Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power: Part II

Maria Alegria Rodriguez and Andrea Dehlendorf on how progressive movement leaders are working to shift narratives in the workers’ rights and immigrant rights movements. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Last week, Off-Kilter aired part one of a series of conversations produced in partnership with our friends at The Forge organizing journal, digging into the role of narrative in shifting power and building a more equitable society — feat. Dorian Warren and Anat Shenker-Osorio. Much of last week’s conversation with Dorian Warren and Anat Shenker-Osorio focused on the neoliberal narrative and how it shows up at the root of so many of the injustices facing working people today. This week, we continue the conversation with two progressive movement leaders working to shift narratives in the workers’ rights and immigrant rights movements specifically:

Part 2:

• Andrea Dehlendorf, Co-Director at United for Respect
• Maria Alegria Rodriquez, co-founding Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition

Find Part 1 of this two-part series of conversations here.

And find lots more on how advocates and organizers are using narrative strategy to shift power in Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power, guest edited by Jonathan Heller and Judith Barish.

TRANSCRIPT:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

Sights to hit the clock by the end of the day

Hot from downtown into the hood where I slave

The only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t safe

I spend most of my time working…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Last week, we brought you part one of a series of conversations produced in partnership with our friends at The Forge organizing journal, digging into the role of narrative in shifting power and building a more equitable society. Much of last week’s conversation with Dorian Warren and Anat Shenker-Osorio focused on the neoliberal narrative in particular and how it shows up at the root of so many of the injustices facing working people today.

This week, continuing that conversation, I talk with two progressive movement leaders about how they’re working to shift narratives in the workers’ rights and immigrant rights movement specifically. Andrea Dehlendorf, a Co-Director at United for Respect, and María Alegría Rodriguez, co-founding Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. You can find lots more on how advocates and organizers are using narrative strategy to shift power in a recent issue of The Forge that bears the same name as this two-part podcast, Shaping Narratives, Shifting Power. Check it out at ForgeOrganizing.org. And you can also find a link, of course, on Off-Kilter’s syllabus page on Medium. So, next, without further ado, my conversation with Andrea and María. Let’s take a listen.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to come on the show.

MARÍA ALEGRÍA RODRIGUEZ: Great to be here.

VALLAS: So, Andrea, starting with you, you have spent your career organizing retail workers and other low-wage workers who are now, finally in many circles, being recognized as or at least called essential. You now work at United for Respect. It’s a national movement of retail employees organizing for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And all of that came out of an effort to organize Wal-Mart workers, which folks may remember known as Our Wal-Mart. We talked a lot in part one of this series of conversations with Dorian Warren and Anat Shenker-Osorio about the neoliberal narrative at a pretty high level. But to kick part two of this series of conversations off, I would love to start with you and ask you to talk a little bit about how neoliberalism and the neoliberal narrative have been showing up and playing out for workers in the retail sector and in particular for workers at companies like Wal-Mart. There’s a lot of timely stories there.

ANDREA DEHLENDORF: I think that what I see is that the most pernicious manifestation of the neoliberal narrative and how it impacts working people is it tells a story that people are responsible for their own conditions and that the economy and the corporations that they work for are governed by, you know, just that their logic will work things out. And the fact that that logic leaves them behind is really their own fault. And if they had just worked harder, gotten a better education, made different choices when they were younger, they wouldn’t be stuck in these low-paid, economically-unstable, extractive jobs. Because the narrative really obfuscates what the drivers are and the decision makers are of the decisions that really set the terms and conditions under which people work. And I think that with Wal-Mart, there’s many members who really see and are able to understand the role that shareholder primacy and the Walton family’s pursuit of profit is really what’s responsible for their conditions. And the process for them of being in community with others and helping bring people together to see that the individual ways that their work is organized is not inevitable and that it’s not their fault, it’s happening to other people, and it’s structural is really critical.

