DREAMs Deferred is an original exhibition designed by The Immigrant Story in collaboration with acclaimed Portland photographer Jim Lommasson’s “What We Carried” storytelling project. Through short-form narratives, object stories, and vivid photography, this exhibition amplifies the voices of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central American who came to the United States as children or young adults. These individuals – collectively referred to as “DREAMers” – grew up navigating school, work, and social life without official papers.
The Immigrant Story https://theimmigrantstory.org/ is a Portland nonprofit whose vision is to provide curated and relevant content to enhance empathy and to create a more inclusive community. Through DREAMs Deferred, The Immigrant Story shares short-form narrative accounts of six undocumented immigrants, capturing each person’s continued resilience in the face of unique obstacles. Stunning portraits accompany the stories of these individuals and their journeys.
Adding a layer of intimacy to the narratives and photographs is a special display of Jim Lommasson’s “What We Carried” project https://whatwecarried.com/ featuring the stories of undocumented migrants traveling across the U.S.-Mexico border. This storytelling project asks immigrants, refugees, and genocide survivors to share items they carried on their journey to the United States. His work captures the result of a split-second decision these individuals must make when fleeing their homelands: “What do I leave behind, and what do I take with me?” After photographing the object, Lommasson prints the image onto photographic archival paper. The owner then writes directly on the photograph, reflecting on the item itself and the journey that brought them to the U.S. This process allows the participants to tell their own story in their own language and with their own hands.
The combination of the story, portrait, and treasured item of each individual allows viewers to look into that person’s eyes, read intimate details about their life, and see a meaningful artifact of their life history. The carried objects become more than just mementos of homes and lives left behind. As these ordinary items cross the border, they transform into the sacred. The result is the recognition that behind the terms “undocumented immigrants” or “alien” lies an individual with a story.
The DREAMs Deferred exhibition is made possible by the generous contribution of the Zidell Family Foundation.
DREAMs Deferred
DREAMs Deferred
Thursday, March 26, 2020
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Bernal Cruz Munoz
FROM FIST FIGHTING TO MEDIATING
Bernal Cruz had just been suspended from high school for taking part in a fistfight when one of the school counselors stopped him and said, “You know, I think you would make a really good mediator.”
Born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1977, Cruz grew up in the midst of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. The family sought asylum in the United States, arriving in Portland in 1990. An eighth-grader at the time, Cruz missed the community he had left behind in Guatemala. “Those kids in my classroom were my brothers and sisters. We had this very collective sense of self,” he explains. “In Portland, I felt misunderstood and got in lots of fights.” Still, he graduated from high school early and enrolled at Portland Community College to complete prerequisites for his planned career in medicine. His high school counselor helped him get a job as a family mediator with Clackamas County, a position he held for four years.
Cruz had dreamed of being a neurosurgeon but realized that life as a doctor in the United States is highly regulated. He decided he would return to Guatemala, where he could be the kind of doctor he wanted to be, more a part of the community.
His mother, however, refused to let him go. So he majored in neuropsychology at the University of Massachusetts. Back in Portland after graduation, he worked as an adolescent mental health therapist at Providence Hospital for 12 years.
Cruz next earned his master’s degree in community-based social work from Portland State in 2014. “It was one of the best choices I’ve made in my life,” he says.
During that time, Cruz married his long-term girlfriend, Karey, a technical designer for Nike. Their eldest son, Augustine, was born in the middle of his graduate studies.
As part of his graduate program, he did an internship at Lutheran Community Services, and his supervisor there was another important mentor. “She let me explore all my interests,” says Cruz. “And that was the most wonderful thing that had happened to me up to that point.”
After graduation, Cruz decided to focus on issues related to immigrants and refugees. He is now a case coordinator for the Office of Refugee Resettlement and volunteers on the advisory council for Refugee Immigrant Services and Empowerment and for Refugee Assistance and Information Network International.
Just as he found his way with the help of various mentors throughout his life, he hopes one day to create a program to empower immigrant youth. He would like to work with kids who take the role of community navigator within their families, translating at medical appointments, calling utilities, or dealing with lawyers.
“I think the school is quick to penalize those kids for missing school instead of upholding them and rewarding them for the great service they’re actually providing,” states Cruz.
Recalling his own strong-willed but misdirected energy as an immigrant youth, Cruz says, “I want to incorporate the energy and the assets that these youth bring into the community.”
—Julianna Robidoux
What Bernal Carried
EVERY MARBLE, A MEMORY
Perfect for this overactive school boy
the stakes were always high,
You could win one or a few marbles
but you always risked losing your own.
Some are worth risking, some you never want to lose,
Some are gifts and some you just find around
but eventually they all become stories of their own.
