Month: November 2024 (Page 1 of 6)

Title: New Realities at the Border: Colombians, Mexicans, and the Changing Face of Migration

Even for those who survive the dangerous crossing, challenges abound. Mario, a Colombian migrant, describes how his wife, Eliana, lives in constant fear of detection, altering even the smallest details of her daily life: “When she’s on the train, she doesn’t look forward; she looks down, so they won’t [notice her].” Additionally, Eliana herself found her initial interactions in America to be different than she expectedt: “Funny enough, she found that she was pretty welcomed by Americans, but not very welcomed by Latin Americans.”

This transformation reflects the evolving dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico border and the broader migration landscape. Once defined by a fluid exchange of families, resources, and culture, the border now bears the scars of decades of militarization and fundamental changes to migration patterns. “The Mexican border… was less populated at that time, and people were just kind of crossing back and forth, had family sometimes land on both sides. So it was a very more fluid border at that point,” explains Rosina Lozano, a historian at Princeton University specializing in the history of migration.

Today, that fluidity is gone, replaced by walls, checkpoints, and patrols. Migration scholar Douglas Massey describes how these changes altered migration patterns fundamentally: “By militarizing the border… the flow shifted… from temporary workers to permanently settled families.” He adds, “Border militarization almost doubled the size of the undocumented population because it discouraged return migration.”

The repercussions extend beyond policy. The arrival of new groups of migrants, such as Colombians, has strained relationships within established border communities. “People that they’re seeing are no longer their compadres, paisanos; they’re people from other countries,” Massey notes. He explains how this shift has contributed to rising tensions and even political realignments: “The Mexican population along the borders [is] heavily citizens of many generations, and they see these people as competitors.” This dynamic partly explains a turn in Texas border counties against the migration across the border that may have been more easily accepted before.

The Mexican Border Today: A Complex Legacy

The story of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border cannot be told without considering the role of Mexicans themselves, whose migration patterns have drastically shifted over time. Once frequent border-crossers, many Mexicans now avoid the journey altogether, deterred by the dangers posed by increasingly militarized policies. Lozano highlights how natural landscapes, such as deserts and rivers, have been weaponized to deter crossings: “The federal government actually has in their strategy that they’re using the environment as a deterrent, because they know people will die if they go that direction.”

Within the U.S., many Mexican-American communities along the border have developed a complex relationship with newcomers. Massey points out that Mexican-descent populations, often U.S. citizens of many generations, feel the strain of competing resources and shifting demographics. This competition, alongside broader economic changes, has fueled resentment toward newer migrants. “And so,” Massey adds, “we’re seeing political shifts that reflect those tensions.”

Newcomers and Their Challenges

Yet, Colombians and other newcomers persist, driven by dire circumstances in their home countries. Eliana, shared her family’s plight: “Her dad was a member of FARC… when the deal was signed… they are going after people who chose to step back.” For others, the challenges are systemic rather than overtly violent. “Now that they’re here, they have two years… either get asylum or go back to Colombia,” Mario explains, summarizing the stark choices many face. The asylum process is anything but predictable and when asked to describe the process the couple indicated the unpredictable nature of the appointment time and date seeing as they are at the discretion of the judge, who can decide to move a date sooner or later than anticipated.

For migrants like Jaime, who settled in Philadelphia, the obstacles extend beyond the initial journey. He speaks of the challenges of finding affordable housing amid gentrification: “Even people who lived here for many years had to leave because of the gentrification situation… The rent and mortgage interest go up, and it’s not that affordable, especially for new immigrants.” This displacement shows how crossing the border is just the first step in a long journey, as migrants face new challenges like rising housing costs and limited resources. Even after arriving, they must work to overcome these obstacles in their search for stability and a place to belong.

Still, Jaime emphasizes the resilience and adaptability of migrants as they strive to integrate. “For me, it was a challenge… discovering a new society, new friends, new everything,” he reflects. Despite the hardships, Jaime has found ways to build community. “We have neighbors; they are very important. You build community with them, sharing food and music,” he says, contrasting this experience with his time in New York. Yet building community, while essential, is often difficult for migrants who face isolation, discrimination, and economic pressures, underscoring the ongoing struggle to find a sense of belonging in unfamiliar and often unwelcoming environments.

