It all started with the Mothers.
Alex Blackwill, PSU class of ‘22, remembers first learning about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo sometime in middle school.
The Mothers were a group of Argentinian women whose children had been forcibly disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. Donning the famous pañuelo blanco (white headscarf), they gathered weekly in Buenos Aires to protest the human rights abuses of their country during the Dirty Wars.
Blackwill’s early feminist leanings and enduring interest in the Mothers blossomed over time, inspiring her PSU academic career, membership in the Center for Women’s Leadership’s New Leadership Oregon 2021 cohort and her post-grad professional life.
“The inspiring way the Mothers protested, they just changed a lot of things,” says Blackwill.
As a PSU undergrad, Blackwill had only researched the Mothers in fits and starts until she landed on their non-violent peace movement as the heady subject of her senior honors thesis. That’s when she got to hunker down and learn all about 1970s Argentina and the critical role the women there played in bringing human rights violators to justice. As an intellectually hungry international relations major, she had so many questions: How had Argentinian feminism evolved since the Mothers gave birth to a movement in the violent 1970s? What had more recent feminists of the Ni Una Menos movement inherited from their political predecessors? What were the new symbols of feminist resistance in Latin America?
Her desire to better understand transformative community organizing would ultimately take her all the way to Argentina as a research assistant to her honors thesis advisor, Dr. Leopoldo Rodriguez. But, according to Blackwill, she might not have dared to undertake a research trip abroad if not for the support of her New Leadership Oregon community and friends.
Blackwill with her honors thesis advisor, Dr. Rodriguez
Saying ‘Yes’
As CWL’s flagship program for the past 20 years, New Leadership Oregon offers Oregon college students an immersive, cohort-based curriculum that allows participants to connect with current leaders and build foundational skills of social justice, advocacy, and networking. For Blackwill, the biggest benefit NLO offers alums is long-term comradery that organically develops among and between cohort peers.
“My experience in NLO gave me so much confidence to say ‘yes’ to things that I wasn’t sure about,” she says. “Being in NLO was like having a support system cheering me on.” At the time, Blackwill wanted to put her long-time interest in Latin America and a Spanish minor to good use as a research assistant in Argentina but still had some reservations.
“I wasn’t going to even apply to the research position because Argentina seemed really far away, and I’d basically be going by myself,” says Blackwill. “Of course, I’d have my professor, but he’d be my boss.”
For Blackwill, a research assistantship in Argentina represented some big firsts: the first time she would leave the country for longer than a month and the first time she’d be living in a place where Spanish was the main language on offer. Both prospects seemed daunting. But Blackwill remembers finding resolve in the encouragement of CWL Director Jessica Mole Heilman and other NLO friends.
“NLO was like having a really big community of people supporting me and reminding me that it’s okay to make scary decisions.”
Eventually, she joined the research team in Argentina and discovered all the personal growth that can come from getting well outside one’s comfort zone. But professional and research experience wasn’t the only fruit of Blackwill’s travels. Among her many new friendships in Argentina, the international relations grad found love.
The Paris of South America
The plan was simple. For three months, Blackwill would accompany Dr. Rodriguez in Buenos Aires and help him interview early adopters of agro-ecology, a form of organic farming.
Arrangements had been made for Blackwill to stay with a friend of Dr. Rodriquez who had an extra room in her home in San Isidro, a city just north of Buenos Aires known for its relative affluence, rugby, and sailing. In the early research days of the trip, there was a lot of travel to and from San Isidro and Rio de la Plata, where most of the team’s interviews took place.
Blackwill took to life abroad quickly, but not even Spanish fluency could spare her a bit of culture shock. Figuring out transportation by bus and train was the biggest challenge of navigating a new city, she found.
“Every time I got on a bus, I had to know what street I was getting off at, or what the neighborhood was called, and I didn’t know this place,” she recalls.
There were many aspects of Argentinian life that Blackwill preferred over American customs. She found she rather liked merienda (“snack”), which is a culinary tradition brought over from Spain. Usually tea or espresso drinks like cortados and light sandwiches are served so that dinner time can be extended to as late as 9 o’clock. All of Latin America is known for later dinner times, but Argentinians like their last meal particularly late, says Blackwill.
