Bringing back some holiday joy to immigrant families

Barrio Power, a grassroots collective, provides gifts to people who have been caught up in the growing ICE crackdown

- BY ITZEL LUNA

JULIANA YAMADA Los Angeles Times.

AZUSENA Favela, a volunteer with Barrio Power, wraps a Christmas gift at an angel tree event in Maywood.

The steady drizzle tested the limits of the string of tarps stretched across the backyard of a Maywood home. Beneath them, dozens of boxes, overflowing with clothes, shoes and toys, lay scattered across the pavement.

Each gift was destined for one of more than 50 Southern California homes whose families have been caught in the growing immigration enforcement crackdown.

This was not charity bestowed from afar, but mutual aid. The organizers are a group of immigrant women who have endured their own struggles and face similar risks as the people they are helping. Five of them asked to use only their second last names because of fears of being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The same drive that has guided them through their own harrowing journeys is what motivated them to form Barrio Power.

One of the leaders, Cruz, grew up working in the fields with her family in Oaxaca, Mexico, and spoke only their indigenous language, Chinanteco, as a child. Determined to learn Spanish, she would sneak out to the local school and eventually began teaching others in her town.

When she got to the U.S. decades later, she would tape dollar bills to the wall to memorize the country’s currency, which landed her a cashier job.

She brings that same ambition to Barrio Power.

“My ancestors, my parents, all the hardship we've gone through as Indigenous people, and we still have to suffer? It’s enough,” Cruz said. “We have to come out of the shadows because we've done nothing wrong. And if we have to leave, we are going to leave with pride.”