The Promotora System: Community Care and Indigenous Women’s Organizing in Mississippi
Originally published in Southern Cultures, Vol. 28, Number 4, Winter 2022
Published in Southern Cultures (Winter 2022), this article documents how Indigenous Guatemalan women in rural Mississippi built a grassroots community care network in the aftermath of the August 2019 ICE raids, the largest single-state workplace immigration raids in U.S. history. Through a collaboration with the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity (IAJE) and the Mississippi Freedom Writers collective from Dartmouth College, this work situates itself within a broader critique of neoliberalism, arguing that the promotora system represents a moral and collective alternative to exploitative labor systems and punitive immigration enforcement.
