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    I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers
    I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers
    I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers
    Ebook142 pages53 minutes

    I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers

    By Ericka McConnell, Rachel Neumann and Thi Bui

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Meet the faces and voices behind the conversations around immigration. These portraits and stories of teenagers who are recent immigrants to the US from all over the world show the diversity, beauty, and potential of the people who now call the United States home.

    Sixty full-page portraits of students at Oakland International High School, photographed by award-winning photographer Ericka McConnell, are accompanied by their own unique, diverse, and surprising stories of what makes them feel at home. Each of these young people is inspiring in their own right and together their stories will help us consider the issue of immigration with new mindfulness and compassion. All profits from the publication of this book will be donated to Oakland International High School.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParallax Press
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9781946764126
    I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers

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      Book preview

      I Am Home - Ericka McConnell

      Cover for I Am HomeBook title, I Am Home, subtitle, Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers, author, Ericka McConnell, imprint, Parallax Press

      Parallax Press

      P.O. Box 7355

      Berkeley, California 94707

      parallax.org

      Parallax Press is the publishing division of Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.

      © 2018 photographs by Ericka McConnell

      © 2018 illustration by Thi Bui

      © 2018 text by Rachel Neumann

      All rights reserved

      Cover and text design by Debbie Berne

      Ebook ISBN 9781946764126

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

      v5.3.2

      a

      I am from there. I am from here.

      I am not there and I am not here.

      I have two names, which meet and part,

      and I have two languages.

      I forget which of them I dream in.

      —Mahmoud Darwish

      dingbat

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Epigraph

      Foreword by Thi Bui

      Introduction: Homecoming

      Portraits

      Afterword

      About Oakland International High School

      Immigration Resources

      Acknowledgments

      About the Authors

      Foreword

      When I was nineteen, I took my first art class with the teacher who taught me how to draw. For our final assignment, a self-portrait, I drew a larger than life version of me, posing behind a headless statue. I have lost track of the original drawing, so I drew a smaller version for you here.

      The reason for centering my hands was to say, I am what I do, not what I appear to be. That part I still believe. The rest was put together to the best of my ability with what was available to me at the time. The statue was supposed to be Buddha, to represent a part of my heritage, but I think it was actually a copy of a Sumerian statue that sat in one of the art studios at my university.

      The real value of the drawing was the time I spent looking at myself and coming to terms with my face. I had never come across a large drawing or painting in a museum that looked like me. I hadn’t even seen someone like me photographed and featured prominently in a magazine. Through drawing myself, I became familiar with the unique curves and slopes of my features, and with every stroke of charcoal over the paper, I felt as though I was stroking my own face and giving myself the love that I clearly craved. At nineteen, I was a long way from the country in which I was born, but still not quite at home in the country where I grew up. For me, home was a place to remake within myself, and part of that process was learning to love myself.

      The young people in this book came to this country older than I did. They remember what their former homes looked like, how they felt, who lived there, or still lives there, and whom they miss. They have more of an original identity than I did at their age. At the same time, they are learning how to live in a new country, adopting its language, culture, and customs, changing the culture even as it changes them. Sometimes people treat them like they don’t belong here. They, too, must love themselves when others won’t. While their new country debates a border wall, a Muslim ban, and restricting immigration from poorer nations, they are growing home inside themselves.

      Somewhere between a good photographer, a good listener, a simple backdrop, and the help of several co-conspirators, a space was created to represent this moment in their lives. And so they stand facing the camera, and this country, with grace, humor, sass, and gravitas. They expand how our imaginations visualize the words immigrant and teenager and help us see the world as it is—diverse, complicated, and much bigger than the sum of our own experiences. They challenge us to expand our notion of we and us beyond our own borders, to take in the greater experience of being a human alive on earth. They share their precious memories of a home that was and their yearning for a home to be, and in that intimacy create a space for all of us to grieve, to reflect, to hope, and to act.

      Thi Bui

      Berkeley, California

      February 2018

      Introduction

      Homecoming

      I am the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Russia, and Poland, and the daughter of New York–born parents who did not speak their own parents’ first language. I spent my first formative years in the Northern California mountains, away from television, electricity, and other media. Though I was U.S. born, pale-skinned, and a native English speaker, when

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