Dr. Steve Pavey traveled to Montreal, QC, Canada to present a paper at the 110^th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.  The paper presentation was part of a SUNTA (Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology) sponsored session entitled “’Coming Out’: Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies of LGBT Politics in the DREAM Movement.”  In this paper Steve continues to build theoretically on his ethnographic research and activism with undocumented youth for immigrant rights.

The Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement:  Coming Out of the Shadows of Fear and Shame, Into the Light of their own Story and Community

This paper is based on activism with and ethnography of the dream activist movement.   It seeks to capture the diversity within this movement out the shadows, a movement searching for and claiming rights of “dreamers” to live, work and go to school in the United States.  The ethnographic description is built around the central themes of story and community while exploring theoretical questions of subjectivity, agency, and structural power.  The paper privileges the voice of the dreamers who are coming out of the shadows, declaring their status as, “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic.”  Nationally, the focus of both research and media reports has been largely on the barriers and access to education, while often missing the broader socio-political context of the lived experiences of undocumented youth.  Our ongoing research projects hope to fill a gap by intentionally using the light of those who are stepping out of the shadows to illuminate the majority of undocumented youth who remain in the shadows.

http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/2011-AAA-Annual-Meeting.cfm

This video created by Felipe Vargas uses the photography of Steve Pavey to capture a window into the growing immigrant rights movement for justice.

When:  November 15, 2011

Who: Immigrant Youth Justice League, The Alabama Youth Collective and the National Immigrant Youth Alliance

Where: Alabama State Legislature, 11 South Union Street, Montgomery, Ala. 36130

What: 15 undocumented immigrants, 2 undercover, 13 public

Building Community with Refugees through the Arts

 Creative Exchange aims:

To offer an opportunity for refugees to share artistic expressions of their experiences and feelings.

• To create a supportive community for refugee youth.
• To use the arts to help them tell their stories of conflict and resettlement.
• To use these artistic products to educate the public about the effects of conflict and resettlement on young people.
• To offer the broader Lexington community opportunities to discover more about the many assets refugees bring with them.

Partners

Kentucky Refugee Ministries; EnterChange Clinical Counseling; Fayette County Schools

Therapeutic Art Project

Since 1990, Kentucky Refugee Ministries (KRM) has placed over 5,300 political refugees in various Kentucky communities. In 2009, the Lexington office of KRM settled 230 refugees in the Lexington area. With the current political instability in many countries, there is every reason to believe the number of refugees arriving in Lexington will not decrease any time soon.

Before coming to live in Lexington, most refugees have experienced horrific trauma and are still dealing with the aftermath. Upon arrival, they are still in survival mode, scrambling to secure housing, food, clothing, employment, etc.

When fleeing the country in which they were persecuted, refugees also left behind the only social, emotional, and cultural support they have ever known. And because most do not know English, there is no means of reaching out for support here in their new country. Through translators, gesturing, and intermittent concrete grasps of American English, refugees eventually make known their most basic survival needs.

However, there are limited means by which to express the less concrete thoughts of their emotional trauma.  There are limited ways of reaching out for help for dealing with the piercing ache of seeing their fathers and brothers gunned down before their very eyes. No second-hand translation which can adequately convey the overwhelming sense of terror/rage/helplessness that refuses to leave after watching their mothers and daughters raped. No elementary word in a bilingual dictionary to express the constant longing for the time before the trouble began, for a home which does not exist anymore, for people who are not alive anymore.

There is an incredible need for refugees in Lexington to express their past and present experiences of displacement, conflict, and trauma through a non-threatening, therapeutic outlet. Artistic expression provides such an outlet. Helping refugees express themselves through artistic media would not only provide a means of conveying/coping with their traumatic experiences, it would also build a bridge of communication between refugees and their new community, allowing them to forge a new means of social and emotional support.

A picture really is worth a thousand words.  Artistic expression allows the refugees to immediately communicate, to themselves and to their new community, the question of “Who I Am.” The high level of communication and cultural understanding required to communicate this verbally normally takes years to master, bypassing the crucial bonding time with the new community and creating a situation in which the refugees live among-but-separately from their new community.

Dream Act

Nearly 65,000 undocumented children graduate from high school every year in the United States. Although they can legally attend most colleges, they are not eligible for most forms of financial aid including in-state tuition.  The DREAM Act (Development, Relief & Education for Alien Minors Act) will create a conditional pathway to citizenship for undocumented children who complete two years of military service or college education.  The DREAM Act would provide 360,000 undocumented high-school graduates with a legal means to citizenship, and could provide incentives for another 715,000 youngsters between the ages of 5 and 17 to finish high school and pursue post-secondary education.

The Kentucky Dream Coalition

The Kentucky Dream Coalition is a network of student and immigrant youth led organizations that are working diligently with allies and educators for immigrant and refugee youth rights, access to higher education and empowerment through leadership, networking, community building and esteem building programs.  The KDC and its allies have focused their efforts in 2010 on getting the Dream Act passed by participating in marches/lobbying in Washington, D.C., fasting for 65 hours, organizing Dream Universities/Graduations in Kentucky, and many other educational advocacy programs.

Partners

Kentucky Dream Coalition; BCTC Enlace Latino Student Association; Migrant Network Coalition (Lexington); United We Dream Network