My Haggadah

Fantastic web upstart Killing the Buddha published my meditation on Passover at sundown last night. Read it here.

Seder, after all, means order. More from the Tepman family gatherings coming soon, with exercises in portraiture and storytelling.

Capturing movement

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!"

Where are they and why did they go? 4 million Colombians overseas

(IOM in Colombia)

Over the weekend, El Tiempo covered the publication of an important study on Colombian migration. The study, "Colombia: migrations, transnationalism y displacement," was directed by National University anthropologist Gerardo Ardila, for the Centro de Estudios Sociales.

Besides shoring up data on the astonishing number of Colombians overseas (over 4 million of 44 million total), the study may also serve to alert the government to its responsibilities toward an exceedingly migrant populace, forced overseas for not purely economic reasons. Though the study won't be complete for another six months, the academics involved hope they spur a cohesive migration policy in a government that has yet to examine its international relations with its citizens abroad in mind.

Colombia's one innovation in the area (from the 1993 constitution) is to have a non-voting representative of "overseas Colombians" in the House, elected by popular vote. (There are other non-voting positions for ethnic minorities and one for women, though all elected positions are open to everyone.)

Says Ardila in an interview in the paper:

En el exterior no hay comunidades colombianas. La desconfianza mutua no permite que se constituyan. Si alguien tiene un negocio relativamente boyante, todos los demás sospechan de su origen.

There are no Colombian communities overseas. Mutual distrust does not allow them to form. If someone has a business that works, all the others suspect a dubious origin.

He also points out the poverty of a foreign policy that seeks to capitalize on remittances, as if the more than 3 million Colombians working in developed countries owed more than their share to a state where they no longer live.

A final point Ardila brings up: many of the Colombians in "receptor" countries are not learning their host language -- but this doesn't mean they are mono-lingual. On the contrary: they are picking up several languages: the languages of their immigrant barrios. In Europe, for example, Ardila points out, many Colombians are learning African languages.