Maya Menezes | Toronto, Ontario
Maya Menezes speaking at a Keep Families Together rally in front of the U.S. consulate in Toronto. Photo by Michael Yc.
This interview was conducted by Gari De Ramos on September 30, 2019. Talia Fox and Aletta Brady also contributed to the production of this story.
As a child of immigrants, Maya has found passion and purpose fighting for climate action and migrant justice in Toronto, Ontario.
“My name is Maya Menezes. I was born and raised in Tkaronto as an uninvited guest on these territories, and I am subject to the Dish with One Spoon Agreement. This land is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron Wendat, and Mississaugas of the new Credit River. I grew up in Scarborough, a neighborhood in Toronto, where I’ve lived my entire life. But my immigrant parents who met in Toronto did not. My mom is from Bombay, India, and my dad is from Karachi, Pakistan.
Key Facts
A Dish With One Spoon is a formal agreement made between the Anishaabe and Haudenosaunee nations, which bound them to protect the land and water now known as Toronto and the Credit river (UCLA Journals, Ryerson School of Journalism).
The Immigration Act. 1976 created an exhaustive list and points system to determine who was and was not allowed in Canada. Although perceived as progressive then, the law prioritized skill and family connections, and broadened the categories for rejection. It has since been replaced by the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (Pier 21).
My mom came to Canada when she was four years old with her parents and her brothers. They came as migrants who had opportunity and were met with open doors at the time. It’s important to acknowledge that racism and colonialism have benefited my family. At the time, Canada was welcoming South Asians who were skilled in certain trades. My mom’s family were upper middle-class Indians and came looking for new opportunities in Canada.
My dad's side of the family is different. They came as refugees and migrants in distress. If you were a poor, displaced, or less educated person, the doors were (and are still) not open to you. My dad couldn’t come until he was 18, because each wave of the family had to sponsor the next once they got citizenship. His family was split up for a long time.
I learned about climate action and its intersectionalities in different places at different times. In 2010, I began studying International Relations at the University of Toronto, but I dropped out because the discipline was riddled with this problematic savior complex and white supremacy, and it was entirely focused on economic development instead of justice. I dropped everything and moved to the Coast Salish territories on so-called Vancouver Island, where I was exposed to more concrete climate anti-pipeline work. At the time, that was a very white, affluent space.
Maya Menezes marching with activists from Powershift Young and Rising, a climate convention she co-organized in 2019. Photo by Desiree Wallace.
Key Facts
Oil tankers have gone through Canada since the late 19th century. Every year, roughly 85% of tanker traffic on the Atlantic coast is transporting oil (Clear Seas).
In 2019, Canada approved an expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. Many indigenous and environmental groups condemned this decision, while others approved and lobbied for the expansion. Many opponents are concerned about the increased tanker traffic that may result from the expansion (The New York Times).
Moving to the Coast Salish territories was jarring. Coming from one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in Toronto (Scarborough), I was not used to feeling like people of colour were the minority. During my time on the Coast Salish Territories, I began noticing that there weren’t other people of colour in the room, in my neighbourhoods, or in my community spaces, even though we were talking about them and doing land acknowledgements everywhere. It felt empty. We talked about tanker traffic, but we weren’t actually talking about whose land we were on. I realize now that I wasn’t in the right scene there, and that taught me a lot. The spaces I was in were filled with badass environmental advocates with no critical lens about equity. At the same time, I learned so much about the Indigenous communities defending and stewarding their lands and protecting the water, from the Tiny House Warriors, to the Wet’suwet’en blockade at Unistoten (10 years strong) resisting pipelines and state invasions on unneeded lands, and I am so grateful to have learned about those struggles then.
I later heard that the University of Toronto had launched a program called Equity Studies, and so I enrolled there. That's where I started to get into the connections between migration and climate, racism and environment, proximity to toxicity, and displacement. I was able to take environmental science classes, and even a class where my professor brought in GZA from Wu Tang to give a guest lecture on resisting the police in our communities.
Key Facts
Around the world, communities of color and low-income communities are more likely to be exposed to air pollution, hazardous waste sites, negative health effects, water contamination, and destruction and displacement caused by extreme weather and infrastructure deterioration due to climate change (Center for American Progress).
