About the photo: Visitor contributions to a sticker wall at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, On the Move: Migration Across Generations, 2017.
Migration and its disruptions define our experiences of home—and probably yours, too.
It shapes a great deal of our personal and professional attentions.
We were both born in D.C., extensions of the circuitous migrations of our respective families. We grew up in a city that is itself characterized by a special kind of transience powered by the cyclical turnover of political administrations. But we also know it for the resilience of generations of people who call the city home, and whose connections to it challenge the idea of a place solely populated by people in flux. In our own adult lives, we ventured far beyond the city before our paths finally crossed here, “back home,” but also in a place much changed from our youths. We recognize that making home or being at home here in D.C. now requires near constant reconsideration of this place and its ongoing physical, cultural, and demographic transformations.
For the last decade, we have both worked at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., where the impact of migration is inherent in much of the work we do. For instance, our signature event is the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Established in 1967, it features cultural performances and cross-generational conversations that inevitably address the interplay of migration, creativity, and heritage. This has been the case whether we are working on domestic U.S. programs or on international programs and their diasporas. For example, we have foregrounded migration and displacement in such programs as Migration to Metropolitan Washington (1988), Tibetan Culture Beyond the Land of Snows (2000), and the Silk Road (2002), as well as explored it more implicitly in programs such as Black Urban Expressive Culture from Philadelphia (1984) or Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S. (2023). Smithsonian Folkways, a record label and catalog of music and sound from around the world, produces albums and educational resources, many of which embody the role of music in documenting migration stories. See for instance, Cajun and Zydeco: Flavors of Southwest Louisiana: A Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathway for students in Grades 6-8. Since 2016, we have partnered with the American Anthropological Association on their education initiative World on the Move: 250,000 Years of Human Migration. And the Center’s ongoing Cultural Vitality initiatives support efforts to sustain cultural heritage through migration, displacement, and other destabilizing forces.
Left: Ronald Moten, an activist who helped mobilize #DontMuteDC, a 2019 protest responding to gentrification and concerns over cultural and racial equity in the city. Right: A banner displayed from a building housing immigrant-serving organizations in D.C., 2017.
In fact, the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage was on the vanguard of Smithsonian Institution work that directly addresses migration/immigration. The core themes that resonated back in the earliest days of the Folklife Festival—as the U.S. grappled with defining its identity during the tumult of the 1960s—are still salient today in 2024, when immigration is a fraught and divisive issue. These themes generally articulate the value of heritage as a resource for people on the move and in the aftermath of major life disruptions and recognize the ways tradition and culture necessarily transform as a result of new exigencies and interactions.
The articles in this JFE volume also explore these ideas in a range of contexts. But as a corpus, they pry deeper and in varied ways into what transpires through and after the disruptions that set people in motion. They reflect how migration is not a straightforward, singular, linear process of leaving one place and arriving in another. Being on the move involves infinite motivations and circumstances. It always involves interaction, adaptation, creativity; it is multifaceted, multi-routed, sometimes circular or cyclical. And what we find resoundingly essential to recognize—whether we work in the classroom, at museums, or directly in community—is that all of us live and produce our senses of community, and by extension home, on shifting ground.
While planning for this volume, we conversed with the JFE Editorial Board and convened an Advisory Group of colleagues whose work engages the topic of migration/immigration. A number of people proposed that the idea of “disruption,” so naturally coupled with the experience of “migration,” should be understood as a generative, productive force, too. This sent us on a path to invite explorations that also suggest disruptions to conventional folklore disciplinary practices as well.
The articles compiled here demonstrate how folklore and other traditional expressive forms offer tools, strategies, and resources for both responding to and catalyzing change. Whether adapting traditional expressive behavior to meet new circumstances during and after migration or asserting them to challenge the status quo, people productively leverage the durability and dynamic nature of culture to strengthen community life through changes of many sorts—whether political, social, environmental, or cultural. To that end, we have included pieces that depict what the tools that folklore gives us can look like in action.
