January 28, 2021

They Walked 1,500 Miles for a Life of Freedom. Revisiting a Book That Chronicles Young American Immigrants.

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Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of a book’s publication that became a major milestone in the chronicling of immigrants’ rights in the United States, and it’s a gripping narrative read with enduring lessons for the Biden era. The Making of a Dream pairs hopeful stories of young undocumented immigrants with historical research that frames immigration as what it increasingly is: one of the paramount movements of civil rights in this country.

The themes resonate across administrations, from deportation to family separation, DACA, the DREAM Act’s many iterations, and the resilience of those who mobilize to resist. It’s told through the experiences of five immigrants and written by Laura Wides-Muñoz, the former AP immigration reporter who is now an executive editor for news practices at ABC News. It became a PEN Award semifinalist and Library Journal Book of the Year, inspired in part by the commencement of a march to Washington from Miami that reinvigorated the movement. Find a copy here.

Double celebration to start the weekend: Tomorrow is also the 75th birthday of Bettye LaVette, the Detroit singer whose life and lyrics are another portrait of American freedom. Happy birthday to LaVette. Brace, if you can, for her historic live performance of “Talking Old Soldiers.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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