The Changing Face of Migration

The stories of both Colombians and Mexicans show how migration has changed, shaped by stricter policies, dangerous routes, and shifting demographics. Despite these changes, the reasons people migrate remain the same: to survive, find safety, and build a better life.

As migration evolves, it’s crucial to understand what it means for migrants to adapt and succeed in new places. These stories highlight the humanity behind immigration policies and the determination of those who make the journey. Whether fleeing violence or seeking opportunity, migrants reflect the challenges, hopes, and enduring pursuit of a better future that define the American dream.

Things left to add: interview with a law enforcement and more commentary about the border wall overall. I think I want to do a bit more historical analysis as well as a paragraph incorporating “People have always found ways to use the U.S.-Mexico border to cross, including the Chinese in earlier eras,” says Rosina Lozano. “At the time, many learned Spanish, dressed as Mexicans, and adapted to blend in” I am not sure where I would incorporate this but that could also be interesting.

The article about dementia is really eye-opening because it shows how complex and confusing it can be when trying to understand a person’s ability to make decisions as they age, especially with dementia. A lot of people think that once someone is diagnosed with dementia, they can no longer make decisions for themselves. However, the article explains that this isn’t true. In fact, a person with dementia can still make decisions, but it depends on the situation and how advanced their condition is. The bridge between both describing the procedure of loosing memories with dementia and intertwining with the chronology of the story beautidfully shows not only the overall applications of Dementia but the personal impact of the disorder.

One important point the article makes is that doctors can disagree on whether a person with dementia is still able to make decisions. This is because there is no one set way to test someone’s decision-making ability. It’s not as simple as saying “yes” or “no” to whether someone is able to make choices. Instead, it’s a lot more specific and can change over time. For example, a person might still be able to decide what they want to eat, but they might not be able to choose the best medical treatment for themselves. The article pin-points a hole of thought within dementia and tries to decompose the complexity of this ethical decision which is often overlooked.

The article also talks about the legal side of dementia. Even if someone with dementia can’t remember a decision, like who they want to make decisions for them, that decision can still count. This is confusing because it means a judge might have to decide whether someone is able to make decisions, even if doctors and family members disagree. The case of Diane in the article is a good example of this. Her family fought over who should be her legal guardian, which led to a lot of legal fees and stress. This also brings into the discussion the relationship between ethical and legal atmospheres. How much does a doctor know and how much does a judge know? Which is more important? How does the autonomy of the patient change?

An important theme in this week’s readings is how individuals connect to larger issues within a community, showing how personal experiences reflect bigger problems in the system. In the article “Fixing the Broken Lovelies”, Naomi, a nurse, shares her experience working in a psych ward. She describes feeling overwhelmed by the growing number of patients coming in, which makes her job harder and leaves her feeling exhausted. This reflects a bigger issue—the lack of resources in the unit. Naomi also notices problems like patients using medication improperly and seeing people smoking outside the ward. There’s a sign she passes on her way to work that says, “Home of the forgetful and the forgotten,” which highlights the challenge of caring for people who may be overlooked or forgotten in society. This all shows how Naomi’s personal struggles in the ward represent larger, systemic issues in healthcare and mental health care. This also ties into the ability to present a topic and indicate a larger issue of the lack of resources for these sections of the community.

Jennifer Senior’s piece for The Atlantic strongly resonated with me. Perhaps it is the fact that I crossed Bobby’s path through Princeton. Or perhaps it is his sensibility that reminded me of people I am close to. Or myself. Senior did an amazing job following the thread of the story and reconstructing the narrative, two decades after they happened. The structure of the article was seamless without being obvious. It seemed to follow the structure of memories and how they come back to us. That is especially true of traumatic events, which is what this piece is following: the life and afterlife of trauma. Senior brings the different pieces of the puzzle together skillfully and allows herself to follow the story where it takes her. What started as an exploration of grief over time ended up touching on important themes such as the workings of conspiratorial thinking, family dynamics, survivors’ guilt and most surprisingly, how memory is reconstructed. The diary is so central to the article. The characters and their motivations come to life around this peculiar item which stands for Bobby, the non-presence at the heart of the piece. Everyone and everything is framed around that treasure, what it tells us and what it leaves as a secret. I also wanted to point out the photos and their contribution to the strength of the narrative. We are not only discovering the characters we are reading about but also diving into archives, such as Bobby’s last diary entry or his wallet. All of these elements build a repository of what is left behind after someone is lost and how those who stay behind attempt to recover or create meaning out of what remains. This is all captured through the quote “Life loves on” which is a creation – though not a fiction – built by those who stayed behind from remnants of what once was.

