UNM held a film screening and workshop last week, centered on immigration in the classroom.
The event, conducted at the Bank of America Theater located in the National Hispanic Cultural Center, was held by the Latin American and Iberian Institute of UNM in conjunction with the NHCC, the Instituto Cervantes of Albuquerque and the Spanish Resource Center.
The event aimed to familiarize educators with effective means of approaching the topic of Immigration in a classroom context.
The seminar began with a screening of the documentary film “Who is Dayani Cristal?” made by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal. In the film, Bernal retraces the steps of a Guatemalan migrant on his fatal journey from Central America northward.
Keira Phillip-Schnurer, supervisor of Community Education Programs at the Latin American and Iberian Institute, said the film is a powerful embodiment of the harsh, occasionally fatal circumstances surrounding Central American immigration.
Her title within the organization may as well consist solely of the word ‘outreach,’ Phillip-Schnurer said, and it certainly plays a significant role within the department that specializes in community outreach.
The LAII is one of a limited number of federally funded national resource centers located throughout the nation with the general mission of broadening and enhancing community understanding, she said. Effective resourcing allows the institute to maintain strong ties with the Latin American art community.
There is little need to express the importance of cultural-understanding in a community like ours, Phillip-Schnurer said.
“Especially in a place like Albuquerque, building on local knowledge means that we can strengthen our assets, and maybe expand our local consciousness about where we fit within a broader world; it means we can have a stronger means to understand our heritage here in New Mexico, in the southwest,” she said. “The whole of our country has ties to Latin America, so it behooves us to acknowledge that and see how we all fit together.”
Phillip-Schnuer said she is an advocate of progressive conversation.
“I would argue that part of the step forward is to have conversations like this, where we acknowledge the people in our country and where they come from,” she said during the post-film response time. “Give them our respect; give everyone in our community the same measure of respect, to acknowledge who they are as individuals.”
Katrina Dillon, project assistant at the LAII and long time educator, continued the discussion with an introduction to some children’s books that broach the topic in what she said was a fitting manner.
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“Those are all resources that we would recommend using to talk about the topic of immigration in the classroom,” Dillon said of the immigration-themed children’s books being examined and passed around by audience members.
Dillon said she acknowledges the particular importance of these discussions in culturally diverse communities, such as Albuquerque.
“I always like to preface these conversations,” she said. “As difficult as it is, it’s something that we have to do, starting from kinder on; Early Childhood educators, sometimes we think ‘our students aren’t ready for these things, they don’t need to talk about it.’”
Dillon said she would prefer it if K-12 educators adopted a more proactive, engaged stance toward discussing the topic of immigration with their students, rather than doing it in impulsive, reactionary terms.
“It’s a matter of using the right materials, and broaching the conversations the right way; but it’s key that we have a model for them from the get go, (on) how to have these conversations,” Dillon said.
Successful classroom discussion surrounding Immigration calls for preparation and a culturally-dynamic perspective, she said.
For instance, Dillon said the humanization of others became a classroom tenant of hers, so that students would learn to refrain from making overtly dehumanizing remarks about another person or other groups of people.
With regard to classroom discussions of this nature, there is no downplaying the immense importance of language and vocabulary, she said.
“Asking our students to (really) think about why (it is) that certain people get to be called ‘refugees,’ and others are ‘immigrants’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘alien,’ ‘illegal alien,’” she said, “thinking about how we decide (which) terms we use and what power there is in (those terms).”
Dillon said, most importantly, we must acknowledge immigration for what it is and decry those conceptions of what it isn’t; in most cases, immigration is not a means of political extremism, it is a means of familial survival.
Johnny Vizcaino is a staff reporter at the Daily Lobo. Contact him at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @thedailyjohnnyv.
