immigrant issues

Like the start of a haiku, the façade of south Minneapolis’ Intermedia Arts states, in three-foot-tall letters, “Home, Land, Security,” the title of an upcoming art exhibit. The highly visible, politically pointed mural on the wall of the Lyndale Avenue art gallery displays the bold new direction it has taken in the last two years, a change sparked by a memorial service two years ago.

At a service for the late Senator Paul Wellstone at the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Intermedia artistic director Sandy Agustín said she witnessed an outpouring of both emotion and solidarity from the region’s immigrant communities. Agustín began trying to think about how the arts could begin responding to these issues, “knowing that this great spokesperson for and ally to new immigrants in particular was gone.”

Agustín and other Intermedia leaders consulted artists in local immigrant communities, and found that no one was talking about the political and social issues of immigration. Nor, for that matter, were the artists getting any work.
“As I was talking to the artists, I was hearing about what they were not able to do because they had all of these other issues to worry about – HIV/AIDS, mental health, housing,” Agustín said. “They weren’t able to be artists.”

Those conversations resulted in the four-year Immigrant Status project, whose second year is set to run from the middle of this month through the beginning of January. The project has given the 31-year-old arts organization a new, more clearly defined role.

“We went from thinking more about just being an artists’ service organization, presenting work, to getting involved in community work and being responsive to what’s happening in these communities,” Agustín explained last week.

Last year’s first installment of the project included gallery shows depicting and exploring several issues of the immigration experience, as well as a host of related films, speakers, and performers. For example, one installation project, “Talking Suitcases,” encouraged its audience to consider “if you had to leave home today, what would you take with you? What would you leave behind?”

The overwhelming response to the art programs included close to 1,000 unsolicited visitors to the gallery, many from far out-state – a fact that Agustín puts down simply to the shows’ evident “relevance.”

While the board considered Immigrant Status’ first year a real success, what they weren’t able to do last year was specifically involve those communities that have been forcibly displaced, either within or to the United States. As this year’s “Home, Land, Security” project progresses, Intermedia will host artists from the Native American, African-American and Hmong communities.

“When we hear those words now we hear Homeland Security,” said Agustín. She says that the administration and the media have co-opted and diluted these words that have long been a central part of the human experience. “I think it’s really interesting to pull those words apart and ask big questions about where peoples’ homes are, how are they related to land, how does the sense of home create a sense of security – or lack thereof?”

For the gallery shows, Intermedia will be creating a boundary-less space, forcing the participating artists both to establish their own personal borders, and to work together to create an overall space conducive to the shows’ larger aims. In addition, “Home, Land, Security” will continue Intermedia’s New Americans film series, bolstered by performances by new immigrant spoken word artists. In cooperation with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, this year will also launch the Moving Lives Speakers Bureau, an ongoing effort to initiate dialogue within and between communities in the region.

This attempt at establishing steady dialogue is ultimately a focus very central to the Immigrant Status project – both as a way of exploring and confirming unique identity, as well as of exploring and discovering commonalities.

“When we were asked if we would be involved in this project, at first I was a little hesitant because of the word ‘immigrants,’” recalled Ernest Whiteman, a member of the Arapaho Nation and a collaborating artist in this year’s program. “It’s not that I dislike immigrants, but it’s because Native people weren’t immigrants and how do we play a part in that? But when they mentioned displacement, then it was ‘Ah, OK.’”

With a centuries-long history of aggressive displacement and relocation, Whiteman says that the Native American experience —both past and present—offers an important counterpoint to the experience of many new immigrants.

“Native people have never immigrated—where could we have immigrated to when war was being declared on us? What country would have taken us? Basically that’s what most immigrants are doing here—running, leaving their country, because of war, economics, politics, political asylum. But Native people have never had ... that opportunity.”

Whiteman’s daughter Missy is collaborating with her father on a project for “Home, Land, Security.”

“When you think of America and coming to America, it’s the New Land,” she said recently. “And it’s had people living here for millions of years. I think the freedoms that people come here to have came at a price—the freedoms we’ve lost and are trying to regain.”

Ultimately, Ernest Whiteman says that the evolved definition of “security” for the Arapaho and other Native peoples would be “no fear or interference of going someplace to live, no fear of being removed forcibly to another area.” Although at odds with much of the Native experience with modern America, this is a sentiment that certainly cuts to the heart of the hope offered by this country to many new immigrants and would resonate as such.

Agustín emphasizes that art needs to stimulate political debate, and that the United States has needed such a debate in recent years, as words like “Homeland Security” are being used in the “war on terror.”

“If we pull those words apart and examine them and ask artists to create renderings of what they think those words mean, particular to their culture, then I think we have a dialogue,” she said. “I don’t think we have a dialogue when we’re saying Homeland Security is the INS and give us a call if you see anybody that looks suspicious. Everybody’s suspicious, particularly those of us who have browner skin.”