“Being undocumented means you don’t have any rights,” Teresa Lee, the original Dreamer, told the audience on Tuesday night for the world premiere of “The New Immigrant Experience.”
“The New Immigrant Experience” was held April 9 at UMass Amherst’s Old Chapel, conducted and created by Felipe Salles and preceded by faculty panelists from UMass Amherst. Felipe Salles, associate professor of jazz and African-American music studies at UMass Amherst and an international jazz musician, is a 2018 Guggenheim Foundation Composition Fellow for his new multi-media work, “The New Immigrant Experience.”
Salles’ path to creating “The New Immigrant Experience” began when his friend, a trombonist, asked him to help Lee, his Korean-American girlfriend, with renewing her Brazilian passport. “The interest [in] the project came from a political interest to make a contribution towards pushing back the anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Salles said after hearing about her story. “I couldn’t do anything about the current situation with the new government with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I was feeling very powerless at that point.”
Teresa’s parents had immigrated to Brazil from South Korea before moving to the United States to pursue greater opportunities. They paid U.S. taxes. They joined a Korean immigrant community. Teresa succeeded in school and in music, winning awards in school and scholarships in music. However, the religious persecution visa the family hoped to obtain never arrived. Teresa and her family became undocumented.
During the college application process, when a teacher discovered she could not apply due to her status, they contacted Sen. Dick Durbin for help. Even so, “there was nothing he could do… Even if I had the cure for cancer, I had to be deported,” said Teresa.
The immigration system in the United States, Teresa described to the audience, is “outdated” and “unjust.” There were no laws that could help her. In 2000, Sen. Durbin had to “write a personal bill” for her, when there was little information on just how many undocumented Americans were in the country. The bill then led to the Dream Act, set to pass on Sept. 12, 2001, with 62 votes “lined up” and President Bush prepared to sign.
But due to the events that occured on the day prior, “everyone was focused on 9/11” recounted Teresa Lee. “Any immigrant friendly bill [was] unwanted after that.” The bill has still yet to pass.
Teresa’s story reflects the stories of many other Dreamers: the hope of their families for a better life; the hopelessness in their own lives as their lack of citizenship prevents them from pursuing opportunities; the “fear that dominates [their] lives everyday, of police storming upstairs and separating the family, taking [their] parents away.”
The struggles faced by undocumented immigrants are growing. For example, police officers in Florida will become immigration officers, following California. Stephanie Fetta, associate professor of Latinx literature and culture at UMass Amherst, reported how Californian police officers “line up at parks [where Latinx families gather] at evenings and look for old cars and pull them over” to find and detain undocumented immigrants.
One interviewee, Hector Martinez, described how the United States allowed his family to be reconnected again after the civil war in Colombia, but it also broke up their family again when his father was sent away.
The work consists of 34 video cues spanning 11 movements, covering video interviews of nine Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, from the Middle East, Asia, Europe and South and Central America. The project also included Fernanda Faya, the video director, editor and cinematographer, and Megan Rossman, the interviewer.
Unlike most forms of media, the music is at the forefront; the images and videos serve to accompany the music created by Felipe Salles. Salles captures the speeches, stories and emotions of the Dreamers in the form of music.
“When I write my music, I imagine the story behind it, the imagery behind it,” explained Salles in an interview. “I thought that, in this case, it was really important to bring [out] people’s humanity, not just the music… You have to stare people in the face and have to deal with their humanity and their stories and their struggles.”
Salles describes his multitude of interests, ranging from mathematics and architecture to linguistics and politics. “They are part of who you are, to however you choose to follow your path. All those interests will follow along and, eventually, find themselves in whatever you’re doing,” he said. These many influences appear in “The New Immigrant Experience” through the (views of NYC) interlaced throughout the piece and discussions of the Dreamers’ mother tongues versus English.
Through “The New Immigrant Experience,” Felipe Salles aims to shine light on the lives of Dreamers and start the needed conversation on their lack of rights and opportunities stunted by their obstacles to citizenship.
Salles’ work is “giving visibility” to how the immigration system in the United States “is not working,” said Luis Marentes, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UMass Amherst, at the panel.
“It is a very complicated process,” Salles explained. “People don’t realize how much money, time, resources and luck it takes.”
Describing his own path to citizenship in comparison, he said: “I was lucky. I had some press back in Brazil before I came, and I had some really great, some really important people supporting me. All of that is luck, and you have to be able to have thousands and thousands of dollars to pay lawyers.”
Salles hopes to show how “everybody has their struggles and everybody has their value and difficulties and humanity, and so, through those conversations [he] wanted to bring that out. [He] wanted to make those people who might not be familiar with those struggles understand [and] relate to those people on an individual level because [he] think[s] it’s so easy to put them apart.”
“As people get older, they get more encrusted in their own beliefs and get defensive. It’s really important for young people to take the conversation [further],” Salles noted. “[This] conversation is a hard one to have… and if we don’t start having those conversations, we will never educate those people. We will never change things, and your generation needs to do that.”
“The New Immigrant Experience” was unveiled at a moment in which the protection of undocumented students has been at the forefront of conversation at Smith. The appointment of new Campus Chief of Police Daniel Hect, a man whose social media presence divulges his anti-immigrant, pro-border wall, pro-Trump, pro-NRA sentiments, is a direct threat to Smith’s undocumented students. “I think that the undocumented people in this country are extremely brave — everyday they are fighting,” said Lee. “We have to fight with them. Go out, make our statements and vote.” The campus, and The Sophian, stand in solidarity with Smith’s undocumented students.
