SESSION 1: THE MIGRANT STORY
The “Good Refugee” and the Constraints and Contexts of Storytelling"
Kate Parker Horigan, Western Kentucky University
Understanding the practical and rhetorical contexts within which refugees tell their stories must be part of our study and presentation of such narratives. This paper explores this need as well as potential strategies for attending to these contexts. Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer have documented the asylum context of storytelling (2018; 2008). Others have contributed to understanding how refugee narratives are presented differently in different situations (Lyon 2018; Nayeri 2019). In my own work with Bosniak (Muslim) refugees of the 1990’s Bosnian war, I collected oral histories and contributed to a collaborative museum exhibit documenting Bosnians in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My colleagues and I emphasized in the exhibit the same themes that our Bosnian participants did in their stories: exceptionalism, accomplishments, and assimilation. By doing this, we risked obscuring the white privilege of these European refugees, and of reinforcing other dominant, limiting narratives surrounding refugees and immigrants. Focusing on this case study, I ask, how might we be advocates for refugees without lending power to the stereotype of “the good refugee”?
Kate Parker Horigan is Associate Professor of Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University. Her areas of interest and expertise include narrative, memory and commemoration, ethnography of communication, and critical trauma theory. Her book Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative (UP Mississippi, 2018) describes how personal narratives and other forms of folk commemoration of Hurricane Katrina have been adapted for and received by public audiences. Her current research explores memory and narration of war and genocide in Bosnia (1992-1995), especially among Bosnian refugees in Bowling Green, KY.
The Structuration of Asylum Narratives
Marco Jacquemet, University of San Francisco
This presentation explores how asylum seekers are socialized into performing narratives of personal crisis by two opposing, and yet complementary, forces: the refugee support community and the asylum courts. In developing their claims, applicants learn how to tell their personal stories from two sources of structuration: 1) prior “successful” refugee narratives as told to them by past applicants who have been granted asylum status, and 2) the expectations of what constitutes a “credible narrative” in the judicial system as explained by asylum lawyers and hinted at by officers. To document this structuration, I analyze the development of the joint asylum narrative of two Kurdish brothers in Italy, including their initial application (filed, in Turkish, with the help of other Kurdish refugees); their first interview, in Kurmanji and Italian, with a human rights lawyer and her interpreter; the entextualization in Italian of their story by the lawyer; the rehearsal by the claimants of the story as rendered by the lawyer; and, finally, their deposition before the asylum court. This case shows how individual experiences are shaped by multiple voices and agents as they morph into socially acceptable and “authentic” narratives. It also reveals how this semiotic structuration is made particularly complex by the massively fluid and multilingual nature of asylum determination, where assumptions of shared knowledge, understanding, and common goals cannot be taken for granted.
Marco Jacquemet is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of San Francisco. He teaches courses in communication and culture, intercultural communication, geographies of communication, and justice and social change. His scholarship focuses on the communicative mutations produced by the circulation of migrants and media idioms in the Mediterranean area. His more recent book project is called Transidioma: Language and Power in the 21st Century. He is also present in Italian media activist networks, where he investigates the link between media and power.
Sharing Moving Stories
Adam Strom, Re-Imagining Migration
Migration is one through line of the American story. Migration stories, or as we at Re-Imagining Migration call them “moving stories,” are the connective tissue of the history of the United States. This presentation discusses how migration stories, as part of an intentional educational effort, can counter polarization and hate and help to break down explicit and implicit national narratives about the U.S. that are driven by white supremacy. Despite our long history of migration, educators are rarely trained to teach immigrant students or teach about migration.In our work with educators in schools, museums, and informal educational settings, we have found that a deliberate and purposeful approach to sharing stories of migration allows individuals to create connections that lead to interest in historical inquiry. In our work with teachers and students, we have watched how in other’s stories people find themselves, and by listening to others, who are willing to listen to them, people can open themselves up to hear that the differences in our experiences often reveal inequities of power. In sharing these stories, people shift their perspectives and learn to communicate across differences, finding ways to connect with people whose experiences both overlap and diverge from their own.
