Humanizing Deportation
Here are portraits of some of the more than 250 community storytellers featured on the Humanizing Deportation website. (Leopoldo Peña photos)

Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la Deportación

Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la Deportación, UC Davis, Releases Multi-Media Project

Documents lives of those deported to Mexico with no actual connection to the country

The University of California, Davis, has released a short documentary highlighting the work of Spanish Professor Robert Irwin (https://spanish.ucdavis.edu/people/robert-irwin) . Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la Deportación is a community-based, digital storytelling project that Irwin and his team began in 2016 to show the human toll of forced displacement. The documentary is mostly in Spanish with English subtitles. Media are welcome to use the footage all or in part, with credit to UC Davis.

A UC Davis video crew traveled to Tijuana, Mexico to document the work Irwin and his graduate students were doing to share the stories of people who had been deported to Mexico yet often had no connection to the country.

"Neither media coverage nor political discourse adequately accounts for the degree of human suffering that deportations have generated," Irwin said. "Our project aims to communicate its human consequences in all their complexity."

Story/video link: https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/humanizing-deportation

Professor Robert Irwin: rmirwin@ucdavis.edu
Project website: http://humanizandoladeportacion.ucdavis.edu/en/