Miriam Contreras-Morales: The Heart of an Activist

According to global relief agencies, over 68 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes, often because of war, poverty and political persecution. Among them were the parents of Miriam Contreras-Morales ’16​, natives of Guatemala, who immigrated to the United States to seek a way out of poverty.

Born in this country​, along with her brother, Contreras-Morales earned a dual degree at Rhode Island College in justice studies and sociology and is currently a paralegal for Orabona Law Offices, P.C. in Providence. In a private interview, she spoke openly about her parents’ will to survive and how it instilled in her the heart of an activist.

While 15-year-old girls in the United States are in school, Contreras-Morales’ mother, at age 15, was headed for the capital of Guatemala to fend for herself. She needed to find work. There, she would encounter attempted robbery and rape attempts like many other young girls wandering the capital ​on their own. She eventually married and immigrated to this country​ in her 20s, where she and her husband found work in Rhode Island factories and ​also faced sudden layoffs as manufacturing jobs left the state. 

Along with underemployment, her parents struggled with the language barrier. Contreras-Morales recalled her difficulty as a child translating complex documents and her confusion when her parents said no to a simple request for a toy. She didn’t realize until she was older that they were struggling with basic necessities.

Today, the RIC graduate listens to anti-immigrant rhetoric and sadly notes the recent expansion of the immigration ban. “I’ve witnessed the struggle my parents have gone through,” she said. “I’ve seen the sacrifices they’ve made. I’ve seen their resiliency, all to provide the best life possible for me and my brother and for the rest of our family back in Guatemala. It fuels my compassion for all people who have lived, or are living, the same experience.”

Now in her 20s, as her mother was when she first came to this country, Contreras-Morales is full of youth and passion and the courage to take fire for those who cannot defend themselves. The immigrant population is just one of many disenfranchised populations in the United States that Contreras-Morales is on a mission to help. She began her activism by educating herself.

In 2011 she earned an associate’s degree at CCRI in criminal justice/law enforcement administration. In 2016 she completed her bachelor’s degree at Rhode Island College. Immediately following, she enrolled in a two-year program at Boston University to become a certified medical, legal and community interpreter of Spanish. And recently she completed a six-month fellowship at the New Leaders Council Rhode Islan​d, for which she was nominated by one of her mentors, RIC Associate Professor of Sociology Mikaila Arthur.

She said Arthur, along with Professor of Sociology Jill Harrison and former Associate Professor of Sociology Khalil Saucier, are three RIC faculty members who were pivotal in her educational and personal development. 

“They saw all the potential in me that I couldn’t see in myself,” she said. “And I fed off of their knowledge and their tremendous amount of field experience.”

From these professors, Contreras-Morales learned the importance of fact-based analysis, fundamental for one who would become an activist. 

She said Saucier’s course, Minority Issues in the Justice System, introduced her to activists like Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton, which are now her role models. 

Harrison’s Law and Society course inspired Contreras-Morales to conduct her own research on communities of color, law enforcement and institutional racism. 

At one time, she wanted to become a police officer, but upon further reflection, she changed course. “I learned how the prison system became an extension of the plantation system,” she said. “The United States​ went from slave plantations, to segregation, to Jim Crow and now mass incarceration of people of color. People talk about prison reform or how to fix the system, but the system isn’t broken. It’s doing what it was intended to do.”​

Moreover, Contreras-Morales said she came to discover that racial injustice operates on a global scale. After taking a service learning course taught by Harrison that involved working at an orphanage in Ecuador, she said she saw how entrenched the United States is in the underdevelopment of other countries.

“One of the children in the orphanage came up to me and asked, ‘Why does the United States hate us so much?’ Then he asked me how much I pay for a banana in the United States. I told him, ‘I can get a big bunch for about $2.’ He said, ‘Wow. One banana costs $1 here.’”

“Here in the United States​ we can buy a surplus of goods cheaply, but in the countries where we acquire these goods, the people can’t afford one banana. It was really sad and really eye-opening,” she said. “I went into justice studies thinking I’d learn about justice and it turned out that I learned about those who enforce injustice.”

“The question for me is ‘How do I impact change?’ I decided that knowing the law and becoming a lawyer is the first step,” she said.

Contreras-Morales plans to take the LSAT exam next year, apply to law school and practice in either civil rights or immigration law. As a paralegal, the RIC graduate is gaining the skills she’ll need, she said, “to challenge injustice, legislation, the Constitution and defend clients.”

​In looking back at her time at RIC, she said one of the most important initiatives she took was to supplement her course work with her own reading and research. “I read critically. I questioned what I was reading. I questioned everything,” she said.

Her ultimate dream is to some day become a supreme court justice, a protector of constitutional liberties and minority rights​ and a proponent of a more humane social order.​

Click below to read other articles in this series:​

​Criminal Defense Attorney Allyson Quay: Fighting Injustice from the Inside​

​​Attorney Katelyn Medeiros: ​Defending the Rights of Children​

​The Mayor’s Deputy Director of Policy: Leonela Felix