Adam Strom is the Director of Re-Imagining Migration. Throughout his career, Mr. Strom has connected the academy to classrooms and the community by using the latest scholarship to encourage learning about identity, bias, belonging, history, and the challenges and opportunities of civic engagement in our globalized world. The resources developed under Strom’s direction have been used in tens of thousands of classrooms and experienced by millions of students around the world including Stories of Identity: Religion, Migration, and Belonging in a Changing World and What Do We Do with a Difference? France and The Debate Over Headscarves in Schools, Identity, and Belonging in a Changing Great Britain, and the viewer’s guide to I Learn America.
SESSION 2: METHODS FOR STUDYING AND PRESENTING MIGRANT STORIES
Migrant Incorporation and Transnationalism
Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr., Davidson College
This paper explores the relationship between migrant incorporation into a host country and the kinds of transnational ties maintained with family in the home country. By employing a historical documentary analysis (Harris 2002) of an archive of letters of migrants, this paper works to understand the emotional, financial, and familial pressures felt by Ghanaian immigrants in the late 1980s. The paper’s use of letters is an innovative way to study personal immigrant experience and transnational relationships with family members. This method allows for an intimate, contextualized, and in depth understanding of the migrant narrative that is difficult to achieve through other approach. Further, the letters themselves speak to the transnational experience, as writing and sending them was a way in which the participants melded their abroad and home country lives and experiences. This research reaffirms and extends the existing literature in important ways, especially the theorization of linear transnationalism by Itzigsohn and Giorguli-Saucedo (2005). This work finds that migrants who are more incorporated into the U.S. (in terms of length of time in the U.S., better established employment, and greater social networks) are able to maintain monetary, material, and physical ties with their family members in their home country. These migrants also voluntarily provide more remittances to their home countries. Migrants who are not as far along in their incorporation process must rely more heavily on communicative and emotional transnational ties, as they have less financial and legal security. Less incorporated immigrants are also likely to encounter and/or perceive familial expectations of remittances that they struggle to fulfill.
Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. is the Malcolm O. Partin Assistant Professor of Sociology at Davidson College. Ewoodzie uses qualitative methods to examine how marginalized populations in urban locales make sense of inequalities in their everyday lives. His dissertation, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson," is an ethnography of everyday eating practices among socioeconomically diverse African Americans living in Jackson, Mississippi. His book, Break Beats in the Bronx, currently under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, analyzes never-before-used archival material to provide a historical account of the making of Hip Hop.
Mother Tongues and The Sustainability of Wisdom: Why Immigrant Languages Matter
William Westerman, New Jersey City University
Language death is a real phenomenon, and the loss of mother tongues among indigenous and immigrant communities is accelerated because of the globalization of communication and the ubiquity of the marketplace. The field of folklore is torn, however, between an appreciation of the community and psychological benefits of cultural sustainability on the one hand, and romantic and sometimes reactionary notions of protecting and preserving endangered cultures without at the same time addressing the causal factors in the dominant culture bringing about this cultural havoc. The recent turn towards decolonizing the academy has raised useful questions about folklore collection for its own sake and existential questions about whether languages, oral texts, and cultures should be preserved or conserved. This paper asks what a new practice can look like in a city, and world, of immigrants. Drawing on the work of two New York organizations that focus on linguistic and cultural sustainability among the city’s 600+ language communities, it examines how the connecting tissue of trans-generational wisdom is threatened by the ephemerality of consumerist communication. How are local communities shifting artistic and intellectual control over their own materials? How can immigrant languages contribute to the more just distribution of economic and intellectual resources? We need new frameworks for collaboration, at a time when both organic community-based artists and professionalized cultural workers in non-profit arts and cultural organizations—and even academia itself—are facing their own crises of sustainability.
