The Fight For Hearts And Minds
Cesar Espinosa leads a press conference this summer, following his group's lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA.
Cesar Espinosa says a racist incident when he was a teenager spurred him to disregard his age and immigration status to start what today is one of the most effective rights organizations in Texas
Cesar Espinosa was the designated family chauffeur In 1999 when he first confronted institutional racism: He was a teenager when he drove his older sister, Aura, on a college application tour. She was undocumented, and the two saw door after door closed to them on the campuses they visited.
Determined, they drove to a community college in downtown Houston, where Espinosa recalls campus officials telling Aura that because of her status, they weren’t sure why she was applying, “or even why she would want to study.”
The incident became a catalyst: Aura did not give up. Today she’s a fierce sight to behold, Cesar Espinosa said. She’s a college graduate and accompanies students on their own university tours.
Aura’s college tour nightmare pushed Cesar Espinosa into his own social and political activism -- in high school.
“We decided to form what we thought was a small group of students, a small club where we were going to advocate for each other, where we were going to advocate for immigrant rights,” Espinosa said.
Today, in his early 30s, Espinosa’s organizing abilities are renowned and in demand going into the most important presidential election he’s yet to witness.
A prized memory for activist Cesar Espinosa was meeting the late civil rights icon, John Lewis, standing, second from left. Espinosa is next to Lewis, at right. Alain Cisneros of FIEL is next to Espinosa on the right. Standing at left is Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. Seated at left is the Rev. Michael Lawson of Wheeler Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, where the picture was taken.
Top of his class
Espinosa is recognized as one of the region’s most effective activists. Barely out of his teens, he founded Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, (FIEL or FIEL Houston) a nonprofit organization fighting for education, immigration and civil rights.
“Fast-forward 13 years later, we are now the largest immigrants rights organization in the state of Texas,” he said.
Espinosa was born in Mexico City, and moved with his family to Houston when he was 5 years old. Through elementary and middle school, he excelled in the classroom, often placed in gifted or talented programs. By the time he started at Houston’s DeBakey High School, he was determined to get to college and missed a perfect SAT score by one point. Armed with that 1599, Espinosa applied to Ivy League universities.
Texas had a new law that Espinosa had pushed for in Austin: It made financial aid available to qualified undocumented students. So he thought for sure that sentiment in higher education, plus his sterling grades, would get him onto an Ivy League campus.
Some of his peers got in, but as Espinosa explained, his became a different story. He believes that, despite his credentials and his near-perfect SAT, his immigration status dashed the Ivy League dream.
He took it as another door, closed in his face.
Espinosa applied to Houston Community College, and later transferred to the University of Houston, majoring in political science.
Cesar Espinosa and FIEL organized a rally of thousands of cars in Houston this summer to call for justice in the wake of the murder of Army specialist Vanessa Guillén. Photo by Ken Lopez
Fuel for activism
In 2012, then-President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, opening an additional way for undocumented youths to stay in the United States.
"One thing we want to make it very clear that at least in the state of Texas, your ability to go to school is not dependent on the DACA program, and we encourage every single young person to go to school,” Espinosa said. “At the end of the day, they can take our cars, our houses, they can take our status, but … they are not going to take away who we are as (human beings), what we've learned and all the knowledge we retain."
Over the past 20 years, Espinosa has pressed on, assisting communities throughout East Texas through FIEL. His team is involved in everything from political and media relations and staging rallies to helping families dealing with violence or deportation.
This summer, Espinosa sued the Trump administration over DACA. It’s the first time FIEL has pursued a legal challenge against the federal government. “I’m very proud of how far we’ve come. FIEL wouldn’t be FIEL without the community’s support. And we are always looking for spaces to advocate and to raise our community’s concerns.”
Still under the protection of DACA, Espinosa has led FIEL to greater impact, along the way earning recognition and respect from Houston to Washington, D.C.
His personal photo album underscores his reach. The collection is dominated by a group shot with legislators, including the late Civil Rights icon Rep. John Lewis. Espinosa was invited to attend the 2018 State of the Union address as a guest of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. And when Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén went missing from Fort Hood this spring, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tagged FIEL in a Twitter post about her disappearance.
Cesar Espinosa leads a protest in downtown Houston on Inauguration Day, 2016.
The challenge of climate change
Espinosa says FIEL has diversified its work. During COVID-19 lockdowns, FIEL has offered online informational seminars and meetings, and gloves, hand sanitizers and masks in organizing drives. After it was determined that Guillén was murdered, FIEL organized a cruise in which 4,500 cars paraded in protest.
“President Trump barely made a statement (about Guillén). That’s unfathomable. If it would have been somebody else there would have already been an outcry, so we condemn these actions,” Espinosa said. “But at the same time we want to make sure that we continue to fight for what’s right, and what’s right is justice for our communities.”
Espinosa believes fear of deportation has stopped many Latinos from speaking out or asking for help. That was evident, he said, when it came to the days and weeks after Hurricane Harvey. While many inundated communities protested loudly to officials in Houston, Austin and Washington, D.C. and got results, three years later there are still displaced people in the region’s Latino communities.
Houston, the energy capital of the world, has seen its fair share of environmental disasters, including man-made messes like the toxic fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) facility. For days, the blaze cast plumes of smoke over Houston and surrounding areas.
