Why I Chose To Study Law At CUNY Law

Candid essay #2

Long Island, New York

October 2020

'How can I practice solidarity in the realm of law?' Choosing to go to CUNY School of Law was my best answer to this question. The school has long centered advocacy for New York’s communities as its core mission, and it is the one that I share. I chose to study law because of my admiration for the advocates who once helped me navigate homelessness and my early experiences with immigration law. These experiences informed my desire to use the law to cultivate a sense of belonging and empowerment for myself and others. In translating this to my academic and professional endeavors, I have gravitated to working on housing justice advocacy. Recently, my deep reflections about my professional identity and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on local ecosystems have led me to care about labor justice, as well. CUNY Law’s Community Economic Development clinic aligns with these interests, especially in its support of worker-owned cooperatives.

The work I have done in an international trade law firm and the work I have done volunteering with my tenants’ union seem quite opposed. Yet, my international work allows me to see across borders and my grassroots community activism shows me the joy of protecting the close-knit fabric of local neighborhoods. With this blended perspective, I understood a protest that challenged my views and led me to focus on local development.

In October 2019, the indigenous community in my home country of Ecuador protested the government's order to eliminate national oil subsidies, an action which I found confusing in light of an undergraduate paper that I had written three years prior. In 2016, I studied the case of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which challenged the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline along their sacred lands. Understanding the tensions between indigenous people and the oil industry in the U.S. made me aware of the frequent opposition between national corporate interests and local populations. The demand for oil subsidies by indigenous Ecuadorians seemed counterintuitive. I came to realize that since Ecuador’s indigenous communities are the pillars of the country’s agricultural industry, they rely heavily on domestic oil for their harvesting and transportation machinery. Farming is their sole source of income. The Ecuadorian government proposed a policy that would harm the livelihoods of its most vulnerable populations and give preference to trade agreements with international actors instead. Still, the oil industry destroys much of the environment upon which indigenous farming depends. This struck a deep chord in my heart and I gained compassion for essential workers and their rights. I began to ask how local communities could control more of their economic resources.

While the protests in Ecuador unfolded, I was finalizing arrangements for an internship I accepted at the International Trade Center, a division of the World Trade Organization, in Switzerland. The internship offered an immersive experience implementing community-based tourism and development strategies in Myanmar, which seemed to align with the conclusions of my undergraduate thesis on the politics of ecotourism. For the thesis, I traveled to a remote village, Nuevo Rocafuerte, located in the easternmost tip of the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, next to one of the world’s most biodiverse ecological reserves on the planet, Parque Nacional Yasuní. It also lies at the intersection of political neglect, economic scarcity, and the power of the oil industry. My analysis concluded that community-based ecotourism, albeit imperfect, connects remote communities to larger markets, providing them with income opportunities, and making them less dependent on the jobs and environmental destruction that oil extraction brings.

Prior to the Ecuadorian protests, I had not questioned my professional identity as an agent in the field of international commerce. These events made clear that the legal constructs used by my coworkers at the international trade law firm to achieve justice for our clients resembled the mechanisms burdening local farmers in Ecuador. I felt torn about my participation in international trade and rerouted my professional trajectory to a focus on community economic development at home, in New York. I realized that I did not have to travel far to contribute to local economies, so I elected not to take the internship and to turn my focus on organizing in my own ZIP code.

Solidarity – the unity and mutual support within a group – is the core value driving the grassroots organizing I do with my neighbors in Queens. Generally, our tenants’ union advocates for neighbors facing evictions. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we created a mutual aid network to support residents struggling to buy groceries and pay rent. During the pandemic, nearly everyone around me, mostly immigrants without a college education, seemed to have lost their jobs, including my mother. More than safe housing, the pandemic has shown me the importance of having a reliable source of income. I began exploring how to resolve the instability faced by essential workers in the informal economies of hospitality and domestic work.

This passionate search led me to discover the world of worker-owned cooperatives. A worker cooperative is a type of company that allows workers to collectively and democratically own the business and participate in its management. This model spoke to the common problem faced by the underdeveloped communities in Myanmar and Ecuador, which is the need for labor, housing, food security, and some control over them. These needs mirror those I witness in neighborhoods across New York. After interviewing some attorneys who engage in the creation of worker cooperatives, I learned that the challenges they face are the lack of awareness about, and funding for these companies. I now feel called to innovate in this field.

The Community and Economic Development clinic offers me the training and resources to nurture this vision. Justice and community benefit are foundational values of worker-owned cooperatives and of CUNY Law itself. As a student there, I intend to use the law to foster communal leadership and solidarity to help essential workers in informal economies gain a sense of freedom, security, and belonging through their own labor.