And we’ve seen this also when we look at some of the big, disruptive changes that are happening in retail corporations, where on the one hand, there is a tremendous amount of Wall Street and private equity acquisitions of retail companies that are driving them out of business. And people, you know, just the popular narrative that’s out there, the neoliberal narrative, is that it’s a survival of the fittest. That if these companies were better run, better managed, and able to stay current, invest in technology, then they would be thriving, and people, they would be fine. When actually, the reason that they are being driven out of bankruptcy is a very systematic approach by Wall Street and private equity firms to buy them out, extract their value, and drive them out of business, causing wreckage of the jobs.

So, it’s really a process of really uncovering what the actual, real drivers of the dynamics that are happening in the economy, whether it’s financialization in the way that or shareholder primacy or really exposing that those things aren’t inevitabilities, but they’re conscious choices that are being made in the search for maximization of profits.

VALLAS: Well, and there’s a pretty specific example there that’s actually part of a story you tell around Toys “R” Us, definitely kind of one of those tales we heard about how, oh, just didn’t make it, you know. Oh, how sad. Too bad. Just part of what happened, that inevitability. But what was the real story there? It’s something you’ve really been trying to kind of get out as part of the narrative correction as part of that larger narrative shift.

DEHLENDOR: Yeah. So, 33,000 people lost their jobs. Many had been working there for decades when Toys “R” Us went into bankruptcy. And I use that frame, “went into bankruptcy,” which is how the story was originally told. It was a passive voice. This is a thing that happened to them. There was a dominant narrative, which is this thing happened. They didn’t make it in the new economy. They couldn’t compete with Amazon and the growth of online retailers. And for a minute, that was really the story that was told. But people who worked at Toys “R” Us, they saw the truth, and they saw what was really happening. Which is that their firm had been bought out by private equity companies. And the first phase was a rapid destabilization in part-timing and erosion of job quality when they were there, and then ultimately resulted in the company being bled dry and not being able to continue to operate. So, really, there was a set of companies who decided to bankrupt it and put them out of business. And just changing the narrative through organizing and activating people who worked there to tell their stories and tell their experiences was able to really shift it to an active-voice story around what Wall Street firms had done to create the conditions and to force this company into bankruptcy, and therefore put people out of work consciously, again, in the pursuit of profit.

And by, again, by people organizing, and I think it’s important that it’s not, you know, part of it was the stories that they told, but it was also the actions that they organized at Toys “R” Us headquarters and in the stores, all of the pension fund meetings that they went to talk to, to explain that the story was really retold and reshaped. And the narrative was changed through workers organizing, taking action, and sharing their stories and analysis, which fundamentally changed the conversation to show the causation and the responsibility for the destruction of those jobs. And we were able, as a result, to win a $20 dollar severance settlement. Which was a drop in the bucket compared to what had been extracted, but was definitely some relief for people who’d been put out of work.

VALLAS: So, obviously, tangible benefits, important relief for workers. But also, as you’re describing, you sort of made visible, you took out of the passive voice, something that was a very active harm being done by villians who needed to be named in order for the narrative to accurately capture what was happening, as opposed to sort of an invisible narrative about what’s going on, that allows people to avoid responsibility when they’re the ones directly responsible for causing the job losses that you’re describing. Just to really kind of concretely explain how the narrative fits with the rest of it.

DEHLENDORF: Exactly.

VALLAS: María, here’s where I would really love to bring you in. You’re the co-founding Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. In that role, you describe your work as serving the members of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. You have spent years fighting to shift the narrative to advance immigrant rights. How do you see neoliberalism and neoliberal narratives showing up in the fight for immigrant rights and enabling an unjust and inhumane status quo right now that is, to some extent, becoming, I think, more visible in this moment, but which is a slightly different conversation than just the essential workers conversation.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes. Thank you. Thanks for having this conversation. And congratulations, Andrea. That sounds so fascinating and so important. We’ve been going through a process, both within the immigrant rights movement, really trying to deepen an understanding of the root causes, both broaden the vision and deepen the understanding. And as part of that, we’re in an alignment process with other organizations, with other progressive organizations, in Florida that are really trying to shift from being in opposition to having an orientation towards governance. And that really requires an understanding of the dominant paradigm, the hegemonic paradigm that is unleashed on us. In Florida, it’s been a testing ground for many of those policies that were part of the structural adjustment program policies of Latin America where government is bad, and you seek to cut it to what is it, “drown it in a bathtub,” as Norquist said, where free markets are good and profit is good and where individualism and so-called freedom reigns supreme. Whereas we’re building a counter to that and really pushing through to understand that we need economies and governments that are in the service of all Floridians and that our lives are, no moment like now to recognize that our lives, our health, our economies are so interdependent.

