An Anticolonial Land-Based Approach to Urban Place: Mobile Cartographic Stories by Refugee Youth

Abstract

This article introduces a mobile Global Positioning System app created by refugee girls in the United States as a social justice- and community-oriented media art project that provides visual and oral countermapping stories that reflect an anticolonial orientation in their presentation of the city of Buffalo, New York. Through collaborative work with refugee girls in a community media art educational setting in Buffalo, I centered our projects on challenging settler colonial geographies by presencing subaltern stories of place. I use a land-based, critical race educational approach to guide my understanding of the youths’ subaltern stories of place in relation to settler colonialism. This anticolonial mobile cartographic story app highlights land pedagogy; the young refugees’ palimpsest-like, subaltern stories of urban spaces, which serve as testimonies to their lived experiences; and countermapping, which challenges and rewrites the imperatives of settler cartographies.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Senior Editor Dr. Dónal O’Donoghue and the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback to sharpen my article. I also express my gratitude to Dr. Alex Stratton and doctoral student Luke Meeken for technical support. Most of all, my deepest appreciation goes to the refugee girl participants, Shwizen, Lydia, Ayebay, Blatsay, Moo, Savior, and Lulu for their long and sincere commitment to the project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This article was supported by the National Art Education Foundation (NAEF) Research Grant, 2018.

Notes

¹ The Karen tribe is an ethnic minority group in Myanmar, which is linguistically and ethnically diverse. British triumph in the 19th century brought Christianity to Myanmar and converted many Karens, who, in return, were favored by British colonial authorities. The Christian Karen resists the Burmese military government that aligns with the Buddhist faction. The name Karen is an anglicized Burmese word, Kayin, which originally referred to the non-Buddhist ethnic group in a derogatory manner. Of the total Karen people, 65% are Buddhists, along with animism, which created huge tension with Christian Karen who represent 15–20% of the population in Myanmar. The religious/political/ethnic factions created continuous tensions until now.

² The participants were girls ages 13–16 years old at the time of their participation. They were originally from Myanmar and were dislocated to a refugee camp named Mae La in Thailand before they came to the US. At the time of the project, they had been in the US for approximately 4–7 years.

³ Buffalo is the second largest city in New York State. The current demographics of the city are approximately 42.5% Whites of European descent, including Irish, Italian, Polish, and German; 34% Black; 12% Hispanic; 8% Asian; and 3% Native American and other races (https://datausa.io/profile/geo/buffalo-ny/). As of 2019, the population was about 256,300. During 2003–2013, the city took in a total of 9,723 refugees, but under the Trump administration, the number of incoming Buffalo refugees has dramatically dropped by two thirds, and approximately 588 refugees have resettled. The city contains refugee people from 15 different countries. The majority of the refugees are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burma (https://buffalonews.com/2019/09/29/number-of-refugees-coming-to-buffalo-set-to-drop-again/).

⁴ My racial and ethnic identity as a Korean immigrant in the US has played a positive role in helping me build a close connection with the Karen refugee girls. As Asian immigrants, we have some shared cultural background, which has provided us with a comfort zone of emotional/psychological affinity. Additionally, the girls’ love for Korean popular culture made our relationship closer as we shared stories about K-pop and discussed Korean culture and language. However, I am deeply aware of my position as a Korean adult and university professor, which provides me a certain amount of privilege. Thus, I am conscious of my positionality and the power hierarchies that such privilege can create. For the past 8 years, I have spent a great deal of time building relationships with and accountability to this community through participating in refugee community events, providing tutoring and mentoring, and establishing a college prep/art and media program for refugees that prioritizes the community’s needs and desires.

⁵ The first workshop was held in summer 2012 at a local community academic center. It involves our drift of the city and our project attempt to create a site-specific art event at certain places the girls chose (Bae-Dimitriadis, 2016).

⁶ On this Buffalo city map, two areas along the river are marked where a large number of refugees currently reside. Since the 1800s, the shores of the river have been heavily industrialized, specifically with chemical manufacturers, which adversely affect the health of the river and land due to industrial discharge and waste. Unlike the waterfronts of some other U.S. cities, the riverfront of Buffalo has been a dull and poor area with many abandoned buildings and little commercial development.

⁷ Settler colonial land pedagogy, as described by McCoy et al. (2016), is a predominant teaching of White settlers that promotes their ownership of the land through converting tribal lands into their own property. This type of pedagogy centers White European settlers’ narratives and focuses on the White settlers who declared their sovereignty over land belonging to Indigenous peoples and who established laws and policies to legitimate their rights and position.

⁸ I use the term “unattended presence” to describe the way in which refugees and immigrants live in places as community members and citizens but are often treated as nonexistent/unimportant through ignorance or indifference via the settler state’s policies and laws.

⁹ We used an app service provided by the company OnCell.

¹⁰ This map shows where the participants created mobile oral (visual) stories, and it traces the routes participants created to connect them. There are three different paths: The upper-left path follows stories of refugee life, the upper-right path focuses on Buffalo’s main cultural and commercial sites where White upper- and middle-class residents usually spend time and reside, and the lower path is a Black history path that includes stops along the Underground Railroad. These paths were drawn by the girls using Google Maps, which was a part of their mapping activity.

¹¹ In this context, this term refers to a current-day White descendant who is an existing resident of a place and/or who moves to the area to take ownership of a place. In settler colonial theory, White settlers are differentiated from refugee settlers in that the latter’s relationship to the land largely remains one of displacement and dispossession rather than ownership.

¹² I use this term to mean that the settler colonial state has continued managing and modifying the land’s functions and purposes based on their economic benefit.

¹³ The area contains racially and ethnically mixed groups of Black, Latino, and White individuals, most of whom are living in poverty, along with refugees from 15 different countries, the majority of whom are from Africa and South Asia, particularly from Burma. Even most White working-class people in poverty have owned their own properties in the ghetto for many years, but Blacks, Latinos, and refugees have rarely owned their properties. Urban development has granted economic benefits to White residents by raising the real estate market price, while Blacks, Latinos, and refugees become dislocated and dispossessed.

¹⁴ In this context, this term refers to a current-day White descendant who is an existing resident of a place and/or who moves to the area to take ownership of a place. In settler colonial theory, White settlers are differentiated from refugee settlers in that the latter’s relationship to the land largely remains one of displacement and dispossession rather than ownership.

¹⁵ This term was originally used in literary work and describes when the original writing has been erased, but the page can be reused for more writing. Many different fields have adopted this term, particularly urban studies, architecture, and history. For example, Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003) introduced a reading technique for understanding urban spaces and their unfolding over time; through this technique, Huyssen suggested that, to understand an urban space, one cannot simply convert the city and its architecture into text but, instead, should view it as lived spaces of a collective imaginary that reveal the multilayered pasts of the city.

¹⁶ Figures 3–5 are a combination of several photos taken by several of the participants that Sweizen, a 15-year-old participant, put together using Photoshop. All the participants collaboratively selected several photos. We discussed ways to protect their identities, and, as such, the participants decided to use photos showing their backs rather than their fronts.

¹⁷ This term refers to a blend of artistic production and activism. It emerged at a 1997 gathering among Chicano artists from East Los Angeles and Mexico. Artivism describes the generation of a political intervention via artistic production, which is created by adopting diverse forms of art to enact political intentions (Sandoval & Latorre, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the National Art Educational Foundation (NAEF) 2018–2019.