Panelist Jaclyn Dean receives Distinguished Alumni Award as part of event
Jaclyn Dean ‘12 was the first Rice student to declare a minor in Poverty, Justice and Human Capabilities (PJHC). Today, she is the policy and government affairs director for the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) and was recently invited “back” to Rice to speak at the annual Gray/Wawro Panel in Gender, Health and Well-being, which took place via Zoom March 4 on the topic of “The Gender of Migration, the Migration of Gender.”
Dean was joined by fellow panelists Guadalupe Fernández, policy and advocacy manager for Tahirih Justice Center, Houston, and Stephanie Santos, assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy.
Dean wasn’t just there to talk work, however: She was also presented — virtually — with the Distinguished Alumna Award from Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality (CSWGS), which houses the PJHC minor and hosts the yearly Gray/Wawro Panel.
“Her career exemplifies our aspirations for our PJHC graduates,” said Diana Strassmann, founding director of the PJHC program (which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2020) and the Carolyn and Fred McManis Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Humanities, who presented Dean with the award.
A key goal of the program, Strassmann said, is for students to become the kind of leaders capable of and committed to enhancing the well-being of all people. In addition to her current work with NAPAWF, Dean — who double majored in political science and sociology — served as a Peace Corps volunteer before obtaining her master's degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
“Jaclyn has been an activist for as long as I've known her, beginning with nonprofit work she did as an undergraduate at Rice,” said Strassmann, who noted that Dean now welcomes current PJHC students as interns at NAPAWF. “They see her as a role model for how to carry out their values and work that furthers the well-being and agency of others.”
Gender as the lens
At NAPAWF in Washington, D.C., Dean works on policy issues related to reproductive health and rights, immigrant rights and economic justice. CSWGS’ yearlong arc of programming — which also included a Feb. 26 panel on “Women in Criminal Justice” and a March 10 lecture by historian Martha S. Jones on Black women as the original voting rights activists — has centered around the theme of gender, race and political engagement.
The March 4 Gray/Wawro Panel addressed this theme at various interrelated scales — locally, regionally, nationally and internationally — by examining how gender and migration impact one another.
“Global migration dynamics and gender are intimately and often violently intertwined,” said Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, an assistant professor of English who moderated the panel. “While many analyses of migration attend to labor markets, warfare and refugee and asylum policies, what can we see when we center gender as our analytic lens?”
Women migrants, he said, are far more likely to be isolated in jobs that offer no social or legal protection, including domestic work and sex work. They’re also more likely to be tied to their employers via temporary contracts that result in long and difficult separations from their families at home.
“While they may sometimes be singled out for special treatment, it is largely as victims,” said Marte-Wood. “What policymakers have generally failed to do, however, is to address the rights violations that most temporary migrants and women in particular experience on a daily basis.”
Santos, who was a postdoctoral fellow with CSWGS from 2018 to 2020, shared her research on Filipino migrants living and working in Houston and introduced the concept of “paluwagan,” a Tagalog term for informal fund-pooling among a group that allows women to sustain a livelihood abroad while saving enough money to afford plane tickets back to the Philippines to see family — albeit one group member at a time.
Over 2.2 million Filipinos are overseas foreign workers (OFWs) and send much of their earnings home. “When you’re an OFW, you're like a faucet and money flows through you,” one woman told Santos. “There's always somebody who needs help.”
Paluwagan groups provide unbanked populations such as migrant workers with ways to save and borrow money. If group trust is strong enough, they can even provide emergency loans. More than that, the groups also act as spaces for information sharing (when are flights home cheapest?) and emotional support (who better to understand your homesickness?).
For the group of Filipino caregivers she followed in Houston, Santos said, it was “a space where vulnerable Filipinos could protect one another ... where they could imagine home together. It's a radical praxis that enabled them to imagine and bring into being their lives as students, as nurses and as friends.”
A dangerous intersection
“We can’t talk about immigration and gender without talking about violence,” said Fernández, who shared her experiences working to transform local and state policies and practices that impact immigrant survivors of gender-based violence through the Tahirih Justice Center.
But to only focus on interpersonal violence is to lose sight of the greater context of institutional violence, she said. “Immigrant victims or survivors live at the dangerous intersection of sexism and racism. … It is impossible to address interpersonal violence without addressing these larger structures of violence that our communities experience.”
And as these institutions often serve to reinforce and perpetuate each other, the only solution is similarly intersectional: collective action within and across communities and identity groups. This, Fernández said, is necessary to end both violence and oppression in all its forms.
Community solutions are especially critical because of abusers’ tendency to isolate their victims. As migrants are already inherently isolated, it’s crucial to offer support to those who’ve survived violence in the form of education, resources and networks of other migrants who can share their experiences.
In addition to community-building, Fernández said, it’s important to talk about repairing the harm that’s been done by the persistence of institutional racism and sexism in America.
“It'll take years to repair the harm of the recent wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the significant changes to immigration policy at the state and the federal level that has created this climate of fear within immigrant communities,” Fernández said. “Comprehensive immigration reform alone is not the only solution. … Therefore, we need to be talking about what repairing harm looks like within our own homes or in communities, particularly in this moment in time.”
Dean shared her perspective on how reproductive control and gender oppression manifests in federal immigration policy, such as abortion restrictions and medical neglect in U.S. detention facilities, and illustrated how restrictions on reproduction targeted immigrants, including Asians and Pacific Islanders.
The Page Act of 1875, she said, preceded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first to explicitly exclude immigrants based on race or national origin — and took aim at Asian groups by effectively banning Chinese female migrants. Under the Page Act, Chinese women seeking to migrate to America submitted to such questions from the American consul in Hong Kong as whether or not they’d ever worked in “houses of prostiution,” whether they were “virtuous” or whether they were coming to the U.S. “for lewd and immoral purposes.”
The language of the Page Act, Dean said, reveals “the beginnings of this stereotype and this trope of Asian women as being hypersexualized, and then being scrutinized for these stereotypes upon entering into the United States.”
In January 2020, the Trump administration imposed new visa rules once again aimed at migrant women via their reproductive systems. Pregnant applicants can now be denied entry into the U.S. should they be suspected of “birth tourism,” or attempting to have a child in America in order for that child to have U.S. citizenship. The restrictions — which don’t apply to applicants from countries within the Visa Waiver Program, comprised of 39 mostly European nations — have been widely viewed as a means of regulating migrant women’s bodies.
“White nationalism really depends on reproductive oppression of people of color,” said Dean, who echoed Fernández’s sentiments on how to best address these issues: centering the communities themselves and recognizing the role of institutions in maintaining power structures.
“If you want to have more sound immigration policies, you have to pay attention to how they are treating pregnant people and immigrant women,” Dean said. “And as such, the immigration and reproductive rights movements have to be intersectional … and they have to be expansive in the way they are looking at who they are serving and who is leading these movements.
“Our solutions must focus on dismantling systems, and not individual policies,” Dean said.