Reyna Montoya

Reyna is unlocking the changemaking potential of the fastest growing demographic in the United States – Latine youth – via a new model that cultivates community resilience and skilled leadership for undocumented and mixed-immigration status young people.

Reyna Montoya founded Aliento to do something new and transformative: take a rapidly growing but deeply vulnerable population of undocumented young people and turn their shared trauma into bold changemaking action. The organization is home to the largest youth-led movement invested in the emotional healing, leadership development, and changemaking potential of those affected by the inequities of lacking immigration status. Starting in Arizona with the “Arizona’s Future Fellowship,” their vision is to create a national fellowship model – rooted in school-based changemaking hubs – that equip young people with the tools of changemaking, coalition building, political advocacy and more, so they can lead in the effort to “document the undocumented” and improve the lives of millions even as broad immigration reform remains stalled at the federal level.

Reyna’s idea is straightforward: putting the millions of undocumented young people in America in the driver’s seat to improve the immigrant experience for tens of millions of others. She asks: what if being undocumented wasn’t just something that happened to them, but rather something they can shape, state-by-state? Reyna refers to the work as unleashing “an army of young people” – self-organized but embraced by a network of teachers, mentors and others – who first develop emotional resilience and leadership skills, and then cultivate the teams they need to drive change. The idea is to turn every school and university in Arizona (and eventually beyond) into a changemaking hub, launched and sustained by young people to lay the foundation for robust, sustained community action led by those living with the burden of second-class citizenship.

Aliento fellowships are one year-long and come with $4,000 of seed funding. The commitment is to a year of intensive leadership development, including weekly one-on-one coaching, monthly cohort gatherings, and to developing hubs to root changemaking more deeply from Arizona high schools to campuses like ASU and Mesa Community College. From these new centers, peers support academic outcomes, institutions make changes to become more supportive environments for students who are undocumented or from mixed-status families, and students work in teams to hone their skills and push for improvements at the local and state level. Some of these improvements are incremental, but nonetheless life changing – for example the ability for non-citizens to secure occupational licenses so they can legally work as nurses, or in nail salons, and more. Aliento’s most high-profile win was the youth-led 2022 success to pass bipartisan Prop 308, the most pro-immigrant victory in the history of the state that allows access to in-state college tuition for undocumented youth (after a 16-year hiatus). Reyna describes the Aliento process as transforming individuals to transform systems – and emphasizes the benefits to both. She asks young people what life might feel like “if you didn’t have a bogeyman,” and is building the infrastructure (including mental health) for them to transform trauma into action and encourage the same for thousands of their peers. The work is a testament to the latent potential of all people, but also to the importance of unblocking the barriers that keep large segments of the population silent so they can begin to achieve change via relationships that transcend political rigidities.

The immigrant experience in this country has always been fraught – but remains particularly difficult for undocumented and Latine communities, especially in this moment. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, there has been a sharp increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric and calls from mainstream conservatives for mass deportation of millions. Young students from mixed-status families (meaning at least one family member is undocumented) are facing the prospect of family separation and having to become primary breadwinners as their undocumented parents consider moving back to their countries of origin. Arizona is arguably the country’s most trying environment for such families, making global headlines for the passage of SB1070 -- the “show me your papers” law – which invited racial profiling of Latinos and others who may look or sound "foreign," including many U.S. citizens who have lived in American their entire lives. Arizona is also the only state in the country with English-only education legislation still in effect, even though one out of every nine K-12 students are undocumented or from a mixed-status family, and research shows that it both harms English language learners (ELLs) and is a factor in Arizona’s graduation rates being nearly 20% below the national average.

Meanwhile, the policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA for short) is at a standstill; while it was operational it granted some temporary legal relief to people who grew up in the U.S. as undocumented children, but who weren’t born here – like Reyna. An estimated 400,000 young people who would have been eligible to apply for DACA have been shut out of the program since 2021, when a federal judge halted it for new registrants amid ongoing legal challenges. Even active DACA holders have to renew their status every two years, a perpetual cycle that exposes them to the constant risk of losing basic legal protections.

The fight for dignity as an undocumented person in this country – and contending with state-inflicted trauma in particular– has a detrimental effect on mental health and the human spirit. For at least a decade, researchers have reported higher rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD in immigrant communities – in fact, three times the rate of PTSD compared with their peers in school. Such issues can stem from being marginalized, tracked and detained – as well as from feeling dehumanized by xenophobic rhetoric, exploitative employment practices, civil rights violations, and the many uncertainties of changing immigration policies. Latine youth have higher rates of depression than any other ethnic group besides Native Americans, yet they are half as likely to receive mental health care when compared to white children.

