Documented: The Community Blackboard, 2006.
When I returned from my Fulbright residency in El Salvador, I considered how I might bridge the distance between the stories of Salvadorans living “there” and those of the Salvadoran community in the Washington, D.C. area. Documented: The Community Blackboard is a site-specific space created for the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. It invited the public to post their family photos and write their own migration story onto the museum walls while a collage-like bilingual sound piece, streaming into the space, wove together my own reflections on migration as gathered from oral testimonies and other aural impressions recorded in El Salvador, as well as from excerpts of poems that I wrote when I first came to the U.S. in 1980.
