Immigration

Richmond Confidential looks back on 2014, year for the ages

Long after the billboards come down, the campaign mailers rest in landfills and the New Year’s toasts come and go, 2014 may be remembered as Richmond’s big election year. We are honored to have been in Richmond’s streets and chambers, its homes and schools and everywhere else, helping write the first drafts of history in an important time and place. Chevron Corp. poured an unprecedented $3.1 million into the municipal races only to lose the open mayoral and city council seats to a progressive coalition on every…

Richmond mosque provides safe space, education for Muslim families

The last thing you’d expect to sit opposite Jerry’s Cocktail Lounge in Richmond is a family-oriented, Muslim place of worship, let alone a full-fledged Islamic school. Yet every Sunday, over 150 parents, students, elders, and teachers pile out of their cars or from the closest bus stop to walk over to Richmond’s Masjid Al-Rahman. Many families come from as far as Albany and Emeryville. Mosques in West Contra Costa County are sparse – the only other Muslim place of worship in…

Friends, family mourn Richmond woman killed in Oakland

Things were looking up for Rusamie Ashly Phongphoumy, who had long dreamed of a better life. On the night of Nov. 29, her boyfriend proposed to her. She accepted. The couple made plans for the future. But all that ended the next day, when she was killed in a West Oakland market, allegedly by a jealous ex-boyfriend. The 19-year-old Kennedy High graduate, who answered to her middle name, had been trying for the past few months to end the relationship…

Retrospective: Archives show difficult road for Richmond middle class

As Richmond prepared to enter the 1960s, the city was about to encounter an era of rapid change. In November of 1959, readers opened the pages of the city’s daily newspaper, the Richmond Independent, to be confronted with Thanksgiving sales and headlines about next fall’s presidential race (“State GOP Supports Nixon”). The advertisements reflected an idyllic version of late 1950s America: A well-dressed businessman, hands clasped in his lap, dozes with a smile as a cherubic young boy gazes up…

Weekend marches turn violent as Berkeley protests police killings of unarmed black men

In reaction to the recent non-indictments of police killings of unarmed black men, hundreds marched throughout Berkeley Sunday night. Riots broke out around 10 p.m., as a mass of protestors vandalized and looted storefronts along the downtown corridor and Telegraph Avenue. Sunday night was also marked by clashes between violent protestors and non-violent ones.

Event helps Asian and Pacific Islanders enroll in health care

The Richmond Memorial Convention Center was the site recently of a health care enrollment event directed at Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities are some of the least represented in healthcare enrollment, yet represent about 12 to 13 percent of the population in West Contra Costa County, said Sean Kirkpatrick, Co-Interim Executive Director of Community Health for Asian Americans (CHAA). But because they are divided by many different languages and cultures, it can be difficult…

In East Bay, immigration reform gets lukewarm reviews

As word spread through Richmond, Oakland and other East Bay cities with large immigrant populations of the President’s executive orders easing some restrictions of federal immigration policy, families and support groups affected by the new orders reacted with a mix of relief and disappointment. “It’s not enough,” said Claudia Jimenez, a former member of the Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO) “because a lot of people have already been deported and a lot of families have already been separated.”…