A crowd of more than a thousand people filled Ackerman Grand Ballroom on Saturday to participate in a series of workshops about information and resources available for undocumented students interested in pursuing higher education.
The high school students and their parents from across Los Angeles, many of whom are undocumented, came to UCLA for the seventh annual Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference.
Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success at UCLA, or IDEAS, and the AB540 Project, the community service component of IDEAS, organized the conference. IDEAS advocates for undocumented students at UCLA.
The conference aimed to encourage undocumented youth to become active in their communities, said Miriam Gonzalez, a third-year biology student and one of the project directors for IDEAS.
The theme for this year’s conference was “Staying Grounded, Moving Forward with Our Families.” The theme was meant to echo how the issues of undocumented communities not only affect students, but also their parents and families, said Jhoana Ascención, a third-year biology student and a project director for IDEAS.
Carol’s Belsai Montes, a founding member of IDEAS and a student speaker at the conference, said the event has grown dramatically since IDEAS was founded in October 2003. The first Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference had about 200 attendants, she said.
Ascención, who is undocumented, said attending the conference when she was a senior in high school reassured her that there were people who would understand and share her experiences in college.
The California Dream Act, which gave financial aid to undocumented students, had not passed when Ascención started college. She said she thinks the content of the workshops at the conference has changed since the Dream Act passed in 2011. She thinks the workshops focus more on activism and providing college resources than they did in the past.
Now a student at the UC Davis School of Medicine, Montes said the power and strength she learned as a member of IDEAS has continued to grow with her through her transition from UCLA.
Montes said she hopes to recreate the community she had at UCLA in her medical school because she said she wants students at all education levels, including graduate and professional schools, to have access to the same resources that documented students have.
“It’s difficult to describe what it’s like being undocumented to someone who isn’t,” Montes said. “We have a lot of challenges and limited resources, but I understand that it’s easy for someone with no template about our situation to not fully understand our needs.”
At the end of the conference, the project directors initiated the group’s unity clap, which started off as low drum of voice and built up until the entire ballroom was filled with their chants.