together, just like we are family.

What does “leading with love” mean?….It means that the pain and needs of one are the pain and needs of us all.

The mission of CCDS is to provide “educational, technical, financial, human, intellectual and organizational support to groups of people in and around East Boston, mostly low-income immigrants, to explore the creation of worker-owned cooperatives as a vehicle to develop economic and social alternatives.”

We say that worker cooperatives are about far more than co-op development. Diana, a member-owner of the developing Wonder Kiddos childcare co-op, told NPQ that within the ecosystem of CCDS, “you know people care about how you are doing, not just economically, but emotionally…we learn from one another so we can build the world we want.”

Building Culture

So much of immigrant organizing in the United States is about building a culture that mirrors our own cultures, ways of being, and vision for our lives.

CECLT originally set out to protect immigrant homeowners from foreclosure, and the initial dream was to build a housing co-op. But after much information gathering and learning, the group decided to create a community land trust that would own the land under multiple homes.

As Ana Vanegas-Rivera, current program coordinator of CECLT, explained to NPQ, “The whole community is the owner of the land, but the CLT administers it. So, the person who buys housing is not buying the right to the land; it is always in the hands of the community….But the property on the land can be sold individually. If you divide things this way, the property is cheaper because you are not paying for the land.” Land contracts are for a very long term. At CECLT, that term is 90 years, and it is renewable.

Vanegas-Riveras elaborated on the link between housing justice and community building: “We are not here to provide homes and see how many units we can get—we are here creating community, and that means finding the link that unites us all.”

The culture of supporting one another and building a sense of family—there during good times and bad—is part and parcel of our work at CCDS as well.

Sayra Pinto, a longtime supporter and board member of CCDS, who grew up in Chelsea, told NPQ, “The story of the community in East Boston and Chelsea for the last 40 years is the story of the endurance of a message about connection. The message is, ‘We are all in this together.’ Everybody’s business is their business; every kid is their kid.”

For Pinto, “The way you do the thing is the thing—that is the culture. You need to create a shared culture and build consciousness through connecting people to that way of seeing the world.”

In the United States especially, but in our home countries as well, capitalism has conditioned human beings to be individualistic, to compete against each other. This comes out immediately; we learn it from childhood.

Wilson, a Colombian immigrant who was an early supporter of CCDS and now serves on its business support group (grupo de apoyo in Spanish), acknowledged that his goal when first migrating to the United States was to “make money, and then return to my country. I was not thinking of anyone else.”

Diana, the childcare co-op member, expressed a similar experience: “I was a very individualistic person. I didn’t like sharing with others. I thought I could do everything alone.”

Creating an Ecosystem

How can culture be transformed? No one organization can change a culture, society, or economy, but a group of organizations can. This is the central insight of what is called the ecosystem approach.

For CCDS, our ecosystem includes staff, board, an advisory group, a business support group, and our cooperative projects, which are all independent businesses, held together by the values, beliefs, and practices that we live by. After a decade, co-op startups are underway in childcare and eldercare, mental health, interpretation, food preparation, maintenance, sewing, and cleaning.

Oscar, a staff member of CCDS and a member-owner of Sazón, a catering and food co-op, told NPQ that “the needs are great, and there is a lot of fear,” but co-op members “are dedicated to helping one another.”

Norma, another member of Sazón, told NPQ that “cooperativism and solidarity are reflected in this ecosystem. We complement each other.”

In concrete terms, members of the co-ops receive trainings in areas such as business plan development, accounting and finance, co-op development, professional and trade support as well as in “softer skills,” which are equally crucial to the functioning of co-ops and the ecosystem such as team building, group decision-making, and conflict resolution.

The message of both of our groups is similar: We are not alone, and if we work and live in community, supporting each other, then we can have what we need and thrive.

There is a culture of sharing what you have and what you know in the ecosystem, especially among members of the business support group, which provides customized training and consultation across a wide range of areas to newer co-ops. Natalia, a member-owner of Sazón and member of the business support group, mentioned to NPQ that she valued how the CCDS’s co-op ecosystem allowed her to continue to practice professional skills she learned in her home country and “to share what we know.”