Each reminds you of someone or that time you won
The same day my schoolmates came to say farewell
I carried these on my lap —
an attempt to take my friends along
so as to never really have to say Good-bye
in a sock in my drawer in my heart
12/06/19
Liliana Luna
DREAMING BEYOND BORDERS
“I don't have papers"
With this admission, Liliana Luna saw her chances for college slip away. The high school counselor who was advising her suddenly gathered
the forms for her college applications and returned them to his filing cabinet.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Don’t you have a green card?”
She had only two options, he told her: return to Mexico and re-enter the United States with a student visa or work at a Mexican restaurant in the Portland, Oregon, area.
It wasn’t what her parents had told her to strive for, but Luna figured that, as a white man, hercounselor must know better. So right after high school, she began a job taking orders and making salsa.
However, her intuition alerted her that this new role wasn’t right, and she changed paths.
Luna, who is now Portland Community College Rock Creek’s Multicultural Center coordinator and retention specialist, a marriage and family therapist, and an activist, was born in Mexico City in 1990.
Luna’s childhood was spent moving across Mexico with her parents and two brothers until in 2005, they moved from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Hillsboro, Oregon. Luna had already visited the United States and was not impressed.
“One thing I knew — for sure — was that I did not want to come to the United States because of the culture and racism,” Luna recalls. “To me, the United States was probably the worst punishment.”
After beginning classes at Portland Community College, Luna was elected student body president, rose to student council chair, and became involved with Oregon Dream Activists.
In May 2012, she protested the lack of a path to college and financial aid for undocumented people in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Portland.
“We came out as undocumented. I believed very firmly that was the right thing to do, and I knew someone had to do it. I’ve never let fear control me,” Luna says. “So I got arrested.”
She was released two days later, but Luna has protested and been arrested a number of times, lobbied state and national lawmakers, made countless trips to provide relief to migrants at the border, and helped establish the DREAM Center and a $100,000 scholarship fund at PCC, among other achievements.
In June 2012, when President Barack Obama announced DACA, she enrolled at Portland State University, eventually graduating in 2019 with a master’s in marriage and family therapy. She now owns a private practice in Tigard, where she aims to provide free or low-cost services to immigrants from high-trauma environments.
She believes that society needs to erase the binaries between “good” and “bad” immigrants, especially undocumented ones. Politicians are happy to embrace immigrants who attend college or start a business, at the expense of immigrants who don’t, Luna says.
—Dora Totoian
What Lilliana Carried
MUSIC FROM HOME
I decided to bring with me this CD because my friends in Mexico had told me that it took time for popular music in Spanish to hit the U.S. I thought, I might not have clothes or a bed to sleep on once I get to the U.S, but at least we will have music that would make us FEEL AT HOME.
Where were you when you turned 15? At that age, I felt as if life has taken me Far away from my roots. When I was 15, my family and I immigrated to the U.S. I didn’t have much time to put in a bag the belongings that would come with me in this new beginning. However, before leaving Mexico, my dad had purchased a trendy stereo, and he wanted to take it with him. I remember that the stereo was too big that my dad asked our family to carry one speaker in our backpack on the way to the U.S. Leaving us with little to no space for other things to take.
(Name)
(Note: Because of the danger of deportation, the speaker in the following story does not want her name revealed).
FINDING HER WAY, BRAVELY
On a drizzly June night in 2015, (Name) crossed the border from Agua Prieta, Mexico, to Douglas, Arizona with her niece and a coyote leading them. The coyote offered few indications about their direction, except for the occasional “adelante” (ahead).
On a drizzly June night in 2015, (Name) crossed the border from Agua Prieta, Mexico, to Douglas, Arizona with her niece and a coyote leading them. The coyote offered few indications about their direction, except for the occasional “adelante” (ahead).
Then they stopped. The coyote promised to return. But he never did, leaving (Name), age 16, stranded in the desert with her 7-year-old niece.
A few minutes later, she heard motorcycles approaching. She and her niece bolted. They didn’t get far. Border patrol agents shined flashlights in their faces and ordered them, in a mix of English and Spanish, to halt.
(Name) burst into tears. She thought they’d be sent back to Guatemala and the problems they’d been fleeing for more than 2,000 miles.
Born in Guatemala in 1999, (Name) grew up in an isolated mountain town.
She remembers days spent gathering firewood and scattering corn and fava bean seeds with her mother, who she describes as her advocate in her large family with five siblings.
(Name) excelled in school, but she focused on academics partly to escape the pain of bullying. (Name) grew up without her father and became accustomed to hearing taunts of “huérfana” (orphan) from classmates.
The bullying decreased at her new, larger middle school. However, in 2015, (Name) left Guatemala for family reasons.
