This chapter by Alyshia Gálvez explores one non-profit organization’s experience with a paradox of good intentions. The Asociación Tepeyac de New York is a group comprised of forty parish-based Guadalupan committees designed to serve the Mexican immigrant community of New York. The committees of the association were originally launched with a mission of dedication to “the social welfare and human rights of Mexican immigrants, specifically the undocumented in New York City.” The word Mexican has since been replaced with the word Latino, as the acclaim that the association reached after its successfully efforts to provide compensation to the invisible victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, the survivors and families of those perished in the towers for whom being undocumented workers meant that they left no paper trail behind, has transformed Tepeyac… in a lot of ways for the worse. The tiny organization that began with the founder being seated on five-gallon paint buckets, using crates for desks and armed with only a single phone and the leaders recruited at city playgrounds as instruments for change, demonstrated its ability to successfully use resolviendo. Resolviendo, a Spanish expression similar to the English word adaptability, became an inevitable part of the reputation of the organization after it became the first to develop an innovative system of identifying undocumented victims of the 9/11 attacks by tapping into a secret goldmine of information, coworkers. People who came to Tepeyac provided notarized affadavits that were used collectively as alternate sources of documentation for those lost whose names were not on the payroll. This allowed for speedy and more effective cross-referencing for those claiming a family member who was a victim, creating a form of evidence of their right to being compensated. Tepeyac effectively referred those whose stories checked out to the Red Cross for monetary compensation and acted as an intermediary between the government and those the association was trying to provide aid to via lobbying. Perhaps the most understated victory of this organization was the role it played in attempting to combat growing xenophobia by serving as a collective proxy which enabled undocumented immigrants effected by the disaster who would otherwise be ineligible for participation in things like protests and lobbying to open up spheres for themselves to be involved in civic processes and prepare them for the anticipated goal of being fully enfranchised citizens. Though these efforts yielded undeniably positive results, the costs of the growth of the organization and more esteemed view of it in the media were felt greatly by the very people carrying them out.
A majority of the Tepeyac’s relief for World Trade Center victims came from private organizations such as the American Jewish World Service, AFL-CIO, and the Robin Hood Foundation. Unsurprisingly the diversity of its donors meant that an organization formed to serve a very specific demographic, undocumented Mexican immigrants, has been balked out and presumed exclusionary for the very reason that many of its donors would not be in a particularly good position if they were to seek out the associations help, as many are not exclusively Mexican. Although many non-Mexican survivors did seek out the services of Tepeyac after September 11th, the nature of the organization that asserted “its collective identity in particularly Mexican idioms,” made the continued communication with the organization for several months necessary to receive the proper paperwork to obtain a death certificate and emergency survivors’ benefits a less likely commitment made by non-Mexicans. Similarly the funding for ongoing services offered by the association was limited, and thus more likely to be allocated for services for the organization’s preexisting (largely Mexican) constituent base. This transformed the original mission to aid Mexican immigrants toward a more inclusive “Latino immigrant” group. The donations inspired due to the Asociación Tepeyac’s role in revealing the invisible victims of 9/11 also had quite a detrimental effect on the association. Contrary to its aim, the donations received made the association ineligible to continue receiving small donations, and the lack of this necessary funding made the sustained overhead of the organization that would be necessary to handle larger government grants impossible. The very people the Tepeyac organization sought to find work became those that the association itself was laying off and taking off of its payroll. Those who helped its founder to create the association lost respect for the direction it had taken and all the quintessential aspects of its origin, even including the connection to the Catholic church that inspired the Guadalupan committees at the heart of its creation, have taken a second seat and become completely out of the picture for this non-profit. This article presented an interesting and somewhat devastating look at a charity group for whom despite the best intentions, the genuine means led to a counterproductive end.