William Westerman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and coordinator of the Program in Ethnic and Immigration Studies at New Jersey City University. He also teaches in the New Jersey Scholars Program, and has previously taught at Princeton University, and the Goucher College Master’s in Cultural Sustainability program. He holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. As an immigration activist, he is a co-founder of First Friends of New Jersey and New York, one of the nation’s oldest and largest immigration detention visitation and human rights programs.
Mediating Cultures Through Theater
Nushin Arbabzadah, UCLA
What happens when a young woman from Kabul spends a year in America only to return as a stranger in her homeland? So common is this problem that Afghans have coined a term for it: “the foreigner Afghan” (Afghan-e Khareji). In my play “Dust Allergy,” I show how in Afghan tradition, the folkloric figure of the trickster is used to break the spell of foreign culture through playful trickery and to help the estranged woman feel at home again. This presentation considers how theater shows us that culture can be both a source of dispute when incompatible cultures meet and a resource of resolution when playfulness and humor is used to address family conflict.
Nushin Arbabzadah is an author, journalist, analyst, and translator. Raised in Afghanistan and educated in Europe, she worked for the BBC before moving to Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on Middle Eastern media at UCLA. She is the author of several books, including Afghan Rumour Bazaar: Secret Sub-Cultures, Hidden Worlds and the Everyday Life of the Absurd.
SESSION 3:
The contingencies of crisis and the role of the unanticipated future in migrant stories
Amy Shuman, The Ohio State University
As scholars, journalists, policy makers, and migrants themselves acknowledge, narrative plays a central role in how we document and imagine the movement of people from one homeland to another. These narratives are often in conflict each other, for example when we describe the U.S. as a nation of immigrants and also characterize new migrants as illegal aliens. I’m interested in some of the ways that narratives are in conflict, for example in the suspicion that economic migrants are masquerading as asylum seekers. This chapter proposes a model for understanding how migration narratives work. Using examples from my research on political asylum narratives for the past two decades, I will suggest the following components as useful for describing migration narratives in all domains, from personal narrative, to media accounts, to courtroom hearings:
- Questions of tellability and audience: who tells these stories to whom, on what occasion
- Questions of circulation and appropriation: how do particular stories circulate and how what are the consequences of this circulation for negotiating the legitimacy of particular accounts or the promotion of unproven, perhaps false accounts, told by narrators deemed unreliable. This discussion includes not only how quotation and reported speech are used but also how images circulate with narratives
- Questions of positionality and alignment in the narratives: how do tellers position themselves and others in migration narratives; how do tellers promote themselves as allies or distant themselves
- Questions of frame and embedding: how migration stories are embedded in other discourses
- The contingencies of crisis and the role of the unanticipated future in migrant stories
- Counter-narratives and the dynamic relationships among migrant stories, including competing logics governing the form of stories
Amy Shuman is Professor of English, Anthropology, and Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University. Shuman is the author of articles on conversational narrative, literacy, political, food customs, feminist theory and critical theory and of Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents; Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy; and (with Carol Bohmer) Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. Shuman is a Guggenheim Fellow and fellow at the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.
SESSION 4: MIGRANT STORIES AND POLICY IMPERATIVES
Narrating Racialized Ideologies in Northern Italy
Sabina M. Perrino, Binghamton University (SUNY)
Since the 1970s, Italy has shifted from being a country of emigrants, with many Italians migrating to the United States, South America, and Australia, to becoming one of the main migratory destinations for many migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea and going through many perilous journeys (Albahari 2015). After briefly describing Italy’s changing political landscape, in this chapter, I examine the stories that northern Italians have been telling about the growing migratory diversity around them, their resistance to it, their unheard voices, and the circulating ideologies around migration as they relate to issues of identity construction, authenticity, and collectivity.