The theme of grief is also present in Nadja Drost’s “When can we really rest?” which makes an account of migrants going through the Darién Gap. Compared to Dickerson’s “Seventy Miles in Hell”, Drost maintains this narration of horror, death and danger which by all accounts are part of the Darién’s reality. However, I really appreciated the humanization of every character in that story, including the smugglers – a term that was used interchangeably with guides – the drug traffickers and the refugees themselves. Drost’s account is comparatively a more neutral description of the scenes in the region that brings together the diversity of people that makes up the landscape – drug traffickers, the indigenous community, guides and migrants themselves.

A common thread with Senior’s piece is the theme of grief. Speaking of the father whose 9-year old daughter got carried away by a river and his response to this traumatic event, Drost writes: “ How would having his daughter’s remains help his family? He tried to explain what might appear to some as heartless: For his family’s sake, he had to find a way to outlast what had happened. Mourning had no place on this journey.”

As Senior puts it, grief is “idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome.” These two texts show two versions of grief, both valuable and meaningful, and intimately different.

All of the pieces have interesting structures with important lessons for us to think about as we work on our feature story. I paid particularly close attention to chronology and choices pertaining to the order of presenting information. For Engelhart’s dementia story, the piece started in October 2017, first describing when the mother stopped answering the phone and the daughters first showed up at their mother’s doorstep asking to be let in. Then, Engelhart moves to the past, sharing descriptions of what the daughters thought their mother was like, then moves back to 2017 to the dementia diagnosis, then moves to the present mostly in chronological order. This order of past – further back – past – present effectively provided context while maintaining reader interest in the story. Although my final story is more focused on the present moment and future anticipation, one potential thing to think about for my remaining interviews is how to ask questions about past events such as the last Trump presidency to set the context for how migrants feel about what lies ahead.

Saslow’s piece on education in the pandemic is an example of several good practices we discussed in class. The first is using a scene as the lede, and I liked that it opened at an airport with the superintendent trying to find the newly recruited teacher. The piece also had several other scenes including conversations from the classroom with students and Obreque’s attempt at maintaining order in the classroom as students asked to use the bathroom. The story also heavily relies on quotes and classroom scenes to deliver the message, which is a great way of following the rule of “show don’t tell”.

Drost’s piece on the Darien gap also starts with a scene of people arriving at the campsite. In terms of chronology, this piece seemed to start with the “present moment” of the scene, then goes back to the past to explain the historical and political context of the Darien gap, then goes back to the group that arrived at camp and explains their journey. A common theme across several of these stories is starting with a scene, moving back to an earlier point in time, then going forward to meet the point on the timeline that opened the story, then continuing from there. Many of them also ended with a scene, and the last sentence was a quote of the main character in the story.

These were all exceptional pieces – I suppose that’s what happens when assigned all Pulitzer Prize-winning articles – but the one I liked the most was Jennifer Senior’s Atlantic piece about a family’s grief after 9/11 (and not because of the Princeton connection, though I appreciated it). Not only was the McIlvaines’ story fascinating, but her writing was amazing. She had so many amazing one liners: “a scent once so powerful that New Yorkers could smell it in their eyes,” “she’d kept too much in, and she was fermenting in her own brine,” “It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.” And that’s just to name a few.

It was such a fascinating protrayal of grief and its many forms – and how it affects life and marriage, and the paths that people take in life. The piece was long, but I flew through it. And I liked how she structured it too: telling the story, and then analyzing it from each member’s point of view. She gave the mountain metaphor and then went through how each family member saw the story and coped with the grief. It was fascinating and captivating, not to mention emotional. And I appreciate she ends with a quote – a small nod to an earlier comment (I’m sure this was intentional, and it does not go unnoticed).

