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Exhibit at Library of Virginia Explores Immigrant Experience

Pat Jarrett
/
Virginia Humanities

 

 

More than a million Virginians were born in another country. Those immigrants are just the latest in a long line of people who have shaped the state. Their stories are being highlighted in an exhibit at the Library of Virginia.

 

  

 

The exhibit features video clips from in depth conversations with more 30 Virginia immigrants from all over the world. Like Sally Imran, who fled Iraq before her family was re-settled in Harrisonburg.

 

“Being here, being safe, in a place where no one tells me what to do. No one’s going to tell my mother and my brothers what to do. It’s huge to me,” Imran says in a video clip from her interview.

 

Imran is a student at Blue Ridge Community College, working two full time jobs.

 

“I thank God everyday. And I thank my mom everyday, of course because she did it. That she brought me to a country that I think is the greatest country in the world,” she says. “Where they give you opportunity.”

 

Barbara Batson is exhibitions coordinator at the Library of Virginia.

 

“They’re really compelling stories,” Batson says. “If you think about Virginia history, if you think about American history, the names change, the ethnicities change, the languages change. But the stories are so similar.”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeaolIJoQjQ

 

David Bearinger and Pat Jarrett, with Virginia Humanities, conducted and filmed the interviews. Bearinger says the stories he heard followed similar arcs of seeking opportunity, belonging, and a way to give back.

 

“One way or another practically everybody goes through the same process of learning a language, education, finding work, finding community, holding on to some things, letting go of others,” says Bearinger.

 

One of his biggest takeaways, though, was that there is no single immigrant experience, and the question of finding identity is a challenging one.

 

“The experience of being an immigrant or a refugee is complicated for the person or the family who is living through it,” Bearinger says. “But if you look at it in aggregate it’s not a simple formula to say - this is who an immigrant is. Or this is what the immigrant experience is.”

 

Take Julia Garcia for example. A Spanish teacher in Arlington, she works to preserve and share the musical traditions of her native Bolivia.

 

“More than 25 years I’m living here. Still I’m Bolivian. I belong there. The only thing is I like this country too. I like it. But it’s not 100-percent I belong to this country,” Garcia says during her interview.

 

The project is part of a series of events held throughout 2019 -- commemorating 400 years of Virginia history. Including a long stream of immigration history.

 

Like when the coal seams in Appalachia opened up and eastern European immigrants went west to work the mines. Or when Filipinos flooded into Norfolk and Hampton Roads amidst the boom of the shipyard and presence of the Navy.

 

Bearinger says, with the exclusion of native tribes, everyone in Virginia is ultimately an immigrant.

 

“And the nation is divided over the subject of immigration," he says. "What I hope is that this exhibition and the conversations that are now going to be available to everybody to listen to will actually be a kind of healing unifying force."

 

More than 50 hours of raw interviews will be made available to schools, journalists and scholars. But the first use of the material is here, at the Library of Virginia.

 

The exhibit New Virginians - 1619 to 2019 and Beyond - will be open for the rest of the year.

 

This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association. 

 
 

 

Mallory Noe-Payne is a Radio IQ reporter based in Richmond.