ABOUT US

Board of Directors

Susan Alva
Susan Alva is the founder and Director of the Migration Policy and Resource Center at Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute in Los Angeles.  Previously, Susan was the Director of the Immigration and Citizenship Project of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).  She has also worked as the Directing Attorney of Public Counsel’s Legalization Appeals Project, and as the Supervising Attorney for the L.A. Center for Law and Justice in East L.A.  While attending law school, she worked full time in the Immigration Unit of San Diego’s Legal Aid Society.  In the mid-1970’s, Susan worked with the United Farm Workers Union at the height of their largest organizing and union election drive.  From 1974 to 1976, she worked for the California Rural Legal Assistance in the San Joaquin Valley.  Born in New York City, Susan is the daughter of Mexican and Dominican immigrant parents.

Eduardo “Eddie” Canales
Born of migrant farm worker parents, Eddie spent his early years in a rural, migrant border town outside of Texas, while his father worked in steel mills in Gary, Indiana and East Chicago.  They were poor: he did not have the luxury of inside bathroom facilities until 6th grade. Early jobs included farm work, shoe shining, barber/beauty shop sweeping and the neighborhood youth corps, followed by factory work, cafeteria cleanup, and bottling plant/warehouse work.

After junior college, Eddie attended the University of Houston.  There he became involved with MAYO and La Raza Unida Party, beginning a long history of political activism and organizing.  He has served the social and economic justice movements in many capacities and with several organizations, such as the Congreso de Atzlan (the National Committee of La Raza Unida), the Texas Farmworkers, the Longshoremen, SEIU’s School District Campaign of custodians and cafeteria workers, and Centro Aztlan in Houston, where he as a Director for ten years. Eduardo has been an organizer in Colorado, New Mexico, Eastern Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming; he has agitated, organized, negotiated and provided direct services around issues ranging from economic and labor justice to anti-police brutality.

Bill Chandler
Bill Chandler is founding Executive Director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA).  An eyewitness to the brutal immigration raids of the 1950’s, he has been continuously involved in supporting the rights of immigrant workers ever since.  

Bill has been an organizer for more than 45 years, beginning as a laboratory worker in 1960 when he helped build SEIU Local 434 at Los Angeles County Hospital, to working with the United Farm Workers during the 1965 Delano-based grape workers strike, to the historic, trans-national, and powerful Starr County farm workers strike in 1966, where, sent as an organizer by Cesar Chavez, he witnessed first hand both the U.S. and Mexican governments’ brutal but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to repress labor justice.

Since then, his organizing focus has been on the lowest paid workers in the South, including farm workers, hospitality, health care, and immigrant workers. Bill has pro-actively served the struggle for affirmative action in the Labor Movement: every union he has organized in the South has been led by women of color, and MIRA’s board of directors is a majority African-American and Latino board.

Lillian Galedo
Lillian Galedo is Executive Director of Filipinos For Affirmative Action in Oakland, CA, where she has worked since 1980 towards its mission of organizing, leadership development, service provision, and advocacy for social and economic justice. Lillian is also the national co-chair of the National Alliance for Filipino Veterans Equity (NAFVE), working to win recognition and equal status for Filipino WWII veterans.

Lillian is a founding board member of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR), is currently on the board of Oakland Asian Cultural Center, and is chair of the East Bay Asian Consortium.  She is a recipient of the Wallace Gerbode Fellowship (1990), the Bannerman Fellowship (1997) and Eureka Communities Fellowship (1998).

Isabel Garcia - Bio not available.  Please check back.

Maricela Garcia
Maricela Garcia is currently the executive director of Latinos United, a research and policy organization in Chicago.  She holds an MSW from the University of Illinois and studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

Maricela Garcia came to the U.S. in the early 1980’s as a result of the war in Guatemala, where she was a student organizer.  In the United States, Maricela Garcia co-founded Casa Guatemala to assist the newly arriving Guatemalan refugee community, and later co-founded Women for Guatemala, an organization dedicated to building international solidarity between women’s groups.  She has served on various boards and councils focusing on immigrant and human rights, including the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Ms. Garcia has received several awards, including the National Hispana Leadership Institute’s fellowship; Casa Guatemala’s Human Rights Award, and the Bannerman Fellowship.  She has published several articles on Globalization and Migration, writes a widely-distributed weekly column on immigration policy, and provides consultation on policy and institutional development.

Hamid Khan – Bio not available.  Please check back.

Gerald Lenoir is the coordinator of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), an organization founded in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay Area in April 2006 to support fair and just immigration reform.  He is also a co-founder of the Priority Africa Network (PAN), a Bay Area organization that advocates for progressive policies toward Africa and organizes dialogues between African Americans and black immigrants.  Lenoir has provided leadership for progressive causes for 30 years within the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-racist movement, the peace and solidarity movements, and electoral campaigns.

Monami Maulik
Born in Calcutta, India, Monami has been an immigrant and youth organizer and in 1999, co-founded DRUM- Desis Rising Up & Moving.  DRUM organizes low income South Asian immigrants facing deportation for racial and immigrant justice.  Prior to that Monami served on the Steering Committee of New York Taxi Workers Alliance and worked with CAAAV (Organizing Asian Communities).  Monami also serves on the Steering Committee of Immigrant Communities in Action and the Advisory Board of the North Star Fund.  In 2001, Monami received the Union Square Award and the Open Society Institute Community Fellowship of the Soros Foundation.  She is currently the Director of DRUM & Organizer with its Immigrant Justice Program.

Rogelio Nunez – Bio not available.  Please check back.