En Root

Inspired by the migratory journey of monarch butterflies, Travieso’s En Root brings together histories of migration and labor in New Brunswick, attention to the natural environment, and a desire to center renewal, community, and joy for immigrants in the city today.

Since the 1990s, the monarch butterfly has emerged as a powerful symbol for immigrant rights and solidarity in the U.S. The monarch butterfly undertakes an extraordinary multi-generational migration from central Mexico to parts of the U.S. and Canada and back. The monarch butterfly represents and embodies movement across borders for survival, profound resilience, and the connections that exist between places separated by geography. For people celebrating el Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, in Mexico, the returning monarch butterflies also represent a form of public memory of the cycles of life.

Monarch butterfly populations have been in decline, leading to their designation as a threatened species, and efforts to restore natural habitats that support and increase the population. New Brunswick lies along their migratory route and provides a summer habitat for monarchs to feed and reproduce on their journey.

Example of a monarch butterfly waystation. Photo courtesy of Chat Travieso.

“What if the Central New Jersey Monument to Migration and Labor could attract monarch butterflies, creating a living symbol of belonging, support, and solidarity for immigrant workers in New Brunswick?”

— CHAT TRAVIESO

Design rendering of the gateway installation with plantings in War Memorial Park.

The monument consists of a large-scale sculptural gateway installation in War Memorial Park, at the triangle formed by the intersection of French Street and Jersey Avenue., This public space is also known as Parque Oaxaca by members of the community, which is a nod to New Brunswick’s significant immigrant community from Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico. En Root features monarch-attracting pollinator gardens, with native plantings, as well as information and resources for immigrant workers. This bright orange, inviting gateway, will serve as a gathering place for celebration, learning, and resource-sharing for both residents of the neighborhood, and the broader New Brunswick community.

Design rendering depicting an overhead view with individual planter boxes making up the structure of the gateway installation.

Design rendering depicting the view from inside the gateway installation.

Design rendering of monument installation with plantings in War Memorial Park surrounded by community members.

In addition to the main archway, there will be a series of monarch-friendly pollinator planters set up throughout the city in partnership with local organizations and schools, incorporating educational materials and resources for immigrant workers and site-specific information and history.

Design rendering of a planter at a satellite location.

The concept of En Root, Travieso shares, begins with a simple planter. Eventually, he envisions the possibility of adding more plantings in War Memorial Park, and beyond, with native perennial species that support monarch butterfly populations on a more permanent basis.In the long run, the goal is to create a sustainable habitat and ecological landscape that honor and echo the immigrant contributions in the city of New Brunswick.

The New Jersey Monuments to Migration and Labor project organized a series of community dialogues across the state in the spring and summer of 2025, including six in New Brunswick. Dialogue facilitators, who were themselves connected to the city or state’s im/migrant communities, guided stakeholders in discussions about the histories and personal narratives of migration and labor in the region.

Unity Square, May 2025.

Unity Square, July 2025.

Caritas/St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, June 2025.

Caritas/St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, June 2025.

Unity Square, May 2025.

Unity Square, May 2025.

Artwork made by participants during community dialogues in New Brunswick; collected and archived by NJMML.

Travieso highlights the importance of these community dialogues in shaping his ideas for En Root. In one activity at a community dialogue at Unity Square, participants were asked to bring an object or artifact that represented migration and labor to them. Some community members brought plants from their community garden, including marigolds, which are particularly meaningful for the Mexican celebration of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

Travieso was also inspired by the fight to pass New Jersey’s Temporary Worker’s Bill of Rights and the work of New Labor, a worker advocacy organization. Alongside the monarch butterfly’s journey, the foundations for En Root can be found at the intersection of nature and the garden, and the meanings that these sites offer about home and regrowth, and the ongoing advocacy by and for immigrant workers in New Brunswick.

Travieso led a series of three public events in the winter of 2025 and spring of 2026, during which he brainstormed with community stakeholders about where the monument might be located, and received feedback on a concept proposal. The public events featured activities aimed at gathering – and sometimes challenging – participants’ ideas of what a monument can and should be. From these public events, stakeholders envisioned a monument that centers their own stories and voices.

The images below are examples of participant artwork during the public event in New Brunswick in October 2025.

Photos from the final public event unveiling the monument design at Unity Square, March 2026. Courtesy of coLAB Arts and Chat Travieso.

Participants mapped out a convincing case for the monument’s placement in War Memorial Park as a location that is highly visible, nearby a commercial area frequented by the immigrant community, and meaningful to many of New Brunswick’s immigrant workers and their families.