In the final year of my degree, I was part-time and had been accepted to be part of the Canadian youth delegation to the UN climate talks in 2016. I met incredible comrades who to this day I still organize with at local and international levels for climate justice. In 2016, the talks were filled with people discussing how long we had before we would be set to pass the 1.5ºC threshold. I kept thinking, if the temperature is going to rise as high as we now know it absolutely will, one of the biggest crises that we will face is migration. People are going to have to move. When they start to move, all our politics will play out in the best and worst ways possible. So, when I got back to Toronto, I joined No One Is Illegal. That was the beginning of a hard, purposeful merging between my climate work and my want to fight for migrant and refugee justice.
I’m a privileged person in many ways, but an important one to note is that I am in one of the safest places in the world from the immediate impacts of climate change. This means that climate change is less visible in terms of the environment itself. That said, one way we see impacts of climate change playing out here is with our horrific treatment of migrants. In the winter of 2017—the first year of the Trump administration—we saw a really frightening uptick in undocumented people walking from the Dakotas and New York to Canada, walking in horrific winter conditions. It’s a treacherous, dangerous journey, especially in the winter. It’s not a journey anyone takes lightly. Many died, many whose names we do not know and some we do. For those who made it, many lost their hands holding their children and belongings in the cold and lost their feet in the snow due to frostbite.
Key Facts
The number of migrants crossing from the US to Canada has drastically increased since the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump. In fear of being denied entry to the US, many migrants make the trek to Canada. As of 2017, border crossings have doubled in British Columbia and tripled in Quebec. In Manitoba, nonprofits went from seeing 50-60 refugees cross the border per year to 40 migrants in just two weekends in 2017. Many migrants are families with small children (CBS Minnesota).
Today, Canada processes tens of thousands of asylum applications per year (Government of Canada).
Toronto’s sanctuary city policy is known as “Access T.O.” This 2013 policy allows for non-status migrants to have access to city services, and ensures that city officials cannot ask for an individual’s immigration status when they seek assistance (The Law Foundation of Ontario).
Years after Access T.O.’s implementation, however, researchers have found that Access T.O. has failed to break down barriers for non-status migrants when seeking public services (Hudson, et al, 2017).
The community truly came together in amazing ways in some border areas, where people offered care and support in an effort to get folks safely away from border enforcement in Canada. In Canada, border services are called Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). They are basically Canada’s ICE, and just like ICE, they have no oversight body and no regulations, and they carry guns. They’re dangerous and are considered the wild west of law enforcement, beholden to few laws. So to help the migrants, there were drop-offs all along the border of Know Your Rights material, emergency numbers, and people to call, in as many languages as possible.
I would be in meetings with folks and service providers who were telling us that every weekend, they were finding hundreds of people of all ages, families who had been smuggled across the border in one way or another, who were suffering from hypothermia and other injuries from traveling.
That was my first real, firsthand look at what was going to continue happening if we didn't do something about climate change. Growing up in Toronto, our first look at the implications of climate change is actually people-based (as opposed to environment-based).
Now, I am an organizer with No One Is Illegal Toronto, which is a collective of volunteer organizers, academics, legal experts, and advocates who push for policy changes at the city, provincial, and federal levels. We have a lot of Know Your Rights Trainings. For example, Toronto is a sanctuary city, but few people actually know this. A lot of women’s shelters, food banks, and hospitals will be stormed by the CBSA illegally for pickups to take people to detention centers. The CBSA also shares information with local police departments, which is absolutely not their jurisdiction, and puts racialized people, namely black and brown folks ‘randomly’ (racistly) stopped by police not only at risk for pick up, but at risk for deportation or detention. This random stopping is Canada’s stop-and-frisk program, the racist and catastrophic policy championed by then-mayor of New York and current Democratic nominee hopeful, Michael Bloomberg. The policy devastated and continues to devastate the black community both north and south of the medicine line. Many frontline service providers and staff don’t know they can turn CBSA away and protect their non-status clients. We also do a lot of case work for those who need support from deportation. The longer game, however, is to engage communities and force governments further to the left; to mobilize people against the normalization of racism and white supremacy; to reject the concept of borders; and to take the first step in rejecting fascist governments.
Maya Menezes speaking at the Powershift Young and Rising convention in 2019. Photo by Desiree Wallace.
My paid job is at The Leap, where we do a lot of public education that breaks down the intersections of climate justice, racial justice, and inequity. We help tease out for people the ways in which these (in)justices are connected. We produce videos, like our recent migration and climate justice video, which went viral. We do a fair bit of convening, where we try and bring unlikely players to the table.
