‘Influencer of change.’ These business leaders aim to make the Coast more inclusive.

Kim LeRoy Washington feels there’s too little recognition and support for communities of color and immigrants on the Coast, so last year she decided to try to change that.

As a inclusion and diversity manager at Mississippi Power, Washington and her friend Carlos Moulds, who works at Ingalls Shipbuilding, launched an initiative called the Gulf Coast Diversity & Inclusion Consortium in 2019. It includes Mississippi Power, Ingalls, Chevron, Singing River Health System and other businesses on the Coast.

Their aim is to exchange information and eventually advocate for local governments and businesses to offer more proactive support for people of color.

“We really want to be an influencer of change on the Coast, serve as subject matter experts, just make our region an inclusive community for a lifetime,” Washington said. “So when people come here, they feel welcomed, they want to stay.”

The Consortium held its first event recntly: a panel discussion featuring three people who immigrated to the United States, settled on the Coast, and hold prominent positions at major companies in the area.

Alecia Asiamigbe, a native of Jamaica who is an engineer at Chevron; Lilia Hernandez, a native of Mexico who is a corporate governance analyst at Mississippi Power; and John Madojemu, a native of Nigeria who is an engineer at Ingalls Shipbuilding, took different paths to the Coast. But they largely agreed that their experiences of immigrating to the United States gave them a sharp perspective on the American Dream and its unfulfilled promise.

Lilia Hernandez

Hernandez still remembers her first morning on the Mississippi Coast. She had arrived from Mexico City after dark and couldn’t see much. When she went to the beach the next morning, she was picturing Miami, maybe Tampa. Pascagoula wasn’t what she expected.

“From one side you were looking at the Chevron and the other side was Ingalls, and I was thinking where are all the palm trees and blue water and sports cars?”

She had first come to visit family members living in the area as she went through a divorce. After spending some time going back and forth to Mexico City, she met someone. In 2005, she decided to stay. And now, years after that first impression on the beach, she doesn’t see herself moving anywhere else.

By 2007, she had started working at Mississippi Power. The adjustment to corporate America was “a little strange,” Hernandez said, and she had few Hispanic colleagues. But she liked working at the bill-payment office in Biloxi. It was nicknamed “the international office,” because many of the people who stopped by to pay their bills were casino workers from all over the world: Russia, India, China.

“I used to enjoy that, that connection with other people” Hernandez said. “We were like outsiders — someone who is not like you, but is not from here either.”

The “common comment” from the people Hernandez met at the office was that immigrant communities on the Coast were too small. They felt isolated, Hernandez said.

She now works in the company’s legal department. But another part of her role at Mississippi Power is to serve as a liaison to Spanish-speaking business owners, many of whom are uncomfortable making business deals in English, since they worry about miscommunication or manipulation, Hernandez said.

She has built relationships with restaurant and store owners and helped the businesses get information about Mississippi Power discounts and energy efficiency audits.

Hernandez thinks local businesses and governments should proactively recognize and reach out to immigrant communities in their areas.

“We used to have meetings with the business owners to discuss what kind of needs they had, and that was one of the things they would say,” Hernandez said. “Local governments should approach them, and let them know all these kinds of things that can benefit them. I don’t think they ever felt included or taken into consideration.”

Alecia Asiamigbe

Alecia Asiamigbe arrived in Florida as a teenager, hoping to find at her magnet high school the rigor that had characterized her education in Jamaica. She was disappointed.

“Here I found in the public school system a very different philosophy,” Asiamigbe said. “Teaching to the lowest common denominator, not even to the class but to the school... . It was compounded by the fact that I was Black. There’s an expectation that Black children are less capable.”

Since graduating from high school and college in Florida, Asiamigbe has lived around the country, from Washington, D.C., to Montana to Texas to North Dakota, as well as in Belize. She chose to enter the oil and gas industry because it allowed her to use her science and engineering background and offered opportunities to live and work around the world.

Her current position at Chevron involves identifying the greatest risks to human and environmental health at the company’s refineries and making recommendations to address them.

Through her travels, she has marveled at both the “unparalleled diversity” in the United States, and the persistence of racial and socioeconomic injustice.

On the Gulf Coast, her first “Deep South experience,” she sees that injustice as especially stark.

“Black people and white people here have been intermingling for centuries,” Asiamigbe said. “And yet still it is the most racially divided place I have ever seen.”

Because she is an immigrant as well as a Black woman, Asiamigbe feels that white colleagues are more comfortable discussing race with her than they might be with American-born Black colleagues. And in the past weeks, as so many Americans have taken to the streets to protest racial injustice and particularly police brutality against Black people, she has felt faintly optimistic about the possibility of change.

Now a United States citizen, Asiamigbe sees racism here as an abdication of responsibility for the country as a whole.

“What’s happening here is happening to American citizens and that is what frustrates me the most,” Asiamigbe said. “These are your fellow Americans. See them as your fellow Americans.”

John Madojemu

John Madojemu credits his sense of adventure with bringing him from his native Nigeria to the United States in 1992.

“I developed a serious curiosity to know more about this country,” Madojemu said. “Because we hear a lot about this country. That brought me here, and it has never failed me.”

Madojemu first came to the Coast for work. He’s currently a shift supervisor at Ingalls Shipbuilding and adjunct instructor of industrial engineering and technology at the University of Southern Mississippi.

He appreciates the “melting pot” of American diversity and the country’s tradition of relatively transparent government institutions.

“We are watchdogs, checks and balances is what we do,” Madojemu said during the panel. “Sometimes I marvel at how the rules and laws are working.”

As an immigrant, he feels he has to work harder, “times three or four, just to be accepted.”

At the same time, simply introducing himself offers an opportunity for others to learn a bit about the world.

“I’ve had people here in Mississippi asking me, ‘Where are you from?” Madojemu said. “I say my origin is Nigeria. There are some people that believe Africa is just one country. When you celebrate a culture and you open the door for other cultures to be involved, they get to know you.”