Her older brother lived in Oregon and arranged for her and her niece to meet a coyote to accompany them on the two-week bus ride to the Mexico-U.S. border.
After the coyote abandoned them, the girls were detained by border patrol.
“A lot of people were waiting, and some were crying, and I think they were getting deported. They were saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to my country,’” she remembers of the detention center.
Nobody communicated to any of the detainees how long they were to stay there and what their next steps were, (Name) recalls.
Then she was separated from her niece for two weeks, as (Name) was not the girl’s legal guardian. Once reunited, they flew north to meet her brother.
When she began ninth grade in the U.S., she spoke no English, and she describes being overwhelmed on orientation day. But she persisted and was frequently the first student to volunteer to read or answer a question.
She gained more confidence and friends as the years progressed, attending prom and joining the Latinos Unidos club on campus, and eventually graduated in June 2019.
(Name) has worked the entire time she’s been in the United States. She now works at a Mexican restaurant and has moved out of her brother’s house and rents her own room.
In fall 2019 she started community college classes and is considering becoming an elementary school teacher, confident about her many plans for the future.
“A lot of people are living my life or have gone through similar things. To them, I say, ‘Keep going and don’t give up,’” (Name) says. “Honestly, those who have papers or who are from here shouldn’t think themselves better — we all have a life we’re struggling for, and nobody can know another person’s life or what they’re going through.”
—Dora Totoian
Then they stopped. The coyote promised to return. But he never did, leaving (Name), age 16, stranded in the desert with her 7-year-old niece.
A few minutes later, she heard motorcycles approaching. She and her niece bolted. They didn’t get far. Border patrol agents shined flashlights in their faces and ordered them, in a mix of English and Spanish, to halt.
(Name) burst into tears. She thought they’d be sent back to Guatemala and the problems they’d been fleeing for more than 2,000 miles.
Born in Guatemala in 1999, (Name) grew up in an isolated mountain town.
She remembers days spent gathering firewood and scattering corn and fava bean seeds with her mother, who she describes as her advocate in her large family with five siblings.
(Name) excelled in school, but she focused on academics partly to escape the pain of bullying. (Name) grew up without her father and became accustomed to hearing taunts of “huérfana” (orphan) from classmates.
The bullying decreased at her new, larger middle school. However, in 2015, (Name) left Guatemala for family reasons.
Her older brother lived in Oregon and arranged for her and her niece to meet a coyote to accompany them on the two-week bus ride to the Mexico-U.S. border.
After the coyote abandoned them, the girls were detained by border patrol.
“A lot of people were waiting, and some were crying, and I think they were getting deported. They were saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to my country,’” she remembers of the detention center.
Nobody communicated to any of the detainees how long they were to stay there and what their next steps were, (Name) recalls.
Then she was separated from her niece for two weeks, as (Name) was not the girl’s legal guardian. Once reunited, they flew north to meet her brother.
When she began ninth grade in the U.S., she spoke no English, and she describes being overwhelmed on orientation day. But she persisted and was frequently the first student to volunteer to read or answer a question.
She gained more confidence and friends as the years progressed, attending prom and joining the Latinos Unidos club on campus, and eventually graduated in June 2019.
(Name) has worked the entire time she’s been in the United States. She now works at a Mexican restaurant and has moved out of her brother’s house and rents her own room.
In fall 2019 she started community college classes and is considering becoming an elementary school teacher, confident about her many plans for the future.
“A lot of people are living my life or have gone through similar things. To them, I say, ‘Keep going and don’t give up,’” (Name) says. “Honestly, those who have papers or who are from here shouldn’t think themselves better — we all have a life we’re struggling for, and nobody can know another person’s life or what they’re going through.”
—Dora Totoian
What She Carried
THE SHORT BUT THE MOST SPECIAL STORY OF MY SHIRT
I will wear and care for this garment wherever I go, because just looking at it reminds me of all the moments it holds and makes me remember and reflect on so many things.
This shirt is one of the memories I hang on to from my life, because this shirt holds moments I will never forget.
In April 2015, my mom bought this shirt. On April 25th, there’s a festival in the place I used to live (Posonicapa Grande), with dancing and games. Also, the 26th is my birthday, and I always had a good time.
When I saw this shirt, I loved it and wanted to wear it for the first time at the dance. My mom bought me this shirt, and I showed it off.
My trip to the United States was the following month, in May. Because I liked the shirt so much, I packed it in my suitcase and brought it with me. When I crossed the desert, I remember wearing this shirt and a black sweater.
When I arrived in the United States, I lived with my siblings for a while, but without my mom. She still lived in Guatemala. It was then that I started to really appreciate the shirt because of how much I missed my mom.