Key Facts
Canada’s temporary foreign worker program allows Canadian employers to hire foreign nationals. Although the program is temporary in name, reports found that those from countries with lower levels of economic development and social stability were likely to stay in Canada for longer. Many extractive industries such as mining, oil, and farming in Canada rely on temporary foreign workers (Symbol of Statistics Canada).
Lately, I’ve been doing these trainings around Ontario on rising racism and how it's connected to climate change. One way I explain it is through the migrant caravan. In 2009, Canada supported a political coup in Honduras to allow Canadian mining companies unfettered access to natural resources and tear open the earth in Honduras—not unlike what has just happened in Bolivia. Fast forward to 2017, and millions of people were displaced, water supplies were ruined, forests were cut down. It has had a devastating impact on farming for almost a decade now. The largest group of people in the migrant caravan were Indigenous Hondurans. In Canada, as this was happening, we expanded temporary work programs that push people into financial precarity, because of the lack of protections and stability in those programs, while forcing folks into dangerous and unsafe conditions—inhumane conditions. We have a program here called the temporary foreign worker program, which is one of the largest migrant worker programs in North America. We bring in many workers from Central and South America, who are responsible for picking most of the food that folks on these lands eat. These migrant workers are stripped of protections that they theoretically should have under almost every conceivable labor law in this country.
While they pay taxes, they have no health care and no recourse if they're harmed (and are often deported), and they are paid almost nothing while often being extorted. We are extracting them for their labor, and then sending people away. They have no pathways to status or citizenship here. They have no capacity in a lot of ways to bring their families here. We're causing fractures in families and we're decimating people's communities in their home countries through harmful economic programs, mining devastation, and environmental destruction. And when people try and immigrate or migrate for their lives, for a different life, we are throwing up borders in every conceivable way. These are the long arms of climate devastation and imperialism.
There also seems to be a really big disconnect with most Canadians about Indigeneity and whose land they are on. I'm really privileged to be in a space that's surrounded by some powerhouse Indigenous organizers who are leading most of our community actions, but during one of the recent climate strikes, white settlers were marching down the streets chanting “Whose land? Our land!” How tone deaf do you have to be to do that? It reminds me that we still have a long way to go.
One of the foundational pillars of No One is Illegal is Indigenous sovereignty. So we don't just talk about migration, we talk about how migration is contextualized within settler colonialism. Settlers need to ask themselves what role we have to play in the conversation about migration, land, and borders. Rejecting borders is one of the ultimate acts of decolonization and rejecting capitalism because the rejection of colonial borders and formally, the re-affirmation of Indigenous self determination, poses the biggest threat to the settler colonial state—it de-legitimizes their claim to power and invests authority in local communities (colonized communities) to govern.
I have hope in our ability to organize. Around 2018 in Toronto, for example, we were having a really rough time getting people out to any type of rally or protest. We had and still have an opioid epidemic, like most of North America, sweeping across Toronto. We have a housing crisis that remains out of control. There were some badass Black Lives Matter protests being organized.
Maya Menezes speaking at the Migrant Rights Network Unite Against Racism March in Toronto 2019.
Things were happening in Toronto around detentions and deportations. There were so many things happening. There was a rally every week and every rally had small numbers. Hundreds of people, however, were on Facebook saying, “Oh my god, I don't know which one to go to. I'm so sorry. I can’t make it to everything.”
I was sitting with a couple of my friends who all did different organizing work and they’re like, “How are people supposed to make six rallies in two days? That makes no sense.”
And then we heard Steve Bannon was going to come to Toronto and give a talk. We were sitting in a meeting and I was like, okay, so many different groups in the city are going to want to talk about this. We could have 11 different groups put up their own Facebook pages and do this thing, or we get ahead of all of that and call everybody who would care about this issue. We call the public to come out and see all of us all together, talking about how addressing white supremacy in our communities, in our government, on our streets is one of the most powerful things we can do to fight for justice.
We had one of the biggest turnouts we've had for a rally in Toronto in years. We fostered really meaningful relationships across a bunch of different organizations. Now, we're planning actions in this city, whether it's for migrant justice, health care, housing, climate action, or whether it's against fascism and policing. There are multiple people who will answer the call and multiple people who we consult with before things move ahead. We've been able to really, tangibly build power and build momentum. It’s now or never, and we’re going to need each other to make it happen.”