“I liked how long this made my days feel. It felt like you just had more stuff to do, more people to talk to. I really liked that it felt I could do more with my day,” she recalls, “and somehow you just weren’t as tired as you might be after a normal day in the States.”
After a couple of months, Blackwill says it became clear that Argentinians valued relationships above all. “Nobody asked me what I was doing for work. In the U.S., that might be one of the first questions you get asked,” she says. “There, it might be ‘Who are you friends with?’”
But the research trip to Argentina wasn’t only a significant professional and academic break for the PSU grad. After landing in Buenos Aires—known by some as “the Paris of South America”—Blackwill found love. Like a lot of Gen Z travelers, she made good use of apps to find like-minded peers. She had joined Tinder hoping to connect with people who could show her around the city. Not long after, she met a local woman studying to become a paramedic, and within the month, they were an item. In time, what was supposed to be a three-month research stint turned into a full, life-altering year abroad. When it was finally time to leave Argentina, Blackwill knew she wouldn’t be traveling alone.
An Advocate in the Making
Once Blackwill moved back to the States, she wasted no time marrying the Argentinian paramedic. Blackwill’s wife now serves as a paramedic here in Portland and is studying to become an emergency medical services (EMS) provider. With an expression of relief and perhaps a tinge of administrative exhaustion, Blackwill says that her partner finally received her green card this fall, which means the couple is now free to come and go as they like between their lives in the States and Argentina.
Perhaps inspired by her wife’s immigration experience, Blackwill found meaningful work this year at a local refugee rights nonprofit, Pacific Refugee Support Group (PRSG), as a volunteer coordinator. The best part of volunteer coordination, says Blackwill, is giving community members a chance to learn more about refugees of the Pacific Northwest.
“Just working through small relationships, getting people to volunteer even just once and helping them to meet a refugee can help take some of the stigma away,” she says. Drawing from her NLO-inspired skills of community building and meaningful listening, Blackwill is happy to be bringing people of different backgrounds together and helping them build relationships that can inspire positive, pragmatic change.
As excited as Blackwill is to be serving in a volunteer coordination capacity, she lit up when sharing that PRSG will be opening an immigrant legal clinic in a year’s time. She and some co-workers are training to become accredited representatives so they can eventually help migrants in immigration court. Accredited representatives can do anything in court that traditional immigration lawyers can, barring litigation.
The PRSG team has already shadowed a few other immigration legal clinics in the community, and Blackwill says they’re learning a lot. No doubt her Spanish fluency, personal connection to the cause of migrant rights, and advocacy training through NLO will make Blackwill a powerful ally to anybody navigating the immigration legal process.
When asked about her career plans, Blackwill doesn’t seem in a hurry to have everything figured out. She’s planning on taking her time to assess how immigration legal work feels as a direction. She wants to be patient and, as usual, to listen intentionally for the answer to come.
Blackwill advocating for her cause at PSU.
In the meantime, Blackwill is keeping busy with a food pantry box delivery program she launched just a few months ago. By centering deep listening in her unique leadership style, Blackwill heard from refugees staying at a North Portland homeless shelter about their biggest barrier to food security: lack of transportation.
But Blackwill is nothing if not a solver of problems. She quickly assembled a group of dedicated volunteers who go to the pantries on behalf of refugees without transportation and deliver fresh food right to the doorstep of families in need. Her newly-launched food box delivery program has already served 38 households and 120 refugees, and will only become more necessary as Portland’s rainy winter sets in.
Blackwill feels fortunate to be in a position in the community that is making tangible change possible for vulnerable immigrant families.
“The most important thing that I’ve learned from my thesis, my research and NLO is how important it is to have that strong community,” she says, “and a support network to be able to do anything. I wouldn’t have been able to launch the food box delivery program if I wasn’t listening to what people needed, if I didn’t have committed people I knew I could call on to help.”
She may not be sporting a 1970s pañuelo blanco in the town square, but, with her instinct for grassroots community organizing and quickly-developing advocacy skills, Blackwill’s fighting for social justice in the same tenacious spirit that animated her long-time Argentinian heroes.
The Mothers would be proud of this NLO alum.