Ryan Catalani

Proyecto Carrito Caravan, Day 4

Boulder, CO — After an early-morning arrival, we presented at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Program in Environmental Design to a seminar of around 100 urban planning students.

Left to right, Proyecto Carrito Caravan co-directors Tamera Marko and Mario Osorio, and CU Boulder professor Jota Samper. — Left to right, Proyecto Carrito Caravan co-directors Tamera Marko and Mario Osorio, and University of Colorado, Boulder professor Jota Samper.

At the invitation of Jota Samper, Ph.D., a Mobility Movilidad founding director and assistant professor at the Environmental Design program, we explored how the Proyecto Carrito Caravan uses physical space, including its role in facilitating interactions between all members of a college community—including immigrant janitors, students, and professors.

“I was very struck by the fact that you presented in a parking lot,” said one student. Another added: “I thought the use of spaces reflected the grassroots nature of the project.”

That topic is critical to our work at Emerson College, where we have an internationally-recognized weekly writing class—from which the stories in our Proyecto Carrito Caravan emerged. For the last six years, it has been one of the only college courses in the US that integrates janitors, students, professors, and staff around the same table.

Our lively discussion resonated with the Environmental Design program’s objective to “train our students to design sustainable buildings, neighborhoods, cities and regions,” in part through “a spirit of service to diverse communities,” as program director Kevin J. Krizek, Ph.D. wrote.

Mario Osorio and a University of Colorado, Boulder student.

Students reflected on places where they interact with workers on campus, and brainstormed ways to create new spaces that encourage those encounters. The challenge, as Tamera Marko, Ph.D.—Proyecto Carrito Caravan co-director and senior lecturer at Emerson College—said, is that at educational institutions, “the labor is divided: some people clean the classrooms, others learn in them.”

Mario Ernesto Osorio, Proyecto Carrito Caravan co-director and Emerson maintenance worker, said another issue is a perception of immigrants as ignorant and uneducated.

“In the United States, immigrants or maintenance workers are invisible,” he said.

Mario Osorio speaks about his perspectives on immigration and education.

Part of our goal with the Proyecto Carrito Caravan is to show audiences that we all already have everything we need to bridge that divide—it’s just a matter of perspective. We believe it begins with bringing people to the table who don’t normally come to the table, like immigrant janitors, and building meaningful relationships. And we’re able to share these ideas with audiences around the country thanks to our generous donors. Donating is quick and easy, and gives you an inside look into the Caravan, through daily video updates sent right to your inbox.

“We’ve found we can create friendships and new relationships between workers, students, and professors,” Mario said. “Everybody’s working in the same institution, and we are a family.”

The Proyecto Carrito Caravan is a group of janitors driving their stories of immigration from Boston to San Diego. For more information about the Caravan, please contact Ryan Catalani at ryan@mobilitymovilidad.org. A press kit, including a fact sheet and full-resolution images, is available to download.

Proyecto Carrito Caravan, Days 2-3

Toledo, OH to Chicago, IL to Boulder, CO — An impromptu presentation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago capped this two-day, thousand-mile stretch. Hours before we were scheduled to depart Chicago, we were invited to present to Drea Howenstein‘s class, titled “Art as Social Force,” in SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries.

Mario Ernesto Osorio and Tamera Marko in SAIC's Sullivan Galleries. — Mario Ernesto Osorio and Tamera Marko in SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries.

We were honored to join this multidisciplinary group on their first day in the Sullivan Galleries, as they were just getting a feel for the space and preparing to install their exhibits.

Mario Ernesto Osorio discussed his perspectives on how education influences perceptions of immigration, calling for children, beginning from kindergarten, to be taught more accurate information about why people immigrate to the United States—in many cases, he said, because social or economic conditions in their home countries left them with no other choice.

Mario Ernesto Osorio discusses connections between education and immigration.

“There’s always some nervousness,” Mario said afterward, “because you don’t know what kind of audience you’re going to find.”

But in the end, Mario said that he felt the class did connect with our project, and understand what we’re trying to achieve.

“They were very attentive to the videos we showed and to what we were saying,” he said, “asking us questions and showing their interest.”

Drea Howenstein's class at SAIC watches a Proyecto Carrito video. — Drea Howenstein’s class at SAIC watches a Proyecto Carrito video.

After wrapping up at SAIC, we set off for our next presentation in Boulder, Colorado, driving over 1,000 miles through the night. Thank you to all of our donors who have made this Caravan possible! Donating is quick and easy, and gives you an inside look into the Caravan, through daily video updates sent right to your inbox.

With two-thirds of our drive done, and several more presentations to go, we’re thrilled with our progress and excited for what’s next.

Proyecto Carrito Caravan, Day 1

Boston, MA to Toledo, OH — We’re off! After an informal and intimate send-off event at Emerson College yesterday, we packed our bags, stocked up on granola bars, and started driving early this morning.

rc-20161007-39944 — The Proyecto Carrito Caravan send-off at Emerson College.