So, while we’ve worked to elevate the right to migrate, we’ve also worked to elevate the right to not have to migrate and have to start looking at the root causes of that migration. And that is a recognition that the migration that we’re looking at is really distorted patterns of migration that are displacing people across the globe. It’s not just in pursuit of the American dream. It’s really a consequence of failures of political, military, and climate policies that are displacing people as globalization goes for the race towards the bottom.

VALLAS: And María, staying with you for just a moment and also kind of staying with this current moment, it’s obviously incredibly difficult to talk about the narrative around immigrants and immigrant rights without acknowledging the incredibly toxic and dehumanizing narrative being advanced in some circles, especially in an election year where that’s red meat to Donald Trump’s base. What is your analysis of this moment as the multilayered challenge and kind of ongoing, chaotic maelstrom that it has become with the pandemic, with so many different layers, but that have that added challenge that people like you fighting for immigrant rights heading into this pandemic already had in the form of that specific kind of xenophobia that we’ve been seeing advanced by this particular White House?

RODRIGUEZ: It’s definitely been unleashed, at so many different levels, Rebecca, at the level of not just local, state, and federal, as Trump is not that is not the enemy. Trumpism is the enemy. And it’s really manifested in all the white supremacy, the xenophobia, the Islamophobia at all different levels. And also it’s not just an issue of rhetoric. Somehow, some of us were wishful thinking that Trump was just stealing the rhetoric because he wanted to get elected, that he wouldn’t put it into the tremendous actions that we’ve seen. Obviously, Steve Bannon and Steven Miller are key white supremacist nativists that are at the heart — Bannon no longer in this round — but at the heart of these policies that are so dangerous. And they’re dangerous not just to immigrant families. They’re dangerous to the democracy that we aspire to or purport to aspire to. So, the whole understanding and dismantling of the white supremacy with then xenophobia, we’ve always been addressing racism as a coalition. Several years ago, we also started to create the distinction between addressing anti-Blackness versus racism. So, all of that, in theory, has been our practice. It’s been a theory and putting it into practice.

And the challenge has been to be responsive and not reactive to the 400+ executive orders that the administration has unleashed on us, as I said earlier, and the attacks that are unrepentant. And so, it’s important for us to not let them manage and hold the rhetoric and the language and the communications and for us to be able to push through. But that’s not an easy task. And I can give you some examples of what I mean by that.

VALLAS: Well, I want to come back to that, and I do want to actually dig in and get into some specific examples of campaigns and how they’ve interacted with narrative. Andrea, I want to go back to you for just a moment, because part of what I really appreciate about the way that you talk about narrative and how it fits in with the work around fighting for workers’ rights is you’ve identified that there are sort of two levels of narrative shift that you’re working to try to bring about. One of them is at a macro level. You were talking a little bit about that before, kind of the pulling back of the curtain on what are the real motives of these wealthy corporate employers? What are the specific ways that they’re actually enriching themselves at the expense of workers? But you also talk about there being narrative shift that needs to happen at the micro level, and that there needs to be work around bringing workers together, creating spaces for workers to come together, to tell their individual stories and connect with each other. I would love for you to sort of talk a little bit about the two levels and how they fit together and some of how narrative shift is being brought to bear in your work at these two levels as part of your organizing.

