L. Mireya Reith
Mireya Reith grew up bullied and belittled in Northwest Arkansas. But she returned to the state to help people who face the same challenges she did as a child.
Mireya Reith’s childhood memories of growing up in Northwest Arkansas were not always happy ones.
The child of an American father and a Mexican mother, Reith felt ostracized at school. She doesn’t have a “single memory of another Latino” in the community. She says she was “relentlessly bullied” and called names like “Mexican monkey.”
“Rumors were told at school that kids could not come to play at my house because all Mexicans carry disease,” she says. “And when my mom showed up at PTA meetings, other parents refused to shake her hand.”
So Reith poured all of her energy into studying, graduated as valedictorian from Fayetteville High School and got out of Arkansas as fast as she could.
“It wasn’t about payback. It was never about payback,” she says. “But it was about showing that anything was possible for me, and my parents felt that education was the great equalizer, and that’s where I threw all of my energy.”
Years later, Reith moved back to Arkansas, to be with her mother after her father died in 2010. When she arrived in Northwest Arkansas, Reith found everything had changed.
“It was immediate from just landing at the airport. I was greeted in Spanish. I actually asked if I landed in the right place,” she says. “It didn’t take me long to find out that Arkansas had become the fourth fastest growing immigrant population in the country since I had been away.”
Now, she is throwing all of her might into helping people who faced the same challenges she did as a child. She is the founding executive director of Arkansas United, a nonprofit with offices at Springdale and Little Rock that is dedicated to empowering immigrants and their communities through immigrant rights advocacy and closing service gaps.
MEXICO CITY
Reith’s parents, Amanda and Donald, met in the 1970s when he was assigned by SC Johnson Wax to help set up a computer system at the company’s plant in Mexico City. Amanda was a secretary at the factory. Donald had a crush on Amanda but he didn’t speak Spanish well, so he asked his secretary to ask Amanda out on a date for him.
“They took a dictionary with them on their dates and passed it back and forth,” says Reith, who still has the dictionary in her office at Springdale.
Just a few months later, SC Johnson transferred Donald back to the company’s headquarters at Racine, Wis. He asked Amanda to marry him. She agreed but said he would have to meet her family first. He made the long trek over the dirt roads of rural Mexico to ask Amanda’s father for her hand. The agreement was made over a bottle of tequila, Reith says.
It took several months for Amanda to obtain the necessary Green Card to live in the United States.
“She landed in Wisconsin in the
middle of winter,” Reith says. “It was sub-zero degrees and it was a blizzard. But she still stepped off that plane and decided with my father that they would start this new life together in the United States.”
Nowadays, Amanda calls her daughter “brave.” But Reith says it is really her mother who is the brave one. “She didn’t speak the language. She followed a man that she had only known for so long. … But she followed her heart.”
Reith was born July 4, 1979. Her sister, Claudine, came along about a year and a half later.
“My dad raised two tomboys,” she says. “My mom raised two Mexican princesses who love to get dolled up and dressed up with the best of them.”
Reith’s father retired early from SC Johnson and wanted to move the family to a warmer climate. He saw a magazine article that recommended the Top 10 places to live in smallto medium-size towns. Fayetteville made the list. Donald thought both of his girls would go to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville to get their undergraduate degrees. Neither did, but Claudia later obtained a master’s degree from UA.
Reith went to Williams College in Massachusetts, where she majored in political science with an emphasis on international relations, and also Spanish. She earned a master’s degree in international affairs, with an emphasis on political and economic development, from Columbia University in New York.
DREAM ACT
Reith spent the first part of her career in the field of international political development, working across five continents with American nonprofit organizations, Peace Corps-El Salvador and the United Nations, to engage marginalized communities in democratic processes, according to her biography.
In 2010, Reith returned to Arkansas to be with her ailing father. She began to explore how to bring these international experiences to her home state, and she became the Hispanic outreach director for the Democratic Party.
One of her main focuses was lobbying for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, aka the DREAM Act — a legislative proposal for a process for granting residency status to qualifying immigrants who entered the United States as minors. It would have granted conditional residency and, upon meeting further qualifications, permanent residency.
“I am the girl who was born on the Fourth of July. I wanted to give up on democracy that day,” she says of the day she learned both Arkansas senators planned to vote against the legislation.
But she didn’t. Instead, she founded Arkansas United.
“We can and should be agents of change,” she says.
“We are not asking for handouts. We want to be part of the change. We want to see that everything we do, it’s about all of our community.
“When we hold one community back, we hold everyone back. A lot of the work that we do here is about challenging this idea that somehow we’re all in competition with each other. And instead, could we all work together — whether it’s through policy work, whether it’s through the organizing, whether it’s through services to help everyone achieve their potential — so that as a state, we can collectively achieve a greater potential.”
A COUPLE OF BIG SCARES
Two years ago, Reith spent most of her time working.
“I had thrown myself completely into the movements and the political work,” she says. “I am the kind of person that’s always meant to have a calling and not a job, and any kind of life-work balance I kind of lost over the years.”
She had a horrible pain in her back and had emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder. Her doctor told her it was “the sickest gallbladder” he had ever seen.
