From March 10-16, six undergraduates took part in the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Alternative Spring Break in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, where they witnessed firsthand the changing physical and philosophical nature of the U.S.-Mexico border. The trip enabled students to examine the impact that a constructed wall and heavily regulated border crossings have on the residents, economies, and cultures of the twin border cities of Brownsville, Texas, U.S.A. and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico. While there, the group members met with representatives of the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and other on-the-ground partners.
Speaking on a public panel at KIE on April 18th, five of the six participating students reflected on how the trip had reshaped their thinking of the immigrant experience by bringing them much closer in proximity to the border and allowing them to speak with individuals for whom the border is a part of life. They were joined on the panel via Skype by Richard Phillips (’17), a participant on a previous Alternative Spring Break trip to the border of Mexico and Arizona, who is currently working as an associate researcher for the Duke Initiative for Science & Society in south and central Texas.
Phillips said of his experience:
The world’s many, intractable human crises, like that of undocumented migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, naturally cause discomfort and pain within those who witness them. That’s how I felt when I went to the Arizona border during my Alternative Spring Break in 2016. It was tempting to find the easy way out: put together a fundraiser on campus, donate a little bit of my time or money to the cause, write a Facebook think-piece on our country’s flawed border security policies, etc. I wanted to feel like I’d done something to help, and then with that peace of mind move on with my life. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that that was the wrong thing to do. That it would result in me leveraging my privilege to escape the reality that many people do not have the choice to leave. That it would be nothing more than a return to my blissful ignorance.
As students at one of the world’s top universities, it’s important to recognize that we aren’t necessarily meant to “do” anything just yet in our lives. We are meant to look, listen, feel, and be changed by the knowledge we are given and the world we see around us. Going to the border gave me a crucial opportunity to leave the Duke bubble and catch a glimpse of the suffering that is the reality of the real world. I learned to sit in the discomfort and pain of that reality, rather than numb myself and pull away. I learned to take advantage of my brief stints in the real world to listen to what it’s trying to tell me, and to learn how I can be of best use towards alleviating its suffering once my time in school is over. The experience changed my life.
Prior to their trip, the 2018 group members met to hear guest speakers and discuss assigned readings. During the experience, they participated in evening reflections and kept journals documenting their questions, concerns, and experiences. The students described how their firsthand experiences in the Rio Grande Valley region had debunked many of their preconceived notions about the border area and the nature of border crossings, while also leaving them with many more ethical questions to be considered and a better understanding of the complexity of immigration issues in the United States.
Watch a “video journal” of the students’ reflections upon their return:
From March 10-16, six undergraduates took part in the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Alternative Spring Break in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, where they witnessed firsthand the changing physical and philosophical nature of the U.S.-Mexico border. The trip enabled students to examine the impact that a constructed wall and heavily regulated border crossings have on the residents, economies, and cultures of the twin border cities of Brownsville, Texas, U.S.A. and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico. While there, the group members met with representatives of the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and other on-the-ground partners.
Speaking on a public panel at KIE on April 18th, five of the six participating students reflected on how the trip had reshaped their thinking of the immigrant experience by bringing them much closer in proximity to the border and allowing them to speak with individuals for whom the border is a part of life. They were joined on the panel via Skype by Richard Phillips (’17), a participant on a previous Alternative Spring Break trip to the border of Mexico and Arizona, who is currently working as an associate researcher for the Duke Initiative for Science & Society in south and central Texas.
Phillips said of his experience:
The world’s many, intractable human crises, like that of undocumented migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, naturally cause discomfort and pain within those who witness them. That’s how I felt when I went to the Arizona border during my Alternative Spring Break in 2016. It was tempting to find the easy way out: put together a fundraiser on campus, donate a little bit of my time or money to the cause, write a Facebook think-piece on our country’s flawed border security policies, etc. I wanted to feel like I’d done something to help, and then with that peace of mind move on with my life. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that that was the wrong thing to do. That it would result in me leveraging my privilege to escape the reality that many people do not have the choice to leave. That it would be nothing more than a return to my blissful ignorance.
As students at one of the world’s top universities, it’s important to recognize that we aren’t necessarily meant to “do” anything just yet in our lives. We are meant to look, listen, feel, and be changed by the knowledge we are given and the world we see around us. Going to the border gave me a crucial opportunity to leave the Duke bubble and catch a glimpse of the suffering that is the reality of the real world. I learned to sit in the discomfort and pain of that reality, rather than numb myself and pull away. I learned to take advantage of my brief stints in the real world to listen to what it’s trying to tell me, and to learn how I can be of best use towards alleviating its suffering once my time in school is over. The experience changed my life.
