This week I encourage my students to extend their community profiles. Do they have an interesting story to tell? Will their writing explore important societal issues?

“You have the privilege to write,” I tell them. Embrace the responsibility. Most of my students are the first in their families to reach college. If they are not going to write about ideas and/or problems that affect them, who will? In her book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, author Edwidge Danticat says that in our reluctance to speak out, we become refugees within our own borders.

Below I share my most recent blog post relating our migrant crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border. Each year millions of immigrants risk life and limb to come here. In Mexicali, many of them are living underground, unprotected, and uncertain of what will happen from one day to the next.