You might not think of storytelling as a weapon against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or as a way to fight against the oligarchs and political elite who work together to derail equality and protect their wealth.
But at a screening last night of three mini-documentaries about Colorado immigrants, the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) showed not only how stories can “change hearts and minds,” as organizers put it, but also serve as an organizing tool to help bring people together to fight.
That’s a theme that came up repeatedly at the gathering at the First Baptist Church in Denver, in the three documentaries and in the panel discussion that followed.
The short films themselves, called “From Many Paths, One Home,” made the point by documenting the similarities between the immigration stories of Luis, a recent immigrant from Venezuela, another Spanish-speaker who has been in the United States for 30 years, and a Japanese-American woman whose father was an immigrant. All three persevered despite giant obstacles that confronted their communities and families: exploitation (e.g., wage theft), imprisonment (e.g., internment camps and ICE prisons), fear, poverty, and more. And they got through it on the strength of human connection and community support. See the films here.
“My eldest daughter just enrolled in university, and my other children have already started their own families,” said the immigrant — who’s lived with out documents in the United States for 30 years — at the end of her story in the film. “I have lived here most of my life. I have worked this land, fed my community, and raised my children here. I am 68 years old, and I don’t know how much longer I will be able to continue doing this. Even if the system doesn’t see me, this place does know me.”
During the panel discussion that followed the films, Marge Taniwaki, whose story is told in one of the films, said, “Everyone in this room has a story, and each one of her stories is valuable and needs to be heard. I think that if we each share those stories, we’ll know each other better, we’ll understand each other’s struggles, and we’ll be able to help each other. We will do it without even being asked. Sometimes people are hesitant; they don’t want to be a burden on other people. I think that if you can put aside, those fears of being a burden on other people, and ask for the help we can each make progress in our lives and in what we want for each other for other, for all people. … So I hope you’ll speak to your neighbors, make friends with people that you might not ordinarily do. ordinarily do, reach out, share the wisdom that you have, and learn from others.”
CIRC’s Karen Orona Moreno, in explaining why her advocacy group launched the storytelling project, said they wanted to try to change the narrative about immigration to achieve a larger goal of helping people understand the “truth about why their lives are so hard.”
“At first it was about combating some of these myths and lies we were hearing about Aurora, but then we realized to teach people the truth about Aurora, we would need to teach them the truth about why their lives are so hard,” said Moreno. “So we needed to talk about exploitation in the capitalist system, and how it really is beating down on all of us, whether we’re conscious of it or not.”
“I mean, for decades the opposition has controlled the immigration debate, and we wanted to teach regular working-class people that the richest, most powerful people in this country blame immigrants, so that we don’t look at them and blame them, because really they’re the ones who are creating most of these issues,” continued Moreno, thanking the storytellers in the films and urging the audience of about 200 people, “Don’t stop sharing your stories” and to organize their own screenings of the Colorado Story films.
Diego Estrada Bernuy, who produced the films, said he was grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the movement, to show the “human side” of the immigration issue, adding that he sees his work as a way to show that “we’re not very different from each other, and we can learn from each other.”
Taniwaki summed up a recurring sentiment when she said, “I learned many hard things about this country, the truthful things about growing up in the United States, and the kinds of things that happen over and over and over again, to seemingly all of the people who have come here, who emigrated from other countries, how we have all been treated to varying degrees to very same kinds of issues, the deportations or slavery, the unjustness with which we’ve been treated, no matter how many years we’ve been here.”
“You know, there’s enough for everyone, if only you would share,” she said.
