Undocumented Tongan gives voice to community's concerns

The passage of the California Dream Act sent waves of joy through Southern California’s Mexican and Central American undocumented community. Starting a year from January, undocumented college students that have lived here for most of their lives can apply for publicly funded financial aid. And now one Southland woman wants public officials to know about the plight of undocumented young people from a tiny South Pacific kingdom. By some accounts, there are 10,000 people from the island of Tonga living in L.A. County. Brian Hui says the biggest concentration is neighborhoods that surround the intersection of the 405 and 105 freeways. "We are just about on the border of Hawthorne and Lennox, and there are lots of Tongans here," he said. "I guess in terms of Southern California, Lennox, Hawthorne, and south Inglewood are where most of the Tongans are living these days." Hui is with the Tongan Community Service Center, a nonprofit that provides health and education counseling for Tongans and Tongan Americans. Hui estimates that about a third of Tongans are undocumented. Twenty four-year-old Fita is one of them. She began an internship here last year, four years after she arrived in the U.S. from Tonga to study at El Camino Community College. "I always have a passion for engineering growing up," she said. "My dream school is Oxford University in London, in Britain. So I was thinking that perhaps there might be a way that I’m going to finish school over here and then graduate and go to Oxford." A year and a half after Fita began classes at El Camino, her family in Tonga and her relatives here couldn’t afford to pay $7,000 a year in foreign student tuition. Fita stopped going to classes. When she wanted to return, her college counselor told her she’d overstayed her visa. She didn’t know, she said, and she cried. For her internship at the Tongan Community Service Center, she decided to reveal the plight of immigrants living similar hardships. "I know there’s a lot of undocumented kids out there that their stories need to be heard so might as well just do it, you know, go interview them… and you know people might help," she said. It took a while for the young adults and their parents to open up. Fita wrote down their stories, amazed at how much they mirrored her own. She printed them in a booklet that’s become an oral history project. One of the stories goes like this:

Fita gave the booklet a bilingual name. "The name in Tongan is Amanaki’anga ‘o Kalefonia and in English it’s “California Dream Act,” she said. The booklet says the California Dream Act and its promise of college aid stands to change the lives of Latino, Pacific Islander, European, Middle Eastern and African youth. But not Fita’s. 'I didn’t go high school here, I just came ‘06, I was 18 years old. The Dream Act is only for kids that were brought here age of 16 and they go high school and go to college," she said. But Fita is heartened that policymakers might read her booklet and her Tongan Dream Act stories and find a way to make more dreams come true.