Mutual Aid: Space Between Visibility and Belonging

“Mutual aid is not charity,” Morella says. “Mutual aid is the process.”

Before Morella became the first Latina immigrant and only renter to serve on White Salmon's City Council, she had already watched generations of women in her family rebuild their lives across borders, carrying one another through each new beginning. “There is incredible labor and beauty in these communities,” she says. “People deserve to feel reflected where decisions are being made.”

Her story begins thousands of miles away, where her mother, Marta, was a university student in Chile when the government was overthrown under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. “She was in her twenties,” Morella says. “Her life was completely upended.”

Her mother fled to Paris, where a large Chilean exile community had formed. Eventually, she traveled to Venezuela, where she met Morella’s father, Gerardo, a driver working for the influential Otero family. Her mother worked as a nanny for the same influential family. And this is when Morella was born. Her mother cared for the children in a wealthy household while raising her own daughter alongside them. In many ways, Morella grew up inside that world; in its rooms, its rhythms, its language of comfort and abundance. And yet, in just as many ways, she was not.

Later, Morella’s tío (uncle) Ricardo, a gifted Chilean musician, fell in love with an American woman in Paris and moved to Connecticut. Morella’s parents divorced when she was five, and her mother made another impossible choice to follow her brother to the United States as a single mother, unable to speak English.

“She had no idea what awaited her,” Morella says.

America was grueling work of fruit-packing warehouses and cleaning jobs. But her mother didn’t stop. She went to night classes to learn English, then college to earn her master’s degree. Eventually, Morella’s mother became a clinical social worker helping immigrant families navigate trauma and the very terrain she herself had survived.

Around them, a circle of Latina women, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Peruvian, and Chilean mothers, created a community in Connecticut despite arriving with different histories of displacement and struggle. They became one another's childcare, emotional support, emergency contacts, interpreters, and chosen family.

“They became my tías (aunts),” Morella says. “They were incredible women providing each other support to make it happen.”

This, Morella believes, is what the public often fails to understand about immigration.

“People are presented as a monolith in the media,” she says. “We talk about what is happening to immigrants, but not who they are.”

Her mother, undocumented for a period of time, paid taxes while receiving no public assistance because she did not qualify. Meanwhile, immigration fees continued to mount in a system that was intentionally difficult to navigate.

“The goalpost is constantly moving,” she says about immigration.

What sustained them was mutual aid. “Your society can only be as strong as the weakest link,” Morella says. She believes when people are disempowered, everyone feels the consequences.

Morella studied anthropology and English literature and worked as a researcher with first-time Latina mothers experiencing depression. She eventually moved to Atlanta with her college sweetheart. The city felt alive with culture, movement, and political history, and Atlanta became transformative for her. She started working in restaurant operations. After suffering pregnancy loss, the breakdown of her marriage, and the emotional strain of trying to build a life while carrying grief, the pandemic hit. Restaurants closed, and entire staff networks disappeared overnight. She found herself responsible for laying off more than one hundred employees. Many of these employees were undocumented Latino workers who had no access to federal relief programs that were available to others.

“My green card had expired while I was in the process of citizenship,” she says. “I was working, paying taxes, and I couldn’t access aid either.”

She immediately got to work. “The DNA of Atlanta is mutual aid,” Morella says with a smile. She contacted restaurant owners and explained to them what would happen to their employees during the layoffs. Morella formed a plan with the owners, and soon the restaurants became informal relief centers. Meals that once moved through the restaurant shifted into food for employees to take home to their families. She helped community members to hold together what institutions had failed to protect. Not charity; it was a structure emerging where a structure had collapsed.

“If people without paperwork are not supported,” she says, “where would the community be without them when everything reopened?”

Mutual aid is resistance to dehumanization itself. “It is an act of violence to not allow people to provide for their families,” she says.

At the same time, her own life was collapsing. She packed her books, art, dog, and whatever else could fit in her car, left behind a 5,000-square-foot home, and moved back in with her mother.

A good friend told her, “Your whole world will open if you leave and start over,” she recalls. Her mom said, “You don’t have to start over. You just have to be brave and keep going.” So she did.

She spent years rebuilding herself through therapy, movement, yoga, and writing. She traveled and poured into her body and mind. She found a deep connection to yoga. “It’s how you find your way back to yourself,” she says.

Then, a trip through the Columbia River Gorge changed everything. “I looked at the Gorge and just knew I was home,” she says.

At the invitation of her close friends, Jason and Laura Mann, she spent several harvest seasons working in their orchard and vineyard in Underwood. The farmworkers welcomed her like family from the very beginning. Long days in the fields turned into shared meals, stories, laughter, and friendships.

“I saw how much of this community depended on immigrant labor while simultaneously excluding those same people from opportunity,” she says.

Housing instability forced her to move six times in two years. The experience became one of the catalysts for her eventual appointment to the White Salmon City Council. “There is no one in these meetings who looks like me,” she told the council.

The region depended on immigrant labor; their presence was shaping the region’s economy, yet their representation in decision-making spaces remained limited. She asked, “What does it mean to live in a place you help sustain, but cannot reliably stay in?”

White Salmon voted unanimously to appoint her.

Within months, she drafted and introduced a proclamation supporting immigrant protections in White Salmon. She worked closely with attorneys and local leaders and held firm throughout the process.

During the public testimony, her mother flew in and sat in the front row. “I dedicated it to her,” Morella says. The room was filled with immigrant families sharing their own stories. The resolution eventually passed, inspiring similar conversations in neighboring communities.

Still, Morella is careful not to frame representation as a finished achievement. “Does having me there create equity? No,” she says. “That’s a long-term commitment communities have to make at every level.”

Morella sees herself as one piece of a much larger inheritance built by countless people before her. Her work has not stopped at the city level. She was recently appointed to Washington State’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board. She is particularly focused on increasing access to affordable housing and advocating for safe, dignified housing for members of our agricultural community. Morella believes the voices of immigrant communities must be part of the conversations, not discussed from a distance.

Morella has now started free Spanish-language yoga classes for Latina women in the Gorge. Her idea did not come from wellness culture; it came from absence. With donated mats, clothing, and support from local organizations, Morella created a space specifically for Latina women, many of whom had never entered a yoga studio before.

“These spaces are primarily white and wealthy,” she says. “So I asked the women where they would actually feel comfortable. The women are so brave, joy-filled, warm, and excited about being taken care of for once,” she says. “For generations, they’ve been master caregivers for everyone else.”

When donations arrive, the women immediately begin setting items aside for future participants in other towns, rather than taking the much-needed items for themselves.

“They are the embodiment of mutual aid,” Morella says. “It comes naturally to them.”

The classes are free and held in community spaces like Machi Yoga and Yoga Samadhi, where women can simply arrive as themselves. For many, it is the first time they have entered a space intentionally created for their comfort.

“I look at them, and I see my mothers,” she says quietly. “I feel like I am healing generations.”

At a time when immigrants are often discussed in terms of statistics, fear, or political rhetoric, Morella continues to ask people to be curious. “Ask why people are leaving their homes,” she says. “People do not want to leave their homes.” Then she pauses. “Recognize your family in their eyes.”

For her, mutual aid is something she came from and is still trying to make visible.

To learn more about White Salmon City Council meetings, visit www.WhiteSalmonWA.gov, or to connect with Morella Mora directly, email morellam@whitesalmonwa.gov

Morella Mora will be teaching a class in the autumn of 2026 on the History of Mutual Aid and its Modern Application at Industrial Street Studios.