Introduction
As I sat beside Manuel, 1 pouring over the words within his college admissions essay, words he had written and rewritten numerous times before asking me to read it, I realized I hardly knew the young man seated at the table with me. Since he entered our school in the seventh grade, Manuel had always been in one of my art classes. His talent and passion for drawing meant we spent a great deal of time in the art studio together during class, at lunch, and often after school. He was a student I thought I knew everything about and now as he was applying to college and about to graduate, I learned the most important moments in his life were stories I had never heard. Stories of getting into fights and running with gangs at the age of eight, of leaving his grandmother's home in Mexico City to sleep on the floor beside his mother in his uncle's one bedroom apartment in Oakland a few weeks later; an apartment where numerous people also slept on the floor. Manuel wrote about having to be quiet and sit in the apartment all day by himself while his mother looked for work. During this time alone he would draw on scraps of paper to occupy and comfort himself. In his essay he described his first weeks of school as he struggled to understand what his third grade teacher was saying and how all of the kids ignored him because he did not understand how to play the games that filled the schoolyard. Although he said this time of transition was way behind him, I could tell by the words woven within his essay that this story was and always will remain a significant part of his life.
After finally hearing the real story of Manuel's journey I realized there must be dozens like his filling my art studio each day. Stories that are imbedded within the fabric of whom each student is, and stories that I have to encourage to be told. At our school when the bell rings, student conversations bounce from wall to wall and floor to ceiling consuming the halls for only four minutes until the bell rings again for the next class. In that short amount of time if I am wise enough to just listen I can hear languages and accents from Mexico, Yemen, India, Somalia, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, American Samoa, Ukraine, El Salvador, China, and the Southern United States. I am reminded that each voice has its own story to tell, some students' stories are from their own memories while others may need to ask family members for details, but each story has a place within our classroom. I hope that this unit will help my students share their stories as they strengthen their voices, look critically at political cartoons depicting immigrants throughout different time periods, and learn from contemporary artists creating work that reflects the current immigration debates in our country.
An immigrant's journey to the United States is a personal story, however an experience that is often shaped within U.S. immigration laws. Through this unit we will explore current and historic representations of those who made treacherous passages to reach the Bay Area and how those images reflect the culture and laws of the time. Our study will center around four federal laws that reflected and also shaped the culture of Bay Area immigration: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. As we learn about each law through an Art Based Research Approach, students will examine images that represent immigrants during the time each law was enacted, break down new vocabulary, and try to make meaning of these laws and their impact on immigrants living in the Bay Area and those planning to make the journey.
Over three months our Art I class will create a timeline to visualize the scope of our learning, illustrate new vocabulary, read first person narratives from immigrants, view documentaries, visit the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), and examine maps, art work, photographs, and newspaper articles to deepen their understanding of how federal laws shaped immigration to the Bay Area and how those laws are reflected in the current debate over immigration. Students will create pieces in their sketchbooks that use image transformation techniques to document their learning and use their sketchbook work as a reference to guide them through a culminating mixed media project that asks students to examine their views on immigration and how it relates to their journey to the Bay Area.
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