Being Human – Transcript
By Claire Kinnen
Voices in Order of Appearance:
Introduction: Malik Brizan-Reed
Benjamin Lucas
Angela Callisaya
Claire Kinnen
Joseph Mantovani
Sam Stanton
Leslie Ariza
Anthony Szeto
INTRO: Mutual aid groups work to create reciprocal systems of care in their own neighborhoods.Sunnyside, Queens resident Claire Kinnen, reconnected with her neighborhood’s mutual aid group to see how they are supporting the recent wave of new arrivals to New York City.
[Sounds of birds and the street]
Benjamin Lucas: Hello.
Angela Callisaya: Claire?
Claire Kinnen: Angela?
Angela: Ah! Good guess!
Claire Kinnen: I’m meeting up with Angela Callisaya who I met once a few years ago through my neighborhood’s mutual aid group. She and fellow volunteer Benji Lucas run gardening and community pickup on Saturdays. They immediately start telling me the story of how the garden began when I get there.
Benjamin: 2020.
Angela: 2020… lockdown.
CK: Wow.
Benji: And so now in three years total, we grew probably about three thousand and a half pounds, uh, of food that was distributed by and large by the Woodside Sunnyside Mutual Aid. And so yeah, that’s the story in a nutshell. It’s called Rusty Wheelbarrow.
Angela: And this is the farm.
Claire: That was amazing.
CK: I first became aware of mutual aid in 2020 – when everything was shutting down in New York City because of COVID and I got involved in food distribution efforts for a while in 2021. This year, 2024, I’m noticing mutual aid again. I’m seeing headlines about how these groups are “meeting the moment” in caring for migrants and providing where the city isn’t. I want to know how and this is how I’ve ended up sitting at a wooden table with Angela on “the farm” – a narrow plot of land between Saint Jacobus church and a steep slope leading down to the railroad tracks.
Angela: I’ve lived in this area of Queens in Elmhurst, Woodside, Jackson Heights since my family and I arrived from Bolivia in South America. And I was really young. My parents, they really never moved far. They always lived within ten blocks. Like, most of our moving required a shopping cart.
CK: Angela and her husband Anthony still live close by – they’re all in the same house – Angela and Anthony and her aunt are upstairs in their own apartment and her parents are on the first floor.
Angela: And that’s what my parents taught me. It was like, first work with what you have, and then you can figure out everything else.
CK: Angela is warm and friendly and energetic and she loves Queens. She works in the nonprofit sector professionally. Her intro to mutual aid started during lockdown when she realized what a difficult time her parents were having not seeing their community in person. After a little investigating, she realized it wasn’t just her parents – not being able to connect at church was a big deal for the Bolivian community. Her first idea was to get her mother and her friends on a video call but it didn’t work.
Angela: It was not only because there was a technological barrier. These ladies – if you’re in a Bolivian home, you are cleaning Friday, Saturday for that Sunday dinner. You know, everything’s spotless. So with the Zoom, it doesn’t give you that. And my mom goes, they’re never gonna go for it because they have to open up their homes. And I’m like, you could blur the background, you could do it with screens. Nope.
CK: So Angela figured out a dial-in conference call system and that did work.
Angela: They call it the prayer line – in Spanish, “la linea del rezo.”
CK: This sparked Angela’s desire to connect with her community on a deeper level. As she became more and more aware of what everyone’s needs were, she started taking on more – she was figuring out which elders needed groceries, and was sourcing tylenol in bulk to split up – some for her husband, Anthony, who had COVID and then some for whoever else did too. And once Anthony was better, they started collecting New York City’s free lunches to give out to anyone who didn’t feel comfortable receiving one themselves. She even got her mom, Maria, to start making meals they would distribute.
Angela: But it got like – we were exhausted because we would leave the house at eight o’clock in the morning and we would come home at like three o’clock going from – down from Woodside to Elmhurst to Junction to Corona.
CK: Angela was burning out. So, when she saw a listing on social media by Leo Kirts asking for a table for the Woodside Sunnyside Mutual Aid group – she responded instinctively and with curiosity.
