Jennifer Allen
December 25, 2003
On the morning after the first freeze of the season, Jennifer Allen sat bundled up in the storefront office of the Border Action Network. The heat had gone out; one of the staffers was trying to type in mittens while Allen placed calls to the landlord. She was simultaneously trying to figure out why the computer network had gone down.
Welcome to the world of human-rights activism.
Just a couple of days before, Border Action had launched a high-profile lawsuit against three Cochise County men accused of vigilantism against border crossers. Allen, as Border Action's director, is the public face of the organization, which works to protect human rights, civil rights and the Sonoran Desert along the border.
She necessarily maintains a sober demeanor at press conferences, but off duty, she's animated and even playful. She's sincere about her cause, but she isn't sanctimonious--least of all about herself.
"In high school, I was active in debate," she says of her secondary studies in Northern Utah. "Debate was the bastion of the outcasts--the punks, the kids whose parents smoked. I couldn't fit in anyway. I wasn't Mormon, and I didn't have blond hair and blue eyes (her father is Scots-Irish but her mother's side of the family is Mexican), so getting involved in animal-rights and environmental issues and doing geeky things like that in high school didn't take guts; it was just coming to terms with reality."
"Being young and being a woman isn't that much of a setback," she says. "We're here because we care about people's lives, and we want to help them speak up to resist efforts to undermine their rights.
"In the narrow sense, with Border Action's specific projects, I hope I can be out of a job in five years. But in the bigger picture, this work probably won't be finished in my lifetime."
[snip]