All of this has the cumulative effect of pushing the fastest growing youth population in the country into the shadows – isolated, fearful, coping with various levels of anxiety and trauma. (Pew Research estimates that young Latines now make up half of all newly eligible voters; and 22 million already live in mixed immigration status families.) The young people with the biggest motivation to improve the immigrant experience and to document the undocumented thus face the biggest barriers to do so, their changemaking potential blocked at the starting gate. Meanwhile, the institutions that we would expect to help support young people – schools -- aren't equipped. Arizona schools practice a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on immigration status, with little to no counseling resources, let alone a culture that encourages changemaking and agency. Many so-called youth-led advocacy groups in the immigration space provide a platform for the traumatic stories of young people but fail provide them with the tools to collectively push for pragmatic reforms that can have a material effect on their families’ lives. Despite falling into the large category of “Dreamers”, millions of young people exist in survival mode, neither encouraged nor supported to realistically dream about what could be.

Reyna’s strategy is to build a self-sustaining movement of young people currently limited by their immigration status into the very change agents who can improve the immigrant experience in the United States. By giving young people tools to become the protagonists and strategists of their own lives, Aliento turns “Dreamers” into “doers” – via a process that young people themselves ultimately lead across the Southwest and beyond. (“Dreamers” are undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, lived and attended school here, identify as American, and would be eligible for pathways to citizenship under the Dream Act if the bill is ever passed by Congress.)

Aliento builds the infrastructure for that movement. The central strategic pillar is to identify, support and connect cohorts of fellows who are selected to hone their skills and increase their confidence to solve problems for their community. The “Arizona’s Future Fellowship” is a yearly cohort of 10-20 fellows (half of which are highschoolers and half are college students) who are highly motivated to become changemakers and face real barriers to doing so. The year-long fellowship, which is co-led by former fellows, is an intense process focused on healing, education and advocacy.

Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $4,000 in-part for students to apply toward required activities, including designing and hosting a series of events, and building out teams of 20-50 peers (with at least one faculty/teacher sponsor) at schools or campuses and ultimately forming or embedding themselves within hubs for sustained student action. Aliento Hubs (including partnerships) are already up and running at 25 schools and universities across the state. Fully run by students and supported by teachers, the hubs provide peer-learning support, tutoring, mentorship, cultivate a sense of belonging and engage students in changemaking and advocacy work through Aliento’s current campaigns. The hubs run independently, focused on whatever youth leaders deem most relevant at the local level via weekly meetings. But periodically they coordinate. One such example is Education Day at the Arizona State Capital, when fellows organize statewide to bring 200-300 students to the Arizona State Capital to educate elected officials – both Republican and Democrat – about their lived experiences and advocate for specific policy reforms.

Just how students are prepared for Education Day, and how they show up, is revealing of Reyna’s broader strategy and methodology. Her central concern is with effectiveness: how can young people – who cannot vote and who live with sometimes debilitating levels of uncertainty and fear – become part of an effective youth movement that materially improves their lives in Arizona and eventually beyond? This is distinct from dogma or clever campaign slogans, and often it means heavy preparation on the intricate details of the law and policymaking (Reyna describes a lengthy conversation about the meaningful different in the sentence of a bill between the words “of” and “for”) as well as the more mundane but important tasks like accurate, diligent notetaking during meetings, power mapping, and follow-up. It also means thorough preparation to communicate with people with different political persuasions. This is part of an effort by Aliento to be pragmatic in their advocacy, and to build lifetime resilience among the young leaders they work with. It is not uncommon for an Aliento fellow to sit down with a politician whose anti-immigrant agenda has directly impacted them or their family. And yet the human contact cuts through the fear and misunderstanding on both sides. It took three legislative cycles to achieve victory for in-state tuition via Prop 308, and when the bill finally passed, a Republican legislator said on the record, “I tutor someone who is undocumented, so I am voting yes!” Reyna defines leadership as “taking responsibility for others in the midst of uncertainty” and helps young people learn how to engage with patience, openness, generosity; preparing them to be builders as opposed to “just being the loudest.” This strategic bridge-building is one reason Aliento is having success where others are not.

Aliento hubs will also organize around specific policy goals, like repealing “English-only” education, changing policy around occupational licenses the ability for undocumented people to get a driver’s license. They identify the barriers, develop a plan, find and recruit allies, assign roles, and more. In more than one instance, this meant teaming up with the conservative-leaning Chamber of Commerce and inviting them to go on local TV to talk about how a particular policy is supportive of economic growth – good for Arizona businesses and also for Arizona consumers. Such efforts are important reminders of what “documenting the undocumented” means in practice: it is not simply a black and white conversation with zero documentation on the one hand, and full citizenship on the other. Rather, there are numerous educational, social, and economic benefits that come with expanding formal recognition (again, like a driver’s license, or an occupational license) in incremental ways. This gets back to the theme of effectiveness: the goal is problem solving, first in Arizona in the here and now, but also elsewhere and in the future. In fact, Reyna thinks about scale across multiple dimensions including time: preparing young people to be effective across their lifespan, no matter where they end up in their careers. (She borrows from a Teach for America theory of change here, where young people draw from their time in the classroom to be effective advocates for education across all sectors and careers.)