NJMML is excited to host a series of events and activities related to the unveiling of the monuments this summer, and programs that will animate these installations even further!

Please see below for information about upcoming community engagement opportunities and the ribbon-cutting event for En Root at War Memorial Park in New Brunswick.

New Brunswick, NJ

En Root: Community Painting Event

May 31, 2026

13:00

to 16:00

New Brunswick, NJ

En Root: Public Opening!

June 18, 2026

17:30

HOW TO ENGAGE WITH EN ROOT

To learn more about how you and your organization might take part in programs connected to En Root, please take a look at the “How-to-Engage Manual” posted below.

HOW-TO-ENGAGE MANUAL (ENGLISH)

MANUAL DE PARTICIPACIÓN (ESPAÑOL)

SATELLITE PLANTERS

En Root includes a network of monarch butterfly-supporting planters that are located throughout the city, forming a living symbol of belonging, care, and solidarity for immigrant workers in New Brunswick. These are placed at sites that are meaningful to immigrant communities and the city’s migration history.

There are 15 satellite planters in total, spread out across the city. Image by Chat Travieso.

ABOUT MONARCH BUTTERFLIES

En Root’s plantings - newly installed and ready to attract monarch butterflies! Photo by Chat Travieso.

Monarch Migration

Monarch butterflies are an iconic species throughout the Americas. These orange and black butterflies migrate between Canada and Mexico annually. Monarchs spend the winter in Mexico in a specific habitat called the Oyamel fir forest just outside of Mexico City. In the spring, the butterflies fly north from Mexico up through the United States and Canada, stopping along the way to lay their eggs. They make their northward journey over several generations, spending spring and summer in the U.S. and Canada. In the fall, a single generation of butterflies flies up to 3,000 miles south to the same forests in Mexico to spend the winter. During this stage of the migration, they can fly between 50 and 100 miles in a single day! This incredible trip is considered a natural wonder of the world.

Monarch Habitat in New Brunswick

Like all animals, especially those that migrate long distances, monarchs need to find and consume food along their journey. Pollinator habitats like the one in this installation and in satellite planters throughout the city of New Brunswick provide food in the form of flower nectar for the tired butterflies. With much of the city covered in asphalt or lawns, providing discrete spaces for food and places to rest makes it possible for the butterflies to complete their migration. Other pollinators like bees and even hummingbirds will also benefit from the flowers in these planters. Pollinators make essential contributions to their ecosystems by maintaining healthy plant populations as well as providing food for animals that eat insects, such as birds. Many species of bees also pollinate our crops such as blueberries, cucumbers, watermelon, and others.

During their travel, the butterflies need both host plants and nectar sources. Host plants are food for the caterpillars. Monarch caterpillars can only eat one food: the leaves of the milkweed plant. The plants give the caterpillars toxins that protect them from predators. The reason that the caterpillars have their bright, stripy appearance is to warn predators that they are poisonous. The adults can drink nectar from many types of flowers. The plants in the pollinator garden here and in planter boxes installed throughout New Brunswick support monarchs at both stages of their life. Milkweed is the tall plant with the orange flowers and oval leaves that stick out at right angles from the stem. Other plants here provide nectar for the adult butterflies to drink. These plants include perennial plants native to this region, like purple coneflower, black-eyed susan, and wild bergamot, and annuals like marigolds, chosen for their cultural significance to Mexican and Mexican American celebrations of Day of the Dead.

How You Can Help Monarchs

- If you have a lawn or balcony, you can plant milkweed and other plants like the ones in this pollinator garden in the ground or in pots.
- If you see a butterfly or caterpillar, observe it carefully and respectfully so as not to disrupt its feeding or rest.
- You can use the app iNaturalist to record your monarch sightings and see if others near you have seen monarchs or other cool species. Eliminate the use of pesticides on your lawn as they are harmful to monarchs and other beneficial insects.

DEFINED BY MIGRATION AND LABOR

The New Brunswick Cigar Company, which went by several names during its history, was famous for producing the “White Owl” brand. A photo from the 1920s shows a group of Hungarian immigrant women, overseen by a male foreman, hand rolling cigars. Courtesy of the American Hungarian Foundation and RUCore.

New Brunswick Through These Lenses

Why focus on New Brunswick as a city whose history is continually being redefined by migration and labor? An extension of En Root, this interpretive text explores how human movement and work have driven New Brunswick’s cultural, economic, and social development, even if the individuals involved in these transformations have often gone unremembered by the public. Channeling En Root’s monumental energy, we hope that this text encourages visitors to reimagine New Brunswick’s landscapes as full of stories of labor and migration that deserve to be seen and commemorated – once we have trained our eyes to do so.