With CECLT, there is not a formal ecosystem, but there is a similar recognition of the need to build a broader culture that sustains community across organizational lines. As Vanegas-Rivera put it, “We are creating a movement which says, ‘You have this problem, but you are not alone.’”

She added, “People often have problems with no documents and lack of money for food and having to care for a number of people and are working multiple jobs to try to do so. So, when we come together, we feel as if we are family. If one has a home, he/she looks to support those who don’t—we are together for a purpose that is larger.”

This notion of network building, Vanegas-Rivera noted, is necessary to meet people’s needs. As she explained, “When people come to a meeting, it is not just for one thing—we have information about other things happening in Chelsea…and everyone tries to pass along resources to help. We are creating a group in which we find support from one another in good and bad moments.”

Confronting Barriers

Immigrant groups like ours are very impactful. But the work isn’t easy. Some of our challenges include:

• Organizing against the culture of capitalism: Leading with love and building immigrant cooperatives in the “belly of the beast” of capitalism that is the United States is very difficult. The barriers are huge because we are all products of the capitalist system in which we live.

As my fellow staff member Oscar has pointed out, “A system in which you are shown so many beautiful things, it makes you want them. It’s supposed to make you happy to have these things. It is easy to get in a rat race.…That is a major barrier, and it takes a long time to overcome it.”

Perez at CECLT has made a similar observation, “We have become so ‘me, me, me,’ that people [only] want something if it is about them and their family. But housing is not the property of one. We need to help them see that there is another way, not only to see property, but the correct, necessary use of the land, to humanize the land.…If we can do that, this system won’t beat us.”

• Learning as you go: Jonathan Rosenthal, a cofounder of the fair-trade worker co-op Equal Exchange and a long-term supporter of CCDS, told NPQ, “In a way, at the start, CCDS was taking on a kind of impossible task. From a solidarity perspective, it was brilliant.” He added that the team at CCDS “had [great] success doing mutual aid and survival work,” but also argued that we relied too much “on people who didn’t have the professional or lived experience of co-op development, which requires a lot of technical skill.”This, Rosenthal observed, from an organizational effectiveness perspective, “was not a great setup.”

On our team, we recognized that from the beginning we wanted to develop slowly. Generally, in the nonprofit world, speed is privileged, but going slowly allows for integration, learning, leadership development, relationship building, but most importantly, the time to build the alternatives by and for the community.

The people in the Chelsea land trust, too, have had to learn as they go. As Perez observed, “We have to support each other with our work on housing. That is what we are engaged in—lending a helping hand, getting to re-know each other, uniting ourselves.

• Financial pressures: One of the toughest hurdles is the pressure to earn a profit. Of course, members recognize that it is important for them to earn income, to bring much-needed resources to their families, and to make a living from their co-op work. As Andrés, a worker-owner at Sazón, said to NPQ, “We cannot be entrepreneurial if we are hungry.”

Often, during the “startup” phase, those working to launch co-ops must have other paid work to support themselves and carry out the co-op building effort on their own time. The goal, however, is not profit, but rather to build a solidarity economy and a cooperative community with enough resources to have a happy, healthy, and fruitful life for this generation and the ones to come.

The community land trust also faces severe financial constraints. As Vanegas-Rivera observed, “If we had enough resources, we could buy directly from the market. Then, we could get homes to those who are most in need. But we don’t have the money now—and have to form other partnerships in order to do this work. That is a big barrier.”

The Chance at Communal Transformation

When CCDS began, the hope was to offer people the chance to transform themselves, their community, and the world around them. Now, 10 years later, we have started to see results, as individuals take leadership roles in our team, committees, and co-ops. Their voices and contributions are respected in our community. And we can begin to share our knowledge, experience, and the results of our struggle with confidence.

In the context of the brutal repression that the current presidential administration is perpetrating on immigrant communities today, the work of groups like CECLT and CCDS is all the more important and hopeful.

The message of both of our groups is similar: We are not alone, and if we work and live in community, supporting each other, then we can have what we need and thrive. But in this message is also a warning. We know that not just our two organizations, but the world at large must learn to survive in community or perish. Let us hope that this message resonates and that the circle of solidarity grows ever larger.