Reading the Nation: Migration as a Generative Theme
Leah Durán

Paulo Freire, a foundational figure in field of literacy, introduced the idea that reading the word always also involves reading the world (Freire & Macedo, 2005). In Freire’s work in adult education, “reading the world” was often accomplished through the use of generative themes, in which the words that students first learned were based on important aspects of their social, cultural and political worlds. These topics or themes were characterized as “generative” in that they contained the possibility not only for learning to read and write but also for thinking critically and expansively about the structures of their everyday lives. In this article, I draw on this concept to show how migration served as a generative theme for our work with teachers in a two-week NEH Summer Institute for K-12 teachers.

Migration is a topic of intense interest to many educators in the U.S., in no small part because the past few decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people forcibly displaced from their homelands due to war, human rights violations, natural disasters, and other severe hardships (Migration Policy Institute, 2024). In the U.S., 11 million students enrolled in public schools (nearly 1 in 4) are from immigrant-headed households, and many of those children are also immigrants themselves (Camarota, Griffith & Zeigler, 2023). Migration is also deeply intertwined with U.S. history. Many people describe the U.S. as “a nation of immigrants,” a phrase which highlights some aspects of history and obscures others.

In our two-week summer teacher institute for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carol Brochin, Kathy Short and I thought about how we could explore with our participants the relationship between the complex history of the United States and the many waves of migration. We decided to consider Arizona as a case study before encouraging teachers to explore their own states and regions. We planned this institute in response to a call from the National Endowment for the Humanities to think with teachers about history and the humanities, and specifically, to consider the meaning of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Responding to this invitation, we looked at how our sense of ourselves as a nation–“we the people”–has been shaped (and preceded) by the movement of people across North America.

Over the course of the two weeks, we learned together about the movement of people over time across our own region, and the ways that borders moved with and around them within the broader scope of U.S. history. As guiding questions, we considered:

• What are the ways in which different waves of migrants influence and contribute to the making of a state? Of a nation?
• What histories have been erased and how might they be recovered? How do those recovered histories deepen our understanding of what it means to be American?
• How does learning about Arizona history inform how we conceptualize the formation of other states and the nation?

In her essay, “Between a Place and a Plot: Reimagining the story of Arizona history,” Anita Huizar-Hernández (2022) considers the relationship between the history of Arizona and the story of Arizona. As she argued, there are particular kinds of stories about Arizona that figure prominently in the national imagination, and those stories often conceal more complex histories. One of those prominent Arizona stories, often featured in the news and repeated by politicians, is about the U.S./Mexico border, and how the wall between the U.S. and Mexico keeps danger and immigrants out. Another dominant story about Arizona is that it is a place without a past, a beautiful landscape that is also a blank canvas. To those of us who live here, the border is a much more complicated reality than this story, and one with a much more interesting history.

We began most days in our institute by looking at a map of the region from different time periods in Arizona’s history. Over the course of time, the lines and contours of those maps shifted a great deal. A number of these maps showed what the region looked like before the current U.S./Mexico border existed, and before migration was tightly regulated. We looked at maps that showed areas with fuzzy boundaries indicating the homelands of Indigenous people like the Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam, spread across North America; maps drawn by Spanish missionaries that faded out north of Santa Fe and east of the Mississippi River; maps that showcased Arizona and New Mexico territories as one singular unit; and maps of modern-day Arizona that show not only the current border between U.S. and Mexico but also those of 22 Native Nations. Looking at these maps across time highlighted the ways that the border has been drawn and re-drawn over time, drawing and erasing new boundaries between “here” and “there” and between “us” and “them.”

In considering stories about migration, we looked for books which showcased little-known histories and complicated some of the dominant narratives. Laila Lalami’s (2015) novel, The Moor’s Account, is told from the perspective of a real historical figure, Mustafa al-Zamori (or as he is known to history, Estevan de Dorantes), the first non-Indigenous person to reach what is now Arizona. In the style of a memoir or travelogue, Estevan recounts an extraordinary life–born free in Azemmour, Morocco in the sixteenth century, he accompanied the ill-fated sixteenth century Narváez expedition to Florida while enslaved, survived and made his way to Mexico City on foot, and finally, headed north as a free man to what is now the United States (trace his journey here). Learning about this history from Mustafa/Estevan’s perspective invited us to think about all of the ways people of African descent have shaped U.S. history, including hundreds of years before the Declaration of Independence, and far beyond the east coast.