We’ve driven alongside rivers glazed with a dawn mist and passed through nascent fall foliage, verdant leaves mixed with cornucopias of autumnal color. Accompanied by Journey, Juanes, and just a bit of NPR’s Alt.Latino, we’ve made it through Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and recently crossed the border into Ohio.

Proyecto Carrito Caravan co-directors Ryan Catalani, Mario Ernesto Osorio, and Tamera Marko in upstate New York.

Now, as we skirt Lake Erie, surrounded by cornfields and apple orchards bathed in the golden streaks of the evening sun, we couldn’t be more excited to continue forging ahead. We feel so fortunate to be able to drive these stories of our shared humanity coast-to-coast, and we’re still seeking additional funds. Donating is quick and easy, and gives you an inside look into the Caravan, through daily video updates sent right to your inbox. Thank you to all our donors to date!

Six hundred miles in, with the freeway still boundless before us, we’re just getting started.

Proyecto Carrito Caravan to be featured in ArtWeek Boston

Our upcoming coast-to-coast exhibit of immigrant janitors’ stories, the Proyecto Carrito Caravan, will be featured in ArtWeek Boston, a 10-day, citywide creative festival, on Thursday, October 6, as part of Arts 4 Social and Civic Engagement.

This event, sponsored by MassPartners of the Americas, celebrates using “the arts as a vehicle for understanding, engaging and influencing the future of the Americas”—closely aligned with how our own Proyecto Carrito Caravan uses a vehicle literally wrapped in stories.

Right now, it’s too easy to talk about immigration, not immigrants. With the Caravan, we want to help people from diverse backgrounds recognize how much they have in common. Arts 4 Social and Civic Engagement seeks to “host conversations about art and social issues,” and we are honored and excited to be part of those discussions.

Our presentation at Arts 4 Social and Civic Engagement will be on Thursday, October 6, from 9 am to noon. It will be at the Arsenal Project Innovation Space, 485 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA 02472.

Read more about the Proyecto Carrito Caravan, and donate today, at proyectocarrito.org.

For more information about the Caravan, please contact Ryan Catalani at ryan@mobilitymovilidad.org. A press kit, including a fact sheet and full-resolution images, is available to download.

Introducing the Proyecto Carrito Caravan, a group of immigrant janitors driving their stories across the country

In October, we’re excited to launch the Proyecto Carrito Caravan: janitors driving from Boston to San Diego in a car literally wrapped with their stories of immigration. These stories are by writers who, because of their status as immigrants and janitors, say they often feel invisible in their cities and workplaces.

Right now, it’s too easy to talk about immigration, not immigrants. With the Caravan, we want to help people from diverse backgrounds recognize how much they have in common.

Donate to the Caravan, and read more about it, at proyectocarrito.org.

The stories featured in the Caravan emerged from our internationally-recognized weekly writing class at Emerson College. For the last six years, it has been one of the only college courses in the US that integrates janitors, students, professors, and staff around the same table.

Along the 4,500-mile Caravan route, we’ll make six public stops: Syracuse, New York; Boulder and Denver, Colorado; and Los Angeles, Irvine, and San Diego, California.

We’re currently raising money to fund the immigrant janitors and the Caravan team. If you donate over $15, you’ll get daily video updates from along the Caravan. And if you donate more, you can get postcards along the journey, a special Caravan shirt, and a copy of the Proyecto Carrito anthology, which has our writing from the last six years.

A limited-edition Proyecto Carrito Caravan shirt

For the Caravan, we’re publishing our work on a car for two reasons. First, it allows the storytellers, the immigrant janitors, to travel with their stories. Second, some of the workers crossed the US border in cars, so our car is a physical manifestation of those stories.

With the Caravan, we’re calling for more humane, compassionate, and inclusive immigration and education policies. We believe that creating lasting change will begin with improving how our schools teach children about immigration. After the Caravan concludes, we’ve been invited to talk about the experience at the Thomas R. Watson Conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

For more information, please contact Ryan Catalani at ryan@mobilitymovilidad.org. A press kit, including a fact sheet and full-resolution images, is available to download.

Global Pathways students launch fundraising campaigns

Since selecting our six Emerson College students for our new Global Pathways: Colombia program, we’ve been inspired by their energy, spirit, and enthusiasm to get to know our community partners. Over a month in Medellín, Colombia this summer, these students will create documentary videos in collaboration with internally displaced women and families, or desplazados, as part of Mobility Movilidad’s archive project, My Home | Mi Hogar.

Now, two of our students, Elizabeth Baez and Nick Vigue, are raising funds for their trip, and we’re excited to share their online campaigns.

eli — Click to visit Elizabeth’s fundraising page.