Prior to their trip, the 2018 group members met to hear guest speakers and discuss assigned readings. During the experience, they participated in evening reflections and kept journals documenting their questions, concerns, and experiences. The students described how their firsthand experiences in the Rio Grande Valley region had debunked many of their preconceived notions about the border area and the nature of border crossings, while also leaving them with many more ethical questions to be considered and a better understanding of the complexity of immigration issues in the United States.
Watch a “video journal” of the students’ reflections upon their return:
Unfortunately, this Do Lunch has been canceled due to illness.
Join journalist and immigration advocate Margaret Regan to talk about how giving voice to the voiceless can change policy and affect public opinion and the role and responsibility of journalists in the age of Trump. Have lunch with her to get a different and involved perspective!
Margaret Regan is the author of two prizewinning books on immigration.
The most recent, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire (2015), which won a starred review in Publishers Weekly, looks at the fate of undocumented immigrants who are arrested long after they’ve established lives and families in the United States. The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands (2010) investigates the tragedy of migrant deaths in the desert. Both were named Top Picks in the Southwest Books of the Year competition.
A longtime journalist in Tucson, Margaret started writing about the border in 2000. She has a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania and she also studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris. She has twice gone to Guatemala, and studied Spanish in two tiny schools in the colonial city of Antigua.
Margaret Regan will deliver the 2018 Annual Human Rights Lecture on February 22, 2018 at 5pm in 115 Friedl, on Duke’s East Campus.
Do Lunch is a series of informal lunch discussions, exclusively for currently enrolled Duke undergraduate students, featuring ethical leaders outside of Duke and their decision-making processes.
Catered lunch available to students who RSVP; space is limited. Sign-up here.
WHAT: Do Lunch with Margaret Regan WHEN: Thursday, February 22, from 12pm to 1pm WHERE:West Duke 107F, East Campus RSVP: Click here to RSVP.
I often tell people that Andrea Patiño, a Colombia native and a 2012 Duke graduate, is the most well-traveled person I know. She grew up in Bogotá, went to high school in Norway, has spent summers and semesters at Duke in the Netherlands, Ghana, Togo, Palestine, and New York City, and always seems to be traveling between continents. As a photojournalist and a cultural anthropologist, she seeks out multicultural stories; as an immigrant, she thinks a lot about mobility. In 2012, directly after graduation, Patiño was awarded a Hine Fellowship through the Center for Documentary Studies, and it was through this program that she moved to Boston, encountered the immense cultural diversity of neighboring city Lynn, and embarked on a multimedia documentary exploration—From the World to Lynn: Stories of Immigration, which opens as a full-fledged exhibition at CDS tonight. I spoke recently with Patiño, who is currently a graduate student in visual communication at UNC-Chapel-Hill, about the exhibition (which is also online here), how she finds herself in her documentary work, and the power of personal narratives.
KI: Tell me about the entry point to [From the World to Lynn]—was it through a particular person you met?
A map showing all of the countries from which immigrants have traveled to Lynn. Image courtesy of Andrea Patiño; part of the exhibit From the World to Lynn.
AP: I moved to Boston [to partner with nonprofit RAW Art Works] and was commuting to Lynn, and I realized pretty quickly that it was an incredibly diverse place. I did some research and found out that almost 30 percent of the population is foreign-born, which is a ridiculously high number—a lot higher than Massachusetts, and more than the national average. That was fascinating right away, and also in contrast to Lynn’s reputation. When you go to Massachusetts everyone says, “don’t go to Lynn, there’s a lot of crime and gang violence,” and so you never really get to hear the fact that it’s such a diverse place, and so rich, culturally and historically. That’s kind of outside of the narrative. Also, just the fact of going [to Lynn daily] and seeing all the different restaurants with different foods and walking the streets and hearing all these different languages. There was a Russian bakery, and a taco place, and lots of Iraqi people around as well. Lynn’s a refugee resettlement city.
When I was doing my work with RAW, I started reaching out to resettlement agencies, and the first one I went to was an Arabic association. Also through RAW I met children of immigrants and second-generation immigrants.
KI: I remember earlier this year we were talking about your current work, about how you’re trying to orient a lot of your documentary projects around immigration. Did [the Lynn project] cement that interest?
AP: I think doing this project reaffirmed a profound interest that I have [in immigration]. It’s such a relevant and important issue—especially in terms of questions about mobility nowadays when everyone’s moving around constantly. Once this project was done, hearing from the subjects [of the photographs] was really powerful, and validated my work in a way that was very profound. That really confirmed that [immigration] is a topic I want to keep working on, because it also felt important to them—having those stories out.