Reyna knows it’s not enough to “document the undocumented” if not done in a healing way. Aliento’s emphasis on self-care and healing trauma acts as the bedrock for a resilient changemaking movement. The fact is that living as an undocumented or mixed status person in the US is inherently traumatizing, and most Dreamers have had experiences that are detrimental to their mental health, and that reinforce a more negative self-definition and an inclination to stand back. So, fellows participate in – and eventually help organize for others – a range of healing “Cultiva” workshops rooted in the arts and creative expression, where they can in solidarity with one another begin to surface their biggest scars and fears, and then move forward within a peer-to-peer support system. While Aliento doesn’t provide individual therapy, they can offer referrals through a database of culturally competent providers. The arts focus draws from extensive research about its therapeutic benefits, not least of which is being able to express fears in less frontal, less vulnerable ways. Meanwhile, participating in the “Cultiva” process with groups of peers helps combat the isolation and shame that many live with and is a strategic starting point for future changemakers to connect with one another and build resilient teams.

In addition to fellow participation, Aliento leads Cultiva workshops in schools across the state of Arizona – both during daytime hours and as after-school programming (they have engaged 10-15,000 students through Cultiva). Depending on the context, some of the workshops are intergenerational – engaging adults as well as youth, which enriches the immediacy of communal healing. The workshops are free, bilingual, and offered in Phoenix, Mesa, and all Aliento Hub schools as well as virtually. In addition to school-based programming, Aliento hosts community open mic nights, art galleries, dance performances and more. For many people in the Aliento community, creative habits that they learned initially through Cultiva become their own artistic practice that keeps them grounded and connected to a supportive community even when the world and work gets difficult.

Aliento’s focus and impact follows an infinity loop between the individual and the macrosystemic. The initial sequence is deliberate: young people need to heal their trauma and cultivate healthy coping mechanisms before they can become a resilient change agent for their community. Part of healing trauma and promoting wellbeing entails learning about the larger systems and policies that were designed to undermine the immigrant community and have made it hard for them to thrive. Via the “Aliento Way” young people move from survival mode to an active, confident, strategic and informed state of being.

In addition to working directly with young people, Aliento is also helping educational institutions become more welcoming and supportive environments. Not only does Aliento provide free workshops and programming in over 100 schools across Arizona (with a long waiting list), but they also provide trauma-informed training for teachers and administrators and help schools revise policies and procedures that are harmful for undocumented and mixed status students. Even schools that have historically resisted supporting undocumented students are eager to work with Aliento because the word has gotten out that their process and guidance improves behavioral, learning and performance outcomes for students (Aliento is currently undergoing an evaluation to assess measurable impacts, and considering enacting a fee-based model for their work within schools).

From a foundation of individual healing, changemaking teams, and supportive hub environments, students can push for changes in legislation, policy, institutions, narrative and more – a gradual transition from inward to outward. Aliento fellows and their teams are responsible for wins in the state – none more significant than passing Prop 308 in 2022, which allows undocumented students to access in-state tuition, a 3x cost savings for them. Not only is Prop 308 is the most pro-immigrant victory in the history of Arizona, if not the US immigrant rights movement – Reyna managed to get it passed at a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy was peaking. During the four-year campaign, young advocates went from being afraid of sharing their immigration status to using that part of their story to educate voters about the issue. Since then, Aliento has leveraged the win to support other states like Massachusetts to follow suit (which it has).

The Hub model is built to spread, driven by young people themselves. Fellows go on to become mentors, and after graduating, students can seek out another hub at Arizona State University or a community college – so that there’s the potential for continuity from age 14 through college. If an Aliento Hub doesn’t exist at university or community college, students already know how to start one. At the moment, Aliento supports 10-20 Future Fellows annually (they are about to launch the seventh cohort), each of whom builds a 20-50-person team – a rapid way to get 1,000-3,000 young people engaged each year. In a state that once made global headlines as an “epicenter of hate” Reyna’s work is now spreading hope. People outside of Arizona are taking note, and Reyna and her team are open sourcing the Aliento model: school hubs, healing, peers, and changemaking. Students have pushed Reyna to seed the model nationally, which they have begun to do in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Indiana, as she makes the case that what they are doing in Arizona is working despite it being an especially difficult laboratory. Reyna knows the problem they are solving is global – pending a work permit, they are set to launch a program in the Philippines by the end of the year . Ultimately, Aliento’s goal of documenting the undocumented will have to happen at a federal level.

