Co-Creating Museum Exhibits of the Immigrant Experience
On the evening of January 28, 2013 we—the authors—sat in a darkened room at the local library in Hyattsville, Maryland, waiting a little anxiously for the third documentary film of the evening. We did not necessarily expect this film to be the most entertaining or thought-provoking, but it was more meaningful to us because we had been a part of its creation. The faces that would soon be moving across the screen were familiar. They were people we had interviewed, and, in some cases, these interviewees had become our friends. The participants, whose stories formed the subject matter of the film, saturated the sterile-sounding term "the immigrant experience" with strong individual voices and poignant details from their lives. Some of these participants were in the audience.