For me as well, I’m trying to figure it out. I’m an immigrant myself, and it’s a completely different kind of immigration story. I’m here for education and sometimes that gets lost; [immigration stories] are nuanced. But here in North Carolina, unlike in Boston, there’s more of a Hispanic presence and I will probably continue doing work on that for the rest of grad school.
A portrait of Antonio, who immigrated from El Salvador. Photo courtesy of Andrea Patiño; part of the exhibit From the World to Lynn.
KI: Speaking of the story of your immigration, I was struck by your exchange with Antonio [an immigrant from El Salvador, photographed as part of From the World to Lynn] who flipped it back on you, and asked you why you were so interested in immigration. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic?
AP: That was so surprising and honestly so good to me, to be confronted with that question. He was an undocumented, unaccompanied minor, which was a huge thing last summer in the States, but he came 11 years ago. At that point, as I was doing all the interviews, I was trying to figure out my own status. My work permit was running out in the States, and honestly it was a very hard. It produced a lot of anxiety. I was trying to figure it out: either I would have to leave, or try get a job that would sponsor my visa. And I’m explaining all of this to [Antonio] and he’s like, “why don’t you stay, and be undocumented?” It’s the first time anyone has asked me that. That was very powerful. Of course it’s something I had never considered, because of the implications of it. It meant I wouldn’t be able to go back home [to Colombia], or if did, I wouldn’t be able to come back [to the U.S.]. Some people choose [to stay, undocumented] because they don’t have any better option. I think that also reveals the nuances of why people come, why people stay, why people make those kinds of choices.
KI: Has, and/or how has, your thinking about immigration changed?
AP: I think it reaffirmed that personal narratives—though often dismissed—are so important in showing how complicated these decisions are. It also got me thinking about the right to migrate, but also the right not to migrate. The idea that if you don’t want to move, why would you have to move? Which is the case for a lot of people who are forced to move.
Mobility for me is such a big issue. When I first came [to the U.S. and Duke], I did my first summer abroad in Netherlands. I said I needed a visa, and everyone was like, “what is that, why can’t you just…?” Which is completely understandable: If your mobility has never been questioned, growing up, why would you even think about it? I’m somebody who has been able to travel a lot despite all these limitations. I’ve been denied a visa here and there, which is really frustrating. Of course a lot of people say, “why don’t people come [to the U.S.] legally?” but don’t realize that there are all these processes. It’s virtually impossible [to immigrate legally, to obtain a visa] if you are, for example, an impoverished person from Central America.
Also, for me, the situation in Lynn with the Iraqi refugees was really interesting. It connects to the idea of the war in Iraq, to America’s involvement and how that had a very tangible impact on people’s lives who are now coming here. What’s that relationship between an American citizen whose taxes paid for the war and someone who’s coming here? How does that relationship work? How are we involved and responsible?
KI: How has your photographic style evolved through your other projects—including photographs of slave castles in Ghana and Palestinian youth in Nablus—up to this point, a show made up solely of portraits?
AP: [During a class] last semester at UNC was the first time I really had to think more deliberately about style. [With the Lynn project], I was going with my gut, trying to figure things out by myself. I thought portraits were more important in this project because I really wanted them to go together with the voices of the people telling the stories, so you can see the portrait while listening.
KI: What does it mean to you to come full-circle and exhibit your work at Duke?
AP: I’ve been at the Center for Documentary Studies forever, from [being a] front-desk receptionist to having an exhibit there. It definitely feels like a bit of a completion. [The place] was so important in my Duke experience, even though I only took one class there.
This is the first time I have an exhibit up. I remember [at the beginning of the fellowship], my advisors were talking about how you’re going to try many ideas and maybe many of them are going to fail. But you’re going to have time and support to do the project you want to do. I think that kind of support is kind of rare, for somebody to tell you right after graduation that you have the opportunity to fail if you need it. So going back to Duke, and back to CDS, feels like a good first exhibit and also a closure to a long circle.
KI: What are you working on right now? What’s your next big project?
AP: I’m thinking about my [graduate] thesis pretty soon. I would be interested to see how Obama’s recent executive action is going to play out and unfold for a lot of families.
From the World to Lynn is on view at the Center for Documentary Studies until April 13. See more of Patiño’s work here.
