Roberto Lovato

Transcription

♪ KU ♪ My name is Tanya Golash-Boza and I'm an assistant professor in Sociology and American Studies. I've put together five posters. Each of the posters has a picture of a couple's hands. So each of these couples are made up of two people, a US citizen woman and a Mexican man who is undocumented. On either side of the picture are two stories. One is the story of the couple's hands, and the other is a story of another couple who is in a similar situation to them. The history behind this project, I was in Chicago doing research and one of the areas I was researching was immigration policy. So I approached a non-profit and asked them if there's any way I could work with them on some of their projects in order to develop my research agenda. And they told me that they were interested in developing a policy oriented program that they wanted to present to legislators which is to change the 245(i) section of the Immigration Nationality Act. What this means is that when an undocumented person marries a US citizen, sometimes they're not eligible for legalization. And it's really just a small provision in the law that they wanted to change. So they asked me if I could collect stories from their clients in order to present these stories to legislatures and try and enact some sort of policy change. And for me it was an ideal opportunity because as researchers we often want our ideas to come from the community as opposed to us just imposing our projects on the community. So that's how the project started itself.  Professor Golash-Boza lecturing, "The importance of relationships between the US..." I would have liked to use their faces. Since they're undocumented, that would put them at risk. So, undocumented people have to live an anonymous life. But if you're a US citizen married to an undocumented person, you also have to life a sort of anonymous life. A lot of the work that I do doesn't fit just in sociology. I draw from anthropology, geography, from political science, from legal studies, even from the humanities, from literature. All of those things, cultural studies, to do my work. For me what was very attractive about the Department of Sociology, it's actually a very unique department nationally, in that most of the researchers are qualitatively oriented instead of using more interpretive methods to understand society. So when I wrote these stories, I just wrote them based on what people told me. It's my hope that somehow, that something in these stories will strike a cord with people that are reading them and I think the advantage of having several stories is that maybe not every story is interesting to every person, but having the hands kind of provides a human connection and potentially some of the stories, people might be able to relate to them in one way or another and just maybe get them thinking about the impact of immigration policy on everybody.