And when he spoke out against a freeway expansion, Espinosa said it was because there was no community engagement over the project which, he said, would affect Latino families disproportionately. The expansion was decided by a board of mostly men unfamiliar with the consequences for families forced to bus kids to a school 20 minutes away.
“I want African Americans and Latinos to know that we should no longer call ourselves minorities, especially in the city of Houston because if you combine African Americans and Latinos we make up 76% of the population and that by no means is a minority.” -- Cesar Espinosa
In his own words
With Election Day looming, palabra. sat down with Espinosa via Zoom to talk about FIEL, race relations, and protesting during a pandemic.
Espinosa’s answers were edited for clarity and space.
palabra.: Immigration policy is a critical issue for Latinos going into Election Day. What made you become involved in fighting against the government putting children in cages along the border?
Cesar Espinosa: We knew that the fight for children detention was a fight we wanted to take on, because it’s unjust. So we were instrumental here in Houston with keeping the federal government’s children’s center in downtown Houston from opening up here for over a year. We helped to amplify the city’s demands for (immigration officials) to be accountable and transparent with the way they were opening the center. Unfortunately, we lost the fight, but the detention center became a juvenile center, which needs a lot less permitting.
We believe this to be a social issue and children don’t belong in cages. Nowhere else in the world do you see this happening, so it really is a shame that in the land of the free, we are putting kids in cages. We want people to know this and take action.
palabra.: Is your entire family undocumented or have they been able to follow a path to legal residency or citizenship?
Espinosa: Cesar Espinosa: We are one of the thousands, of millions of families in the U.S. who are part of a mixed-status family, so some of my family members are U.S. citizens, some of us are permanent residents, some of us are DACA and some of us are still undocumented. It’s just been a way the laws have kind of shaped our lives and our family to allow some of us to get status while leaving some of us out.
For example, my brother was able to give status to my stepdad, but unfortunately at the time when they applied, I was already over the age of 21, so because of the way the laws are set up, I couldn’t file under that petition and that’s how my sister and I were left out.
palabra.: What made you and others want to leave the security of your home, in a pandemic, to protest the death of George Floyd this summer?
Espinosa: It’s the fact that we realized or we were reminded that there are bigger epidemics and pandemics in this country than COVID. And what I mean by that is an epidemic … of racism, sexism and classism, and all these systems of oppression that exist that keep people of color and poor people down.
We knew that we were taking a risk every single time we go out, but at the end of the day, the fact that we’re taking a stand for what’s right is what drives us and we take that calculated risk and we also make sure that we minimize the risk.
We’ve had to adapt, but at the same time when we are out in the street, we realize that we are there for a purpose, there are bigger diseases in this country than COVID. Not to minimize it, and we are all worried that we might … contract the virus, but we feel there are bigger issues and we need to stand up for those issues, no matter what.
palabra.: What do you say to people who say protesting is irresponsible and might be helping to spread COVID-19?
Espinosa: What’s more irresponsible is the lack of action by elected officials at all levels to help communities of color, and then opening up businesses way too fast. We’ve seen a spike … . What we see is a lot of people protesting the use of a mask and things like that when, in reality, we’re just doing it to take care of one another.
palabra.: There has been much talk on social media about how African Americans are able to band together along with the help of global allies, yet we keep hearing Latinos don’t tend to do the same. Why do you think Latinos haven’t protested as much? Can the Latino community forge alliances to bring change?
Espinosa: There’s a couple of things here. Number one is we have to have these conversations around race relationships. Let’s take a step back to race relationships between Latinos and African Americans, and we cannot wait until Thanksgiving dinner, we cannot wait until next year, we have to have those conversations now.
We have to be very open about the fact that there are myths that pit the communities against each other, but when we really talk to each other we will realize we have more in common than we have differences. More importantly, I want African Americans and Latinos to know that we should no longer call ourselves minorities, especially in the city of Houston because if you combine African Americans and Latinos we make up 76% of the population and that by no means is a minority.
So we would be a lot stronger if we came together and had these open conversations around anti-Latino, but more importantly about anti-blackness in the Latino community. And we need to have those conversations. We are working with a coalition of folks where we’ll have unfiltered conversations about what that means and how we can fix it. Because long-term change is going to come from people internalizing and taking care of that.
palabra.: Can you further explain what you call the anti-blackness within the Latino community?
Espinosa: There is a sentiment of anti-blackness and there is a misconception of who African-Americans are here in the United States. And we’ve also failed to learn the history and the intense struggles that African-Americans have gone through. If anyone needs a read, read the book “The Warmth of Other Suns” (By Isabel Wilkerson) because it talks about the great African-Americans’ fleeing north in pursuit of liberty, better education for their kids and a better future.
And when you think about that in the global world that we live in, there are a lot of parallels about why African-Americans migrated then and why Latinos are migrating now. We have more in common than separateness.
When somebody makes an anti-black comment in our families, number one, we need to shut it down and number two, ask why people think and feel that way because the same racism that killed George Floyd is the same racism that kills immigrants and puts people in cages. So we need to fight against the system of oppression instead of fighting against one another.
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Ruthy Muñoz is a freelance journalist, a multilingual linguist, and a soon-to-be book author. She served in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of specialist during the Desert Shield/Desert Storm era.
Previously, Ruthy was a Chips Quinn Scholar, and National Association of Black Journalists Reuters Fellow. She speaks five languages and was a French translator for the Haitian national football team.