Two days after the surgery, she boarded a plane to participate in a panel discussion in San Francisco. “I felt horrible, and that was the impetus for me to say, ‘Wait. Maybe I should check on some other things in my health.’”
She found she had a lump in her breast — but it wasn’t malignant. “Thankfully, it was just a scare, but it was a wake-up call. That month made me realize I let eight years go by just literally in the blink of an eye.”
She ran into a close friend at an event. He looked fit and healthy, and she asked him his secret. He told her about a 30day cleanse diet. She did the cleanse for 60 days and lost 20-25 pounds. She then went on a paleo diet and began running and working out. In four months, she lost 60 pounds.
“Now it doesn’t matter how crazy my days are. I’ll at least make time in the morning to get some aerobics in or late at night — running with my dog is my thing. But now it’s part of my rhythm and making healthier choices on eating,” she says.
Reith convinced her best friend, Sarai Portillo, to move to Arkansas about a month ago to become the deputy director of Arkansas United. Portillo met Reith while working for immigrant reform initiatives.
Portillo confirms that Reith “works literally from sunrise to sunset,” but stopped short of calling her a workaholic.
“It is in her nature,” Portillo says. “She really is a community leader — her leadership and her style. She is so respectful and loving of the community.”
Reith adds she still has a lot that she wants to accomplish.
“I still have aspirations of motherhood,” she says. “I would say if anything really inspired me to just do this ‘come to Jesus,’ it is this continued hope of being a mother.”
For now, she gets to fulfill her maternal urging by playing with her nephew. Last year, her sister, Claudine, and brotherin-law, Eric Speecking, adopted Jacob, who is 7 years old.
“The minute he walked through our door, I thought, ‘Yep. That’s my nephew, this blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy.’”
HONORS AND AWARDS
The list of awards Reith has received — as well as the number of boards she has served on — would take up more than one single-spaced, typed page. But two are particularly noteworthy.
In 2011, Reith was appointed by then Gov. Mike Beebe as the first Hispanic woman on the Arkansas Board of Education, and she would later become, in 2016, the youngest person in state history to chair the board. In 2013, President Barack Obama gave Reith the White House Cesar Chavez Champions of Change Award.
“She is a special person. You are formed so much by your environment and your history, and it is reflected in her,” Beebe says. “She never forgot where she came from, and she pays it forward.”
The former governor adds that Reith was recommended for a seat on the education board based on her quality, character and achievements.
“She is a voice and a cheerleader, and she advocates for immigrants, immigrants’ children, Dreamers, the less fortunate,” Beebe says. “She is just a tiger when it comes to advancing the part of the American dream that some people find is difficult to achieve.”
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott describes Reith as “persistent, passionate and progressive.” His path has crossed with Reith’s many times as both worked on public policies and politics.
“When we are preparing to have a discussion, I come extremely prepared as it could be a long debate,” the mayor says.
“She is truly an asset to this state as a new generation leader,” Scott adds.
U.S. CENSUS 2020
One of Reith’s biggest projects for this year is encouraging people to participate in the U.S. Census. She is one of the founders of Arkansas Counts — an initiative made up of several advocacy organizations.
The U.S. Constitution requires that a census be conducted every 10 years. The information is used to make decisions at every level of government, Reith says, such as determining where new roads, schools and public facilities are built; and funding for education and health care. The Census also affects the amount of money the state receives for federal programs such as Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), highways and transportation, education and childcare programs, and affordable housing programs.
Arkansas Counts is focusing its efforts on immigrants and other minorities who distrust government. Reith says there are many misconceptions about the Census, particularly the notion that the information is shared with other agencies.
“Our immigrant community believes the information the Census Bureau collects will be shared with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and that’s not the case,” Reith says. “By law, it’s unconstitutional for them to share any personally identifiable information with anyone.”
Arkansas Counts has a coordinated statewide effort — to educate Arkansans on the importance of accurately filling out Census forms — that includes knocking on doors in immigrant communities to spread the word.
The organization will work with public libraries where residents can use computers to fill out Census forms. Also, Arkansas Counts is encouraging people to use the phone option to complete the Census.
“It’s in times like this where there are a lot of reasons — if you are an immigrant in this country — to feel disempowered,” Reith says. “The Census gives us the power back and that chance, as immigrants, to show what we do is for the greater good of everybody.”
Reith is working with immigrants who were once like her mother, Amanda. In 2000, Amanda became an American citizen. She waited until dual American-Mexican nationality was allowed because “she always feels very passionate about our Mexican identity.”
Amanda sent her daughters to Mexico once or twice each year to learn Spanish and learn about their heritage and culture.
“One of the moments I like to joke about was when we called Taco Bell ‘Mexican food.’ She said, ‘No. Taco Bell is not Mexican food. I’ve got to make sure they get the right education.’”
Reith takes pride in her mother’s courage to follow her heart to America.
“I feel like that’s what I am doing, as well,” Reith says. “That’s my mother’s legacy. I follow my heart. … I always tell folks when I am giving speeches that I was born to love democracy. I am literally the girl who was born on the Fourth of July.”