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Meeting the needs of immigrants

By Annie Correal | Special to amNewYork

June 13, 2007

Tepeyac Foundation at 251 W. 14th St. in Manhattan. (Photo by Jefferson Siegel / June 12, 2007)

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Tepeyac Association was transformed.

Before the terror attacks, the Mexican association was devoted to community organizing on a small scale. English lessons were offered around the five boroughs, but in people's living rooms.

After the attacks, around 900 immigrants arrived at the door of the association's two-story headquarters on West 14th Street.

"We were a small organization with little money, unprepared, with only part-time volunteers," says executive director Joel Magallan, 48. "Suddenly, we had to support the whole community."

In the months after 9/11, the association turned into a hub for immigrants from Mexico and from around Latin America. Since then, its education and advocacy programs have made it a local Latino landmark.

The Tepeyac Association was founded by Mexico's Jesuit Order in 1997 to train leaders and open community centers around New York to help organize the Mexican community, now estimated to be one of the city's top three immigrant groups, after the Dominicans and the Chinese. Mexicans began arriving in large numbers in New York only a decade ago.

After September 11, Tepeyac spent two years getting the Latino community back on its feet. Fueled by Red Cross and FEMA moneys and $800,000 in donations drawn by the association Web site volunteers and interns fed destitute immigrants and helped them look for jobs, created identification cards for families to go to the authorities and report their missing kin, and created a job-training program.

Today, Tepeyac provides vital information for survival to newly arrived immigrants--on state minimum wage, what to do if there's an accident and how to open a bank account, for example. For the more settled, it offers cultural activities, from traditional dance classes to soccer clubs, and education and advocacy programs.

Its human rights program is focused on educating immigrants about their civil rights and their rights within the public education system and seeks out legal counsel when it's needed.

Currently, over 2050 students are enrolled in the classes it offers, including English, computer, and GED courses--the most access to education many immigrants have ever had, according to the association.

The association has also partnered with other organizations to serve the Mexican community in different ways.

Beginning this fall, Tepeyac will work with city council members and with the City University of New York to open centers in public high schools around the boroughs for at-risk Hispanic teens, thanks to the support of the Robin Hood Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

This is meant to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the community: the children of immigrants who are failing out of school.

An independent survey showed that 80 percent of Hispanic children of immigrants dropped out of high school in 2006, according to Magallan.

"It's a lost generation," says Magallan, who hopes the program will not only help kids stay in school but draw drop-outs back to the classroom by providing scholarships.

"If the children of immigrants fail, the immigrants fail too," he says.

The lack of medical care and the risks of undocumented work are also perennial problems within the Mexican community. Two other issues Magallan says affect the Mexican community are the approximately one thousand young Mexicans in prison who "aren't getting attention," and the 25 Mexican immigrants who die in New York every month and need to be shipped home.

Magallan, a brother in the Jesuit order from Zacatecas, Mexico, first came to New York to assess the needs of the Mexican community on behalf of the Catholic Archdiocese in 1996, after receiving a master's in education in Chicago.

Today, Magallan estimates that 60 percent of people served by the association are Mexican, while the other 40 percent come from other Latin American countries.