We appreciate the way these contributions of articles, curricula, media, and case studies represent praxes that:
- Value collaboration, reciprocity, dialogue, and the prioritization of first-person stories and explanations;
- Account for multiple vantages, perspectives, and relationships as inherent to community;
- Focus on untangling webs of relationships and intersecting experiences;
- Endeavor to center experiences that have been overlooked or marginalized in conventional texts or reporting; and
- Explore varied modes of research and interpretation, with many articles including links to videos, audio streams (including playlists and podcasts), websites, and other online educational resources.
These may be read in any order, but here we present them in three sections to suggest some principles critical to how we are inclined toward approaching the topic of migration, and the many vantages that can illuminate and interpret it. The section titles also outline what we consider the basic work underlying the translation of migration experiences into meaningful, accessible expressions of community resilience and creativity:
- Re-Envisioning Place
- Finding the Words
- Telling the Story
- RE-ENVISIONING PLACE
We begin with PLACE—from which the very notion of migration hinges: the ground upon which people settle and are unsettled. The pieces organized under this theme zoom in and out—centering not so much the movement across national borders as offering case studies and deep dives that unpack the complexity of human connections to places and the forces that compel their movement across them. These each suggest that the “where” of migration is not simply a sequence of geographic coordinates—from here-to-there or there-to-here—but also a vast topography of human relationships, transactions, interactions, and imaginaries.
“These stories are steeped in the deep collective memory that land and water hold.”
The pieces by Maya Castranovo (“Flood of Memory: Navigating Environmental Precarity Through Folklore and Filmmaking”) and Ann Kaneko (“Manzanar, Diverted: Confluences of Memory and Place”) put us immediately on shifting ground, considering the interplay between the movement of people on and off the land and its dramatic geology. Each shares a film project addressing the history of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans at Manzanar, a confinement site built at the base of the Eastern Sierras. In the aftermath of the flooding wrought by Hurricane Hilary in 2023, Castranovo in her eight-minute video reflects on the precarity of both individual memory and the land literally shaped by this WWII history. Kaneko’s feature-length documentary takes in Manzanar as part of a wide landscape of overlapping histories and offers educational resources that explore the connections among multiple populations moving around, in concert and conflict, with one another in the same place.
“How can we as teachers and folklorists be equipped to research the narratives of fuller, more multicultural histories of regions, accounting for diverse migrations?”
Phyllis M. May-Machunda’s “Teaching to Disrupt the Narrative of Presence: Multicultural Migrations to the Great Plains” confronts a prevailing perception of the region as undifferentiated, racially homogenous “flyover country.” A longtime professor of multicultural education, she emphasizes that migration is not a recent force or “disruption,” but rather an ongoing, constant state, and she describes the local regional research she has assigned to her students. May-Machunda highlights histories of African Americans in the Great Plains as a way to model how interdisciplinary methods—from folklore to literature to oral history, from geology to archeology—can contribute to more accurate representations of the dynamic complexity of places as home to many, diverse populations.
“The ways Manitos forged new understandings of their old and new locales is significant, and they have participated in preservation of their cultural traditions through storytelling; marking the landscape; and the production of cultural arts.”
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Patricia Perea’s article, “Son Útiles: Learning from Manito Sheep Culture,” describes the K-12 learning opportunities offered through an exhibition documenting the migration of New Mexican Hispanos from Taos County to regions across the Southwest U.S. Featuring personal histories and expressive culture, the exhibition represented a sense of identity and heritage firmly rooted in physical place and in certain sectors of work, such as sheep herding. It traced how these were sustained in the diaspora—and how the expressive culture and labor of these populations contributed to shaping the broader region. The authors, who were among the collaborative team that produced the exhibition, describe how its content aligned with recently implemented state social studies standards calling for curriculum that better reflected the cultural heritage of the state’s student population. The exhibition provided opportunities through which students could explore shaping moments in regional history in relation to their own migration experiences and senses of local place.
“…the ‘rural renaissance’ of this community . . . . is a growing collaborative, and sometimes contentious effort between a variety of actors”
Sarah Craycraft and Petya V. Dimitrova’s article, “Educating from Scratch: Toward a Revitalized Bulgarian Village” focuses on how contemporary urban-to-rural migrants endeavor to remake the places they are settling through activities that enact a form of “futurism”—rather than based in a nostalgia for the places they have left behind. The authors specifically explore discrete cultural and educational initiatives as spaces through which old residents and new migrants disrupt and negotiate the social dynamics and expectations associated with village life in a changing present. With its focus on “lifestyle migrants,” this article reminds how the varied causes and consequences of being on the move are reshaping the contours of community.
