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UC Davis Just Made a Video of My Poetry: Refugee/Refugiado

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My Poetry: Refugee/Refugiado

After a long time coming, Humanizing Deportation at UC Davis has just published a digital version of my poems #Refugee/#Refugiado, in both Spanish and English, with my own photography, to show the world WHAT #AsylumSeekers go through.

Sarah Hart from the University of California, Davis saw my poems, so she asked me if they could do a digital version of it for their project Humanizing Deportation. John Guzman edited and produced it.

This poem is a composite of many stories, many mothers and children who have given me their trust, and their tears, through the work I do. Their varied and tragic tales transform into one composite. Thus, these poems becomes an allegory for an entire group of marginalized women and children. Refugee/Refugiado gives voice to their silent screams.

English and Spanish versions are available on YouTube:

En espanol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVRbUVwHGks

Some information on Humanizing Deportation from their website:

Humanizing Deportation is an online open access archive of personal stories about deportation. Policy debate on deportation tends to be driven by statistics, with little attention to human experience. This project will make visible a range of humanitarian issues that mass human displacement has generated as the result of its management on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

It employs digital storytelling, a digital genre that puts control of content and production in the hands of community storytellers (deportees and others affected by deportation and deportability), to produce a public archive that will give a human face to the deportation crisis.

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About Ana Maria Fores Tamayo

Ana Maria Fores Tamayo is ABD in Comparative Literature from New York University, though she presently lives in Texas. She never completed her Ph.D. because motherhood got in the way: tenure and parenting do not mix. Thus she switched fields and worked in academic publishing for many years. She missed academia, however, and decided to return, only to find the Ivory Tower inhospitable to most educators. It did not take her long to take up their cause, beginning a petition for adjunct faculty, now with over 10,000 signatures. This grew into a Facebook forum for like-minded individuals to connect and organize. The past few years, Fores Tamayo expanded her work to reach out to those rendered invisible. She is trying to raise awareness of these marginalized peoples in order to erase borders. Her labor naturally grew from her work with students: DREAMers, undocumented students, and eventually asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America. Although this is heart-wrenching work, it is at the same time quite satisfying, being able to help others one to one. Working with diverse populations too, she is trying to make sure the disenfranchised become strong and have their voices heard. Her work can be seen in the Dallas/Fort Worth Refugee Support Network.

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