When Tran Dang is asked why her nonprofit is called The Rhizome Center for Migrants, she doesn’t hesitate.
“Rhizomes sprout more roots and more shoots in unexpected ways. A rhizome symbolizes growth that has no origin or end. It represents, for us, resilience across borders and interconnected journeys.”
For Tran, founder and director of The Rhizome Center for Migrants, the rhizome is the perfect metaphor for the people she serves: people returned and deported who must navigate complex realities of life in Mexico after being uprooted from the United States. Like rhizomes, they survive by adapting, surviving, and forming networks in nonlinear ways.
Tran shared her story on September 17 at the American Society of Jalisco (Amsoc), offering a glimpse into the challenges deportees face and the fragile but resilient networks that sustain them.
First-hand experience of forced displacement
Tran’s passion for migrant rights is personal. Her parents came to the U.S. as students before the end of the Vietnam War. When the war ended, their visas were converted to refugee status.
Growing up as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in the United States, she saw firsthand the toll of separation. “I remember when my mother saw my grandmother again for the first time after 30 years. I remember what that reunion was like and what it meant to be able to grow up in the United States with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and what it was like for them to start over,” she recalled. That experience of forced displacement and integration became the seed for her later work.
By the time she moved to Mexico in 2016, the Trump administration’s deportation machine was in full force. Living in Guadalajara, she couldn’t ignore what was happening around her. So, Tran, a human rights attorney focused on migrant and refugee rights, decided to found The Rhizome Center in this context as a way to lend a hand.
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