For Immediate Release

June 22, 2010

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By Monette Austin Bailey

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Judith Freidenberg collects stories of families leaving all they know for vague promises of something better in America. As an associate professor of anthropology, she explores the adjustments they've made to fit into their new home, and as a fellow immigrant, she understands the importance of sharing these narratives.

On June 19, she helped CASA de Maryland celebrate its 25th anniversary and the grand opening of its multicultural center in Langley Park by giving people a chance to talk about who they are, where they've come from and why, and what it means to belong.

I'm very interested in the way people have defined themselves," says the Argentinian native, and the ways they're expected to."

Freidenberg, in collaboration with the Smithsonian's Center for Latino Initiatives, worked with six teams of two - pairing up her students trained to do videotaped interviews - to record oral histories of community members. The videotapes will be used in a future Smithsonian project and also stored at the center. She hopes to get funding to put them into a video that could be part of a permanent exhibit at CASA and used for teaching and research.

The new center is also designed as a place where people can celebrate their cultures and histories. So it's a good home for Freidenberg's earlier exhibit, which was displayed at the Museum of the City of New York and later integrated into a virtual project for the Smithsonian, "Inside/Out: Growing Old in the United States." It and the book that followed, "Growing Old in El Barrio," look at the socio-economic conditions that shape elderly immigrants' lives in East Harlem, N.Y., and Langley Park.

Her current exhibit, "The Immigrant Experience in Prince George's County," includes a 20-minute video, "Immigrant Voices," that Freidenberg produced last year with Maryland Adjunct Professor Gail Thakur as part of the department's Anthropology of the Immigrant Life Course program. The video features Indian, Vietnamese, Trinidadian, Ethiopian and Latino residents of Prince George's County.

"We were both very concerned with the fact that the students here had such little awareness of the social milieu where they were coming to school," says Freidenberg. "A lot of time when people talk about immigration in our area, they believe they are referring only to a Latino population, and that is just not true."

She notes that several census tracts surrounding the university - Langley Park, Riverdale and Hyattsville - have the largest portion of immigrants in the county.

A companion catalog to the exhibit compiled by doctoral student Amy Carattini gives the backstory to some of the journeys. A woman left her native Trinidad dreaming of becoming a secretary; a Guatemalan man talks of the country's 36-year civil war that sent him looking for a better, safer life.

"Her work really provides a new way to look at immigrant populations," says Magdalena Mieri, program director in Latino History and Culture for the Smithsonian's Natural Museum of American History, who has worked with Freidenberg for nearly 15 years. "She works across communities, trying to find those universal values. She has a very good rapport with people."

Freidenberg, who moved from Buenos Aires to New York in the '70s, says her early experiences shaped her research. "When I first came to America, I was exposed to a wide variety of people since I lived in the center of Manhattan."

As a research assistant at Columbia University and later as faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she studied immigrant social networks and their impact on mental health. She went into people's homes, sat down to plates of rice and beans and started listening. What she heard - feelings of isolation and frustration, yet hope that they could create a new home in America - encouraged her to seek ways to make these thoughts and issues more public. Through her exhibits and books, Freidenberg hopes to bring what she's learned to the attention of those shaping immigration images and policy.

"An immigrant is a human being and that human being does not have very dissimilar experiences from any other human being in larger society," she says. "The media or perhaps other public discourse creates images of immigrants that they are a potential deviant - or not so committed to the United States, almost to the point of portraying them as a permanent outsider."

"There are all of these issues about immigration that we don't understand - to the detriment of the health of the nation," she says. "Even if we put up a wall on the border, we're all still in here together."

Tom Ventsias contributed to this article.

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