San Diegan Mariel Horner loves to help people.
She works as a mental health professional, organizes for police accountability and participated in regular protests outside the Otay Mesa detention facility and raised money to contribute to the commissary costs of people held there.
“I was one of the original five people who were sending money directly to detainees and communicating with them over the phone … and that was a very interesting experience,” she said.
But she saw more people in need everywhere she looked.
“I started thinking in the past six months, what can we do to bring joy, community and a really artful form of protest?”
She thought about a way to raise money for people who needed it, and eventually hit on an idea with cultural, traditional and heavily personal significance.
“Growing up, I remember I would always stand in front of the mirror and my mom would braid my hair, and that was something we could always do together,” she said.
Plus, as she points out, fashion has a history as resistance against oppression and has long been used as a tool of protest.
Horner contacted a Los Angeles-based mutual aid group, Ponte Your Moños (Put On Your Bows), which offers braiding and bows to raise money for communities affected by ICE raids.
Mutual aid is a very old type of assistance that is beginning to fill needs locally as nonprofit organizations suffer through funding cuts, spiking prices and an uncertain future.
The mutual aid model is characterized by voluntary exchanges and collaborative work rather than top-down volunteerism, which sets people apart from the populations they serve. Mutual aid organizations have existed as long as humanity has, but formal mutual aid organizations are attaining new importance in a country where the old rules are being rewritten by the day.
In San Diego, much of that work coalesces around getting food and shelter to people who are in dire need due to extreme costs of living, skyrocketing prices of food staples, fear of increasingly aggressive and unchecked immigration enforcement, or any combination of those issues and more.
“Dulce (Flores) and her friend Angie (Portillo) started it in Los Angeles last year,” Horner said. “So I reached out to her and said, I would really love if you would let me organize events down here in San Diego.”
A braiding session with Ponte Your Moños. (Photo by Adrian Childress/Times of San Diego)The Los Angeles group was willing to help, she said, so she started asking around online to gauge interest.
“I was just flooded with people who wanted to help,” she said.
The first San Diego event raised more than $5,000 for the Otay Mesa detention facility’s commissary.
“Dulce and I looked at each other, and she said to me, ‘You need to start a chapter down here. You need to bring awareness.'”
At their second event earlier in March, they decided to shift their fundraising to another group, Mutual Aid for Moms, a collective that, as its name suggests, focuses on getting food and shelter to local mothers. Its co-founder, Sharon Swatowski, said that creating the organization was never an explicit goal; as with many such groups, the people involved saw a need and responded to it.
Swatowski said they found out that the money for migrant shelters and aid services had run out due to funding cuts from the Trump administration, forcing many to close. At the same time, the Border Patrol was dropping off migrants at a San Diego trolley station and just leaving them there, vulnerable to any predators who might be scouting the place.
Swatowski also discovered that individuals and families just released from immigration detention were getting dropped off by border agents at the San Diego International Airport.
“We were there (at the airport) like almost every day almost all day,” Swatowski said . “We noticed that moms and kids were there. … They were in an unsafe environment.”
Add that to the trauma already suffered by many who had been forced to make the notoriously dangerous trek north through South and Central America to get to the U.S. border, as well as what they endured from the human traffickers and other predators circulating through and around the immigration system, and Swatowski knew that someone needed to step up.
Moms for Mutual Aid was able to get some families to safety. Some just needed to get to their flights to rejoin family members in other states, but others had nowhere they could go.
“We then continued with the families with case management,” she said. “We were able to get the kids in school, with health insurance, legal aid, housing, whether it was an apartment or shelters.”
Clients look at a selection of ribbons and braids ahead of a session with Ponte Your Moños. (Photo by Adrian Childress/Times of San Diego)Now they have a regular “market” that provides diapers, food, strollers and other basic items for moms and their children. “We are getting new cases and new situations all the time, and now we’ve networked and collabed with the community.
“We really are just trying our best,” Swatowski said. “We try to carry the hope, we try to carry the joy, that’s just the evolution of what we are, because we’re committed to showing support.”
Mariel Horner agrees. Ponte Your Moños’s most recent event, in partnership with Ambiente y Cafe and Más Vida Market, ended up raising more than $2,000 for local families that have been directly affected by Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids, including two people who were arrested in front of their children.
“We directly give them money to the people in the cause,” she said. “We love these families, so everything that we do is with so much love, and they feel it.”
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