“Now We Are Here,” Stories of Immigrant Families

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FEATURING GABRIELLE OLIVEIRA - Donald Trump’s second term agenda is centered on the criminalization, scapegoating, incarceration, and disappearance of nonwhite immigrants. And although many Americans seem to have forgotten it, his first term was also marked by the same. 

A new book called Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, follows the stories of 16 migrant families from Latin America who were victims of harsh government enforcement through 2018 and 2019, and how their stories distill the deeply-politicized issue of immigration through a much-needed human lens.

The book's author, Gabrielle Oliveira, is Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar recently about it.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, as I mentioned, a lot of folks forgot the family separation scandal, the horrific kind of human tragedy that unfolded in the years 2016 to 2020. And far too many Americans decided that they could cast their vote for Trump, including people from mixed-status immigrant families. And now we're seeing, I think in escalation even it seems of what happened in the first term. 

So, tell me about these families you profiled and why you wrote this book. These were families that were victimized, criminalized and, really traumatized in 2018 and 2019. Why them? 

Gabrielle Oliveira: Right. So, I was doing work, you know, at the time I was doing work in schools here in Massachusetts that had bilingual programs, which meant that, you know, children were learning in Portuguese and in Spanish. And that has been, you know, some of the work that I've been doing for my own trajectory, my own career. 

And I started hearing during these interviews with families, families describing what had happened to them at the border, either being detained and separated, or detained together. And those stories just seem that, you know, the families were very much still thinking about those stories. The children were bringing those stories to the schools, and the teachers didn't really know what to do with, you know, the stories that were being brought to the school. 

So, for me, it was really important to try to capture in real time what was happening and to hear from the families that had just gone through those separations and detentions, either together right, or being sent to different places in the United States.