We’re honored and appreciative that Elizabeth, Nick, and our other students will be spending their summers working with us on such a meaningful project. We were impressed by their applications and interviews this spring, and in our meetings since then, we’ve been moved by the thoughtful ways they have approached this work, and their motivation to get started. We fully support their fundraising campaigns, and we hope you’ll consider contributing.

The desplazados with whom the Global Pathways students will collaborate tell their own stories of displacement and resilience in their own words and images—largely from their family albums. Their family albums are, in many cases, the only records of how communities, with their own hands, built the city of Medellín.

We’re looking forward to starting this new chapter in My Home | Mi Hogar with Emerson students. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Emerson is one of the country’s only colleges dedicated to communications and the arts in a liberal arts context, making its students a natural fit to collaborate with Colombian storytellers. Our Global Pathways students this year come from a variety of majors, including film production, journalism, and writing, literature, and publishing.

Since starting My Home | Mi Hogar in 2008, we have recorded and published over 250 stories of Colombians who were forced to flee their homes due to violence and rebuild their neighborhoods in and around Medellín. With over 7,000 hours of footage, My Home | Mi Hogar is Colombia’s largest archive of internally displaced people’s stories. See co-directors Tamera Marko and Ryan Catalani discuss the project below:

Proyecto Carrito presents at YMCA of Greater Boston

“I love the project, it’s an excellent idea. Many of us are immigrants and we do have dreams, and we fight for them, leaving behind our roots. Thank you.”
— YMCA student

Mobility Movilidad artist-in-residence Maria Cecilia Cardona and directors Tamera Marko and Ryan Catalani joined English-language classes at the YMCA of Greater Boston’s International Learning Center on February 17, 2016 to talk about Proyecto Carrito, a collective of immigrant janitors, students, professors, and administrators at Emerson College who write together to cross physical, social, emotional, and institutional borders.

They discussed how, in the words of Mario Ernesto Osorio, one of the Proyecto Carrito members and maintenance worker at Emerson, “we need to recover the humanity that, for the moment, we have lost,” by making our schools and other institutions more inclusive for all their community members, including immigrant workers.

The Proyecto Carrito collective does so in the spirit of convivencia—or learning to live and work together, despite cultural and language differences—by not just meeting as a weekly class, but also building trust and sharing time as a family over the last five years.

Ceci, a Colombian artist who participated in Mobility Movilidad’s 2011 exhibition of Through Our Eyes, also showed a video that she produced with the immigrant maintenance workers last year. They talked about where they have loved life—and found that those places were their homes and roots in Latin America.

Students in the YMCA classes, whose native languages include Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian, wrote notes to the maintenance workers responding to their stories.

Many of the students said they identified with the workers’ stories, and shared their own deeply personal stories, like having to leave their kids and families in their home countries and immigrate to the US to support them economically.

Others wrote that hearing about Proyecto Carrito made them feel supported, because the project recognizes that immigrants do have dreams and fight for them, despite leaving behind their roots, and congratulated the group for trying to make it possible to live with love and peace.

Thanks to the YMCA of Greater Boston and Sara Bilman, the YMCA’s DESE Program Manager and Educational and Career Advisor.

Proyecto Carrito on the Florida Caribe Show

Mobility Movilidad directors Tamera Marko and Ryan Catalani joined the Florida Caribe Show—a program on the community radio station WSLR in Sarasota, Florida—on Feb 24, 2016 to talk about Proyecto Carrito, a collective of immigrant janitors, students, professors, and administrators at Emerson College who write together to cross physical, social, emotional, and institutional borders. The interview also featured clips from Proyecto Carrito members Mario Ernesto Osorio, Maria Portillo, and Ramiro Soto, who are immigrant janitors at Emerson.

They discussed how the weekly translingual classes began and how those led to publishing texts by wrapping them on a car; the upcoming Proyecto Carrito Caravan, an immigrant-led movement for a more inclusive education system, launching this summer; and how schools and other institutions can be more inclusive toward all their community members. The interview starts at the 30 minute mark in the clip above.

The immigrant janitors who co-founded Proyecto Carrito were working during the show, so last week, they recorded themselves responding to a question that the hosts of the show, Paola Baez and Gerina Gjergji, sent in advance: What would you do to change the world? Those responses were played at the end of the show, starting at the 53 minute mark in the clip above.

