Julia Curry Rodríguez, San José State Chicana/Chicano studies professor, presented a public lecture called “Immigrants and Refugees Negotiating Public Spaces” at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library on Tuesday.
Curry’s special guest lecture was one of the many events organized around the “World on the Move: 250,000 Years of Human Migration” exhibit, according to an SJSU webpage.
“World on the Move” explores humanity's migration journey including why people migrate, what they undergo during migration and their life after migrating, according to a website by the San José Public Library.
Curry said migration occurs when people leave their homelands in search of new opportunities or when they are trying to escape humanitarian, economic, political or climate-related crises.
Anamika Megwalu, interim associate dean for students and faculty who helped organize the event, said “World on the Move” is a traveling exhibit sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Anthropological Association and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Megwalu said the San José Public Library is one of the 15 libraries in the United States selected to display the exhibit.
The exhibit is currently located on the third floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library and will be closing on Oct. 20.
Curry said she was delighted to be asked to be a guest speaker because immigration has always been a significant topic in both her academic and personal life.
She said she migrated to the United States with her mother and sister in the 1960s when she was seven-years-old.
Curry said she has dedicated her life to studying immigration in higher education institutions to help defend immigrants and their children.
“Immigration is something that has truly been a part of my life for over 40 years,” Curry said.
She said people often associate migration with economic struggle, which is not always the case.
“There are crises involving violations of human rights or economic crises, where governments and wealthy individuals don’t develop jobs to incentivize people to stay or don’t give them access to education,” Curry said.
Curry said throughout her career, she has specifically studied immigration in relation to women and children and what role they play in it and how they are affected by it.
She said women have always had active roles in the immigration pathway, even though they often stay in their home country.
Curry said their impact came in the form of contact and communication, like sending letters to their loved ones migrating to the United States.
“They were affected and they were active agents,” Curry said. “That's really important because we have always thought of women as individuals who are left behind, who awaited the money from the migrants that left.”
Curry said another role women played in the immigration pathway was using money they received from loved ones to build up, support and sustain their family back home.
She also said it is important to recognize the difficult decisions immigrant women often have to make, including leaving their children behind.
“When men leave, nobody asks them, ‘Why are you abandoning your children?’ ” Curry said. “When women leave, women ask themselves and they tell themselves, because women are conditioned through patriarchal culture, to be aware that their responsibility is not just the financial sustenance of their children, but the emotional sustenance of children. They have to care.”
Curry said motherhood is something that is not acknowledged or discussed enough in conversations about immigration.
She said motherhood in migration is not always planned and can sometimes be the result of rape, and can greatly shift the experience that women and children have during and after migration.
Curry said it’s an even more complex issue when you consider the life of underaged immigrants coming to and living in the U.S.
“Immigrant children or the immigrant experience is something that scholars have referred to as ‘Being lost in no man's land,’ not from there, not from here,” Curry said. “These scholars argued that they [children of immigrants] were both there and here simultaneously.”
Natasha Lowell, acting senior librarian for San José Public Library, said she believes the unique experience of immigrants who move to America and how relatable and relevant it can be to others is why this event is so important.
“Many of us are children of immigrants, and I think it's just important for our community to learn about this since it touches every one of us,” Lowell said.
Preston Rudy, assistant sociology professor and event attendee, said he believes immigration will always be an important topic to bring into classrooms, especially when it might resonate with students.
“We have lots of students that have immigrant experiences in their family history,” Rudy said. “We have quite a few students, some who I’ve worked closely with, who are undocumented and part of DACA who can relate to this experience.”
Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, specifically those who arrived at a young age under the circumstance of migration being beyond their control, according to an article by the Anti-Defamation League.
Curry said migrating can be very dangerous, rigorous and unpredictable and not everyone is able to make it through the hardship.
However, she said the promise of human rights and safety awaiting immigrants in the U.S. is the biggest draw to migrate.
“They want to survive,” Curry said. “They want the best for themselves and their family members. If they can survive, maybe just maybe they can share that with others who they’ve left behind.”
Curry also said the decision to migrate is something that should not be taken lightly because it’s a difficult decision to leave the comfort of home.
“It’s a difficult decision, leaving your homeland, leaving what I refer to as the familiar,” Curry said. “The way my air smells, the food I can eat, the sounds of my neighborhood. All of that is normative to me. It's normative to them. So they take those memories with them. And they migrate back to their communities through their imagination, which is truly a part of that human survival.”
Anamika Megwalu, interim associate dean for students and faculty and organizer of the event, said the biggest takeaway she hopes people get from the lecture is that people moving to other places is not a recent phenomena and it's something to look at with sympathy.
“We have too look at immigrants through the eyes of compassion and humanity,” Megwalu said. “All they [immigrants] need is a place where their hopes and dreams can come true.”