- FINDING THE WORDS
For people who are migrants or have been minoritized, WORDS can have power beyond their literal meaning. They can support people who are searching for a sense of identity but can also be a source of “linguistic trauma” (Foulis). The works in this second section explore the intersections of language, migration, and place. They express how disruption can serve as a conduit for the claiming of place (belonging) or a reclaiming of language and identity. Relationality, “honoring the primacy of direct experience” (Cajete 2004, 46), ties these pieces together. Each author invites us to listen to their stories as they work through some of the multilayered meanings and implications of language and how it grounds their identities and conveys their search for belonging.
“If we are committed to linguistic transformation and decolonial practices in education, we must center authors and content that privilege the experiences of minoritized communities…”
Although Spanish has a long history in what is now the United States, it continues to be linked to “otherness” and those who speak it regularly experience “scrutiny and profiling.” In “I did not write this for you! Using Translanguaging in Pages and in the Classroom,” Elena Foulis aims to challenge “unidimensional” perceptions of Latinidad through a discussion of “translanguaging,” which is both the ability to move between languages and a pedagogical approach to teaching bilingual and biliterate students. Drawing from the poetry of San Antonio poet laureate Eddie Vega, whose writing she employs in her work as an educator, Foulis discusses how Vega uses translanguaging to “interrupt[s] monolingual sensibilities” and create a space for Latina/o/e communities to assert and reclaim their multidimensional identities.
“I have been eager and anxious to find a place in the United States where I am allowed to belong.”
Xinhang Hermione Hu’s article “Finding a Second Jia (Home): Language, Culture, Identity, and Belongingness from an International Student’s Perspective” also discusses translanguaging, but while Foulis explores it as a pedagogical tool, Hu’s contribution takes the shape of a personal reflection on her search for a sense of place given her use of multiple languages. The voice Hu brings to the essay is made richer by her multilayered discussion of the idea of home in English, her second language, and Chinese, her mother tongue. Describing “home,” as a “single word with a superficial meaning of where one lives” and jia (home) which for her, embraces “country, family, house, and hometown,” the journey to belonging that she takes in this article is guided by her ability to communicate the complexities of finding her place in both languages.
“She was the link between my culture and this new culture that I was introduced to when I first came here.”
Language is central to the ESL classroom, but as Natasha Agrawal and Tzuyi Meh Bae make clear in “Teaching and Learning with Migrant and Refugee Students: A Conversation,” communication also requires other instincts and sensitivities that have nothing to do with the mastery of English grammar. In this transcribed conversation, Agrawal, a 4th-grade teacher, and Tzuyi Meh Bae, one of her former students, reflect on their two years of working together, revealing how their classroom became a space for a shared process of teaching and learning.
- TELLING THE STORY
Finally, we organized this last grouping of articles together because they represent a range of dialogic formats—built upon collaboration and interaction—for storytelling. These explore dance and music performance, provide curriculum examples, describe a community documentation project, and introduce a podcast series. They offer resources that can be directly adapted for use in the classroom as curriculum guides or as primary source material.
“It [the United States] holds many dancing stories, migration stories, and stories of diasporas dancing back to their homeland.”
In “Embracing the Choque: Pedagogical Disruptors in Folk Dance Instruction,” by Kiri Avelar and Roxanne Gray, the rhythm of el choque, the striking together of castanets in Spanish folk dance, serves as a metaphor for disrupting paradigms in classical dance (e.g., ballet, modern) instruction. The authors, who are dancers and dance educators, describe their journey teaching Spanish folk dance to classically trained dancers in a university program that aims to provide more “diverse offerings” to their students. Weaving culturally relevant and liberatory approaches such as Chicana/Latina feminism and emergent strategy into their dance practice, Avelar and Gray discuss how they embraced and addressed the “tensions between the familiar and the foreign,” among a group of dancers from divergent backgrounds who felt uneasy about exploring genres of dance that did not reflect their Western concert dance training. In addition to discussing how the class unfolded, the authors share strategies for how their work might be replicated; the article concludes with recommendations for folk dance practitioners who are working to disrupt conventional academic spaces.
