For the undocumented immigrant teenagers in Martyna Majok’s unsparing, unsentimental new play, home is a heartbreaking lesson in betrayal.
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In “Blue Bayou,” what begins as an affectingly unfussy immigrant story centering on a New Orleans tattoo artist — brought from South Korea to the United States for adoption as a child, but without proper paperwork, and now facing deportation in his 30s, after his citizenship status comes to light — is unable to sustain its nuanced, naturalistic tone.
The mural, spanning 150 feet across and reaching 20 feet high, is in Playas de Tijuana, next to the Mexican side of Friendship Park where the border fence meets the Pacific Ocean.
As a boy, even when the Salvadoran army was laying waste to his hometown and guerrilla rebels were stalking the nearby woods, José Zelaya held fast to his dream. “One day,” he told his mother, “I’m going to work for Mickey Mouse.”
“Song to a Refugee,” an inadvertent concept album from the singer and songwriter Diana Jones, strives to center the voices of migrant women.
“Five Years North” follows two New Yorkers whose paths you hope will never cross. Luis is an undocumented 16-year-old from Guatemala, who at the film’s outset has just been released from detention and awaits a court date. Judy is a middle-age Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer overseeing Luis’s neighborhood.
I’m an immigrant—and I’m not alone. Padma Lakshmi opens each episode of her new Hulu series Taste the Nation with that mantra, and it’s one that’s powering the food author and TV host during the Trump administration’s all-out war on immigrants, from the “Muslim ban” and separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border to the recent suspension of immigrant-worker visas through 2021.
For the past three years, David and his son, Adelso, have communicated only by phone. Adelso is just one of about 5,500 children who was taken from a parent, as a result of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
