Experiential

Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Almost everyone in the room came from somewhere, or their people did, and almost everyone has a family story about it. Some of those stories are proud, and some are silent, and the silence is usually the interesting part. This lens starts there, then puts two archives side by side: the poems carved into the walls at Angel Island, and the interviews recorded at Ellis Island. Same decades, opposite coasts, opposite outcomes. Nobody has to explain the argument of this theme once a room has read both.

Anchor questions

Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room, and expect some of it to be tender. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.

• Where did your people come from, and what is the story your family tells about arriving? What does the story leave out?
• Did your family become white? When, and what did it cost, and who did they have to stand on?
• Has anyone ever asked you where you are “really” from? How many generations does that question survive?
• Has your family stopped speaking a language on purpose? Whose idea was that?
• Who in this room has been asked for papers? Who has never once been asked?

Materials that may help

Experiential work begins from the room. All free unless marked otherwise.

Two islands

Read these against each other. It is the whole theme in one session.

• Angel Island Poetry Finder (Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation). Between 1910 and 1940, Chinese detainees carved 154 poems into the barrack walls of the station holding them. They have been recorded, translated, and presented room by room, with calligraphy and audio. This is the primary source of the entire theme: people writing on the wall of the building that is holding them, in a language their jailers could not read. Free: aiisf.org
• Ellis Island Oral History Collection (National Park Service). About 2,000 interviews with people who arrived between 1892 and 1976: the life before, the voyage, the arrival, the after. Free: nps.gov

One coast processed people and let them in. The other detained them for weeks and sent many back. Same country, same decades. Ask the room what the difference was, and make them say it out loud.

Oral histories and testimonio

• Densho Digital Repository. More than 900 oral histories and 100,000 items on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, transcribed and segmented so you can pull one clip rather than assign an archive. Free: ddr.densho.org
• Bracero History Archive. Oral histories and artifacts from the guest-worker program, gathered by George Mason, the Smithsonian, Brown, and UTEP. Read a bracero’s account against the treaty text in the historical lens, which promised him a minimum wage and clean housing. Free: braceroarchive.org
• South Asian American Digital Archive. 486 oral histories, photographs, correspondence, and a magazine, free and open. The South Asian voice that Prashad theorizes about. Free: saada.org
• Gloria Anzaldúa (1942 to 2004), Borderlands / La Frontera (1987). The border as an open wound, and a mestiza consciousness built out of it: mixed, plural, refusing the demand to be one race or speak one language. Part theory, part poetry, part testimonio, and it does what no analysis in the other lenses can. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: auntlute.com. A free interview in which she discusses la mestiza directly, hosted by the University of Arizona Poetry Center: poetry.arizona.edu

Video

• “The Immigrants of Angel Island” (TIME, 2021). Roughly 11 minutes, about 201,000 views. The visual companion to the Poetry Finder. youtube.com/watch?v=wkKBZ8aEeLY
• “The Model Minority Trope, Explained” (The Take, 2020). Roughly 18 minutes, about 542,000 views. Traces the trope through film and television and names its anti-Black function outright. Pop-culture criticism rather than scholarship, so label it, and pair it with Wu and Kim. youtube.com/watch?v=qWBPGc_dpmY

A note on method

This theme’s room is likely to contain people whose families became white and people whose families never will, and the conversation can turn into a competition over who suffered more. Head that off. The point is not to rank the arrivals, it is to notice that the same country handled them differently on purpose, and that some of the people who got in did so by helping to keep others out. That is uncomfortable for almost everyone, which is usually a sign the session is working.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910 to 1940 (1980). The scholarly edition that recovered and translated the barrack poems, called the first literary body of work by Chinese North Americans. The free Poetry Finder covers the primary material itself. Not free: uwapress.uw.edu
• Peter M. Coan, Ellis Island Interviews: Immigrants Tell Their Stories in Their Own Words (1997). The edited print collection drawn from the National Park Service oral history program, for reading aloud. Free to borrow: archive.org
• UTEP Institute of Oral History, Bracero Oral History Project. The deeper interview collection behind the Bracero History Archive. Free: scholarworks.utep.edu

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially contemporary detention testimony in detainees’ own unmediated voices, which is genuinely hard to source, and testimony from African and Caribbean immigrants.