Top: Kica Matos, who leads the National Immigration Law Center, moves from her drum to the street during a set from Proyecto Cimarrón. Bottom: Proyecto Cimarrón members Carlos Cruz and Davis Calderon.
The words floated over Frank Street, voices joining in until it seemed like the whole block was singing along. Si te preguntaran / donde es que yo vivo / no le des mi nombre / ni tampoco mi apellido. On one side of the sidewalk, the sharp, round rattle of the maracas opened up to rolling drums. On the other, the smell of pork carnitas filled the air, fragrant and thick.
The words repeated, stronger and louder this time. Si te preguntaran / donde es que yo vivo / no le des mi nombre / ni tampoco mi apellido. If they ask you / Where I live / Don’t give them my first name / Or my last name.
A fierce, sometimes fleet-footed call to action came to Frank Street Saturday afternoon, as members of Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA) hosted a block party and fundraiser supporting the family of Nancy Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who was arrested and detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 9, as her two young children watched in horror. In the weeks since, more ICE arrests have come to New Haven, separating multiple families in the process.
Martinez, who had lived in the United States for 15 years, is being held at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Her 13-year-old daughter, Monse, said that she calls home every day, reminding her kids about appointments and trying to keep them calm.
Attendees, most of them neighbors with crisp $10 and $20 bills, raised over $1,800 for the family. To donate to support Martinez’ family, you can click here or Venmo @ulanh.
Musician German Xilotl and ULA Co-Founder John Lugo.
“I’m doing okay, but I don’t really feel okay," Monse said Saturday, while watching her brother go down an inflatable waterslide that had materialized in the driveway, a dinosaur roaring from his Jurassic Park t-shirt. “I’m just trying to get my mind off it. I’m trying to stay strong, for my little brother especially. Sometimes, he just cries on my shoulder.”
“It’s not right,” she added of the fear-mongering and increased violence toward immigrants that has defined the Trump Administration, almost always without due process. In the five weeks since that Monday morning in June, she’s had to hold her own grief alongside that of her family’s, and isn’t always able to talk about it. “It does get to a point where I want to cry,” she said.
To make extra money for her family, she has started a small business selling baked goods, flan and chocolate-covered strawberries. “It’s to get my mind off it,” she said. She credited her friends, all of whom know what’s happening in her life, with helping her try to stay motivated in the midst of a summer upended by grief.
Around her, a mix of vendors, neighbors and artists focused on cultivating joy—and some sense of normalcy—as a form of resistance. Beneath a row of tents, kids waited on hamburgers, tostadas de tinga and gem-colored aguas frescas, their hair slicked back after playing on an inflatable waterslide. Friends and neighbors embraced, catching up with their families between bites of food.
Monse, who watched neighborhood kids on the slide, peppered her shouts of “De cuidado! De cuidado!” with smiles, as if she was soaking it all in to remember the image later.
At a table for ULA, attendees stopped to sign up for information alerts and “Know Your Rights” trainings, including court accompaniments that the group is hoping to grow in the next weeks and months. ULA Co-Founder John Jairo Lugo, who launched the organization in the early 2000s, said that he is bracing for increased ICE presence in New Haven, particularly after the passage of President Donald Trump’s supersized tax and spending bill earlier this month.
In the bill, Trump has allocated roughly $170 billion toward his immigration and border policy, a massive increase in funding that largely supports the removal and disappearance of migrants and the expansion of detention facilities, including to private prisons and jails. He has also ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, Cameroonians, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans, all groups that risk facing extreme violence if they are sent back to their home countries.
“When you see the news about California, you feel like nothing is going on here, but it is,” Lugo said. “Our feeling is that the situation is going to get worse. We feel like they are coming after us, and we need to be ready. Unfortunately, that’s the reality that we live in these days.”
Amidst that work, he added, the reminder of community may be been necessary than ever. At a microphone, musician German Xilotl launched into a mariachi serenade, his voice swelling as he dipped into standards like “Cielito Lindo,” “Los Mandados,” and “Mujeres Divinas.”
As he began to sing “México Lindo y Querido,” it seemed he was vocalizing what it meant to exist across two countries, both of them home, when they are separated by hundreds of miles and manmade borders.
Voz de la guitarra mía / Al despertar la mañana / Quiere cantar su alegría / A mi tierra Mexicana, he sang, and a few people swayed along in the street. Yo le canto a sus volcanes / A sus praderas y flores / Que son como talismanes / Del amor de mis amores.
