By Leah Shaw
The Brooklyn College Listening Project celebrates the diverse, vibrant and unique city of Brooklyn with a new multi-media exhibition that opened this week in the Brooklyn College main lobby. The exhibition featuring the stories of immigrants and children of immigrants in their own voices along with photographs and profiles of their lives. The exhibition will be featured in the Tenement Museum’s Fall 2018 Tenement Talks series this fall.
The exhibition includes stories of immigrants from all over the world of people who settled in New York City and impacted the lives of the Brooklyn College students who chose to interview them. Pedro is a Dominican-American man who met his mother at the age of 5 when he arrived in Washington Heights.
Luisa is an Italian-American mother of three who as a girl taught other newly arrived Italian children how to speak English and as she grew up observed the civil rights movement and the way Carroll Gardens became gentrified. Hassan is a Pakistani taxi driver who goes out of his way to learn to greet his passengers in their native language–he can do this in seven languages–and he shares his experience driving his cab during 9/11 and the conversations he had with New Yorkers afterwards.
These are just a sampling of the stories featured in the multi-media exhibition We Are Brooklyn: Immmigrant Voices. The interviewees gave their time and personal narratives to a bigger cause in hopes of fostering a greater understanding of what connects all of us.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the multi-media exhibition in the New York City area.