How Charlotte organizers’ hard work delivered a big win for Colombians in the Carolinas
Astrid Palacios watched as Colombian families started their days hopeful, yet ended frustrated.
A volunteer for a February 2023 pop-up Colombian consulate in Charlotte, Palacios spent the day greeting and directing attendees from across the Carolinas. With less than 200 appointment slots, it was impossible to help all who needed legal documents and passports. Lines of people waiting to take a forgotten appointment slot stretched out the door.
Attendees left grateful — or dissatisfied if they didn’t receive help. Regardless, something greater was missing for the quickly growing Colombian population in the Carolinas: a place nearby instead of hundreds of miles away to get basic government services.
The closest Colombian consulate to Charlotte is in Atlanta, a four-hour drive. Palacios said many of her friends give up full days to travel to the consulate in Atlanta — and appointments are hard to come by.
Organizers such as Palacios capitalized on that experience to drive interest in a new consulate — and Colombian government action. Years of community work led to the Colombian Foreign Affairs minister’s announcement in May that the government will establish a new consulate in Charlotte.
An opening date and location have not been announced.
The petitioning process
After working with the Atlanta consulate to organize the pop-up visits in Charlotte, Festival Colombiano President Natalia Silva, journalist Rafael Prieto and Fredy Romero, executive director of the Colombo American Foundation, wrote a petition last year asking the Colombian government to open a consulate in Charlotte.
Prieto, editorial director of Qué Pasa-Mi Gente, said he was skeptical at first about the feasibility of setting up a consulate in a new city. But the petition’s importance became clear after meeting with other community leaders.
Nearly 50,000 Colombians reside in North Carolina and South Carolina, according to American Community Survey data from 2021. Ten years earlier, the Colombian population in the Carolinas was half that size, at around 26,000 people. About 6,000 Colombians reside in Mecklenburg County alone.
Silva, Prieto and Romero published the petition online at Change.org, distributed posters with a QR code petition link to local Hispanic-owned stores and caught the attention of the Colombian government.
“I said, ‘You know what? We need more. We need the Colombian ambassador here,’ ” Silva said.
When then-Columbian Ambassador Luis Gilberto Murillo attended Festival Colombiano, Silva and event co-president Karol Cortes greeted him with the petition and an introduction to the scale of the Colombian community in the Carolinas.
“We were not asking the government to help us out, but we were working together with the government to make it possible,” Romero said.
Volunteers also stood at the entrance of the Festival Colombiano and gained 700 signatures.
Their work paid off.
Just a month after the festival, community group Líderes Colombianos en Charlotte received a letter announcing Murillo would pass on the request to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the ministry still needed to finish technical, administrative and legal analysis.
Murillo, now the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, in May announced plans to open four new Colombian consulates in the U.S: Phoenix, Denver, Seattle and Charlotte.
The new consulate’s impact
Besides leading the Colombo-American Foundation, Romero is a teacher with a work visa. He often needs to travel to the Atlanta consulate to complete visa documentation and authorize agreements for his nonprofit.
But not everyone can travel to Atlanta. Silva said it’s particularly difficult for older people or those with children, and can involve paying for a hotel and food. Transportation can be nearly impossible for Colombian migrants without a passport who may be living in a shelter or with family members, she added.
“They cannot start a life here without a passport,” Romero said. “Because a passport is needed for them to open a bank account, they cannot apply for a job, they cannot do anything.”
The new consulate in Charlotte will provide closer access to cities with sizable Colombian populations, including Raleigh, Durham and Winston-Salem, and speed up documentation and legal processes for Colombians across the Carolinas.
Silva said she encourages other Latino groups in Charlotte to organize through community work.
“Sometimes we don’t think about all the people who contributed and all those people who signed the petition,” Romero said. “They are actually the ones who made this possible.”