DEHLENDORF: Thank you for that question. I really believe that there is an insidious and incredibly challenging dynamic that happens in this country where people have so much just deep, deep shame and self-blame around the conditions in which they are. And that people internalize, on a very deep level, the dominant narratives that exist in our society. And that often within the movement, we spend a lot of time talking about how we shape public opinion and how we shape the opinions and perspectives of opinion leaders and policymakers. And that is critical, and I in no way want to diminish that. But I really believe that the narrative work and the storytelling work and the shifting and undoing of dominant narratives also really has to happen in the ways in which we work within our own communities and our own bases to create the conditions for people to take on the forces that are defining their lives.

And so, I talk a lot about narrative and storytelling as part of an organizing practice, which is that people talking to each other and sharing their own experiences, whether you’re hearing somebody else talk about an experience that you had a lot of shame and self-blame around, or whether it’s you sharing that story and having it be validated by somebody else, it unloads a tremendous amount of pressure and burden and allows people to really be more ready to both see who is ultimately responsible and be willing to take steps to be able to combat it. And there’s some very interesting research around the psychology of this, that it’s not just a precursor for, you know, it’s not a precursor. But it’s not so much just even a precondition of being willing to organize and take action and to publicly share stories, but it also literally, it’s killing people because the stress of shame and the health consequences in terms of blood pressure and other kind of major health issues are absolutely exacerbated by this. And that we are literally in this country, people are dying and are suffering because of the impact of these dominant ideologies that blame people for their own circumstances and inability to have real economic stability.

And so, just to put a story on this, you know, one of the really powerful things that we did was we realized that within our network, and people who worked at Wal-Mart specifically, there were so many people who were literally hungry and didn’t have enough food to eat. And somebody told a story, who’d been in the organization a very long time, but had not shared this around the pain and the shame that she felt around chastising and yelling at a child for eating for lunch the last can of tuna that was in the cupboard, which meant that they weren’t going to have anything for dinner. And what she had been just carrying for years around that experience and watching the reaction of other people who also worked at Wal-Mart around hearing this story. Because it was something that they didn’t dare admit because it was too painful. But then seeing this leader, somebody who also had worked at Wal-Mart, who was willing to tell that story, opened them up, and other people started telling the story. And then we did some actions with Twitter where people were taking pictures of their empty refrigerators and really taking this thing that they’d felt so much shame and were trying to hide and say, actually, I’m going to share this. Because if we can’t tell the truth about this, we can’t actually change the situation so that this is different.

And so, I really, you know, I think it’s just so important to not just consider and think about narrative as a public act to build public support, to build the political will, to be able to make the change, but also as a practice of organizing and both individual and collective transformation and action.

VALLAS: And I find that to be such an incredibly powerful story because, I mean, as you talk about the kind of psychological side of it, right, most of the time when people talk about and think about narrative shift, everyone’s assuming that the audiences is the media so that we can be communicating with the broader public and winning hearts and minds. And there is a lot of that at that macro level that needs to happen. There’s another story I’m going to put you on the spot to tell that I think is incredibly powerful from this COVID moment. But at this micro level, right? That how are we going to get to a place where we have workers rising up and actually building power, organizing together to win the wages, the benefits, the fair and predictable hours, access to personal protective equipment, PPE, in this moment — you know, my god, basic human rights — if what they are feeling that they’re experiencing is somehow an individual experience that’s unique to them, and it’s their fault because of that individual responsibility component that’s at the heart of that neoliberal narrative. Versus that this is a structural problem that is doing great policy violence to millions upon millions of workers and that they are in a position to do something about it. I find that story incredibly powerful for that reason and so many others.

So, María, to bring you back in here, you have a pretty incredible example to share as well, actually from back during the Obama years, which feels like a different lifetime at this point. And I’m going to put you on the spot to tell that story, and it’s the story of the Trail of Dreams.

