In January, students returned to school facing a new year, a new semester, and a new, unhinged presidency in Washington. In November, two months prior, DVC faculty organized a post-election panel discussion to address students’ anxieties as the nation looks toward a tumultuous four years of a second Trump administration.
Organized through the Social Justice Program, the event featured panelists from the LGBTQ+, indigenous, and undocumented communities, all of whom championed communal solidarity in the face of adversity.
Pride and perseverance
James Wilson, an English professor and coordinator of the Pride Learning Community at DVC, discussed transphobia in politics as the LGBTQ+ community began bracing for a whirlwind of aggressive policies and rhetoric from the Trump administration.
“This is a dark time for queer folks,” said Wilson, who uses they/them pronouns. “Many of our acquired rights are up for debate again.”
They said the Republican Party spent millions of dollars on advertisements that drummed up hatred toward transgender people to attack the liberal agenda of the Harris campaign.
As promised by the Trump campaign, the new presidential administration has rolled out policies limiting the rights of the transgender community. Within his first days in office, Trump signed executive orders that aimed to prevent trans people from joining the military, withdraw federal funding from healthcare organizations that provide gender transitions for minors, and deny the use of self-identifying pronouns in passports and public schools.
Many of these orders have since been blocked or challenged by lawsuits.
“We are targeted because we are free,” Wilson said, quoting LGBTQ+ author and internet personality Alok Vaid-Menon. To preserve that freedom and support others when that freedom comes under attack, Wilson encouraged LGBTQ+ people to find strength in shared history and community spaces, and assured LGBTQ+ students that DVC is committed to their wellbeing.
“Take care of your people, find your people, stay with your people and ask for help from your people,” Wilson said. “We here at DVC, we’ll fight for you. This district will fight for you. You belong here. That is not going to change.”
Indigenous resilience
Ethnic Studies professor Dr. Dani Ahuicapahtzin Cornejo underscored the resilience of indigenous peoples and other historically marginalized groups in the face of adversity.
“My people have a principle called tezcatlipoca, or the obsidian mirror. When we gaze into the obsidian mirror, we see ourselves as we are: the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
He said the United States had to look into its own obsidian mirror after the 2024 election and confront the ugliness of its “late-stage neoliberalist capitalism.”
“White supremacy has shown its white pasty ass in this election, and it’s demonstrating very clearly how these pillars of colonization are being upheld,” Cornejo said. “The well-intentioned, colorblind, inclusive facade of a liberal utopia has been burst.”
“Now for indigenous people, Black communities and working-class communities of color, this reality is nothing new. We’ve seen worlds like this, and we’ve survived worlds like this.”
Cornejo traced the tradition of perseverance through his own line of descent, sharing, “My Opata and Picunche people [experienced] Spanish colonization, Spanish missionization, Spanish erasure, invisibilization, and still found ways to thrive.”
Even as the branches of his own family tree grew entangled in adversity over the years, every knot and gnarl was met with strength and resilience.
Cornejo’s fifth-great grandfather survived the Mexican-American War and its fallout as the new national borders converted his home into U.S. territory. Cornejo’s grandmother raised four kids in third-world poverty and watched them grow up to attain master’s degrees and PhDs. Cornejo’s own father escaped the Chilean dictatorship of Augosto Pinochet, who took power after a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the country’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, in 1973.
“That ancestral legacy of resistance, ingenuity, vision runs through my veins. And if you’re like me, it runs through your veins, too,” Cornejo told the audience. This is the reservoir of resilience from which people should draw strength as they enter the new year, Cornejo said.
“Give yourself time to recover from this wounding, and then organize, strategize, and mobilize within your spheres of influence,” Cornejo added. “Build that community. Check in with each other to break the alienation of late stage capitalism.”
Concluding his speech, Cornejo read from an email he had received from an elder the day after the 2024 election. It read, “As indigenous people, we’ve already endured 500 plus years of colonization. We can do this. Do not despair.”
Surviving Thriving together
Juan Huerta Villicana, a professor and department chair of Early Childhood Education, as well as the chair of the Dreamers Alliance at DVC, spoke to the concerns of undocumented people bracing for a new wave of blatant xenophobia and deportation.
During its first weeks in the White House, the Trump administration introduced executive orders affecting undocumented immigrants, including an expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and a currently blocked attempt to remove birthright citizenship – a right embedded into the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
As a social worker assisting the migrant community of Salinas Valley during the first Trump Administration, Huerta said he observed undocumented individuals consistently refuse or underutilize the services offered to them so as to conceal their legal status.
“The survival for our community is being under the radar,” Huerta said, predicting that the practice of self-deprivation would likely return and intensify under the second Trump presidency.
But Huerta urged the undocumented community to continue utilizing resources provided to them through DVC’s Dreamers Alliance and local organizations.
“We can’t go back to just survival,” he said.
Concluding his speech, Huerta asked the audience to use the power of their local vote and their voice to stand up for undocumented people in the coming years.
A nation of immigrants
Also invited to speak about undocumented people was Aid Saidi, an immigration lawyer at the head of the legal services and deportation defense programs of Contra Costa County. Saidi discussed xenophobia and the impacts of cynicism and alienation in a politically polarized society.
“The point of cynicism is to make people feel like everything sucks,” he said. “And [the powers that be] want us cynical, because they want you to feel powerless. They want you to feel like it sucks, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Saidi said that people in power propagate cynicism and alienation in the mainstream media to divide and subjugate the public. But there are ways to combat this.
“To me, the antidote to cynicism is courage,” Saidi said. He explained that although immigrants are not ignorant to the prevalence of xenophobia, sexism, and racism in the U.S., many of them derive hope and resilience from the American Dream.
An immigrant himself, Saidi said that “nobody cares about community, about family, [or] has courage like immigrants do. Nobody loves the idea of America the way immigrants do.”
But he noted that America doesn’t always reciprocate the sentiment.
“Like many other groups, we [immigrants] were used as a political football, punching bag, whatever you want to call it,” Saidi said. “We’re seeing anti-migrant things go on all around the world because it’s easy to blame others.”
He offered a way to combat xenophobic prejudice on a local level, inviting the audience to visit the CCC immigration center to meet and interact with undocumented families.
He also stressed the need to fight for a multicultural democracy in a post-neoliberal and post-colonial world. “Here in California we have the opportunity to do that — not just the opportunity, we have the responsibility to do that,” Saidi said. “We need to model what the future is going to look like for the rest of the country.”
“We have an opportunity to really tap in and not let cynicism and alienation get the better of us,” Saidi continued. “These problems aren’t bigger than us. No problem is bigger than us. We have power. We have strength, and together we must defend the Bay.”