Cultural collaborations at Migrahack
Hard data essential, but personal connections persist
Two Nicaraguans meet in Florida after fleeing their home country, taking long journeys by different paths, during the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s. They raise their family in Miami’s large and strong Nicaraguan community, Little Managua. Now, in late 2019, their daughter, Denisse Solis, is a residency librarian in Denver, which boasts no Nicaraguan community of which to speak.
That young woman’s story is just one of many told at the 2019 Colorado Migrahack at the University of Denver. Organized by the Colorado Media project and DU, it took place September 27–28, mostly in Anderson Academic Center, aka the school library.
Solis was a vital part of my team, and Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Texas and Canada were among the other exotic locations represented by attendees at the “unconference,” which brought together information scientists, immigration experts and journalists , among others, to investigate immigration data and tell the stories with which it is associated.
Yes, the numbers were important, and they were examined, but it turned out, for me, to be the individual stories that really carried weight.
Friday morning journalist Cindy Carcamo, of the Los Angeles Times, received the Anvil of Freedom Award from the Ed and Charlotte Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media at DU. Not only did she recount stories of her own background growing up as a child of immigrants, but she told of a last-minute assignment to report from Guatemala. Since her husband was away on a business trip, Carcamo had to bring their three-year-old daughter with her. Despite the warnings of her parents, natives of Guatemala themselves, all went well. Old family friends took care of the child while her mother traveled the country, working on her story. In the end, Carcamo not only filed the story her editors had asked for, but also a travel feature that ran in the Sunday magazine of the Times.
Later that day, leaders who work with immigrant communities in the Denver metro area told stories that related more to policy than individual people, but were still interesting and useful.
My three-member team merged with another on Saturday, a move that helped jump-start the process. Nevertheless, due in part to difficulty finding the information necessary to fulfill our original plan, we improvised and created a decision tree that depicted the hard choices and difficult processes people from other countries, especially in Central America, experience in the immigration process.
As hard as I tried to find information and research the questions that came up, it was the women of the group who contributed the most to the work. Specialties such visual design and personal interviews with people who made the journey from Central America to the southern U.S. border were more useful than my experiences.
I did make a successful run to find someone with technical expertise that might help us, but in the end it was simple drawing on whiteboard that did the job. Maybe it was an example of the only male in the group, of northern European descent as well, reining himself in to let the women, mostly of color, take the lead, but perhaps it was an example of the same guy letting others do most of the work.
That evening, the informal communication that was so interesting to me continued. A woman with Columbian roots sat at our table during the closing reception and joined the discussion of topics like food and holiday traditions from different countries. We heard how Santa arrives Christmas Eve on a motorcycle and hands out candy to the boys and girls while mothers frantically arrange the gifts that Mr. Claus is supposed to have brought, among other stories.
The finale of the Migrahack featured chef and food writer Adan Medrano, of San Antonio, Texas. He shared information about food and cooking in the native populations that inhabited that region of Texas and Mexico and how their diets changed after European contact. He also told tales of the importance of cooking in his own family and the ways in which food helps bring people together.
In the end, to me, it seems that hard data, number crunching and creative ways of presenting that information are essential to telling the true story of immigration. But, somehow, the personal connections and stories of the weekend stuck strongest in my head. Perhaps the best communication about any issue combines both approaches to illuminate the issues.
Mike Clifford works for KRZA community radio in Alamosa and Taos. He traveled to Migrahack Colorado thanks to support from PEN America.