Angela: And I was like a table? You just need a table? And I just needed to not think about my friends and my route and Anthony and the prayer ladies.
CK: Angela walked all the way from 79th St to 46th with her folding table in tow and ended up staying that Saturday to distribute food.
Angela: So I started telling Leo about my friends and about the – about the Bolivian ladies, and I said, “I don’t have enough money, but I need help.” And Leo says, “Yeah, if you want to come, feel free. If you can take some stuff for these folks, why not?”
CK: This was the moment when Angela realized she and her family didn’t have to do this work alone.
Angela: The weeks that followed, during prayer time, I started praying for Leo and the – and the mutual aid, like everyone. Because I was just like, there’s all this shitty shit happening everywhere around me. And then there’s this group of people who are like, just being there for people.
CK: Angela connected with a broader community of people trying to do similar things as her and her family. People trying to care for people. This is how she also ended up teaching English on Sundays for new New Yorkers. She invited me to come to a class as we left the garden and walked out through the church.
[Church hallway]
Angela: Every once in a while, we do the boring stuff because it’s the fundamentals. Adjectives, verbs, blah, blah, blah.
Claire: You have to, yeah.
Angela: Yeah but it’s that.
CK: This ESL class started as a group effort between the mutual aid and some other organizations that Angela was connected to. Now, two years later, it’s Angela, her husband, Anthony, and a few others who show up on Sundays for an informal class.
Angela: If it hadn’t been for what Leo taught me and all the people from the mutual aid during the lockdown, it was just like, okay, what do we do? Who do we call? And we had a network already which made it easier.
Pastor Joe: Please return to what you’re doing.
Angela: No –
Pastor Joe: That’s literally all.
Claire: I’m doing an audio documentary about mutual aid.
Pastor Joe: Oh! So, do you want to see the room they’re gonna meet in today?
[Laughter]
CK: Pastor Joe joins our conversation. H e’s the Lutheran pastor of Saint Jacobus. He shares the space with five other congregations and lets the mutual aid group sort food and hold meetings in the church.
Pastor Joe: Two years ago, the governor of Texas sent two busloads of migrants to our door. They all had notes that said go to St. Jacobus.
CK: St. Jacobus was already holding a celebration and a bunch of people from the community were there and just jumped in to help.
Pastor Joe: Angela was there, Anthony, Manny, Lisa, all the people that literally do this stuff for a living. Lisa works for public schools doing enrollment of migrant families, Manny works for health insurance doing Medicaid enrollment. Like, we did a clothing drive, we bought whatever we couldn’t find, and that was it.
Angela: Like, we stopped recording because, you know, I don’t know, uh, data, like, uh, so we just stopped recording, but the numbers are there every, every week.
Pastor work: This is the work of Team Angela, I mean.
Angela: It’s Pastor Cesar.
Pastor Joe: And Team Angela.
Angela: Like, the mutual aid, what it is – it is what everybody does and this is even the Bolivian ladies. When I translate and I explain to them what it is that we do – and then the ladies are like, Oh, they call that mutual aid. They’re like, “called being human in Bolivia” and I’m like-
[laughter]
CK: Mutual aid is really just the continuation of longer traditions that have been established globally for a very long time but the recent structures that were put in place by mutual aid groups in 2020 have continued and extended their reach into 2024. Over the past two years, New York City has seen 175,000 new arrivals. Many of them have been bussed here from the Southern border like Pastor Joe mentions but people come by other means too. They’re from a wide variety of countries in Latin America like Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador but also countries in Africa like Senegal and Guinea.
I spoke to Sam Stanton, who is a policy expert at the City Comptroller’s office about how they see the impact of mutual aid from a city perspective.