Despite the humid afternoon air, he glowed in a purple traje de charro, studded with ornate silver buttons that glittered in the light.
While Xilotl normally plays with the group Mariachi Nuevo Son, he’d come as a solo act on Saturday. It felt like second nature to be there, he said: as an immigrant himself, he sees it as a responsibility to support other immigrants. Like fellow members of ULA, he’s horrified by the increase in deportations across the country.
“I just like to support,” he said. “They think we are terrorists and criminals. No. We just come to work and support our families.”
Addys Castillo, who for years led City Wide Youth Coalition. "Seguimos en la misma lucha," she said.
A few feet away, members of Proyecto Cimarrón waited to take the street-turned-stage, hands resting on their large Barriles de Bomba and hanging over their long skirts and sneakers. For just over three years, they’ve turned to the Puerto Rican tradition of Bomba—and its constant vision of liberation—as a teaching tool for the present. It is, as member Addys Castillo later explained, a music of resistance that has been used as a way to communicate for 400 years.
“Seguimos en la misma lucha [we continue in the same fight],” she said before the group performed “Fuego en Bucaná,” describing how enslaved Africans would send messages through the music. Then, switching to English: “We’ve never been a quiet people.”
As they sang, drums and footfalls joining the percussion, those words came to life over and over again. In “La Central,” which has become a staple in the Proyecto Cimarrón’s repertoire, musicians leapt between past and present, spinning song into story. The work, which refers to a sugar mill or sugar plantation, communicates where enslaved people plan to gather, a reminder that critical mass is a powerful and possible response to state-sponsored persecution.
So too in the group's final number, as member Kica Matos urged attendees to learn and pass on the lyrics “Si te preguntaran / donde es que yo vivo / no le des mi nombre ni tampoco mi apellido." As head of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Matos has led a lot of “Know Your Rights” trainings, she said. The phrase is just one thing neighbors should know and repeat “cuando la migra vendrá” (when ICE comes).
People—particularly U.S. citizens—can also help by doing court accompaniments and documenting ICE arrests, including with recorded video that lawyers can reference afterwards, when looking for constitutional violations. “They’re acting with impunity and they’re violating people’s constitutional rights,” she said. “When people step up to document it, we’re finding that everything changes.”
On the sidewalk, the sound of drums and voices was infectious: people moved in place, swayed from the curb and on their lawnchairs, listened from stoops, and sang along. Down the street, two neighbors came out onto their porch and sat on the banisters, taking a video as their heads bobbed in time with the sound.
Monse, who seemed to know every kid on the street, scooped up one of her pint-sized neighbors and began to walk toward his front stoop, listening all the while. Minutes before, he’d seen a trio of bees flying close to his arm, and begun to whimper as his hamburger fell to the pavement. Now, he was totally calm in her arms.
That’s one of the ways New Haven’s immigrant community will get through this, Lugo later said. As ICE expands its presence in Connecticut, he worries about how groups like ULA will keep up with monitoring, verifying and responding to arrests and detentions in real time (ULA's rapid response line is 475.323.9413). Raids are already taking place in broad daylight, at small businesses, courthouses and homes across the state.
“This is just two or three cases that we have on our hands,” he said. “What happens when we have 100? 200?” he said. “We have to start using our survival tactics.”
While most of those are secret, one is not: the necessity of neighbors coming together to protect the most vulnerable among them. That was clear back by the water slide, as longtime ULA members Rafael and Pablo gave out the last of their carnitas, slow-cooked pulled pork that they had prepared for the event.
“If we stay united, we will be stronger and our voices will be heard,” Rafael said.
When Rafael heard about the fundraiser, he donated, seasoned, and cooked 110 pounds of pork to make sure the community was fed. Floridalma Morales, who is a friend and peer, also donated hundreds of tortillas from her Bright Street food truck, Tortilleria Tacaná.
“If we stay united, we will be stronger and our voices will be heard,” Rafael said in Spanish as Lugo translated. “We came here to live the American dream. Suddenly, they want to kick us out after our families have been working for so many years.”
Attendees Ariadne Leal-Pintor and her mom, Patricia Pintor, echoed that feeling. As supporters of ULA, it was a no-brainer for them to show up, they said. In the weeks and months to come, both hope to see more action from the wider New Haven community, from court accompaniments to more attendees at events like Saturday’s.
“We want to see the community more involved,” Leal-Pintor said. “They are involved, but we want to see them showing up.”