Cristina Awadalla has served as a Barrio Internship Program intern with the Immigrant Legal Defense Center since January 2021 under the supervision of Executive Director Julissa Peña. Cristina is a PhD candidate in the UCSB Sociology Department, with a Feminist Studies emphasis, and is working on a dissertation titled, La Violencia Machista Reproduce Dictaduras: Aesthetics, Violence and Women’s Counter Narratives in Contemporary Nicaraguan Politics. As a Santa Barbara County Immigrant Legal Defense Center intern, Cristina's work seeks to provide sustained support to the center through grant writing and ongoing work on community education activities. She has worked with Santa Barbara County Immigrant Legal Defense Center community partner Just Communities to develop a youth-led Know Your Rights Project. Using a promotorx model in which community members are trained to be community peer educators, nine youth immigration ambassadors have been equipped with knowledge about the immigration system, immigrant rights, and facilitation skills.
Beginning in September 2021 the youth began delivering a three-part series of Know Your Rights workshops to the community. Through in-depth workshops, the program seeks to de-mystify the immigration system to empower community members to assert their rights—particularly in encounters with employers, law enforcement, and government bureaucracies—and share this knowledge throughout their personal networks. Cristina’s ongoing work through this initiative includes building community partnerships to expand the program to meet the diversity of needs and experiences among the primarily Latinx immigrant populations in the tri-county California central coast region. Pursuant to this expansion of Santa Barbara County Immigrant Legal Defense Center services, Cristina is the lead Co-Principal Investigator with Ben Olguín for a UCSB Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Social Justice Grant (which includes additional matching funds from The Global Latinidades Project). This grant provides equipment, logistical needs, and the hiring of community promotorx, indigenous-language translators, and university student assistants to ensure the program's success and to continue building university-community partnerships. For more information, please visit https://www.sbimmigrantdefense.org/.
ILDC Contact: julissa@sbimmigrantdefense.org