The New York Times Magazine piece reminded me of a piece of advice that, ironically enough, came from a writer for the New York Times Magazine (Nicholas Confessore): don’t give your readers any off-ramps. And in my opinion, Engelhart gives multiple off-ramps – any time she goes on a tangent from the story about a medical study about dementia or a philosophical arguments about a fictional “Margo” (as fascinating as I found that section), I found it distracting. It gave me a place to leave the story – I was interested in the story, not necessarily the academics surrounding it. Perhaps that’s why I loved Senior’s piece so much: she never detracted from the story. Even the mountain metaphor was relevant, and it provided structure to the rest of the story. I didn’t feel the same for Engelhart.

Drost’s piece was similar to Senior’s in that she remained focused on the story, for the most part. I found that I didn’t mind when Drost took time apart from the story to give context on the Darien gap, because it’s important to understand. What did distract me, though, was I kept wondering how – how did she know all of this. She made the reader feel like she was traveling alongside the Cameroonians and Pakistanis the whole time. How did she know these details and these quotes without traveling with them? Get the photographs (which go uncredited until the end)? And if she was traveling with them, why wouldn’t she help them in their pain and struggles? I wouldn’t have minded inserting herself in the story as Senior did.

The Washington Post article(s) from Saslow were also great, but I found myself asking once again (and perhaps this is the journalist in me who is struggling to juggle multiple stories) : how? How could Saslow go so deep in these stories, from all over the country, and produce four in one year? Each of them emotional and intricately detailed – how?

“The way that vulnerable immigrant communities feel about the election is that he has been given license to do whatever he wants to do.” Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz will not say Donald Trump’s name. Ruiz, the Reverend Pastor of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is known throughout New York in the undocumented migrant community as a champion of undocumented people’s welfare and rights. He came to the US from Mexico in 1986 and was undocumented himself for eight years. “45”, as Ruiz calls the incoming President, is on his mind. Like so many other people and organizations who support undocumented migrants, he knows what is coming, and he is doing his best to prepare.

Three weeks have passed since President Donald Trump won the election to become the 47th President of the United States. In his first campaign for the Presidency in 2016, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric focused on preventing migrants from reaching the US. He famously promised to “build a wall” on the US-Mexico border. This time, Trump has campaigned on deporting immigrants who are already in the US. Back in May, he told a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, “On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Since then, immigrant aid organizations have started planning for how they will oppose Trump’s planned immigration policies. However, the Trump administration is anticipating this battle. In his last presidency, Trump’s immigration policies aimed at ending TPS and DACA were hampered by legal challenges. Stephen Miller, who will be White House deputy chief of staff for policy in the new administration, recently told the New York Times that “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The primary immigration policy goal of Trump’s presidency will be mass deportations. Pew Research Center has reported that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. These people are Trump’s first target. However, Trump has referred to different numbers, in excess of 11 million, for his deportation target. In August, incoming Vice President J.D Vance told ABC News’ Jon Karl, “I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.” There are a range of possible measures the Trump administration could take. Incoming Border Czar Tom Homan has promised to send ICE agents into cities to make arrests and raid workplaces.

Trump’s plan has echoes of Operation Wetback, a mass deportation program of Mexican immigrants under President Eisenhower that deported over a million people, including many US citizens. But what Trump is suggesting would go even further than Eisenhower did. The latest indication of how Trump might go about the deportations came on November 8th, when conservative commentator Tom Fitton wrote on Truth Social, “Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.” Trump responded to the comment, “TRUE!!!”. Under normal circumstances, the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of armed forces for law enforcement purposes. However, Stephen Miller has promoted the idea that the government would invoke the Insurrection Act which gets around this legal obstacle. Julia Preston, a former national correspondent for the New York Times, told me, “I don’t think that voters are prepared for the level of disruption that this is going to cause.”

[interview material about the economic impact of these raids.]

The evolution of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church under Reverend Ruiz speaks to demographic trends in America. The proportion of Hispanic people in Bay Ridge, a historically white and conservative neighbourhood, has doubled to 20% since the turn of the millennium. Zion (he would not tell me his last name), the caretaker of the building, showed me around the church’s hall, with its wooden floors, tables with bouquets of flowers, and high ceiling. On a lower level, down on the left, is the church. Rows of pews line an aisle, and at the front is a pulpit where Reverend Ruiz preaches during services.

