[On December 14th, 1950, the
United Nations adopted its Statute on
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75th
anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR
and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and
crucial issue in 2025.]
[Note: I originally
shared this post as part of my 2020 Year in Review blog series, but once again
it feels even more timely here in late 2025.]
On a short
story that helps cut to the heart of an ongoing horror.
It was
almost impossible, in the final months of 2020, to pay attention to all of the
important news stories that broke; not that that was in any way a new problem,
but I nonetheless felt that constant struggle for focus to be amplified as we
all tried simply to navigate the conclusions of the Fall semester, of the
multi-month crisis of
democracy following the 2020 presidential election, of the end of a very,
very long year. So it’s fair to say that a couple of late 2020 stories about the
ongoing human rights abuses of migrant and refugee families and children at the
US/Mexico border—a story about how
the federal government had purposefully made it much harder to reunite
separated families (illegal actions that reek of Stephen
Miller’s xenophobic touch), and a related one about just
how much children remain separated from their parents long after that policy
was supposed to have ended—largely flew under the radar for far too many of us
(this AmericanStudier very much included).
The
frustrating absence of such stories from much of our collective consciousness
isn’t simply about information overload, however. Precisely because the
government has kept these individuals and families so isolated and separated,
so hidden from even those tasked with helping them (much less our society as a
whole), it can be quite difficult (speaking for myself, at least) to get to the
human heart of what is happening to these people, of the intimate realities of
the detention process and centers, of all that has been done and is still being
done to these fellow humans and Americans (for that they are, despite our
government’s and system’s most xenophobic
and destructive attempts to define them otherwise). There certainly
has been excellent investigative journalism despite those imposed limits—I
would point for example to this
stunning late August piece from Carmen
Molina Acosta, an editorial intern with the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) who clearly has a very bright future in
journalism, on the horrors of COVID in the detention centers—but there we’re
back to the information overload challenge.
Such
journalistic pieces are still entirely worth reading and sharing, to be clear.
But I also believe that cultural works have a role in play in cutting through
the noise and helping us understand and empathize with the human experiences of
these migrants and refugees. As part of my two online Short Story sections this
Fall, I taught one stunning such cultural work: Cristina Henriquez’s “Everything
Is Far from Here” (2017). Henriquez’s short story stays solely
and fully within the perspective of her main character, a refugee woman and
mother experiencing individual versions of detention and separation from her
young son; readers get only the briefest glimpses of the broader social and
political contexts for those experiences, both in the US and in her Latin
American country of origin. But that’s precisely the vital strength of short
stories—using literary elements like narration and perspective, descriptions
and imagery, dialogue and free
indirect discourse (the intimate representation of a character’s
inner thoughts, a really powerful literary concept and effect despite the
overly theoretical name) to locate readers within such an experience and world.
If I could ask all Americans to read one text about the ongoing border horrors,
I think I’d go with this simple, brutal, vital short story.
Contemporary
connections this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