The Colony's Foundations

“We did not propose to deprive ourselves” – Thomas King, Oneida Chief

Prior to European settlement, the indigenous, Algonkian-speaking Lenape people of the region lived in villages along the Raritan River. The river provided access to oyster beds in the bay, and rich alluvial soil for Lenape to grow corn, beans, and pumpkins. In 1681, Daniel Cooper and John Inian were recorded in property transactions as the first European inhabitants of what would become New Brunswick. They were drawn to the area by work ferrying travelers across the Raritan River. European settlers’ insistence on outright land ownership led to clashes and resulted in Lenape displacement. At the 1758 Treaty of Easton, when the indigenous peoples of New Jersey ceded their remaining land to the English colony, one of the assembled leaders noted that with earlier sales, we “did not propose to deprive ourselves of hunting the wild deer or using a stick of wood when we should have occasion.”

Many of the migrants who built and maintained life in New Jersey during the colonial period, did so as unfree labor. English, German, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh migrants arrived in the colonies as indentured servants bound to employers until the cost of their transatlantic passage was paid off. Perth Amboy, down the Raritan River, was a major point of entry for enslaved people from Africa brought to the Americas against their will. The institution of slavery was crucial to colonial New Jersey’s economy, with slave-trading families endowing Queen’s College – later Rutgers University – and employing enslaved laborers to build the original campus.

Hands Wanted

After the American Revolution, in the early nineteenth century, New Brunswick emerged as a manufacturing hub. The construction of the Delaware and Raritan Canal between 1830 and 1834, with its eastern terminus in New Brunswick, depended on thousands of Irish manual laborers who dug without the assistance of machinery. Labor brokers placed advertisements in Irish newspapers in New York City, and Liverpool, England, promising jobs and advanced fare to any able-bodied man willing to work hard with a shovel and pickaxe. When cholera ravaged the East Coast in the summer of 1832, and work on the canal suspended, scores of Irish immigrants died in hastily assembled shanties along the river.

By the 1850s, nativist, anti-immigrant groups such as the Order of United Americans characterized the fast-growing Irish and German Catholic immigrant communities in New Brunswick as a “threat” to be controlled. In 1853, for instance, the Order proposed that trades’ guilds in New Brunswick bar “all foreign competition” from employment.

Still, the demand for immigrant labor overwhelmed anti-immigrant sentiment. From the Civil War until the 1920s, unrestricted immigration from Europe allowed the United States to become a leading industrial economy. In New Brunswick, companies like Johnson & Johnson maintained plants, cotton mills, and warehouses for the manufacture and distribution of plasters and other medical supplies. Janeway and Carpender, one of the country’s leading wallpaper companies, employed thousands of workers at multiple sites across the city. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ability to hire Eastern and Southern European immigrants in abundant numbers, for relatively low wages, was vital to New Brunswick’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse.

Despite being young men and women who were often obliged to support family members living abroad, immigrant workers still fought for fair pay and safe working conditions. In June 1912, at the New Brunswick Cigar Company on Somerset Street, for instance, more than a thousand Hungarian immigrant women working as cigar rollers walked out on strike, with hundreds of more workers from the weaving rooms of Johnson & Johnson's surgical appliances division joining in solidarity. Chastised for the ferocity of their pickets and “unladylike” behavior, the young women did not want their demands for better wages, union representation, and regular working hours to go unheard.

Their Roots Were in the South

“Their roots were in the South. They moved up during the Great Migration. They must have had serious problems. They just made it look easy.” — Jimmie Staton

In the early twentieth century, attitudes in the United States and New Brunswick against immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe hardened. Politicians and academics, including scholars at Rutgers, argued that Italians, Slavs, Magyars, and Jews, the so-called “new immigrants,” diluted the character and racial “stock” of the nation. When Congress introduced quotas on European immigration in the 1920s, in response to these beliefs, labor demand did not end but instead spurred the migration of Black workers from the South as part of the Great Migration. Black laborers migrated to New Brunswick in large numbers, often fleeing white racist terror in the South, even though they were often forced to take low-paying, non-unionized jobs. Despite facing discrimination, Black migrants opened small businesses and established commercial services that catered to the city’s Black community. In the 1950s, Puerto Rican migrants were contracted, often as seasonal and temporary laborers, to work in factories and farms across New Jersey. Many migrants remained in the state and moved to cities such as New Brunswick, eventually bringing their families from the island as well.