Here’s what the workers said:

“Personally, I believe that for us—who, as immigrants in the US, interact daily with people from different nationalities and cultures—I would start by trying to understand each of these cultures and take what’s good from them, leaving behind the negative, and trying to adapt it to our own. That way we can try to understand each other better, and we would form true human connections, despite our differences, between all people. We would try to help one another, and little by little, I believe we would start to change the world.”
— Mario Ernesto Osorio

“To change the world, in the first place, we have to change personally, because it’s through changing ourselves that we change the world. We must end wars, eliminate discrimination because of nationality, skin color, sexuality—there can’t be discrimination for any reason. We must seek God, take care of planet Earth, take care of nature, look out for the poor, be generous with our heart, and give our time without expecting to receive anything in return.”
— Maria Portillo and Maria Guerra

“We think we need to believe that every culture is valuable and has knowledge to share with the world. We need equality and respect for human rights—for example, education, shelter, food—for everyone. We need to accept each person as they are and take care of the environment.”
— Ramiro Soto and Maria Cecilia Cardona

Ramiro also talked about what the class means to him and the other workers:

“In this class, we have people from Peru, Hawaii, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, California, Indonesia, China, Puerto Rico, the Philippines—that’s Proyecto Carrito. We enjoy the cultures we each bring. I think if you don’t come to the class, you don’t get through the week. It’s something that you need, to be here. It’s a time that we look forward to since Monday. (The class meets every Wednesday.) We feel good. It’s a place where you feel accepted and share with everyone else. Outside, we’re not accepted, and here in the class, everyone is equal. We all learn and we all teach.”

Mobility directors launch new summer program with Emerson College

Starting this summer, Emerson College students will be able to live and work in Medellín, Colombia for a month, creating documentary videos in collaboration with internally displaced women and families. Global Pathways: Colombia is one of 14 faculty-led programs offered by Emerson this summer.

The videos that Emerson students make will become part of our My Home | Mi Hogar archive. Since 2008, My Home | Mi Hogar has recorded, published, and choreographed conversations around the stories of Colombians who were forced to flee their homes due to violence and rebuild their neighborhoods in Medellín. They tell their own stories of displacement and resilience in their own words and images from their family albums—which are, in many cases, the only records of how communities, with their own hands, built the city of Medellín. My Home | Mi Hogar now has over 7,000 hours of footage from over 250 storytellers, and is Colombia’s largest archive of internally displaced people’s stories.

Now, we’re excited to start a new chapter in My Home | Mi Hogar with Emerson students. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Emerson is one of the country’s only colleges dedicated to communications and the arts in a liberal arts context, making its students a natural fit to collaborate with these Colombian storytellers. Global Pathways: Colombia faculty director, and Mobility Movilidad founding director, Tamera Marko, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in Emerson’s department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing. On-site coordinator, and Mobility Movilidad founding director, Ryan Catalani is a 2011 graduate of Emerson.

My Home | Mi Hogar was started eight years ago with students from Duke University, who went to Medellín through DukeEngage, the university’s summer civic engagement program. From the summers of 2008 to 2015, DukeEngage students created over 100 short documentaries and developed relationships with communities in Medellín that, through our new partnership with Emerson, we are looking forward to deepening and expanding.

Emerson students can receive four course credits through Global Pathways: Colombia, which will take place from July 20 – August 17, 2016. The program cost is $3,467, which includes tuition, housing, and most meals. Read more and apply.

‘Through Our Eyes III’ artist exhibits in Roxbury

Jose Alexander Caicedo Castaño, one of the artists in Mobility Movilidad’s Through Our Eyes III exhibit (2013), has a new show at Roxbury Community College‘s Joan Resnikoff Gallery. Titled “Carrying the Load” and curated by Mirta Tocci, Jose Alexander’s work will be on display from October 16 to November 6, 2015.

In Through Our Eyes III, Jose Alexander exhibited a multimedia project called “Bearing the Burden: Aesthetic Imaginaries of the Woman Victim of Territorial Conflict in Medellín’s Comuna Ocho Neighborhood.” This formed part of his master’s thesis at the National University of Colombia in Medellín. He wrote about his work:

Pinares de Oriente is a human settlement, situated on the mountain ridge Pan de Azúcar in the city of Medellin. This place is high risk because of the possibility of tropical rain-induced landslides and the vulnerability of being far up, isolated from the city center and its resources down below. Between 1940 and 1950, many families or individuals have self-settled in the neighborhoods of Comuna Nororiental. They came because they were displaced, forced to flee their rural towns due to violence. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, the armed conflict in Colombia caused massive migration of the nation’s population. The largest number of displaced people are from rural areas of Colombia. The process of displacement creates a transition between a rural society and an urban society. People also engage in an aesthetic process of transition, forming productive, interconnected roots like that of an orchard, a rhizome.

Because people must occupy the land illegally, the neighborhoods and their residents have an anonymous quality. That is, they know they are not supposed to live there, according to the law—yet they have no other place to go. In these neighborhoods, women have a leading role in this rural-urban transition, weaving social imaginaries, remaining adaptable and staying in a hostile territory. At the same time, it is a promise of continuing in one’s own habitat, one’s own home. It is a meaningful mixture of what they left behind in their rural life, including growing their own food, and the new goals of including themselves as productive individuals of community life that the City of Medellin demands.