It’s no secret that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus is a big one, comprised of more than 50,000 students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries. Not long ago, Arnoldo Ayala (BS, ’21, political science; BA, ’21, Spanish) and Alexandra van Doren (PhD, ’19, comparative literature) were two faces among thousands on campus, but they were by no means small fish in a big pond.
Ayala was the first Latino speaker of the Senate, vice president of education for the Illinois Coalition Assisting Undocumented Students’ Education (I-CAUSE), and department director for Helping Others Personal Excellence (HOPE). His legacy: the HOPE scholarship, a student-run effort that helps students who don’t qualify for federal financial aid continue their education.
“We’re in the second year, so we’ve handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars since it started,” said Ayala.
Van Doren, who specialized in Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies, followed a similar path, co-founding a non-profit organization that provided emergency services for immigrants and refugees in Champaign-Urbana. The non-profit eventually established a scholarship fund for international students who weren’t eligible for federal aid, which is now stewarded by the University Y’s New American Welcome Center.
“We provided whatever emergency services we could, whether that was clothing, food, employment, preparation, educational opportunities, housing,” said van Doren.
But neither Ayala nor van Doren are done helping people, and they’re using the foundation the university and SLCL gave them to continue both their advocacy work and their education.
Ayala is now working at an immigration law firm as a legal assistant, his Latinx background and Spanish degree giving him the tools he needs to help Spanish-speaking clients, and he’s applying to master’s degree programs in public policy to further his career.
“A lot of my applications focused on my immigration advocacy work and the issues I see within the immigration system and just immigration policy in general, and potentially working with think tanks or other politicians to change it and create a mutually beneficial relationship between immigrants and the United States,” said Ayala. “A lot of immigration policy is focused on bringing in people who are extremely qualified and charging them a lot of money to come here. I want to find a way to do that with other people, without it being such a big financial burden on them, so even if they don’t have a very specific skillset, they’re still allowed to come in. Just finding a way to work that out with the United States in which both parties benefit.”
Van Doren’s route after the U of I looks a little different, with the same overarching goal of using her skills to help immigrant communities.
She’s getting ready to graduate from the University of Michigan Law School in May, where she’s worked as a student attorney at the Michigan Innocence Clinic for two years, representing wrongfully convicted clients. She’s the managing editor for the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, producing scholarship from students of color and amplifying their voices and research in the legal community. She was also the co-president of the Latinx Law Students Association at Michigan, advocating for an immigration clinic at Michigan and helping establish the Michigan Immigration Law Collaborative during her tenure.
Van Doren said it was the CU community, both on-campus and off-campus, that really helped prepare her for the work she’s doing now, as well as the inherent interdisciplinarity of her field.
“There were just so many opportunities for advocacy work and students and professors who were really hungry to contribute in a meaningful way to the community,” she said. “And my field, comparative literature, is so interdisciplinary and so focused on the intersection of cultures and identities. I feel like that really positioned me well for having a sort of cultural competence or cultural fluency to be able to navigate difficult and sensitive issues, particularly around immigration and refugee work, and also just having extensive training in Holocaust studies and working with survivors.”
While giving back to the community has been a big priority for van Doren throughout her academic and professional career, it hasn’t been the only one.
“First and foremost, I needed to take care of my family and our own complicated immigration situation,” she said. She also had a daughter during her time at U of I and welcomed another baby last year.
Ayala is no stranger to family as a motivator, either.
“I’m a first generation college student,” he said. “My parents moved here from Mexico. Neither of them had even graduated high school, so it was a big deal for me to go to undergrad. They were formerly undocumented for most of my life until I turned 21 and was able to sponsor them.”
That’s played a big part in his advocacy work, but it’s also served as personal motivation when challenges arose.
“At the end of the day, they have sacrificed so much for my siblings and me. They gave up so much, completely changed their lives and moved to a different country for us,” said Ayala. “Just reminding myself of that daily as a motivation for why I’m working so hard every day.”
But it’s not just their sacrifice that keeps him moving forward. It’s also their support.
“They’re very proud,” said Ayala. “When my diploma came, my mom took it for herself. It’s not my diploma. Even though it has my name on it, it’s her diploma. It’s hung in her room.”
While his father is just as proud as his mother, Ayala said he shows it in different ways.
“My mom is posting my graduation pictures everywhere, whereas my dad is telling people those things, but he’s proud quietly,” he said. “So they’re very proud, but they want to keep motivating me. They don’t want me to be complacent and just say, ‘Okay, this is good enough.’ They want me to keep going for better and better.”
And he is. His goal after graduate school? To work with think tanks in Chicago or Washington, D.C. that work with lawmakers that truly care about immigration policy, or work as a policy analyst.
Van Doren isn’t stopping, either. She said she wants to continue finding ways to serve immigrant communities after graduating from law school, and the Chicago law firm she’ll be working at will allow her to do just that.
“They give so many opportunities to do pro-bono immigration-related work,” she said.
Her summer plans are one example of that. She’ll be completing a PILI Fellowship at Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, where she’ll be immersed in both family and immigration law. Her biggest interests moving forward are immigration law and public defense, always with that public service aspect in mind.
“I’ve tried to be very conscious of whatever opportunities are beneficial for my family, safety-wise and financially. And I also try to plug those resources or my own efforts back into the community and pay it back, pay it forward.”
Dania De La Hoya Rojas