A City Shaped by Migration, Work, and Community

“What matters to me is earning my dignity, that the employer knows that I have rights…so the immigrant knows that they have value anywhere, anywhere in the world.” — Gloria Guerrero Romero

In 1965, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the United States eliminated exclusions and quotas that openly discriminated against immigrants based on their race and nationality. In subsequent decades, immigration from Asia and Africa would dramatically change the demography of New Jersey and the United States.

Since 1970, New Jersey’s Latine population has also grown steadily, and now accounts for approximately one-fifth of the state’s population. In New Brunswick, as of 2020, more than a quarter of the city’s population is of Mexican origin, with students coming from Spanish-speaking homes comprising 90% of children enrolled in the city’s public schools.

Today, immigrants from across Latin America – and from other regions around the world – continue to come to New Brunswick and provide essential labor. Immigrants work in landscaping and construction, in warehouses and restaurants, in homes and hospitals, and in dozens of other jobs not listed here. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of New Brunswick shuttered, it was these recent immigrant workers – and other working-class New Brunswick residents who had no choice but to continue to labor at in-person jobs – who delivered goods and services that could not be halted.

Far beyond their role as workers, the vivid and diverse array of restaurants, shops, religious institutions, and community organizations that surround this park and populate all corners of New Brunswick remind us that migrants have shaped, and continue to shape the city, in many wonderful ways.

As Germania Hernandez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and longtime organizer at New Labor notes, in a statement that would have resonated just as strongly in the 1830s or 1910s: “Many of us came to look for the best life. We don't come because they give us anything, or because everything is free. We came to sacrifice ourselves – to improve our working conditions. So, I do get angry when they say ugly things about us immigrants who work hard.” Surrounded by the plants and butterflies of En Root, we hope that the beautiful resilience of immigrant and migrant workers, past and present, is instead what you take away and, ultimately, remember from this monument.

COMMUNITY RESOURCES

Know Your RightsFor information on what your rights are as a noncitizen in the United States, family preparedness plans, and red cards, please visit the website listed below:
www.ilrc.org/community-resources/know-your-rights

Legal Support HotlinesIf you or someone you know is facing deportation or has been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), New Jersey’s Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI) might be able to help. Complete the referral form so that DDDI can reach out to you and complete a legal screening.
Referral Form

Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ)- For detained individual and other detention-related calls: 1-888-894-0612
- For statewide non-detained immigration matters: 1-732-572-9100 ext. 8782

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) - For detention-related calls: 973-474-9861
(call on Tuesdays/Thursdays between 2:00pm–4:00pm)
- For residents of Monmouth and Ocean Counties: 732-902-0460
(call on Tuesdays between 1:00pm-4:00pm)

New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children (NJCIC)For individuals seeking immigration legal assistance for an unaccompanied child or youth under age 21: www.njcic.org/refer-a-child-english

ICE Detainee Locator If you suspect a loved one was detained by ICE, you can use ICE’s online detainee locator to check using the following link or QR code: locator.ice.gov/odls/#/search

New Jersey Rapid Response NetworksNew Jersey residents have mobilized to support its noncitizen community members being threatened with arrest and detention by ICE in NJ communities. Each area in New Jersey has its own rapid response network, please see below for which network services your area and their contact information:

Cosecha New Jersey, DIRE, and New Labor:888-347-3767 (call or dm social media accounts)
Middlesex, Essex, Union, Somerset, Sussex, Passaic, Bergen, Morris, Warren, Hunterdon, Monmouth, Burlington, Camden, Glouster, Salem, and Cumberland Counties.

Resistencia En Acción: 640-466-2386 (call or text)
Mercer County

Spirit of Liberation (SOL) :201-616-2816 (call or text)
Hudson County

El Pueblo Unido :609-200-1030 (call or text)
Atlantic and Cape May Counties

If you see ICE, call your rapid response network and provide the following information: Exact location
Time of sighting
Send a photo and/or video

Inspired by the migratory journey of monarch butterflies, Travieso’s En Root brings together histories of migration and labor in New Brunswick, attention to the natural environment, and a desire to center renewal, community, and joy for immigrants in the city today.

NJMML is excited to host a series of events and activities related to the unveiling of the monuments this summer, and programs that will animate these installations even further!

HOW TO ENGAGE WITH EN ROOT

To learn more about how you and your organization might take part in programs connected to En Root, please take a look at the “How-to-Engage Manual” posted below.

SATELLITE PLANTERS

There are 15 satellite planters in total, spread out across the city. Image by Chat Travieso.

ABOUT MONARCH BUTTERFLIES

En Root’s plantings - newly installed and ready to attract monarch butterflies! Photo by Chat Travieso.

DEFINED BY MIGRATION AND LABOR

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