10:00 am, Friday, October 21, 2011
Church-Chapel

Chapel - "My Story of Faith & Immigration," Jaqueline Salamanca

Originally from the Mexican state of Guerrero, Jaqueline GarcĂ­a Salamanca is an advocate and organizer working in Veracruz state with the Jesuit Service to Migrants. She has worked tirelessly in migrant sending communities while also providing humanitarian support for migrants who are taking the dangerous journey northward. Most recently, she led 120 local volunteers through an intensive training program on how to create strong migrant support committees along a significant stretch of "la Bestia," the deadly train that many thousands of Central American migrants ride northward each year in search of jobs and better lives for their families. Because Veracruz has become an important sending region for migrants, Jaqueline's work has also been to help strengthen those communities left behind by organizing empowerment and support programs for women and families of migrants.

"Migration has always been present in my life: my father left town when i was 4 years old and never returned. My mother left me and my brother with my grandparents to search for him, but never heard from him again." After studying social psychology and later a Master's Degree in social sciences, she joined the Jesuit Service to Migrants and began to see migration in a new light: "I read books, studies, and articles about migration and ended up reading my own story: i am the daughter of migrants and bear the marks and emotional costs that are left by my father's absence; i am a witness to the unfinished story my mother began to live as the wife of a migrant." Her work has allowed her to "gain the tools to reconstruct myself as a girl, as a young woman, and as a woman, to understand the loneliness my mother lived through. In community work I have been able to revalue and accept the challenges that migration has placed on my path."

Contact: Bob Yoder, campus pastor, phone 7542, email robertey@goshen.edu