Next week, Wednesday 2/23 Fullerton College is having a multidisciplinary panel on immigration, in honor of the book Enrique's Journey. I will be one of the panelists and will be talking about the issues indigenous immigrants face when they come to the U.S.
This will be held in rooms 224-228 at 10:30am in case any of you guys want to come by to check it out. I'm guessing we'll have a very divided crowd as this event was announced in the O.C. Register, and we talked about how vocal its readers tend to get (anti-immigration).
While doing research on central American girl immigrants , enriquez journey had been released. Growing up in a Latino immigrant community aka ghetto, the stories in the book where all old familiar stories to me . Neighbors and friends awaiting their children fearing the worst , and the stories the children shared seemed like the making of horror movies. The worst stories came from the girls. What girls negotiate in order to escape the "normal abrnormalities" in hopes to find their mothers in the US are seldom explored . Most importantly, what immigrant children face in our school system , once integrated in the US, is brutal and a clear violation of our future. and WE let it happen daily what are we going to do about it?
ReplyDeleteAs anthropologists what can we do? Do we benefit from the suffering of others ? And how? These where the questions I faced while doing work in San Francisco...
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. The event was really awesome. I'll post a summary soon. You are right in the sense that anthropologists have to apply holism and cultural relativism to promote a better understanding in this complex and complicated subject.
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