Just like among voters across America, it seems that there is a sense of resistance to new immigrants and the cultural changes they bring with them at Good Shepherd. Zion, who holds a PhD from MIT and worked at Microsoft for 30 years, is an immigrant himself. “I was born in Soviet Azerbaijan. We fled. And my family has been here ever since. I was Bar Mitzvah’d at the synagogue across the street.” He told me that when Ruiz, who was originally ordained as a Catholic priest before converting to Lutheranism, was appointed Reverend of the Church, there were “suddenly a lot of Hispanic immigrants coming, and a bunch of old white people stopped coming”. In a small room filled with children’s toys just to the side of the hall, Zion points out what he is most proud of in the church: Tiffany-stained glass windows of Jesus and saints praying, now mostly covered up by bookshelves filled with children’s books. Before he leaves, he tells me to enjoy my conversation with “Don Ruiz about being Hispanic”.

[insert more transitory paragraph here – maybe interview w migrants here?]

Reverend Ruiz plans to use the lessons he learned during Trump’s first presidency when Trump returns to the White House in January. He told me, “What works is the very hyper-local organizing. So, during the 45th presidency, we had a corridor of sanctuary houses from Atlantic Avenue all the way to Coney Island, in which houses of worship.” When I ask how far he is willing to go to help undocumented migrants, he tells me, “I am more afraid for the people next to me. I think I know enough of the law that I know that I have within the Constitution. I am not doing anything out of bounds.” Tom Homan recently told the New York Post that harbouring illegal aliens is a felony. He warned people, “Don’t cross that line.” When ICE comes knocking, Ruiz explains, “You know, we have a kind of task force, or teams of people from ICE detention. You know that if one of our families is, you know, the ice police is knocking on their doors, we’ll have 50 people right there, you know, as witnesses or as shields, trying to stop them.” But it is unclear if Ruiz’s community organizers would be able to stop an arrest under the new administration.

[insert back and forth between immigration aid lawyers and Trump policy thinktank people]

[include interview with migrants about how they feel]

[end with going back to Ruiz and the church]

Inside a small room in Conakry’s Maison Centrale prison, a uniformed police chief sat armed with a recorder.

Why don’t you want to let us govern in peace?, he asked. Why do you want to take away our power?

Saikou Balde, the inmate being questioned, could not speak. He felt as though he was suffocating. His silence prompted the police chief to order the guard who was in the room with them to begin beating him. And so he was hit, repeatedly, with a baton for almost an hour. The police chief sat on a seat next to him as he lay on the floor. Saikou remembers looking up at him helplessly as he lit up a cigarette, unfazed. This was just another day in Maison Centrale.

Now, Saikou sits in another small room, this time on the third floor above a Brooklyn credit union, wearing a suit and an airpod in his left ear. From his appearance, you would think he had just returned from his job in the financial district. That is, until he begins to talk.

Our conversation is conducted in French, as he tells me of his time in confinement. How he was crammed in one of the rooms of Maison Centrale de Conakry, the colonial era prison that despite being built to hold 300 prisoners, was now holding almost 2000 individuals. He was detained in July of 2023. Many, such as himself, were there on political charges without arrest warrants. Balde was a member of the Front National pour la Défense de la Constitution (FNDC), an opposition coalition created to campaign against the then-president, Alpha Conde’s attempt to amend the constitution. Following the 2021 coup, the FNDC became a key force in calling for the reestablishment of democratic rule.

When his family, lawyers and fellow activists were finally able to obtain his conditional release five months after his detainment, Balde knew he had no choice but to leave Conakry for good. All around him, FNDC members and other activists were being detained, disappearing or killed. His release was a stroke of luck and an opportunity; he knew that one way or another, he had to find a way out of Guinea before his next prison stint turned out differently. And so in January 2024, Balde made his way to Dakar, Senegal, going on to Istanbul, Turkey. From there, he would embark on what has been dubbed the ‘luxury route’ to the US by the New York times; a journey from West Africa to Latin America and into the US through the US-Mexico border. For him, this involved taking flights from Istanbul to Bogota, San Salvador and then Nicaragua, after which he used a variety of different modes of transport to get to Mexico and the Arizona border.

