About 10 students gather in a common room at UC Santa Cruz on a Tuesday evening in May.
These meetings—of the Iranian Student Union—occur every other week.
For a few minutes, folks chat as everyone settles in with a tiny cup of tea. Then, Ali, a leader of ISU, kicks things off with some announcements.
A note: KAZU is using the pseudonym Ali to protect his family in Iran.
“We have the beach barbecue,” Ali tells the other students. “We're gonna be cooking up Joojeh kabab.”
At first, the announcements and conversation seem typical of any student club on a college campus. A club leader asks people to vote on merch designs for new hoodies, and the students talk about midterms for classes that are very Santa Cruz.
“Oh my God, bro, your Psych class,” one student chuckles. “I thought it was gonna be more gender studies,” the other student responds. “No, it's literally about sex.”
But it’s a strange time for these students.
For the past four months, many people with friends and family in Iran haven't known if their loved ones are safe.
The Iranian government cut off internet access inside the country on Jan. 8 amid widespread protests.
There were moments in the weeks that followed when Iranians could access the outside world. But, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the blackout resumed.
Now, despite the fragile ceasefire, many Americans of Iranian descent are left in limbo.
Students in ISU are hanging out with friends and going to classes, but they're also trying to make sense of what's happening for their relatives thousands of miles away in Iran.
“I guess you could say I'm two generations removed,” says one 19-year-old student, who KAZU is referring to by his first initial, A. “It was a little weird, my relationship with being Persian. Because, especially [being] born [in] 2006, it was about five years after 9/11, the racism against Middle Eastern people was very much still present.”
A. was born in San Diego to an Iranian father and a Mexican mother. Every day as a kid, he said, his mom would take him to school across the border in Mexico.
“Because she didn't want me growing up in the U.S. as a visibly Persian person,” he said. “She told me, like, never tell anyone I'm Persian, or Iranian.”
When the Iranian government violently cracked down on protesters in January, A. worried for his grandmother, who lives there.
“The blackout of communication, it had me pretty worried for a good amount of days until she called us and she's like, ‘I got the last plane to…’ like she got a small apartment in Dubai or something like that,” he said.
A. said his grandma doesn't think the U.S. should be involved, but she supports efforts to overthrow the Iranian regime.
“She's just like, ‘This regime needs to fall no matter what,’” he said. “‘And then later they can work on how to overthrow the second one.’”
But the Iranian regime has not fallen.
Ali, who was born in Iran and grew up in Canada, thinks the U.S. and Israeli war has only made things worse.
“I think the Iranian people want a secular democratic Iran,” he said. “I don't think they'll get it through America or Israel, given that neither has a track record of doing that in the region.”
Unlike A., whose grandma left Iran in January, almost all of Ali's family is still there.
“I have family that's in Tehran, and specifically in areas that have been bombed,” Ali said, “and so, no idea what's happened to them.”
According to Ali, about three weeks into the war, his mom got a call from one of his cousins.
“He's a CS major. He knows how to do the whole firewalls and VPN stuff,” Ali said. “It was like a 5- to 10-minute call, just, like, them checking in.”
And then the call cut out.
“I was talking to my dad last week, and it was one of the first times I've actually heard him, like, voice anxiety and fears over what's happening,” Ali said, “and he's very much a cards to his chest type of person.”
While President Donald Trump alternates between declaring the war over one day and threatening to obliterate Iran the next, students in ISU are left in a liminal space.
“I don't want to say we're avoiding these conversations,” Ali said, “but we're not directly talking about them, mostly because there isn't much to talk about.”
He has tried to make ISU a safe space for students to get away from the news for a bit. But, hovering in the background is the question: are our families okay?
“And there's only one way to find out, and that's a blackout going away,” Ali said.
The Iranian government has been gradually expanding access to an expensive internet service available to certain professionals and business owners.
About a week ago, Ali’s cousin was able to use it to talk to his mom and let her know they’re safe.
But the Iranian government has said it won’t fully restore the internet until the war ends, and there’s no clear sign of when that will happen.
