Last week, ARTE, in collaboration with Art for Change and students from the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry participated in a unveiling of their #ImmigrationRightsMural. Students were joined by family members, a representative of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, and immigrant rights activist, Adriana Escandón.
Below are some pictures of the event, courtesy of photographer Corey Torpie and a poem from Sierra Davis, one of the inspiring ARTE participants involved in the mural project.
Immigration
We all come from different places
With different races
And different faces
Our ancestors fought
For us to occupy the same spaces
American is a word
We all take under our wing
A word of all the different cultures
People all over the world bring
Even though we accept this word
As a way to describe us
Keeping it in no way
Is the only way to define us
Even being born in this country
Doesn’t change the differences in the blood
That runs through our veins
Yet that shouldn’t allow for us
Not to be treated one and the same
We breath the same fair
Occupy the same space
Still we continue to be oppressed
Because our race
And the people who oppress us
No one seems to remember
That their ancestors
Were once the foreigners together
How we became the week, despite our numbers
I’ll never understand
Maybe it was the way they presented
themselves or the guns in their hands
So thank God for the ones
Who refused to bow down
Beg for their lives or be pushed around
Cause without them where would we be?
Tending the fields? Hiding in trees?
Yet I’m glad to say
That the youth have risen
To stay off the battlefield
And out of the kitchen
Not originally our battle
But we’ve taken the cause
Used our paintbrushes and smartphones
To not go back to the way America once was.
-Sierra Davis, 2015
