- Arthur Rothstein, “Homes of Oyster Packinghouse Workers, Shellpile, New Jersey,” 1938
Working in close partnership with community stakeholders over multiple stages, MONUMENTS TO MIGRATION AND LABOR is creating public art, monument installations, and programming that explore what it has meant to migrate to and work in New Jersey.
The first of its kind, this project offers a model for how public history and art, and monumental expressions, can actively and democratically involve the public in constructing new and more inclusive commemorative landscapes.
Examining immigrants who have come to New Jersey from abroad, as well as Southern Blacks and Puerto Ricans who moved to the state, this project confronts the hostility and exclusions that groups migrating for work have historically encountered.
Demonized in the media and political discourse as economic burdens, criminals and worse, this project represents a collective opportunity and effort to change perceptions. We aim to examine how im/migrant laborers are essential to New Jersey and the United States, while also interpreting their complicated stories.
Although monuments have come to be associated with statues and other sculptural forms representing top-down celebrations of “great men” and famous events, this project asks: what if migrants and laborers, and the communities they belong to, are given the chance to build commemorative works of art whose content they determine. From this project, we hope that the art and history produced by New Jersey im/migrants, artists, and scholars can inspire further public engagement with labor and migration – in myriad forms and forums – that sustain the original project’s spirit.
- Ashley Gilbertson/VII Photo/Talking Eyes
- Inside a Paterson Silk Mill, Courtesy of the American Labor Museum.
This project spans the breadth of New Jersey and the entirety of the state’s history and includes a diverse selection of stories and engagements that highlight the incredible range of groups who migrated to the state. In New Jersey, histories of migration and labor are layered on top of each other.
In Paterson, New Jersey, for instance, the city’s historic role in American industrialization led to its status as a manufacturing center that attracted Syrian, Lebanese, and European immigrants and Black migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which now coexists with its twenty-first-century importance as a commercial and social hub for Arab American and Latin American communities in the state.
In Cumberland County, at Seabrook Farms, the stories of incarcerated Japanese Americans laborers who resettled in the state during World War Two, after incarceration in camps, cannot be understood separately from the stories of Black migrant farmworkers whose families also contributed to the wartime agricultural and food processing economy. Nor can the economic dependence of the region, and the cost of agricultural goods, be understood without appreciating the approximately 20,000 migrant farmworkers who continue to come to New Jersey each growing and harvesting season in the present.
We encourage connections across time and space, to encourage generative conversations about why we need to rethink how we value migrants and laborers.
Prior to European settlement in North America, the lands that became the colony and then state of New Jersey, were occupied and worked by the indigenous Lenape peoples.
For New Jersey to be “opened” to migration from aboard, many of the original inhabitants were pressured or forced to leave, as part of involuntary expulsions. We acknowledge this history as an essential part of the story as well.
We acknowledge this history as an essential part of the story as well.
- Diwali, Jersey City. Photo by David Berman.
