From Ukraine to Afghanistan, Mexico and beyond, KQED Live's "Finding Asylum in California" event touched on asylum broadly as well as the U.S. immigration court system, the role of social media, and art.
Aiming to see the path of asylum-seekers to California through different lenses, KQED Newsroom host Priya David Clemens interviewed on stage Fouzia Azizi, director of refugee services at Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay, as well as Fresno City College professor and artist Caleb Duarte and KQED Immigration Senior Editor Tyche Hendricks.
Azizi helps find homes and support for those fleeing war-torn counties. That's here and now. But when Azizi saw photos and videos of the war in Ukraine, it brought her back to her time growing up in Afghanistan, she told a virtual KQED audience on a livestream last week.
"It's [taking] me back to all those memories that I had when I was in Afghanistan as a young girl seeing Russian soldiers all over the city," she said. "What I see and witness right now with Ukraine, my heart goes to these people. But the situation was not different in Afghanistan."
Caleb Duarte, who grew up in both Mexico and the U.S., is known for painting, public sculptures and community performances across the globe in places like Cuba, Honduras and India. He said his work tries to explore the human condition while empowering others to exercise art: political prisoners, children, people in disability centers. His aim is to go past the hopelessness, to see evidence of power, resistance and survival.
"We as artists, our tool is the image, the painted image, the ability to tell stories through simple actions that are kind of sometimes absurd actions that really change, can possibly change someone's perspective," Duarte said.
A 2021 project he worked on called "Burning Houses" saw Duarte and asylum-seekers in Tijuana create small, symbolic houses with the families of refugees camping at the border to highlight the hope they have for their children: to seek a new life. Duarte said he considers the project "invisible theater," with the audience being asylum-seekers.
"We decided to carry the houses through the camp and straight to the U.S.-Mexican border as a symbol as evidence of resistance, of survival, also evidence of joy," Duarte said.
The community artists then burnt the homes at the U.S.-Mexican border.
"Generally, we think of the idea of burning as such a destructive act, but it seems like you were really working to reclaim that. Why burn them?" KQED's Clemens asked Duarte.
Duarte pointed to a statement made by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who told Guatemalan immigrants at the time, "Do not come." The artists hoped to point to intervention from the U.S. into Central America throughout history, Duarte said.