“…we lifted up undertold immigration stories and, specifically, stories with clear contemporary connections.”
In “From the Printed Page to the Concert Stage: Migrant Poetry and Labor Songs as Public Folklore,” B. Marcus Cederström describes the development of a bi-national project that connects migrant experiences across generations and geography, working both in the classroom but also in community spaces. This artist-driven project was organized around poetry penned in the 1910s by a young woman who worked in Minnesota for several years before returning to her native Sweden in 1920. Set to music by contemporary musicians, these verses document migration experiences of a century ago. Live performances of this repertoire have found resonance among contemporary audiences in the diaspora—who are moved to imagine what their immigrant ancestors experienced—as well as in Sweden, including by new refugees to the country.
“It is truly miraculous that technology allows people in very different places living in different circumstances to share something about their lives despite distance, linguistic and cultural diversity, and restrictions in mobility.”
Lisa Gilman’s article, “The Dzaleka Art Project: A Community-Based Documentation Project in a Malawian Refugee Camp,” also describes an international collaboration. In 2022-23, Gilman and her students at George Mason University in Northern Virginia worked with a team of six young people living in a refugee camp in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, to document the artists and arts activities there. The book and website they produced underline the significant role of art and creativity in the lives of people who have been displaced from their homes—presenting the stories of almost one hundred different people or ensembles. The project provided a platform for making their experiences and artistry accessible to a larger public. And, pedagogically, it offered an opportunity for young people in two countries to connect virtually, learn directly from one another, and build something together.
“A singular focus on the music—a reverence for the expression alone—has often obscured the creators, the everyday people and their collective culture…”
Lamont Jack Pearley’s contribution to this issue, “Blues People, Music, and Folklore,” is a curriculum that traces the migration of Black people and their cultural traditions through the U.S. Adaptable to a range of classroom settings, the curriculum units and accompanying music playlist explore the historical forces and contexts that gave birth to the Blues and considers genres such as Hip-Hop, which were, in turn, “birthed by the Blues.” Based in Pearley’s work as a musician, music scholar, folklorist, and educator, the curriculum offers opportunities for students to apply their learning in exercises involving documentation and/or composition and performance.
“We have created a space for connecting, sharing stories, and finding a sense of home through discussions of foodways, music, and migration journeys.”
The final piece in this issue is also sonically oriented. In “Hearing Home Through a Podcast of Asian American Tales,” Fariha Khan, Margaret Magat, Nancy Yan, and Juwen Zhang introduce the series “Yellow and Brown Tales: Asian American Folklife Today,” which they created during the days of the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown. This project represents their collective concern from their different vantages as applied, independent, and academic-affiliated folklorists that Asian American folklore has not been well represented in the field. Here, they introduce and link to some of the stories and issues they have produced thus far, ranging from interviews about culinary nationalism, lunar new year celebrations, K-Pop, and sex education.
Artwork by MISS CHELOVE at the 2017 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program On the Move: Migration Across Generations.
As we conclude, we consider:
What questions do we need to ask ourselves as we continue to work through our own senses of place and belonging?
And how do these shape the work we do, whether it’s in the classroom or out in the public?
How can we better identify and access a wide range of resources so that our efforts and these stories of community-making on shifting ground are meaningful where we work and/or call home?
Whether you read these articles as we ordered them or trace an alternate pathway through them, we hope you find content applicable to your own work. These pieces offer varied insights into how we might all better connect the dots. And not just in terms of recognizing how the theme of migration is inherent to so many social and cultural contexts, but also in how we can identify productive avenues for collaboration, find unexpected resonances across sectors and topics, place ourselves in the bigger picture, and challenge our assumptions about the possibilities of scholarship.
Works Cited
Cajete, Gregory. 2004. Philosophy of Native Science. In American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, ed. Anne Waters. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 45-57.