ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity documents the experiences of families separated by the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance Policy. The interview collection includes the stories of parents and sons and daughters directly affected by separation and ensures that their stories of resistance and solidarity are included in the historical record.
The project also documents the work of defenders (individuals who are part of the Justice in Motion Defender Network) who work to protect the human rights of migrants and seek families separated and deported to Central America and Mexico. The experiences of the defenders demonstrate the value of legal international collaboration focused on respect for the cultures and customs of the communities in the region. In this project, storytellers and oral historians work together to ensure that the repository of stories is used to educate and build collective memory about the impact of separation on families, communities, and nations.
The project is managed by Fanny Julissa García (Oral Historian) and Nara Milanich (History professor at Barnard College) with funding from the Columbia Center for Mexíco and Central America (CeMeCA), Justice in Motion, Oral History Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The first phase of the project was made possible through a collaboration with Women’s Refugee Commission. Visit separatedoralhistories.org to access the project’s website.
EXHIBITION
In Spring 2017, I designed and curated an exhibit at Columbia University titled, Show Me Your Hands: A Salvadoran Refugee Woman Shares Her Story. The exhibit reimagined the dwelling spaces left behind in the narrator’s country of origin and explored the symbiotic relationship between agency, anonymity, and body language as a rejection of the tragic figure or supplicant tropes most often assigned to immigrant narratives.
In the 10 ft x 10 ft space available to me in the Social Hall of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, I re-constructed the narrator’s garden, living room, and dining room from the narrator’s memories in attempt to create a familiar container for the narrator’s lived experiences. Interspersed throughout the space were short audio clips with themes about loss, motherhood, and migration and detention. The narrator contributed personal items for the exhibit including a tiny prayer book and two rosaries the narrator and her daughter carried on their journey from El Salvador to the United States.
Exhibit attendees each received an exhibit booklet which contained information about immigration and detention in the United States, and the transcriptions of all the audio excerpts used in the exhibit in both English and Spanish. Click on the exhibit materials to the left to read more about the materials designed for the exhibition.
To learn more about the exhibit, read Decolonizing Cultural Spaces To Tell Refugee Stories at the Columbia University website for OHMA.
To read an excerpt of the oral history interview used for this exhibit, read Reminiscences on Migration: A Central American Lyric.