Through a linguistic anthropological analysis of northern Italians’ storytelling events, this paper crucially shows why neo-fascism can exist, solidify, and be successful today in Italy and beyond (Perrino 2020). I analyze narratives that I have been collecting in various regions in Northern Italy, including the Veneto region, since the early 2000s. In several towns and villages in Veneto, for example, I collected many interviews in which racializing narratives about migrants and migration issues often emerged in Venetan, the local language of this region, and in standardized Italian. Being a native Venetan and Italian has made me able to study these emerging patterns from various, contrastive, perspectives, by looking at speech participants’ discourse strategies (Gumperz 1982), such as codeswitching. How can these racializing and racialized ideologies exist in the first place? How can scholars unveil them first and then analyze them? How do individuals make sense of these ideological frameworks? It is through a close analysis of northern Italians’ storytelling practices that some of these ideologies surface and coalesce. This chapter thus sheds light on why and how extremist movements, such as the Italian ones, can exist, solidify, and make sense in people’s everyday lives.
Sabina Perrino is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Perrino is a linguistic anthropologist with a multidisciplinary interest in language and culture. She has conducted fieldwork in Senegal and among Senegalese migrants in Italy. She has examined the modernization of Senegalese ethnomedicine. More recently her research explores the politics of dialect revitalization in northern Italy, showing how language becomes racialized in everyday social life. Her research interests include tacit racism in everyday conversation; racialized language in joke-telling in northern Italy; new methods for studying oral narratives; language use in ethnomedical encounters and in political speeches; and transnational and globalizing aspects of language use.
A Perilous Journey from Cuba to the United States
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, George Mason University
This presentation tells the story of two Cuban men, Aledmys and Usnavi, as they migrate through twelve Latin American countries in 2018-19 with the goal of seeking asylum in the United States. However, just as they were about to reach their destination, in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez they were confronted with the reality of the strict immigration policies employed by the Trump administration, including metering and the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). After undergoing difficult experiences along the migration routes—such as encounters with fraudulent coyotes, extortion from police of multiple countries, a dangerous journey through both the Amazon and the Darién jungle, and waiting for weeks in countries that are unprepared for the influx of migrants they are receiving—the two men were forced to wait in Mexico to enter the United States. This is their story based on a 2019 interview, news articles, scholarly sources, and two detailed maps that provides insight on the difficulties of trying to migrate to the United States from Cuba.
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University. Her areas of expertise are Mexico-U.S. relations, organized crime, immigration/migration, border security, social movements and human trafficking. She is the author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017; Spanish version: Planeta, 2018). She is co-editor (with Victor Konrad) of the volume titled North American Borders in Comparative Perspective (University of Arizona Press, 2020). Her two new books (co-authored with Dr. Tony Payan) are entitled Las Cinco Vidas de Genaro García Luna (The Five Lives of Genaro García Luna; El Colegio de México, 2021) and La Guerra Improvisada: Los Años de Calderón y sus Consecuencias (The Improvised War: Calderón’s Years and Consequences; Editorial Océano, 2021).
How to Reshape Public Understanding of Immigrants
Wendy Feliz, American Immigration Council
Reshaping the narrative and the public’s understanding of the people we call “immigrants” and “refugees” is desperately needed. As long as significant numbers of Americans see immigrants and refugees as a threat to their livelihood, safety, health, and success, they are unlikely to support pro-immigrant policies. This chapter discusses applied field research on the efficacy of migrant stories conducted by the American Immigration Council. Our investigation demonstrated that longstanding strategies that advance the narratives of immigrant struggle and/or exceptionalism are not necessarily helping, but in fact may be hurting the cause with some Americans. The American Immigration Council has found that more effective story-telling strategies are those that connect U.S.- and foreign-born people across their common identities, struggles, dreams, and aspirations. This latter approach avoids the proliferation of narratives that cast immigrants as “others” and creates new ones of immigrants as “us.”
Wendy Feliz is the founding Director of the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council. The Center houses the signature, culture and narrative change programs of the Council. The Center also convenes institutions and individuals nationwide who share the common goal of building a more cohesive America where all people are welcomed and included. Wendy has been with the Council since 2008 and has two decades of experience in public policy/advocacy communications. She also serves as an adjunct communications professor at Georgetown University.