This fall, I will be conducting a series of creative storytelling workshops with student groups in the Bay Area. Through a wide variety of artistic mediums, I want to explore perceptions about migration. In each workshop, I’ll share some of the stories that I learned and projects that I facilitated during my previous projects in India and Central America, and then ask students about their own journeys : what is it like for them to get to school in the morning? To visit their grandparents and cousins? To bring home the food they eat?
The collective voyages of these students compose a narrative of the way the Bay Area’s unique culture has emerged, and how it continues to evolve. I want students to step up and tell their stories in a way that an audience will understand across boundaries of language, class, and nationality. I’ll bring a good supply of pencils, cameras, colors, papers, scissors, books, songs, and ribbons; the goal is to figure out a universal language along the way.
Depending on its context, migration is simultaneously an ideal and a consequence. Ideally a choice, the freedom to move around represents independence and privilege, particularly treasured values in the story of the United States. However, the reality is frequently a burden, sometimes imposed by desperate circumstances. The mobile and dynamic populations in the Bay Area illustrate the entire spectrum of these journeys. Funding from Spot.us would allow me to spend more time on both sides of the Bay and collaborate with a greater number of organizations here.
Along with the final article I will post frequent blog updates throughout the workshop series in an image-centered style similar to the way I wrote about my previous two projects, displaying artwork and sharing extraordinary experiences (that coverage can be viewed at http://mavenkind.wordpress.com). I will be able to produce and share more digital video and photography than was possible from abroad, allowing me to display more diverse mediums and detailed coverage throughout the workshop and writing process.