As Aliento enters their 8th year of operation, Reyna’s instincts as a “multiplier” are playing out. Students who joined Aliento in elementary or high school are graduating from college, getting jobs in local offices, and leading open conversations around immigrant rights that were never possible before. The first Aliento alum is about to graduate law school. Reyna is helping turn an identity that was once a liability into a source of pride. In time, hundreds of thousands of young people will gain experience and skills working on a whole range of relevant social problems, not just those related to immigration status. Already Reyna and her team have reached 50,000 people – 20,000 are young people and educated hundreds of thousands of voters. They provide support, trainings, and programming within over 100 schools across Arizona and have a long waitlist. Aliento has a projected budget of $2.3 million and a team of 16 – all of whom are system-impacted.

Reyna grew up in Tijuana as the first-born of young parents. When Reyna was nine years old, her father was kidnapped by the Mexican police, which resulted in her family's abrupt move to Nogales, another border town, and shortly thereafter, her father’s solo migration to Arizona. At the time, Reyna’s parents didn’t tell her the reason for all of the changes or why they suddenly became stricter about her whereabouts. She dealt with the stress and uncertainty by pouring herself into schoolwork. For three years, Reyna lived in two worlds. Every Friday, Reyna, her mother and her brother would cross from Nogales to “the other side” to stay with her dad. They came back every Monday morning in time for school. When Reyna was 13, her family was worried about the continued threats of violence and they were forced to migrate immediately and permanently. To ensure their safety, they cut off contact with family and friends in Mexico.

In Arizona, Reyna encountered a different kind of split-world reality. Her neighbors came to welcome them with a plate of warm cookies and not a lick of Spanish. Meanwhile, Arizona was making global headlines for the governor's anti-immigrant agenda. After being top of her class in Mexico, Reyna walked into an English-only classroom where some teachers treated her like she was not smart. Her family faced the typical barriers to survival– unable to get drivers licenses, difficulty finding employment, etc. Reyna excelled in school despite a lack of support and when it came time to apply to college, she was looking at a price tag three times higher than that of her peers. She won a handful of competitive scholarships but couldn’t accept any of them because she didn’t have a social security number. At the last minute, she was awarded the one private scholarship that didn’t require a social security number and enrolled as a freshman at Arizona State University.

After graduating from college, Reyna immersed herself in full-time community organizing while dancing with a professional company in Phoenix. In 2013, amidst a government shutdown, the prospect of immigration reform hung in balance. As one of the lead organizers of #AZ2DC, Reyna coordinated 50 directly impacted individuals to travel by bus from Arizona to Washington D.C., where they spoke with more than 400 members of Congress. Reyna then helped turn #AZ2DC into #US2DC – and trained 500 people from across the country to put pressure on the Obama administration to halt deportations. As a result, then-president Barack Obama provided relief to approximately 5 million undocumented immigrants. Reyna also led efforts to prevent a bus full of undocumented immigrants from being deported in Phoenix, AZ -- for the first time in the nation’s history. That same year, with the help of her community, she successfully stopped her father’s deportation.

During these years as a frontline organizer, Reyna witnessed firsthand the paradox of social justice spaces doing powerful organizing work while unintentionally reinforcing trauma within communities. She also saw hardline political tactics getting in the way of tangible reform. Reyna took a step back from organizing to pursue a master's degree in education – and began her own healing process by seeking mental health support.

As a teacher at a 98% Latine school, Reyna’s saw that her students were dealing with the same issues that she had struggled with as a kid. This chapter of her life spent teaching, working through her own past traumas, and reflecting on the inefficacies of the organizing space helped cement her diagnosis of why current organizing efforts were failing to improve the lived experience for immigrants.

So, in 2016, Reyna launched Aliento with the support of a Soros Justice Fellowship. From a place of frustration and hope, she sought to unblock the latent potential among Latine youth in order to cultivate an army of resilient changemakers motivated to change the situation for immigrants in this country.

Reyna is a national expert on immigration and regularly featured on major media outlets to provide insights on how anti-immigrant policies affect families. Aliento actively works with digital and traditional media to challenge negative stereotypes and highlight the contributions of the immigrant community. In 2022, Arizona joined 23 other states and the District of Columbia to allow in-state tuition for undocumented students. But given her historic achievement in the “ground zero” state for immigration issues, Reyna is the most likely architect of a future national-scale policy.