RODRIGUEZ: I’m glad to tell that story. And a lot of the DREAMers themselves have told the story. So, I was more of a, I accompanied them in that process. But I did want to go back to Andrea’s point around the personal testimony, because that’s been a methodology that’s so important as we try to help understand that we don’t want to just address symptoms, but we really want to go after systems. And for people to understand that their experience is not a personal failing, but it’s a result of a real systemic approach of exploitation or marginalization, or in our case, xenophobia. And I think that in the stories and the sharing of the experiences, people get the aha moment of yeah, it’s not because I’m a bad person. It’s really, you know, it’s a result of all of these forces that are acting upon me. But there’s also this not just a passive piece, but a protagonist piece that gets awakened for us to be really subjects in our history and not just objects of these systems. And by talking together, I think people get the courage to take action that becomes increasingly more relevant, more escalated, perhaps more militant. And I think that that is healing to us as we own our stories and also healing to the systems that surround us, the culture and the systems, because it’s two different levels.

And we use that methodology, which is either based in popular education. Marshall Ganz has the methodology of story of self, story of us, story of now, but so powerful. And as an organizer who really resisted communications, like any money that would come in, you put straight to organizing and not really, like really being skeptical about having some magical words that would lit a campaign or fancy consultants that would give us the script. We really went through a process to understand that, yes, we want to change policy, and in order to do that, we need to address politics. But in order to address politics, we can’t really do that successfully without really addressing consciousness and consciousness, communications and culture. And so, we’re beginning to shift to create that as a terrain to be contested. Yes, we always did political education, but we really need to do that at scale. And so, our actions inform that. And so, I was able, throughout my trajectory as an organizer, I’ve been able to see moments and how organizing feels magical at times and been able to witness some cultural shifts. And I can give various examples.

Everybody likes the Trail of Dreams. But there’s other examples, too. But the Trail of Dreams, really, you know, when I tell this story, it feels like it happened very quickly. The reality is it took, you know, 5, 10 years. But from going to where nobody really knew what a DREAMer was. And I remember being in communication with some journalists, and they really didn’t know, to building a core of directly-impacted youth that, little by little, through retention of their leadership and growth and support, they did escalated actions and ultimately did a 15-mile walk. This is not the only tactic. There were many tactics of the moment across the country, but this is the one from our Florida viewpoint we saw. And I literally saw the headlines change and our own DREAMers on the cover of Time magazine. We culminated with a civil disobedience at the White House, and a few years later, two years to be exact, we were able to get the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, which is a reprieve from deportation, just a temporary protection from deportation. And that would allow people to have a work permit and a driver’s license, which really changes lives, not just their lives, but their parents’ and their family’s lives.

VALLAS: So, bringing us back to the current moment, and María, hearing you tell that story, I mean, I said it feels like it’s a different lifetime. It’s obviously incredibly timely in this moment as well because of recent Supreme Court cases that brought good news when it comes to DREAMers, right? So, really a lot of relevance in this moment. And I really appreciate you being real about kind of how much work went into it, how long it took, because I think a lot of people do know that story, but also probably know only the outputs that were visible and that were so incredibly transformative. But bringing us back to this present moment, which I keep coming back to Arandhati Roy’s words calling this moment a portal. Obviously, it’s the way that a lot of people in progressive movement spaces are thinking about this moment as an opportunity. Obviously, the tremendous tragedy and hardship all around us makes it difficult to use phrases like “silver lining” without a lot of caveats. But there is some sort of moment that we are currently in that feels critical, I think, to all of us as an opportunity to really shift the narrative now that in so many ways the curtain has been pulled back on so much amid the COVID pandemic, amid the joblessness crisis, amid the uprisings against structural racism.

My question to each of you, and I’d love to hear both of you weigh in and offer your thoughts on this question is, are we at a tipping point? Has the curtain finally been pulled back wide enough for us to, I’m going to use a phrase here from Dorian Warren in part one of this series of conversations, put the nails in neoliberalism’s coffin and in the neoliberal narrative that you’ve both been describing as infusing and being at the root of so much of the injustice that you’ve both spent so many years fighting? And, Andrea, I’ll take that to you first.

