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AM: And the other thing is, Colorado Trust is the organization that saw the need to look at immigrants in our communities and how to integrate them into the community. And so they have funded ten communities in the state of Colorado, and Boulder County is one of them. And I was asked to be -- and most of them are service organizations like Intercambio, the organizations that are Latino organizations that are serving the Latino population, recognizing that immigrants are beginning to add to their population. So they took the challenge, and so I'm on the steering committee for the Boulder County Immigrant Integration Committee, and what we try to do right now is to run dialogues, using the dialogue format to start conversations with the receiving community (and) immigrants. And it's really hard to get immigrants to come and be part of this, because it's at a great cost to them. The receiving community doesn't understand this very well. They don't realize what a cost it is to them, and don't appreciate it the same way. But I know what it is to them, it means that they have to give up time from their work and come and answer stupid questions. Because for the most part, people are very, very ignorant about immigrants and... and I keep saying, "All of us are immigrants. We all were immigrants at one time or the other." It's just that the far right today takes it upon itself to sort of trumpet the anti-immigrant -- for whatever reason -- sentiment, and focusing on that. So our job with the Immigrant Integration Committee, Steering Committee, is to try to continue the conversation. So I think we've been pretty successful. We had one at the University of Colorado, at Sewell Hall residence, and had all the students who were part of the Sewell Hall residence participate. And one of the things that one of the students said to me was, "You know, she cleans my toilet bowl for me, but I didn't even know her name." So she got to know them, and they now, you know, they're not ever gonna really understand each other, but at least they're beginning to understand that these are human beings that are doing this, and that they're taking care of you. So this one student, anyways, said to me how grateful she was for the opportunity to know her by name, which I think is really a recognition of one's humanity, to know somebody's name, and to have the students actually acknowledge it. So we've run that program two years in a row now, and they're doing -- I'm not saying that we run the Sewell Hall program, but we run the dialogues for the students.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.