Indigenous Migrants 2024 Banner

July 2024

By Joanna Lee (ERI), Lupe Renteria Salome (ERI), and Janet Martinez (CIELO)

Los Angeles County is home to many diverse Indigenous Migrant communities from what is now known as Mexico and Central America however data and reports on Latinx immigrant communities as a whole often obscures and effectively erases these communities in their analysis. A newly released brief,  “Indigenous Migrants in Los Angeles County” provides an opportunity to learn more about these diverse communities through the work of Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an Indigenous women-led community-based organization, and preliminary research conducted by CIELO and the USC Equity Research Center. Community data gathering efforts such as survey data from CIELO’s outreach events offer a unique opportunity to better understand the diversity of Indigenous Migrant communities throughout Los Angeles County.

A full report will be released in early fall of 2024.

Check out some of the preliminary data findings and hear directly from organizers, interpreters, and leaders supporting indigenous migrant communities in Los Angeles. This informational video was created by CIELO’s team from informant interviews with indigenous migrant community members conducted by USC ERI.

 

mycielo

Comunidades Indígenas en liderazgo (CIELO) is an Indigenous women-led non-profit organization that works jointly with Indigenous communities residing in Los Angeles. One of our priorities is to fight for social justice through a cultural lens. Our fight for social justice includes ending gender-based violence, providing language access rights, cultural preservation, and reproductive justice. CIELO is a link, a resource, and a liaison for migrant Indigenous communities residing in Los Angeles.

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    Immigrant Inclusion & Racial Justice

    Our work on immigrant inclusion and racial justice brings together three emphases: scholarship that draws on academic theory and rigorous research, data that provides information structured to highlight the process of immigrant inclusion over time, and engagement that seeks to create new dialogues with government, community organizers, business and civic leaders, immigrants and the voting public to advance immigrant inclusion and racial equity.

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    In the area of economic inclusion, we at ERI advance academic theory and practical applications linking economic growth, environmental quality, and civic health with bridging of racial and other gaps; produce accessible and actionable data and analysis through the data tools; and establish research partnerships to deepen and advance the dialogue, planning, and actions around racial equity, environmental justice, and the built environment.

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    ERI’s work in the area of governing power includes: conducting cross-disciplinary studies of today’s social movements, supporting learning and strategizing efforts to advance dialogues among organizers, funders, intermediaries, evaluators, and academics, and developing research-based social change frameworks and tools to inform—and be informed by—real-world, real-time efforts towards a vision of deep change.

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    In 2020, the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) merged to form the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI).

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