DEHLENDORF: Great question. And I think that there is an incredibly exciting window that has opened up in the midst of all of the pain. And I think that watching just the support for defunding the police just take a huge leap in this period shows that often, I believe our movements get trapped into a notion that change happens incrementally, and that we have to just kind of keep building sort of one sort of what’s the next best thing we can get, and then the next best thing we can get versus really putting out these really big leap forward alternate worldviews that we can move towards. And I think that we’re really seeing what becomes possible when making much more large-scale structural change that feels like an incredible movement lesson for all of us. I think around essential work specifically, it’s been astonishing to watch public perception and discourse around what have been considered really throwaway jobs, that just get diminished constantly as being temporary. People are passing through them. They’re not really worth investing in. It’s just, you know, and just incredible callous disregard that we’ve had for those jobs as a society. All of a sudden, seeing people really realize and reckon with, what does it mean to rethink these jobs as essential and core and vital to the functioning of our entire economy and society?

I think that if it really was a tipping point and we had gotten there yet, I think we would be seeing significantly more actual changes to what corporations are doing and what policymakers are doing. I mean, I think making policy takes a long time. Corporations can change and make decision in an instant. And I think that the fact that instead of seeing massive reinvestment and changes in wage structures and overhauls of paid family leave, I think we see a lot of corporate great messages come out, whether it’s about how much they value their essential workers or how committed they are to Black Lives Matter. But if you look at and compare the public statements to what the actual policy changes are, it is not yet manifesting. So, I think that there’s a window of opportunity, but we still have to do work to push it over to become a real tipping point. And I don’t think that we’re there yet.

And I think what’s the most terrifying to me is, is that I think, I guess I would say that I think that we’re more at a choice point or an inflection point where what is clear is, is that the current system and the current ideology and the policies and practices that flow from that are broken. But there are two broadly very competing worldviews around where to go. And one of them is a very right wing, nationalistic, racist, white supremacist, fascist perspective. And then there is a, you know, can we actually build a new social compact and a new way of being together with each other? And I think that we as a movement still have a lot of work to do to push in the direction of really changing and moving towards a more just and equitable and inclusive society that really gives meaningful voice and power to communities and working people.

VALLAS: María, I’m going to take the same question to you. And again, because I’m famous for multipart questions, so I’ll give you the parts again. I’m curious, hearing Andrea talk a lot about how we’re not quite at that tipping point yet, and I’ll show my cards. I would agree. Although inflection point, I think, is a great way to think about this. How do we use this moment to shift the narrative now that the curtain is starting to get pulled back on all of this? And how do you see this as an opportunity?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I definitely see there’s opportunities, but I don’t know if they’re fundamentally addressing the core of the system, given all the wealth redistribution towards more concentrated inequality that the pandemic has posed. The opportunities, I would say, are, given the nature of the crisis of this moment, the global pandemic, I think it highlights the global aspect of our orientation, the fact that we’re a planet, and we are connected and interdependent. Similarly, the centrality of healthcare and how none of us are well until all of us are well. None of us are free until all of us are free. And so, the fundamental access to healthcare is good and beneficial for everyone, I don’t see the political leaders really embracing that, seizing the moment to be as bold as we could be in that arena. And the third piece that is an opportunity is around government over profit. Like, we saw that government had to step in, even at the expense of certain sectors of the market or of industry or profit. And that there is a role for the collective good and that the collective good is more important than the market.

Beyond that, there are so many cultural opportunities around: the value of teachers, the overemphasis on consumption and how mindful people have been, the relationship to neighbors and just that neighborly connection. So, those are some opportunities. Obviously, the resistance or pushback on white supremacy and overpolicing and mass incarceration and the whole beauty of the Black Liberation movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, have created so many openings. I really hope that we are able to land those in real systemic, not just policy, but systemic change. And I think there’s a lot there.

For the immigrant communities, which are affected by everything that I’ve said, I would say it’s really contextual, any threats and opportunities or whether there is a pivot moment or not. Because the time, place, and conditions vary from region to region, from area to area. And we’ve definitely just seen more marginalization, more exclusion, more exploitation during this period, sadly. We set up a fund Essential, Yet Excluded, but it really should be Essential, Yet Excluded and Exploited. And neoliberal wisdom and capital uses workers as if they were disposable, and immigrant workers are at the bottom of the barrel in that sense. So, when you need them, you extract every level of productivity, sunup to sundown with poverty wages. And when you don’t, you either put them in immigrant prison to feul the mass incarceration that Black and brown communities have faced, or you deport them because they’re disposable. We’re disposable. So, in that sense, it’s very dangerous times.