“I really didn’t want to leave. It was a question of saving myself,” Balde says. He shows me pictures of his wife, twin girls and baby boy who he left behind in Guinea on his phone. “That’s why I left. For them. I didn’t leave of my own free will, I left because it was necessary.”

More and more individuals such as Balde are making the long and arduous journey to the USA through transit stops in Central and South America, the route that has become known across West Africa as the ‘Nicaragua Route’. The numbers of migrants from these nations, although still only a small percentage of all individuals crossing the border, has dramatically increased over the years.

In 2023, the number apprehended at the border was 58,462; a 436.09% increase from 2022, when 13,406 migrants from African nations crossed, according to figures obtained by the New York Times. Driven by political violence, persecution or even just economic necessity, the trend reflects shifts in migration patterns that have seen young people, primarily from Senegal, Guinea, and Mauritania, set their sights on the US as their goal rather than Europe.

Insert interview with migration specialist – European borders being fortified? is this impacting the shift?

Ruth Maclean, chief of NYT’s West Africa bureau, points out that in order to make the journey, migrants have to have a significant amount of capital already, making this a migration route strictly reserved for the middle and upper classes. Flight packages from West Africa can cost up to $10,000, with thousands more being spent along the route.

Momadou Pethe, who now lives in Philadelphia, also immigrated from Guinea through the US-Mexico border following political persecution. His 49 day journey, in which he traveled by foot and bus after landing in Brasilia reveals the reality of the ‘luxury route’; a passage marked by extortion, physical hardship and police brutality.

Unlike Balde, who took flights for much of his journey, Pethe largely relied on buses to get to Mexico, traveling through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador before reaching the infamous Darien Gap in Colombia, which he had to cross by foot, an experience he says ….

~ insert his experience crossing the Darien gap

“From Peru, the policemen are taking your money,” Pethe explains. “When you meet the policemen, they take you off and check your stuff, and if they see your money, they take it.” Between each encounter, Pethe says he lost around $1000. By the time he reached Mexico, he had no money left and no means of getting more. He managed to make the last leg of his journey thanks to the generosity of another migrant he met, from Iran, who wired him $500 once he arrived in the US. They had met in Mexico, but Pethe had been forced to stay behind, unable to afford the rest of his journey.

“Among immigrants, if I see you and you have money, you help me,” Pethe said. “If I have money, I will help you. Even though we are not from the same place; you might be from Asia, India, or South Africa—if you see someone in need, you help them.”

~ Talk about the police brutality next – Saikou Balde and Talhatou’s experience

Next things to include:

The WHY

Push factors – insert interviews from Abdou, who lives in Senegal, academics emailed this week and Ruth Maclean,
Why certain nationalities predominate, Economic and social factors enabling the journey, Role of existing diaspora communities
Logistics – how this is being advertised (Abdou), what people’s perceptions are of the ‘nicaragua’ route in West Africa
Deeper analysis into regional trends maybe (unless covered in the section to be added on europe fortifying borders)

Present realities in the US & future outlook with Trump presidency

Language barriers, Economic integration } what factors are unique to African immigrants and asylum seekers
Little Senegal
Alpha Diallo’s work with Pan-African Community Development Initiative – is most of the support coming from within or outside of the community?
Success stories and support networks. Role of organizations like the Welcoming Center
Mamadou’s transition from asylum seeker to community worker
Concerns about Trump administration & the varying perspectives on future risks (Saikou’s optimism with Momadou Pethe & Alpha Diallo’s concerns)
Impact on future migration patterns – quote by academic / experts

Conclusion

broader implications
Future of African migration to US
Resilience, human cost, insular community, questions of integration?…..

Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and pianist Nadia Shpachenko’s duet reverberates through the silence of the room. The space is humble in contrast to its grandiose exterior: a three-story mansion across the street from the Met, home to the Ukrainian Institute of America. They are performing far from Ukraine, where Shpachenko used to live and where all Ivakhiv’s relatives are today. The concert named “Rediscovering Hartmann” closes on dances from the 20th-century Ukrainian composer’s Epera opera. Yet, underneath these folksy melodies, if you listen closely there is the interlude of New York City bustling underneath.

