Chicago is steeped in the immigrant tradition and alive right now with the energy and natural chaos of recent arrivals to the city and suburbs.
The project and site bring together the personal stories that emerge from the multiple immigrant communities in and around Chicago, and the committed reporting on issues of interest to immigrants and their families. Meet our staff and contributors and read our stories too.
The project is an ongoing collaboration of storytellers with those whose stories are well worth sharing. We are connecting college and high school students eager to learn more about diverse cultures with people eager to have their stories told. We are collecting stories reported by the ethnic media, translating them, and disseminating them throughout other immigrant communities. We are an integral part of a cross-community collective of teachers, librarians, museum curators, activists and social service workers who work regularly with immigrants whose stories enrich us all. And we offer an easy-to-use place on the site for people to tell their own stories and to connect with one another.
Why? Because the immigrant experience is historically one also of isolation and insecurity, and the sharing of stories and information is a time-honored antidote.
Through stories, we cross ethnic, cultural, neighborhood and generational lines. Immigrant experiences are as varied as the people involved, and though those stories surface every day, they often go untold, unshared and unappreciated.
We owe an enormous debt of gratitude and our very existence to Northwestern University, the Medill School of Journalism and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and we’d like to thank the McCormick Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Community Information Challenge, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University for their support.
For more information, please get in touch with us at j-doppelt@northwestern.edu.