While there are opportunities because of what we have gone together and shared as a humanity, it’s similar, Rebecca, to when a hurricane comes. We were talking earlier about hurricanes. When a hurricane comes, people really step up and be more concerned with their neighbors. And everybody’s checking in on each other. And hurricanes expose the systemic vulnerabilities of communities. And when the hurricane goes away, those with money and homes and resources and savings, they’re okay. But the rest of us are tossed around, to, not just natural disasters, bad manmade disasters that [audio cuts out].

VALLAS: And María, staying with you for just a moment. Because so much of your work has focused in the immigrant rights space and as you mentioned, that Essential, Yet Excluded. And I think that that extra piece you add on, it should be part of the campaign name, right, Essential, Yet Excluded and exploited. It’s an incredibly timely point to make and to acknowledge, and, I think, really to give you an opportunity to speak to in this moment, given the incredible levels of exclusion of immigrants that we’ve seen from leaders actually on both sides of the political aisle in this moment, in the deals getting struck and who’s getting the relief and who’s being cut out of these packages? Obviously, none of that is new. It’s a direct through line going back quite some time in our politics and in our policymaking. And all of which relates back to the type of overlay that neoliberalism and the neoliberal narratives bring to the immigrant rights conversation and the absence of that kind of common humanity or us frame, rather than the them that lays the groundwork for the divide and conquer politics that are at new heights or lows, depending on how you look at it in this type of an election year, as though it could even have gotten worse since 2016. And I think we are, without question, watching it continue to head steadily in that direction with many months between now and November.

How do you address and combat, and how can we as progressives approach and combat the divide and conquer frame that is part and parcel of the neoliberal strategy for erasing who the real villains are here and pointing the finger at the wrong people to ensure that folks who are economically precarious and struggling because of the economy that has been built, that is not in their favor, but that is rather at their expense, but in a way that could allow them to understand bo, are we as a working class all in this together and immigrants are part of that?

RODRIGUEZ: Absolutely. And I’m sitting here just so angry when I really just feel how the governor of Florida, having to recognize that farm workers are essential and people aren’t going to have food security if our farm workers don’t continue harvesting, but yet then blaming them for his incompetence on the rise of COVID as we become the laughing stock of the globe or the epicenter of the crisis today. And I don’t know when this will be aired, but it’s the fourth day of record deaths in Florida. And it’s just so, the hypocrisy of wanting people’s labor but not wanting their lives or their families is fundamentally so screwed up. It is at the core of what the neoliberal exploitation is about. And it’s so, so maddening. But for sure, we’ve been in a process for the last 15 years, quite frankly, of building Black and brown alliances. And really now we’re building what we call the bigger we or what somebody more smart called the bigger we and is Black, brown and white, in building to understand that we have more, not just more in common. Our interests are interdependent, and yet they’re using racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy, patriarchy, anything they can to divide us. Those who benefit from us being divided. And that sounds very cliche, very [unclear], they say. But I think fundamentally, it’s important to really see that.

In Florida, it’s so interesting and really so beautiful in many ways, but we have Cuban immigrants, and we have the Puerto Ricans who have a migration experience that aren’t immigrants. And then we have people from Central America that are refugees but aren’t recognized as refugees. And obviously, South Florida, founded by Black immigrants, Bahamians have the largest number of immigrants of African descent. So, there’s so many possibilities for us to really come together in a common experience. And that requires leadership that we need to build and create and displace, because the leadership we’ve had completely divides and conquers. And the leadership we have has been transactional and not transformational. And and the leadership on both sides, I have to say, leadership of those with power and leadership of our movements have to also be bold in decolonizing our spaces and creating the capacity for people not just to protest and oppose, but the capacity for people to propose and to govern.

VALLAS: I love that phrasing. Please repeat that. I want to borrow that. Say that one more time.