Similarly, we explored the history of Arizona during the time period when it was part of a newly independent Mexico, between 1821 and 1848. In addition to reading books and articles, we looked at images to help bring this era to life. One resource we used was the Mexican Heritage collection from the Arizona Memory Project, capturing vignettes of everyday life among Mexican Arizonans–picnicking by the river, posing for family portraits and tending their businesses. To make the most of these images as teaching tools, we borrowed a technique from art educators, first describing the image, then reflecting on our own interpretations and emotional response, and finally formally analyzing the image. We also looked at images as part of our collection of picturebooks which represent Mexican history and culture, including, for example, many books by author/illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh which draw on a distinctively Mesoamerican style of illustrating.

For each migration, we created multimodal text sets for participants to interact with, which included maps, photographs, art, music, and archival documents alongside children’s and young adult literature. One such example is a text set we created about Chinese immigration in the 19th century. Through a collection of fiction and nonfiction books, like David Wong’s (2012) graphic novel, Escape to Gold Mountain, Julie Leung’s (2019) Paper Son and Russell Freeman’s (2013) Angel Island, we learned about the reasons for the surge in Chinese immigrations to the West in the late 1800s, and how these migrants were received by those already in the U.S. We also looked at oral histories, photos, archival documents, academic scholarship, and community historian’s work to understand how this period of time and movement of people shaped communities all across the Western side of North America (including not only Arizona but also Mexico, Canada and Hawai’i), and how this legacy continues in present-day Tucson.

We also closely analyzed how authors and illustrators told stories about migration. For example, we ended the institute by looking closely together at Yuyi Morales’ (2021) Bright Star/Lucero, and by talking with Morales about her work. Beautifully illustrated with the flora and fauna of the Sonoran desert, Bright Star follows the journey of a fawn through the borderlands, harshly interrupted by a border wall. Yuyi Morales’ beautiful artwork also shows up in another collection of contemporary migration stories we read, Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz (Binford, 2021). This bilingual collection of first-person testimony of children held in immigration detention centers, illustrated by 17 different artists, including Pura Belpré winners like Yuyi Morales and Raúl the Third. Reading these books, alongside others like Aida Salazar’s (2020) Land of the Cranes, highlights an aspect of Arizona’s border story often overlooked by politicians and reporters—that the current conditions for migration are often cruelest to those who are most vulnerable.

In conversation, Morales noted that Bright Star was created in response to the detention and separation of the children and families at the border, and her desire to create a book that spoke to the possibility of healing and caring for those same people. This desire showed up not only in the narrator’s words of reassurance, but also in the art. For example, keeping in mind the widely circulated photographs of children in detention center covered only by aluminum-foil-like blankets, she wove and embroidered cloth for the endpapers, with the intent of conveying warmth and care. (For more on her process, see here).

Teachers took up these ideas through the creation of their own multimodal text sets, placing the stories told by authors and illustrators alongside other resources for understanding history. Coming from across the U.S., teachers chose the topics that best fit with their own context and work. These thoughtful and detailed collections focus on topics such as the Hmong community in Minnesota; immigration policy along the U.S./Mexico border; the history of the Yaqui (Yoeme) across North America; and counternarratives of the transatlantic migration of African people to the eastern seaboard, among many others. Several of those teachers are featured here in this issue, and we hope that readers can see for themselves how and why migration has been generative for their work.

References
Camarota, S. A., Griffith, B., & Zeigler, K. (2023, June 20). Mapping the impact of immigration on public schools. CIS.org. https://cis.org/Report/Mapping-Impact-Immigration-Public-Schools

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2005). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Routledge.

Huizar-Hernández, A. (2022). Between Place and Plot: Reimagining the Story of Arizona. Journal of Arizona History, 63(3), 263-279.

Lalami, L. (2015). The Moor’s account. Simon and Schuster.

Migration Policy Institute (2024, August 12) Refugee and asylum seeker populations by country of origin and destination, 2000-2023. migrationpolicy.org. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/refugee-and-asylum-seeker-populations-country-origin-and-destination?width=1000&height=850&iframe=true

Children’s Literature Cited
Binford, W. (2021). Hear My Voice/Escucha mi voz: The Testimonies of children detained at the Southern border of the United States. Workman.

Freedman, R. (2013). Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain. Clarion.

Leung, J. (2019). Paper son: The inspiring story of Tyrus Wong, immigrant and artist. Schwartz & Wade.

Morales, Y. (2021). Bright star. Holiday House.

Salazar, A. (2020). Land of the cranes. Scholastic.

Wong, D. (2012). Escape to Gold Mountain: A graphic history of the Chinese in North America. Arsenal Pulp Press.

Dr. Leah Durán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. A former bilingual teacher, her scholarship sits at the intersection of early literacy and bilingual education.

Authors retain copyright over the vignettes published in this journal and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the following Creative Commons License:

WOW Stories, Volume XII, Issue 1 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on by Leah Durán work at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/stories/xii-1/3.

WOW stories: connections from the classroom
ISSN 2577-0551