Our Team & Our Stories:
My name is Daniel Tossing, and I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. I have an Associate Degree in Art from St. Louis Community College at Meramec in Kirkwood, Missouri and a Bachelor of Fine Art Degree in Photography from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
Growing up in St. Louis, immigrants and immigration was integrated into my family’s way of life. My parents met each other at an immigrant owned Chinese bar named Kwan Yin where my father played piano. My mother worked with an organization that helped immigrants and refugees come to America. When I was three, she helped four Cambodian refugees immigrate to America where they lived with us for several years. Soon after they left our house, my parents divorced, and my mother married an Ethiopian immigrant. In college I lived with a South Korean immigrant while simultaneously teaching in Irving, Texas, which happens to be the second most diverse city in America (only behind Queens, New York). While working at North Lake Community College I taught immigrants from Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Columbia, Crimea, England, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Honduras, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam in my photography classes.
My paternal grandmother’s family (the Wagner’s) immigrated to the United States from Germany in the early 1900’s. As I child, I would visit that side of my family outside of Chicago, and my grandmother would serve us delicious German food. Based on these experiences I always assumed that I was predominately German, but a few years ago I took a DNA test to know more about my family history I learned that I was predominately Scots Irish, so for this project I have decided to focus on this part of my family history.
The symbol that I have chosen to represent my family’s immigration experience is the Celtic double spiral. The term Celtic commonly refers to the cultures and languages of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Isle of Man, and Brittany. The double spiral traditionally symbolizes spiritual awakening, birth and death, and creation and destruction existing in balance. Having been around countless immigrants and refugees I can see how these ideas parallel their experiences of leaving their countries to start a new life here in America. I’ve recently lost my job, sold my home, left my friends, and moved to Colorado with my family. I feel like my old life suddenly vanished and now I’m creating a new one here. The symbol itself also reminds me of where I grew up, close to the banks of the mighty Mississippi River.
The color that I have chosen to represent my immigration experience is a combination of blue and green. Green was my father’s favorite color, and it symbolizes the expansive green grasslands of Ireland and Scotland, and blue is my favorite color and represents the water that nourishes these grasslands and surrounds these scenic islands. Ironically, blue and green were also the school colors of the college where I taught.
My name is Malea Vitt, I was born in Boulder Colorado. I have a bachelors degree in Studio Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder. I moved around a lot as a child, living briefly in North Carolina and other small town southern states before coming back to the place where I was born.
Looking at my roots, the foundation of where I came from as an indigenous woman and the child of a single mother, immigration and immigrants hold a very different place in my story and the story of my people. Everyone who lives in the united states is an immigrant of some sort, can be traced back to the immigration of white colonial settlers in the 15th century. Ancestors of my mother were immigrants from Ireland, and my other ancestors, they were indigenous to North America. The centuries that followed the arrival of Europeans were years of tremendous upheaval, as the expansion of settler territory and the founding and growth of the United States resulted in Native American communities being moved, renamed, combined, dispersed, and, in some cases, destroyed.
These dislocations and changes took place across many centuries, and each individual episode was marked by its own set of unique circumstances, from public negotiations and careful planning to subterfuge and deceit; from declarations of friendship to calls for genocide; from disease, starvation, and bloodshed to perseverance, resistance, and hope in the face of persecution. But all were driven by the relentless expansion of European settlement and U.S. territory, and by U.S. government policies that relegated the independence and well-being of Native Americans to secondary status, if that. At the end of the gold rush era, before boarding schools, and polices influenced by the bureau of Indian Affairs, my people were forced to migrate due to immigration, forced to go on what they called the long sad walk, later to be coined the trail of tears by the Cherokee nation. For those who may not be aware, in order to be recognized as native you have to be able to trace your ancestry back to the original signing of the Dawes rolls, in order to be numbered and designated tribal rights to. Now Natives like myself are given blood quantum cards that designate what percentage of our blood is native, at some point my great great grandchildren will not have enough "native" blood to be considered a member of any tribal nation. The current national debate on illegal immigration has left out the voices of the people who are native to this land – voices that challenge who exactly is ‘illegal.’” I strongly dislike the word “illegal,” especially since the very policies currently in place are set up to eventually erase natives from popular culture and the future of the united states as a whole. Often I feel invisible, forgotten, and unrepresented, and I don’t think people realize that the first illegal immigrants were European settlers. , if we’re going to talk about illegal immigration, we need to go back in the last 350-500 years ago, of starting with Plymouth Rock and who had permission to come over to our lands. If you are reading this there is a chance you are on indigenous land, you are an immigrant, and it is sad how many people have forgotten that.
The symbol I have chosen to represent my immigration story is an Eagle. Which is both a symbol for the united states and what it has become, but more importantly for my tribe has been a symbol of peace and acceptance. My views on immigration are very different than most, however my views mirror those of other natives on reservations, an acceptance that immigration has been long apart of our story as a nation, it is woven into the fabric of Americans founding story. This symbol acts to remind me of my people, and the very foundation of the past on which we all stand as immigrants.
The color I have chosen to represent my immigrant experience is a golden yellow color, it is the color at the center of my tribal flag. it is a color I associate with sunshine, the future, and a tomorrow for all people. It reminds me of shucking corn, and long days on dirt roads with mush and cornbread. It is a color that is woven throughout my own life as much as it is a color that makes me feel safe, warm, and happy.
I’m Nikki Alexander Atkinson and I was born in Fort Collins Colorado, but raised in Seattle, WA from three to 23 years old. I graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Art History and a BFA in Painting. I then moved to NYC for ten years where I worked professionally as an artist assistant to Jane Hammond and a jewelry designer for Jane Diaz.
After moving to Austin and continuing to make and design my own line of jewelry, I also took up teaching a curriculum-based afterschool arts program where I taught metalsmithing the first year and sewing the second year to teens ages 12-18. I discovered my passion for teaching and moved back to Fort Collins to get my M.Ed.
My mother is from Guatemala and my father is from a small German community in New Braunfels, Texas. For this project I choose to focus on my mother’s early memories of Guatemala and making the move to the United States as a little girl with her parents (my grandparents.) I chose the symbol of banana; which has some weighted emotions when surrounding Guatemala, both as a symbol of pride and one of sadness when surrounding the complicated history with the United Fruit Company.
My mother’s earliest memories of the United States were the hot open flat grasslands of Oklahoma. She remembers at night hearing the trains and thinking that they sounded ghost-like and scary. The move was in hopes to change the family’s opportunities, yet it was such a stark contrast to the lush rainforests, plants and plethora of family and culture they left behind. In Guatemala, she remembers picking sugarcane and bananas with all her cousins on the farm and knocking spiders off the fruit.
I chose the color of bright green for the vibrancy of the rainforest and the symbol of banana to represent her and those complex feelings and the sense of pride for what that brings to the fabric of the United States.