Sam Stanton: I think from having worked in government for many years, I do think that oftentimes the community organizations have the most cultural competency for working with new arrivals. I think that mutual aid groups have done a tremendous job. They were really the folks creating the infrastructure for people to come here when those buses started coming. However, I don’t believe that the community should bear the full responsibility for welcoming new immigrants. Government has a role to play in welcoming people, getting them on their feet, giving them immigration legal services, enrolling them in benefits, making sure that language access is there at every step of the way.
CK: Organizations like Make the Road are working to provide and advocate for some of what Sam outlines.
Leslie Ariza: We work with working class and immigrant communities so that they can live with dignity and equity.
CK: That’s Leslie Ariza, Make the Road’s Media Associate. As an immigrant-led grassroots organization that operates all over New York City with sister offices in other parts of the US, Make the Road sort of bridges the gap between the community work folks like Angela do and the substantial policy changes that need to happen at the city, state, and federal level.
Leslie: We realize that asylum seekers need things like work authorizations, legal services, education services, healthcare services. And other basic resources to essentially thrive in New York. New York has always been a state essentially built up from the ground by immigrants from all over the world, and this is just a new wave of new New Yorkers. There’s a time of adjustment. During that time, as a community what we need to do and the way that we support them is by helping them with resources.
CK: Leslie makes the point that when everyone is supported, we all thrive. I think in its essence this is what mutual aid is about. But no matter how it’s defined or what it’s called, it’s something a lot of people are doing and have been doing. This is evidenced by the way Angela is constantly referencing names within the network of people working out of the mutual aid group, the church congregations, the prayer ladies and how interconnected they all are.
She’s also insistent this involvement has made her and Anthony healthier, happier. This resonates with me. I think about how my friend Nicole’s eyes lit up when she told me about how her “Buy Nothing” group in Brooklyn connected with one of the hotels sheltering migrants there and started supplying them with whatever they could. Or how the panicky way I felt alone in pre-vaccine 2021 lessened as I got to know people at the same food table Angela met Leo at.
There’s something to be said for caring, for building community, for being human.
[English class in the church basement]
CK: Back at Saint Jacobus on a Sunday as one congregation wraps up their after church coffee hour, another group settles into the basement. They’ll do English class before joining Pastor Ceasar for church upstairs. There are a few single people but several families too – the kids play together as their parents sit around several large tables. They’ve been reading “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, and they alternate between Spanish and English, putting everyone on the spot, balancing out the attention.
[People speaking in Spanish, children playing]
Angela: Alright, so, todos tienen una copia del libro? Sí? Todos, todos? Fourteen-
[Angela Interview]
Angela: I chose it because the story of this young person coming from the background of an immigrant family – the author she describes with such preciseness what I myself as an immigrant went through.
[The class reading “The House on Mango Street”]
Angela: Okay, so, ahora yo voy a leer primero y ustedes repitan conmigo.
Angela: We ride fast
Class: We ride fast
Angela: And faster
Class: And faster
Angela: Past my house
Class: Past my house
[Angela Interview]
Angela: Being Bolivian and assimilating to being an American – these folks, our friends, they’re going through the same. The transition…
CK: Learning English will help with this transition but so will sharing – a meaningful book, time together, community. The prayer ladies have a point.
[The class continues reading]
Angela: Down the avenue
Class: Down the avenue
Angela: And around the block
Class: And around the block
Angela: Back to Mango
Class: Back to Mango
Angela: Ahora – Anthony!
Participant: In Spanish.
Participant: Anthony in Spanish please.
Anthony: Okay.
CREDITS
This piece was created in the Craig Newmark School of Journalism’s Audio Documentary course and produced by Claire Kinnen
With editing by Veralyn Williams
Sound engineering by Amber Watson
And the intro voiced by Malik Brizan-Reed
Thank you to the participants:
Angela Callisaya
Maria Eusebia Alonzo Arce de Callisaya
Anthony Szeto
Rev. Joseph Mantovani
Benjamin Lucas
Leo Kirts
Sam Stanton
Leslie Ariza
All of the participants of the ESL class
Additional thank you:
Erin Kinnen, Amara Thomas, Nicole Okai, Stacey Anderson and Stefanie Barton