The Maps We Carry: On Borders, Belonging, and Bearing Witness
Welcome to The RootED Weekly
Deeply Rooted in Education and Equity
Issue 11 | 9 June 2025
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A Note from Dayson
Querida comunidad,
This week’s issue is just a letter from me.
I’m still processing all that has happened over the last few days, the raids, the protests, the deployment of the National Guard, and the weight it carries for so many of us with deep ties to these stories. There is more I want to write. More I want to share. But I also need to take care, to pause, and to recognize the emotional labor it takes to hold these moments with the depth they deserve.
So today, I offer this reflection, not as a full newsletter, but as a way to stay grounded in what matters, and to remind myself (and maybe you) that even in grief and anger, we are not alone.
This week, I’ve found myself thinking about all the invisible maps we carry. The ones shaped by migration, by memory, by struggle. The ones drawn not in ink, but in stories passed down, phone calls that come at strange hours, and the quiet calculations we make every time we speak our names or roll our R’s in a public space. These are maps I know well. I grew up navigating them, straddling borders both literal and spiritual. This week, I write from that liminal space, where fear, memory, and resistance converge, because what’s unfolding in Los Angeles and across this county demands more than observation. It demands response.
What’s happening in Los Angeles is painful, but it is not unfamiliar.
On June 6, ICE agents carried out coordinated raids across the city, arresting at least 40 people in the Fashion District and other locations. Within hours, the community responded: blocking the 101 Freeway, marching downtown, standing quite literally between neighbors and the machinery of deportation. The government responded not with de-escalation, but with riot gear, tear gas, and stun grenades. Then came the decision from President Trump to send 2,000 National Guard troops, unrequested by the state, to contain what they call “unrest.”
But we know better.
What I see is not chaos. It is community defense. What I hear is not disorder. It is dignity refusing to stay quiet.
When I first read Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, I remember underlining this passage over and over:
“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European— or later United States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centres of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. Production methods and class structure have been successively determined from outside for each area by meshing it into the universal gearbox of capitalism.”
The legacy of extraction and domination didn’t end with colonization. It persists in detention centers, in wage theft, in the quiet terror of sirens outside your apartment. The “open veins” Galeano described still bleed, and they bleed most often in the homes and bodies of Latino immigrants. What we’re seeing is not new. It’s the same theft, only mechanized, militarized, and wrapped in the language of enforcement.
The families caught in this latest wave of enforcement are not abstract to me. They are my students, my neighbors, my relatives. They are the people I love. And when communities respond with protest, with protection, with organizing, we shouldn’t look away. We should look closer.
In April, RootED published “When Immigration Policy Walks Into the Classroom.” That resource is still available and still essential. If you’re an educator, administrator, or advocate, now is the time to revisit it and its resources. Share it. Use it.
Our school buildings are not untouched by these moments. Whether you live in a border city or a rural Southern district, the children and families we serve are carrying this fear. We need to be ready, not just to support them, but to stand with them.
To those who teach: your role is more than instruction; it is refuge. To those who lead: your job is more than administration; it is defense. Our schools must remain spaces of sanctuary and dignity, where all children, regardless of status, can exist without fear.
Let me be clear: we are not neutral. Neutrality is complicity. We must be rooted in love, but also in the unflinching clarity that what is happening is wrong.
So, where do we go from here?
We organize. We speak up. We protect one another. We share resources. We resist. And above all, we remind one another: you are not alone.
The state may wield force, but we wield community.
They deploy troops.
We deploy truth.
In the days ahead, I hope you’ll check in on your students, your colleagues, your neighbors. I hope you’ll speak up when it’s easier to stay silent. I hope you’ll remember that even in moments of intimidation and spectacle, our people have never stopped building—schools, movements, sanctuary.
We’ve been here before. We know how to hold each other through the storm.
For our people, always,
Dayson
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