New Americans project Reflection

New Americans Project Reflection
Wyatt Baquial

The purpose of the project is to learn about the experiences of immigrants from all around the world. We started our project with reading a book about an immigrant. My book was the book called Brother, I’m Dying which is based on a girl named Edwidge that emigrated from Haiti to America. I’m not entirely sure whether or not I liked my choice. It did show that for a lot of immigrants, it’s hard to immigrate to America. My book had good description but to me all the bad things that happened to her made me not want to read it anymore. It was a little predictable. The blogging for me was easy. I spoke from my heart and could connect to almost all the quotes I picked. The only problem I had with blogging was that my group members rarely posted their blogs so I had to respond to people in the other class.
For the art section of the project, I chose to paint what I thought was the theme of the book. I painted what I depicted the book was about. My painting had pictures of Edwidge and how she had to take care of her dad and her uncle while pregnant with a baby. I also painted a bridge going from America to Haiti with a gap in it to show that for a while she couldn’t immigrate to America to live with her dad. I was really able to connect to the intellect of the book. She was going through all these things that she didn’t anticipate but tried to stay calm and collected. When I am in a wreck I try to think it through and make sure I’m on the right track. I liked the final product on my painting. I think I captured the expression of depression on her face. I also think the colors like the grey and white contrasted each other and drew a lot of eyes. I think if I spent more time on details it would have been a more professional painting. I wish I used a skinnier brush for the face and around the countries. I think all the proportions were good but I could have spent more time touching up the painting. While reading the book I knew there were a lot of depressing things that happened, but until I put most of it on paper I really realized how hard it was for all the characters in the book. I learned that immigrating to America isn’t just a plane ride and you’re free. For millions of immigrants it was a long and hard journey for the ultimate gift. Some were detained. Some were turned down, and some didn’t even make it on the way to America.

The last part of the project was where we were assigned an actual immigrant who was a different race then our own and we had to interview them about their journey over to America. My interview was with a woman who works for my dad named Rose. My interview with her went really well. I didn’t see many problems with it and since we’ve known each other for so long, we were both comfortable. The only thing differently I wish I did was to have more follow up questions because some of her answers were answers like, “Not really”, “Probably not”, “Yes”, and “No”. I wish I had more open-ended questions. I didn’t really like having to do three different interviews but I know what their purpose was. I just feel like I asked so many questions at all these different times. I wish we just had one interview. I learned a lot of things about Brazil during the interviews. I learned that in Brazil during the 1980’s it was required to learn 2 years of English in High school. I had never heard of a place called Sao Paulo before the interviews. I learned that Sao Paulo was one of the richest cities in the world and is the business center of Brazil. I learned about Rose’s reasons for immigrating and all the things she did before she came here to America. I really liked the project and am grateful I got to interview someone I’ve known a long time