Blogger’s note: As we move into the fall, I’m going to use the Insider space occasionally to investigate “Ethics Around Campus.” This includes events, talks, exhibitions, performances, and general Duke campus happenings outside of Kenan that align broadly with our thematic programming and focus on engagement, analysis, and debate of ethical issues. If you’re savvy with our website, you’ve likely seen “Ethics Around Campus” highlighted before—it’s at the bottom of our main page, in RSS feed form. Throughout the semester, as usual, the feed will be updated with links to various campus events. I’ll highlight a few here—partly out of my own curiosity for what ethics can be and look like at a university, and partly to connect Kenan’s work with other campus work, and vice versa.
Adichie’s novel. Image courtesy of NPR.
I, like many others at Duke right now, am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. It’s kind of a neat feeling, to read a book alongside a huge network of people, many of whom I don’t know, as we all spend our 9-to-5s doing and studying ostensibly quite different things. Doing something in common—like reading a book, or, say, playing on a kickball team—can blast us out of isolation and into the sudden, personal sharing of something. You dog-eared that passage, too? How did it resonate with you?
If we’re lucky, we can come together through these mutual realizations. Duke has done something clever in the past few years by building the Summer Reading selection—typically reserved for first-year bonding exercises during orientation week—into a university-wide conversation. Faculty and staff book clubs (including Kenan’s), as well as initiatives like DukeReads, read and discuss the book together. The author comes to campus for a lecture in the fall. And beginning with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (the 2011 selection), the Nasher Museum has curated a small exhibition in tandem with the Summer Reading Book’s themes. This year, the exhibition—on view in the Nasher’s Academic Focus Gallery—includes works from the Nasher’s permanent collection, ranging from West African wood tools to contemporary paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works by the likes of Jasper Johns, the Guerrilla Girls, and Henry Clay Anderson, among others. The curated collection gives life to Adichie’s story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two young Nigerian lovers growing up in recent decades between Nigeria, the United States, and the U.K. Together and apart, the pair navigate displacement, immigration, race, and identity. The novel takes its title from the term “Americanah”—used to refer to a native Nigerian who emigrates (often to the U.S. or U.K.) and returns to Nigeria with foreign affectations. When Ifemelu returns to Lagos after several years abroad—during which she becomes famous as the blogger behind “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”—some friends call her, mockingly, “Americanah.”
The Nasher exhibition interprets these themes broadly and pulls together a sharp collection of works. The hallway is spatially tight, which gives the exhibition a conversational effect: Dan Perjovschi’s Postcards from America sits opposite Vik Muniz’s American Flag; a Nigerian Janus Headpiece looks diagonally toward Dan Driskell’s Woman in Interior. Pieces talk across time, as if saying, hey, this is what being an outsider in America felt like to me then, and here’s what a barbershop—in London, or Durham, or Lagos—looks like to me now. The gem for me, though, is the accompanying gallery guide. A handful of Duke administrators, faculty, and librarians were asked to respond to various works in the exhibition, drawing in their experiences reading Adichie’s novel. The respondents, and their responses, are wonderfully diverse. Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Law, unpacks Driskell’s painting via quotations from Toni Morrison, Destiny’s Child, and Ralph Ellison. She likens Adichie’s Ifemelu to the “quilted concoction,” the “diasporan woman” of Driskell’s painting. Li-Chen Chin, Director of Intercultural Programs, writes—in response to Vik Muniz—about immigrating to the United States from Taiwan. “The last thing I did before I left Taiwan was learn to ride a bike because in many university brochures I had received, the ‘American’ students were always smiling and either standing next to or riding their bikes on campus.” Her words push us to consider what it means to “look American,” or to “be American.”
The final work on the first wall is Hurvin Anderson’s 2010 Barbershop Print. Ben Adams, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions, wrote a long anecdotal piece in response, recalling trips throughout his childhood to the hair salon with his grandmother. He ties in one of the main plot points of Americanah: Ifemelu travels to Trenton, NJ from Princeton (where she is on a humanities fellowship) to have her hair braided before she returns to Nigeria. “What Ifemelu had hoped would be an afternoon of braiding,” Adams writes, “turns into a detangling of hair, race, and the immigrant experience in America.” Adams then talks about his grandmother’s own conflicted salon experience, and the function of the salon or barbershop generally: it can be a space of both community formation and community unraveling, where the individual can “literally or figuratively look in the mirror” and draw a distinction between “‘us’ and ‘them.'” In similar ways, Americanah—both the book and the exhibition—remind us of both the precariousness and power of community. It dares us to form our own, too.
—MD
Americanah is on view in the Academic Focus Gallery at the Nasher Museum of Art through October 12.
Brianna Nofil, the 2012-13 Stephen and Janet Bear Postgraduate Fellow at the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, is the author of a TIME magazine article on the history of detaining migrant children in the United States.
