On May 27, 2009, Mixteca Organization, a community-based organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, offered its first Mixteca Diaspora Awards to four “courageous leaders” that have “worked to create a lasting foundation for the success and growth of the Mexican Latin American immigrant community.” Although the word “diaspora” is rarely used by Mexican migrants and community organizations, or by the Mexican government, which normally favors the term “Mexican communities abroad,” for Dr. Gabriel Rincón, founder and president of Mixteca Organization, this is a “real term” that describes the suffering of Mexican migrants and the reasons behind this “forced migration” (personal interview, 2009). In his view, the use of the term “diaspora” in the Mexican case reflects the experience of traditional diasporas: “Even if Mexican migration is explained more by economic than political causes, these are just as meaningful as the Jewish experience in the sense that there is a great deal of suffering in the process of crossing the border, in leaving their families behind, in the conditions of poverty that exist in Mexico and force them to leave, and in their inability to go back home” (personal interview, 2009). Dr. Rincón, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, recognizes that the Mexican community in general does not identify with the term “diaspora” and in most cases its members do not understand what it means. Still, he argues, for those who do know what the term means, it makes sense.