For final exam, Stritch freshmen play immigrants
On their last morning of finals week, freshmen Lakira Grant and Cierra Jones found themselves wandering a ballroom at Cardinal Stritch University.
They both wore name tags identifying themselves as the same person: “Sergio Rodríguez.” They had a packet of information about Rodríguez, along with some documents.
And they needed help.
For the final exam of their freshman seminar class — required to acclimate new students to college — they were in a simulation along with some 150 of their peers. The activity, dubbed the “laberinto” (labyrinth in English), was a first for the university, an attempt to teach a lesson, spark hearty discussion and impart life skills in a way that went beyond a research paper or multiple-choice exam.
Freshmen were paired up and assigned one of 32 immigrant identities, which the university’s Spanish translation and interpretation class researched and wrote. Then Grant, Jones and the others were given a list of tasks to complete (get a driver’s license, enroll in school, find a job), and two 18-minute “days” to complete them. Around the ballroom, professors and interpretation students posed as the lawyers, police,
employers and bureaucrats with whom the “immigrants” would interact.
Rodríguez was a hypothetical 32year-old Cuban man living in Milwaukee on an expired tourist visa. Back in Cuba, he worked in a tobacco factory to support his wife and 5-year-old daughter, Tania. The two were his entire world, until his wife died in a car accident, leaving him to care for Tania alone.
Rodriguez lost his job and could think of only two relatives to get help: his brother and sister-in-law, who lived in Wisconsin. They would help care for Tania while Rodríguez took odd jobs and looked for long-term work.
Rodríguez was undocumented. He did not speak English. He did not have a driver’s license or health insurance.
The first step for Grant and Jones: head over to the bean farmer, hoping to get four weeks of back-pay they are owed.
“Find someone who speaks English,” the manager of the bean farm — as played by psychology professor Terry Steele — told them dismissively.
And with that, the students began weaving through the room, trying to find help.
“It’s frustrating, because now I see how these people feel and it’s like, it’s not fair,” said Jones, who is black. “It’s like I transitioned minority groups.”
A different kind of final
One of the biggest challenges colleges face today is the task of preparing students for tomorrow’s jobs, not knowing what those jobs will be. More than ever, employers tell colleges they want empathetic leaders, strong communicators and sophisticated problem solvers, regardless of their major.
Engineers, computer scientists and researchers need to communicate effectively and work in groups. Doctors and nurses need to be sociologists while maintaining sensitivity. Teachers and lawyers and entrepreneurs need to be creative and self-driven.
Kathleen Rinehart, Stritch’s president, said education has shifted. The goal is not just to absorb information, it is to apply it throughout a student’s life.
“One of the biggest problems that we face in education is when we think that learning is kind of the vacuum-packed, solo experience,” Rinehart said. “It’s not this Ziploc moment of, ‘OK, I learned this, I’ve written it down, and now I can forget about it because I learned enough for the test.’”
With this idea in mind, professors at Stritch revamped the freshman seminar course. The class has traditionally picked one topic — this year’s was immigration — to explore. Mark Boergers, chair of the performing arts department, and Marilyn Jones, chair of the modern languages and culture department, teamed up with the idea of the “laberinto.”
The final would be less of a test and more of a culminating lesson. There would be no answer key, no rubric or grading scale. All the students actually needed to do was show up.
“(We are) placing them inside of the situation and also making it something where there is no right or wrong answer,” Boergers said. “They can have whatever feelings they want to have — I don’t necessarily have a political objective. We just hope that they’re engaged.”
The tasks were simple. Buy groceries. Go to work. Enroll your child in school. Join an English class. But the playing field was not even. Some students, assigned U.S. identities, zipped through. Others floundered. Many couldn’t find a job because they were undocumented; language barriers made everyday tasks frustrating.
And then there were the lines for education centers, jobs and legal services, all of which snaked around the room, as students watched the clock tick down.
“The students see it as kind of an obstacle course or a scavenger hunt, but the truth of the matter is, most of them will not be able to complete the tasks and they’ll experience a good amount of frustration in terms of all of the hoops they have to jump through,” Boergers said before the final.
There were even police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers circulating the room, sending people off to a detention center on one end of the ballroom.
Into the labyrinth
As the freshman made their way around the room, Marilyn Jones’ 10-student interpretation and translation class was in the room, acting as interpreters. Jones herself was undocumented in her youth, and said she remembered it felt “like I lived in the shadows.”
Daniel Gutierrez, a junior majoring in political science and Spanish, wrote several of the immigrant identities.
“I used to work for an immigration attorney, so some of these identities were based on some of the stories that I actually worked on,” Gutierrez said. “They were stories that, really, I took away and continue to remember because they just show how cruel this immigration system can be.”
He wrote of a 16-year-old boy who came to the U.S. when he was young and found out about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program too late. DACA was rescinded in 2017. The federal government has only accepted applications for renewal since.
“(It was) for the students to learn, this is the process. And sometimes, there is no process for you. So, you just have to remain undocumented or without status,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez’s classmate, Beatriz Reyes, also rooted her immigrant profiles in her own life. She said many of her family members are undocumented.
She wrote about a 40-year-old man who got pulled over by police and penalized for driving without a license. It was his second offense, so he had to appear in court to pay his fine and possibly face jail time.
Reyes said her family talks openly about their status and she knows the fear of getting a phone call at midnight from a family member who got pulled over by police and needs a ride home. She also knows it could be worse: One of her relatives was deported a couple of years ago.
