This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.” This post comes from Levine Museum of the New South. A few Charlotteans were asked: What is your definition of “immigrant”? “Someone who has moved to a different place in hopes of a better future & life.” “Someone who doesn’t have papers. They’re illegal.” “Someone who takes our jobs.” Immigrant. When people hear or see …
May 1st marked “May Day,” also known as International Workers Day, begun in 1887 as a day to honor laborers and draw attention to workers’ rights. Since 2006, this day has become closely tied to immigrant rights and immigration reform. Thousands of people throughout the country recently gathered in solidarity to protest and advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. Here is some of the news coverage from May Day activities last week: May Day — Then and Now via Huffington Post May …
A Huffington Post article claims that, “This Immigration Documentary Will Make You Rethink Border Security.” “Who is Dayani Cristal?”, with Mexican actor Gabriel García, “retraces the steps of a migrant from the town of El Escanito in Honduras, to the Sonora desert in Arizona, where his body was found in August 2010 by border officers and delivered to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.” See a clip here. Immigration in the news this week: Anti-Immigration Group Uses Earth Day To Recycle …
This week, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, a team of multimedia artists who are part of a new project called Immigrant Nation will be working with visitors to record their stories and add them to an installation art piece at Ellis Island. “Whether you arrived just recently or your family came to the U.S. generations ago, the millions of immigrants and descendants of immigrants who make up our nation have something important in common,” said Immigrant Nation …
Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories, edited by Megan Bayles and Achy Obejas, is a newly released (March 2014) collection of fiction written by recent immigrants to the United States. It includes eighteen short stories “that speak to the experiences, concerns, and aspirations of those who have left their homeland for a new life in the United States” by well-known authors, such as Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Yiyun Li, and Aleksandar Hemon. You can listen to a brief discussion of the …
by Peter Wong, Park Ranger, Ellis Island Immigration Museum Mainstream American society considers me affectionately as an “ABC,” or “American-born Chinese.” Native-born Chinese, meanwhile, refer to me as a “juk sing,” or “hollowed bamboo” — a derisive term indicating that while I may look outwardly Chinese, I lack the language or cultural insights to be accepted into Chinese society. To be fair, I cannot read or write Chinese, and I speak the Chinese dialect of Cantonese like a precocious nine-year-old. …
In the StoryCorps series aired weekly on NPR, see this short video clip, “By the time I was in the second grade, everyone was calling me Raymond,” where Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez recounts how teachers changed the names of Mexican-American students during the 1950s. Here’s the audio link NPR is also running a special series, Borderland- dispatches from the US-Mexico boundary. This week’s story is, Crossing The Desert: Why Brenda Wanted Border Patrol To Find Her, about a woman who becomes separated from her …
This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.” This post comes from Irina Zadov of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. -Milan Kundera For the last three years, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum has been facilitating dialogues which connect histories of migrant and immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary …
In the news this week: learn about La Posada Providencia shelter, near the border in San Benito, Texas, that has in the past year received asylum seekers from about 20 countries, including Saraa Zewedi Yilma. Hear the story of her journey from Ethiopia to Sudan to Brazil, through Venezuela, Colombia, and eventually, to the US border here via NPR’s Morning Edition. In other headlines: Maps Reveal How Immigration Transformed Boston’s Neighborhoods via Wired Paying Price, 16 Years Later, for an …
What’s making news in immigration this week… At this week’s SXSW (South by Southwest) – the annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, Texas (March 7-15) – actress Rosario Dawson weighed in on immigration and immigration reform: Post by FWD.us. FWD.US created an initiative and hashtag, America is #BuiltByImmigrants. #BuiltByImmigrants features stories by immigrants who have made a difference in America, whether through starting companies, or contributing significantly in an industry. The goal of Built By …
