Knapp Fellow Yesenia Grajeda Yepez: Project Familia United Aims to Reunite Children at the Border with Families. Her advice to GW Students: “Follow and pursue nagging questions.”
Yesenia Grajeda Yepez is one of the Knapp Fellowship winners for the 2019-2020 school year. Community Engaged Scholar, Maureen Albero, sat down with Yesenia to discuss her project. Yesenia’s project focuses on developing and implementing an app, Familia United, which assists Central American immigrant families in Yuma County, Arizona with family tracing and reunification.
Yesenia’s project closely intertwines with her areas of academic study, Latin American and Hemispheric Studies and Sociocultural Anthropology. An elective, Care of Children in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies, sparked her interest and helped her develop the scope of her research project.
Yesenia primarily relies on qualitative methods in her research. She notes, building trust in the community and understanding motivations for migrating are detrimental for providing a solution to the Central American migration crisis. Yesenia has been involved in politics in her hometown, so she already had relationships with many of the community members and knew about the processes that helped to reunite immigrant families. When approaching the Central American migration crisis, one cannot simply rely on quantitative data. Yesenia noted that if a researcher used a method that solely focused on numbers, the researcher would not know about the processes and culture surrounding the local organizations assisting these immigrant families. Second, the quantitative researcher could overlook the overall purpose of the research, to keep immigrant families safe and together.
Yesenia said it is important to incorporate members of the community into the research noting that what happens in the community is very different from what is portrayed in the media, which tends to misrepresent community circumstances. One goal of her research: to develop a mini manual to help integrate Central American immigrants, particularly immigrant children, into American life.
Yesenia’s Master's capstone focuses on national security challenges posed by mobile technologies in Mexico. More specifically, she aims to assess how organized crime utilizes mobile technology gang recruitment and trafficking. Yesenia reflected on influential professors she had at GW who helped with the scope of her research. From taking a variety of classes in her academic field, Yesenia noted how these classes shaped and better equipped her for her research project. Yesenia acquired “tools at GW to make change.”
To Mr. And Mrs. Knapp, Yesenia said that she is “genuinely happy, thankful, and uplifted after being awarded the Knapp Fellowship and that the Knapp's continue to invest and believe in student potential.”
If you are interested in learning more about Yesenia's work please come and hear her presentation at the symposium on Community Engaged Scholarship on December 9th at the Marvin Center RSVP here.
Applications for next year's Knapp Fellows are open to learn more about the fellowships and application information click here.