Marilyn Jones said seeing her students’ stories for the laberinto was unexpected, even for her.
“Being a Latinx (person), being a person who was once undocumented and went through the process to then become documented, some of the stories that they shared and that they used for the identities — I was just shocked to see what they’ve gone through,” Jones said. “Some of those stories, those students had never shared that.”
Both Gutierrez and Reyes are DACA recipients. They speak openly about their experience with the immigration system.
Gutierrez’s family has mixed status. He arrived in the U.S. from Michoacán, Mexico, when he was 2 and is protected from deportation under DACA. His younger sister is an American citizen. But his parents are undocumented.
“Obviously, there’s a fear if there was ever a separation of her from us. It would be traumatic, and we do have to live with that,” Gutierrez said.
Stritch is “opening a pathway” to his dream of one day becoming an immigration attorney, he said.
Reyes is a junior at Stritch studying Spanish with a minor in Spanish translation and interpretation. She hopes to become a Spanish-language medical interpreter at a children’s hospital.
She was 7 when she came to America from Veracruz, Mexico, and still remembers the culture shock of enrolling in a school where she didn’t speak English. She got bullied and felt isolated. But her dad encouraged her to translate everything she could, supplementing the school’s efforts to catch her up.
“I began forcing myself to learn more and more and more,” Reyes said. “I would carry a little book/dictionary that had the ABCs and how you should pronounce them in English and then it had words in Spanish and their translations in English.”
When she was in her early teens, Reyes’ grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. Reyes attended every doctor’s visit to translate. Despite the circumstance, she later realized she enjoyed the job of interpreting.
Reyes didn’t learn she was undocumented until eighth grade. But she was a bright and diligent student, graduating fourth in her class with a 3.9 GPA. She was inducted into the National Honor Society. She ran cross country and played soccer.
But college still seemed like a faraway dream. Everyone around her was applying. She’d worked to beef up her résumé. She got into all 10 schools she applied to. But despite the protection DACA gave her from deportation, money became the new hurdle. DACA recipients don’t qualify for federal financial aid. Even the private scholarships her teachers and supporters sent her required U.S. residency or citizenship to apply.
“It was all hitting me. I’m this great student. I have A’s and B’s. I’m involved in all of this,” Reyes said. “Then why don’t I deserve the same chances that other students get?”
“We’re here.”
Back in the laberinto, Lakira Grant and Cierra Jones were picking up beans off the ballroom floor.
They’d made the mistake of going back to Steele, the professor posing as a bean farmer, with a bilingual student who didn’t understand why they were there.
In the crowded chaos, Steele sent them off to work, telling them to pick 15 of the beans scattered on the floor to earn $5. The people translating for them left, so Grant and Cierra Jones just did what they were told.
They took home $5 from their work that day, but none of the money they were owed.
They wandered around, listing off their tasks with exasperation. They needed to enroll their child in school, buy groceries, get a bus ticket, enroll in English classes.
They walked past Yanelis Rodriguez, the executive assistant to the vice president of academic affairs. She had donned a sheriff ’s badge and sunglasses and was stopping students walking past, asking for identification and generally “harassing people.”
She asked them for identification, booming in drawn out Spanish: “¿Entiendes? ¿Comprende?”
“Oh my God, this is terrible,” Grant said.
“I’m pretending a lot. But I’m also mirroring things that have happened to me in real life, like police officers just stopping you and giving you an attitude,” Rodriguez told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after the encounter. “I’m just approaching people and being like, ‘You look like you don’t have a driver’s license.’ That’s been done to me before. So, what am I supposed to look like to have a driver’s license?”
Eventually, Grant and Jones got in line for an education center, thinking it was where they’d be able to ask for an interpreter. It was not. They were getting guidance from strangers and much of it was wrong. Others couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to help and the rest were as confused as they were.
“That’s how people be in real life though,” Jones said. “That’s why I’m not liking this one bit. I’m having a crisis right now, and this is not even my life.”
The two were eventually detained, losing two minutes of their day to sitting on a stage on the side of the ballroom. By the time they got out, the first 18-minute “day” of the simulation was coming to a close. The freshmen were herded out of the room to await the start of “day two.”
They’d spend much of the second day as stuck as the first. By the time it was all over, Grant and Jones — as Sergio Rodríguez — would barely manage to make some money picking beans and purchase some groceries. They’d try to enroll their daughter in school, but because her immunization records from Mexico were illegible and they were uninsured, they would be rejected. Their last task, to enroll in an English class, wasn’t even considered.
As the simulation neared its end, Jones mulled over the idea of getting detained again.
“I’m basically out here on the street. I have no roof over my head. There’s nothing, really, I can do. I can’t get help. The best option would be to go back to jail,” she said. “You have a roof. You have food. There’s more people in the same situation. It’s to survive.”
But they were out of time before that could happen.
Following the laberinto, the freshman were asked to reflect on the experience either in writing or in a class discussion. Boergers gathered his students in a circle on the stage and asked them for one word to describe the experience.
Scared. Flustered. Confusing. Jail. Soul-sucking.
Afterward, many students and faculty agreed the activity was a start at understanding a life different from their own. That’s the main thing Reyes, who is also president of Stritch’s Dreamers Welcome student group, said she wanted people to take away.
“We’re not criminals. We’re not rapists, like our (U.S.) president says. We’re human beings. We work. We go to school. We contribute to the country in every way: socially, politically and economically,” she said. “Whether people want to acknowledge that or not, it’s on them to decide. But we’re here.”