Rediscovery has rested at the core of Ukrainian identity since the start of the war in Feb. 2022. This is a rediscovery rooted in the revival of the past—of personhood, of lost historical traditions, and of an appropriated national culture. For these musicians, performances of largely forgotten Ukrainian compositions represent a broader phenomenon since the war: an artistic and linguistic tradition rising from the ashes.

However, as the global platform for Ukrainian musicians dwindles, they must grapple with how to maintain the memory of an ongoing, brutal war. Three years out from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 6.7 million Ukrainians have been forced to migrate away from their homes and grapple with how they should preserve the identity of Ukraine. The response for Ukrainians has been an increasingly politicized purpose behind their musicmaking and branding as artists.

Shpachenko and her colleagues were ready to share a political and aggressive message in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. “The war started on my birthday, so I was crying all night. The next morning, composer [Lewis Spratlan] passed away, we were very close collaborators. I was invited to perform at his memorial. Lewis’s brother always wanted me to play, he wrote most of his piano music for me,” Shpachenko said to the audience.

“He called me the next morning after the war started, and he said, ‘I want to write a piece about this war, and I want to kill Putin with it.’”

Before they performed, Ivakhiv told the audience that Shpachenko had been learning Ukrainian for the past few years and now refuses to speak Russian. “She is not as good as me yet, but she’s getting there,” joked Ivakhiv. Shpachenko’s choice is emblematic of a broader trend of Ukrainians agreeing upon a resistance that is centered in culture, rooted in ancient artistic and linguistic traditions. The embrace of traditional art forms has served as a form of therapy as well as a political statement to the threat of erasure of the Ukrainian identity, a movement that has become increasingly visible on a global scale.

Perhaps there is no better example of an artist using their work to confront political turmoil than Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy was a comedian and TV show star of the 2015 television series “Servant of the People” where he played the president of Ukraine before launching a real bid for the presidency in 2018. References to the series appeared in his political campaign’s logo and his inauguration. Zelenskyy too, grew up in the native Russian-speaking city of Kryvyi Rih, and delivers national addresses in Ukrainian.

“I believe that as musicians, we are citizens. When people say that art is beyond politics, I disagree, because art is created by people who have to be responsible for their acts, statements, and beliefs,” said Ivakhiv, sitting down for an interview. “It’s about taking a stand and I believe that Ukrainians have the right to their own sovereignty.”

In the aftermath of the full-scale invasion, there was an explosion of musical practices: Ukrainians have been making more music, but also creating new sounds by repurposing traditional folk music according to ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

The hit song from Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra that won Eurovision Song Contest 2022 “Stefania” represents this modernized return to Ukrainian music. The hip hop track features rap verses against lines played on traditional Ukrainian flutes, the sopilka and the telenka, and a Ukrainian folk song vocal hook. In the song’s music video, there is heavy imagery of soldiers and the war.

“The melody itself is from a very traditional province in southeastern Ukraine, but it’s taken a life of its own,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “When I went there, singing and leading the camp with the kids, they were trying to play ‘Stefania’ on their violins. It was a way of protesting, but also expressing Ukrainian identity,” said Benham.

“We’ve been seeing musicians figuring out ways to use musical tools for advocacy. Ukrainian musicians, who had huge platforms at the very beginning, have smaller platforms now, as the world has gotten tired of the war in Ukraine, and so they’re finding new methods to call attention to their various causes,” said Sonevytsky.

– – –

“There was a propaganda by our neighbor that Ukrainian culture does not exist. I am on a mission to share our deep, sophisticated Ukrainian culture,” said Ivakhiv. “It makes me happy to see that there is such interest in discovering Ukrainian culture through literature, music, art. But also, it makes me sad that it takes a tragedy for people to be more aware,” said Solomiya, sitting down for an interview.

All these award-winning long-form pieces share a structure in the most abstract form, that they are examining characters on a deeply personal and even introspective level. Meanwhile, the narrative of the character in focus becomes a telescope that allows the reader to comprehend the implications of a specific story to a broader set of phenomena, connections, and realizations.

