September 30th 2020
After looking back at a previous assignment I had done back in 2018, I have decided that I wanted to explore the multifaceted stories of immigrants. In a previous assignment, I recorded my mom’s voice and had her speak of the first thing that came to mind when coming here to the U.S. She normally does not talk about it much but the first thing that came to her mind was an empty room with a mattress that she shared with her brother and three sisters. It was the first time she spoke about it in greater detail. Her story stuck with me for a while, so much so that I want to expand on it more. The media normally just tends to focus on the repercussions of immigration and treats them like statistics rather than humans. I hope to change that through talking to more people and sharing their unfiltered stories through audio recordings.
October 4th 2020
I have done some background research and with the information I found on the history of immigration, I am not that surprised at all. I actually am just continuously more disappointed and disgusted. In the book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America, the U.S congress decided to put together a quota on immigrants. Though on the outside it looked like they were trying to organize the incoming immigrants, they did this as a way of controlling the “genetic makeup” of the country. They would allow immigrants in certain areas to get their citizenships faster than others, and those who struggled to attain it were less desirable and even deported fairly quickly. This “quota” is still used today and reading about this just further validates my points in immigrants not being treated as actual human beings. All of the other books pretty much confirmed what this book was saying as well, and although the Impossible Subjects book was the first one I read, the passage that I paraphrase really stuck out to me.
October 6th 2020
After giving my project some thought, I decided that my project isn’t really going to be on a strict timeline. Because I am going to be going out and doing a series of mini interviews with people, the recordings I gather will be on a rolling basis. I have sent out the first wave of messages from my own social media to friends and family whom are immigrants to ask if they are willing to participate. I haven’t gotten a response yet so in the mean time, I am watching documentaries and listening to StoryCorps stories to get inspiration in how I want to present my project. I intend to have a visual aid that captures the main point of each person’s stories, and I am leaning more towards a still life sort of visual as of now. I will be continuing to ask around as well and my hopes is to have maybe 5 people in total for my project.
October 9th 2020
I have gotten three responses of people who are willing to help me out in my project. These people are friends and so it won’t be as anxiety inducing for neither of us since we already know each other. I have to find dates where I can meet them up, which might be tricky since all of them are also in school, and on top of that midterm season is upon us. But, despite that I just need two more people to be satisfy my short term goal for my project, which is a good thing
November 12th 2020
Midterm season has ended and I have not been able to meet up with the people who were willing to participate in my project. It is looking like I won’t be able to at all since there is a stay at home advisory in place in my city as of now. I have to rethink how I am going to execute this project, so instead I am going to have them send me in recordings of themselves, and have them record off their own phones. I feel like even though this is a work around it will have more of a personal touch since these participants are doing the recordings themselves. Hopefully this turns out good.
November 20th
I got the first recording from one participant. It was short and they have expressed to me that they had a hard time answering the open ended question I had for them, which was, “what is the first experience you had that comes to mind when you immigrated here to the U.S?” I know now that I have to rework my questions for the recordings and the participant said they are willing to have a do over again, so I will be experimenting with the questions that I will be asking to see what kinds of responses I will get with those.
