Language justice across South-South migration: roundtable with Tamara Isaac

Black immigrants in São Paulo face language-related barriers that function as mechanisms of racialised exclusion – not simply as communication challenges. 

Brazil's legal framework guarantees equal access to healthcare, education, and public services regardless of migration status. Yet immigration offices, hospitals, and social services operate almost exclusively in Portuguese. No professional interpreters are available at any critical access point. Staff treat language barriers as the immigrant's individual problem, not as an institutional failure. The existence of a legal right without language access to exercise it is not protection. It is paperwork.

This public roundtable presents the findings of Tamara Isaac's FCRJ Activist-in-Residence project, Language Justice Across South-South Migration. Drawing on trauma-informed focus groups with Black immigrants from Haiti, West Africa and Central Africa, and an organisational assessment conducted with immigrant-serving organisations in São Paulo, the project documents these failures and offers concrete tools to address them: an institutional assessment framework, multilingual rights toolkits, and a policy brief addressed to government agencies, funders and organisational leadership.

This event is presented in English, with live Portuguese interpretation.