This is what I’ve observed in nearly all of the long-form, character-focused pieces that have been assigned to us this semester, but I think in the context of the stories that we are writing it is interesting to see how diverse the characters are, and how different journalists choose to handle the writing of that.

Specifically, I found myself intrigued by the focus on the character of the billionaire, and a non-traditional one at that. From the perspectives of us students taking the class, the characters that we’ve been working with carry story of a migrant and someone who quite easily elicits empathy: their arduous journey, a sense of purpose that fuels their migration. Eli Saslow’s piece delves into how the billionaire as a character is unsympathetic, constantly the target of democratic politicians’ rhetoric but yet also someone whose everyday habits center around making and ultimately giving money to charitable causes. The multidimensional and at times contradictory nature of this person provided a look into how a billionaire from humble beginnings really thinks. To me, this was a person who was utterly devout to the capitalist system and perhaps blindsided to some extent by that too.

Katie Engelhart’s piece focusing on a mother with dementia and how her closest circle must react was an interesting philosophical look into how one grapples with the ethics of patient treatment and medical agency. This piece felt more analytical and academic to me, pulling in a variety of voices and sources from different frameworks of thought to assess the specific situation of Diane. I also found the legal lens to be an interesting one, which was a shocking bubbling undercurrent of the piece where the dysfunction of guardianship/conservatorships were exposed in a raw light.

By looking through all of these pieces, there’s also a refreshing diversity in the styles and approaches to storytelling. I think certain techniques were very effective, specifically in how literary some interpretations verged on. I enjoyed the style of writing in Jennifer Senior’s piece on Bobby Mcilvaine, especially in the long-form lede that seemed to unpackage the mystery of what the story was behind Bobby and that form truly lent to the content of the story, similarly to the perspectives of the people around him trying to grapple with the belongings and scraps that remained after his death. This was intriguing from a reader’s experience, and is helping me think more broadly and creatively about what forms I may choose to use in my final piece.

It was really helpful to read these four incredible long form pieces and see what they shared (and didn’t) in structure. The first three pieces that I read, “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia” by Katie Engelhart, “Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15” by Eli Saslow, and “When can we really rest” by Nadja Drost, to my eye, were all structured similarly despite the very different stories they were telling. Each started with a vivid scene and used its characters to illustrate the story of a larger issue, weaving back and forth between the story and historical and, at times almost scholarly, context.

I found “The Mother Who Changed” particularly interesting structurally. Englehart didn’t just weave between the story of her characters and the broader context, but had to tell almost two versions of the story as told by Diane’s daughters and by Denzil – the very basis of the piece was in the “then-self” v.s. the “now-self” of dementia, and in the ways that the people in dementia patients’ lives understand them differently.

Engelhart’s two sets of sources had diametrically opposed understandings of what had happened in the battle over Diane’s care, and yet Englehart managed to present them both respectfully without seeming to choose a side – this is the power and importance of the third party observer. Englehart would switch every few paragraphs from telling the story through the eyes of Diane’s daughters and from those of Denzil, consistently showing two different versions of the same moments.

When Englehart did throw in her own voice, however, was in the large sections of the piece that went through the history of the frameworks for assessing capacity. These sections felt almost more like academic writing – she would write for many paragraphs using scholarly sources and quotes from academics, and even include her own analysis and claims. One moment that stuck out to me was when she wrote that,

“In our own lives, we insist on the right to make our own choices, even bad ones — what is sometimes called “the right to folly.” As independent agents, we are free to be unreasonable and unwise and to act against our own best interests: maybe because of flawed reasoning, or just because we want to. But with older relatives, we often insist on prudence over passion.”

I read this as her own analysis, not as coming from a source – it’s cool how with long form at this level, journalists can play with the rules.

The Darien Gap and bus pieces similarly used a specific set of characters as a framework for telling a larger story, gliding between anecdote and context. The final piece I read though, “What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind,” felt different. Senior told the story from a personal perspective – her relationship to Bobby and his family was a key part of the story. The piece read almost as a profile of Bobby and of his family, rather than using it as an illustration for a bigger phenomenon.