Susana Barciela, a Miami writer turned champion for immigrant justice, dies at 66

In Susana Barciela’s final year as policy director for the Miami-based Americans for Immigrant Justice, she wrote a column to honor the work immigrants have done to help shape South Florida.

“Living in the immigrant capital of the world, I’ve seen Miami grow into a vibrant economic and cultural hub. Watching the Miami Heat play in the NBA Finals, I marveled at the spectacular views of downtown Miami. I also knew that immigrants played an enormous role in this growth and prosperity,” Barciela wrote in the Miami Herald in July 2013.

Barciela died on March 23 at age 66 after a nine-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, her husband Daniel Zuckerman said.

In addition to her work with the local nonprofit law firm that helps undocumented immigrants find a path toward citizenship, she was a senior research policy analyst at Miami Dade College. Earlier, she was a Miami Herald business writer and member of the editorial board.

Zuckerman, like others, wanted to point out a trait he felt remarkable about his accomplished writer, humanitarian and immigrant wife who had arrived in Miami from Cuba at age 4 with her sister Beatriz. She was “a fighter and a real idealist,” he acknowledged, but she didn’t amplify her own achievements. She did her work and fought so that others like her could achieve in the States, too.

Barciela was guided by her mother Amada Eiríz Barciela whose values she emulated. “As my mom says, ‘the truth is the truth,’” she wrote in the Herald in 1998. Her aunt was the celebrated Cuban artist Antonia Eiríz, whom she affectionately called Ñica.

Zuckerman pointed to an example from another field. He shared an anecdote that has gone around over the years about the late country music guitarist Chet Atkins, father of the Nashville Sound.

“I’ve got a lot to be modest about,” Atkins, the unassuming yet abundantly gifted musician, once reportedly told a fan.

“Susana was like that,” Zuckerman said. “She wasted no effort on self-promotion or advancement. These weren’t her concerns. She always put everything she had into fighting the good fight and making the world a better place.”

Barciela’s honors

Barciela, born in Havana, on Sept. 5, 1957, was a Miami Senior High alum — like Sen. Bob Graham before her who died Tuesday; as well as Florida Sen. Ileana Garcia and Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent José Dotres. Barciela finished third in her class, her husband said.

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“My mother brought me to Miami when I was 4 years old. I didn’t know it then, but I was a Cuban refugee,” Barciela wrote in a 2013 Herald column that stressed granting citizenship to deserving immigrants as a means to reform a broken immigration system. “Within months of my arrival, I was speaking English with a young girl who lived nearby. By the time I discovered McDonald’s around the corner, my assimilation was well under way.”

Barciela graduated from Harvard University with honors and a business degree.

One of Barciela’s future bosses — her last boss — retired Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padrón, said he welcomed working with Barciela on immigration policies at the South Florida educational institution. “She was very bright, extremely well. educated and very knowledgeable,” he said.

Among her career honors: Barciela had won the Inter-American Press Association’s Opinion Award in 1998, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center’s Building Bridges Award in 1999, and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children’s Voices of Courage Award in 2003.

At the Miami Herald, five years after she had joined in 1987 to write for the business desk and before she had joined the editorial board in a 21-year career with the news outlet, Barciela was part of a team of reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Hurricane Andrew. That Category 5 pre-dawn monster had leveled much of South Miami-Dade on Aug. 24, 1992.

The Miami Herald’s publisher at the time, David Lawrence Jr., said of Barciela: “Susana was a great gift to Herald readers, and then just as great a gift to Americans for Immigrant Justice. Smart and wise with a soul for justice. A great example and a great loss.”

Work on behalf of immigrants

At Americans for Immigrant Justice, which she joined in 2008 until 2013, her efforts to advocate for immigrants on topics such as healthcare, her 2011 report, “After the Earthquake-Haitian Children Seeking Safety in the U.S.,” and “Unleash the Dream-End the Colossal Waste of Young Immigrant Talent” in 2010, led to societal change.

“Susana was a passionate advocate and powerful voice for some of our country’s most vulnerable immigrants. Her work on the 2010 Justice report ‘Unleash the Dream’ was a catalyst for DACA passing in 2012. Having Susana on our staff was a privilege, and her impact on our community through her immigration work — both at AI Justice and on the editorial board of the Miami Herald — was substantial. She was exceptional and will be greatly missed,” Cheryl Little, co-founder and executive director emerita of AI Justice, said in a statement posted on Facebook.

Zuckerman was particularly moved by the human touch of her work on behalf of four young Dreamers who, between January and May 2010, walked from Miami to Washington to support their cause.

“Susana provided support and we flew up to D.C. and helped set up a press event for them at the National Press Club. In the years that followed we attended the weddings of three of them,” Zuckerman said.

At Miami Dade College

Padrón, with whom she worked at Miami-Dade College for a year in 2014 as a policy analyst, said it was a privilege to tap her expertise on immigration.

“She had a passion for the issue of immigration and was able to help us a lot in developing our procedures and policies and really making sure that we treated those students who were immigrants with respect and dignity,” Padrón said. “She was a great contributor — very low key. Quiet. But someone who produced results all the time and who really cared and had a passion for people and helping people and was a real asset to Miami Dade College.”

A family bond

“Miami is a testament to what immigrants can accomplish,” Barciela wrote in her 2013 editorial.

“Since the 1960s, waves of immigrants have come here from Cuba, Haiti, the Americas and across the world. They took low-wage jobs, learned English, built businesses, taught their kids the value of education and work and turned Miami into a modern metropolis.”

Behind the scenes, they become the guiding lights for others, too.

Zuckerman, who served as Barciela’s caretaker as her health declined after signs of Alzheimer’s became apparent in 2015, says of their enduring union: She was his wife “in the last century.” That’s because they wed after a couple years together on Dec. 5, 1999.

“I chased her and I chased her and she caught me,” he said, chuckling.

Survivors, service

In addition to her husband, Barciela is survived by her sister Beatriz Barciela Dale.

A celebration of life will be held at 2 p.m. May 11, at Robbins Preserve, a park at 4005 S Hiatus Rd. in Davie.