RODRIGUEZ: Like I said at the top of the hour, we’re really moving from becoming an opposition resistance movement to a proposition governance movement. And governance at all levels. Like, you govern your bodies. Your govern your homes. How you govern your organizations, your unions, your churches, your schools. I think we want to build that governance muscle from our people. And that requires ideology, but it also requires a certain amount of personal, emotional, spiritual healing and strengthening and elevation of the resilience of our communities in order to be able to be in a true governance orientation.

VALLAS: Andrea, María’s talking about moving from opposition to proposition. I love that so much. And but she’s also talking about the challenging and incredibly important and ongoing work of building a cross-racial working-class movement, fighting for shared priorities and a shared agenda. You’ve also done a lot of thinking and a lot of talking about the importance of working in a cross-movement way as well, so that we’re not having 1,000 separate, siloed conversations about housing and about healthcare and about immigrants’ rights and about other workers’ rights. A big part of that work has been a project called Athena, which is a coalition taking on Amazon. Talk a little bit about that cross-movement work. We only have a few minutes left, but I feel like this is a really important place to go before our time runs out.

DEHLENDORF: Yeah. And I’d just say that I just love everything that María just said and wanted to just say one note around governance, which is, for a long time, we’ve been really focused on winning the things: better pay, better paid leave. But over the last couple years, we’ve really shifted to actually start to frame the fact that actually, workers should have a role on governing the corporations where they work. They should be able to be on the board. They should be able to govern. And taking it a step further, which links us to the work around Athena is, how do we actually think not just about workers having a role on governing and being a part of governing and decision making of corporations? But actually, how do we build potentially multi-stakeholder governance of these big corporations that really look at and address and give a voice to everybody who is being impacted? And that’s really the vision of Athena, is to build a broad table that is really looking at all the intersecting ways in which this absolutely unprecedented billionaire is controlling our lives and our society. And so, workers are one constituency because they’re clearly a major source of extraction that is a problem with Amazon’s model. But it’s also about who is being impacted by the technology that they’re offering to ICE or to the police departments? Who is being impacted by asthma rates in the communities that are adjacent to the warehouses and transportation hubs of Amazon? How are small-business people being impacted? How are consumers being impacted? And really think about what would it look like to really build multi-stakeholder governance and really break them apart and really change, versus trying to kind of win something incremental on the margins. How do we really be bold enough to make a larger demand? And then what is the kind of movement that we all need to build to be able to do that?

VALLAS: And María, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about working in a cross-movement way as well. It’s a big part of what you’ve been trying to do.

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, absolutely. We are building, at United Front here in Florida, and we’ve been in a process of alignment where we started thinking long-term, less defensive and reactive and more proactive towards that non-patriarchal governing power. And we’ve developed shared capacities together. We’ve strategized and developed theories of change for 20 different counties approximately, and shared leadership training and aligned some of the ideology and communications. And we’ve launched this cycle something called Florida for All. And that’s how we’ve been doing, that’s how we are doing an ambitious and colossal civic engagement campaign that centers in culturally competent constituency strategies as well as the technology and the expertise to go to scale. So, we are really grooving. There’s all kinds of challenges all the time from the inside, from the outside. But I feel really positive in terms of building that bigger we and that united front.

VALLAS: The bigger we. And I want to close by actually bringing back some words from Anat Shenker-Osario from the first part of this two-part series of conversations. She said, “I like to think of progressivism as the radical notion that people are people and not units of productive capacity.” I feel like it’s just such an excellent through line for this series of conversations, including so much of what both of you have been sharing about your work and the challenges that you’re up against and taking on with your organizations and your movements.

I’ve been speaking with María Alegría Rodriguez. She’s co-founding Executive Director who serves the members of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. And Andrea Dehlendorf, a co-director at United for Respect. I appreciate both of you so much and am just in awe of all of this incredible work. And I’m so grateful to both of you for taking the time to join the show.

RODRIGUEZ: What a privilege to be able to do so. Thank you.

DEHLENDORF: Yeah, thank you very much.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back I feel my spirit is revealing

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