That's the way things are these days. You have an idea, you go with it. This is what happened with Maria Gomez, a Colombian anthropologist working as an enthnographer at CUNY.
As part of my fieldwork, I was interviewing "latino immigrants" in the Bronx, and I thought it would be interesting to show life stories as opposed to statistics, and to create an experimental project that involved my own personal experience as an immigrant and that showed my particular reality.The result: the Colombian Migration Project, a blog posting her collection of video interviews with Colombians living in New York. (All Spanish is subtitled to English, and notes are written in both languages.) The second half of the project, she says, now involves talking to people with overseas experience living in Colombia, and the first of these are starting to go up.
Gomez explains in an update from January:
The project was always meant to be non-spectacular, kind of the opposite of the stuff you hear about on the news around migration. We’re not looking for the drama, we’re just trying to show the experiences of regular people who go and live in another country. It’s not a scientific sample, the people we interview are mostly middle-class, well educated. We’re just trying to show a slice of the immigration experience, what it’s really like. Most of what you see about immigrants always shows the same story, the poor farmer who goes to work in a kitchen in New York or on a farm in California, and a lot of people do live that experience, but the people we know and the experiences we lived were very different from that, which is why we decided to show that side of the story too.And non-spectacular it is, which is not to say uninteresting.
For a taste, I recommend Vanessa, who talks about her arrival 20 years ago as a child, setting up her beauty salon in Queens, and missing the grandmother who raised her back home:
I was talking about what you lose, the little things you lose... I would have liked not have moved here when my grandma was still alive.Gomez says she's not sure what will come of it. "For now," she says, "the idea is to put the edited interviews on line so other people can see them." As one comment says, "sometimes you just can’t get home out of your system. you always go back!"
