Student Storytellers
The Migration Storytelling curriculum was piloted in a large, Midwestern high school English class serving both immigrant and non-immigrant identifying students in the spring of 2023. The images and excerpts provided here provide a glimpse into the storytelling possibilities. The names for each student are the pseudonyms selected by the students.
Yuri
Yuri (she/her) emigrated to the United States two years before she developed her migration story. She was the only student who chose to develop a migration story about herself, creating a narrative and an image (below) to communicate her migration experience.
She provides the following description for her illustration of her migration story: "My poster board represents my migration story. As you can see on the left, that is my current neighborhood where there are only two houses that are near our house. My house is in the middle. On the right is my neighborhood in the Philippines, where houses are really near to each other and have different sizes, shapes and distances to each other. The airplane represents my moving from my home country to the USA. "
Bobby
Bobby (he/him) identifies as Latino. His mother is an immigrant from Chile, and his father is a child of immigrant family members from Mexico. Bobby decided to develop a story around his mother as a migration figure. He chose to develop this story through the modality of Google Slides. The following image was used to frame his mother's story within the social and political scale of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970's. After identifying the dictator's rule, Bobby narrates, "Six days later my mom was born September 17 1973 so she was born right after the dictatorship and five years later moved to the US because the military was corrupt."
Dior
Dior (sher/her) identifies as Mexican American. She is the eldest child in her family. Her mother immigrated from Mexico as a young person, and her family takes regular trips to visit her mother's hometown. For her migration story, Dior chose to develop a story about her mother as a migration figure using Google Slides. Dior describes, "Mexico is where my mama was born and raised. Guanajuato, Mexico has always had issues with the government & economy. Many people have been affected by this and have moved to the United States for a better life for not just themselves but also their family."
Stella
Stella (she/her) is a multiracial student who identifies as Puerto Rican and African American. She is a fourth-generation American who has always lived in the Chicago area. Members of her immediate family have transnational ties to Puerto Rico, but she does not identify as an immigrant. Stella chose to portray the migration story of celebrity figure Sofia Vergara using Google Slides. The following image captures one of the slides she developed that uplifts Sofia's relationship to her family and its connection to her migration story. In her interview, Stella elaborated, "She [Sophia] like posts things about it and like she's not afraid to show that she's Colombian, um, and she brought her family back here with her."
Esther
Esther (she/her) identifies as African American. She is an adoptee from Ethiopia and describes her family as white. At the start of the curriculum, she did not explicitly identify affinity to the experience of migration. By the end of her experience with migration storytelling, she reflected, "But then as we were like talking about it in class, I was like, oh, okay. So I'm definitely like a part of that [migration]."
She chose Bob Marley as her migration figure, an artist whose music was central to her relationship with her Dad. Esther chose to develop her story through Adobe Spark which engages her audience through images, sound and movement. When reflecting on her storytelling choices around Marley as her migration figure, she explained, "Cause not a lot of [people], like me, I didn't know that he, um, like immigrated and like moved to all these different places because I just viewed him as like this huge, music star, you know?"
