Browsing by Author "Estrella, Amarilys"

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    Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
    (Elsevier, 2022) Roels, Nastasja Ilonka; Estrella, Amarilys; Maldonado-Salcedo, Melissa; Rapp, Rayna; Hansen, Helena; Hardon, Anita
    This comparative study of community organizations serving marginalized youth in New York City and Amsterdam utilized a novel ethnographic approach called reverse engineering to identify techniques for social change that are active in each organization, adaptable and translatable to other contexts. It found that youth-serving organizations led flexible responses to the crisis of COVID-19 as it affected those marginalized by race, immigrant status, housing instability, religion and gender. The organizations employed techniques that they had previously developed to cultivate youth well-being – among them connectivity, safe space, and creativity – to mount tailored responses to COVID-19 related crises. In New York City, these groups addressed crises of material survival resources (personal protective equipment, food, housing) whereas in Amsterdam, youth-serving organizations focused on social connections and emotional well-being as the government met more of participants’ material needs.
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    Muertos Civiles: Mourning the Casualties of Racism in the Dominican Republic
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2020) Estrella, Amarilys
    Black Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Reconoci.do movement often state that denationalization policies in the Dominican Republic have caused their muertes civiles, or civil deaths. Although Reconoci.do’s members organize to fight against their figurative deaths, their struggles are not limited to a fight for legal recognition. They also fight for survival in the context of higher rates of death as a direct result of systemic racism and social exclusion. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, this article explores resistance to the deaths of Black individuals who form part of a large-scale movement against statelessness. I engage Christina Sharpe’s analysis of “wake work” in order to examine “Black people’s ability to everywhere and anywhere … produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing” (2016, 11). I analyze Reconoci.do’s activism as wake work to interpret the movement’s manifestations of resistance to death by racism.