Coleen Elias works in nonprofit health care and is a community advocate in Lewiston. 

Four centuries ago, a woman taken from the shores of West Africa, was forced onto these shores in chains. I learned about “Angela of Angola” during a recent visit to Jamestown, Virginia.

In the exhibits, she is described simply: a woman from Angola, captured, trafficked across the Atlantic and brought to English North America after privateer ships intercepted a Portuguese slave vessel near Point Comfort.

She is the first documented African woman in the English colonies.

Her name appears in the 1624-25 Jamestown census (one of the earliest surviving records of the colony), listed as “Angelo,” enslaved in the household of Captain William Pierce. A line in a ledger. A fragment in history.

History feels different when it carries a name. Angela was not an abstraction. She was a daughter of Angola — someone torn from the place that first called her home. She survived the Middle Passage, a voyage so brutal that many never reached these shores. And in her survival, her life became part of the foundation of a system of racialized slavery that would shape this nation for centuries.

Standing in the museum exhibit, reading about her arrival in 1619, I felt not only the weight of the past but the pull of the present. I found myself thinking about the Angolan families who now share life in our communities, and how rarely we connect their presence here to a history that began on these shores centuries ago.

Back home in Maine, I meet and work alongside neighbors who have come here from Angola and other nations in West and Central Africa. They are not statistics in a policy debate. They have names, families and stories of their own. They are parents raising children in our schools, small business owners opening their doors each morning, essential workers and students building new lives.

When I meet them now, I cannot help but think of Angela, who was forced here by chains. Our modern neighbors from that same land were forced here by circumstances no less real. Both arrived because remaining was not an option.

Too often, I see real world examples of how invisibility is constructed. Policies debated far from our communities shape daily life in profound ways — determining who may work, whose children feel secure at school and whether families are treated as neighbors or as problems to be managed.

The expectation that some must continually prove their worth in this country is not new. It repeats a long history of relying on the labor and resilience of African people while questioning whether they truly belong.

In the generations that followed the arrival of the first enslaved Africans here, their descendants helped build the economic and civic foundations of this nation — cultivating its land, constructing its institutions and sustaining its prosperity while being denied the rights it promised others. The labor and resilience of people taken from places like Angola were never peripheral to the American story. They were central to it. Yet their names and stories were largely erased from official record. Angela survives in history because her name was written down.

History rarely repeats itself in identical form. But it does echo. Today, people from Angola once again share life in our communities — working beside us, raising families and contributing their talents and hopes to the places we all call home. Their presence is not a new chapter in the American story, but a continuation of one that began long before most of us ever learned Angela’s name.

Angela survived a voyage meant to break her. Her name survived a system designed to erase her. Four centuries later, immigrant families in our communities live with the knowledge that policies can determine whether their lives here remain stable or suddenly unravel.

Immigration law is not abstract; it shapes whether children feel safe, whether parents can plan for the future and, ultimately, whether neighbors are allowed to remain neighbors.

We cannot undo historical injustices. But we can decide what kind of country we want to be now. The choices we make about immigration today will answer that question. To honor Angela of Angola is to build a country where belonging is not questioned.