Workers Center of Central New York - Creatives Rebuild New York

The Collaboration

Immigrant writer Víctor Ma. Chamán led the coordination of a collection of 49 non-fiction stories told by Latino immigrants in New York State. The majority of the collaborators were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala who had been living in Central New York for over a decade. Others come from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, and El Salvador. Most storytellers come from agricultural communities, and some still speak their indigenous languages. Each collaborator decided the length, content, and style of their story, as well as their own chapter’s particular editorial treatment, resulting in many different levels of editorial involvement. Because the collaboration had no set parameters regarding content or length, it provided the widest canvas possible for each collaborator to imagine and fill on their own. The result is a type of bible encompassing all types of narratives, from more than a dozen full biographies to discrete anecdotes—all worked by the artist and the storytellers collaboratively and non-extractively. The resulting manuscript is in Spanish, with entire chapters translated into half a dozen indigenous languages. The project is communally owned by the storytellers.

The Organization

The Workers’ Center of Central New York is a grassroots organization focused on workplace and economic justice. Through policy advocacy, leadership development, organizing, and popular education, they support and empower low-wage workers from all backgrounds to combat workplace abuses and to fight for improved wages and working conditions.

The creation of this manuscript represents so much more than the final product. The communal process opened up new opportunities for marginalized peoples to determine the form, content and means of sharing their voices, and to benefit from it. Jessica Maxwell

Being the first listener to these more than four dozen stories changed me. More than creating a system or a vessel to convey whatever interests the immigrant community in NYS, I see our project as fundamentally one of strangers telling strange stories. Ours, one experiment of trust after another. Víctor Ma. Chamán

Our members saw this as an opportunity to tell their stories, not just as workers or as immigrants who, as one member reflected, "often come to work here, leaving the best years of our life here only to return home sick or old," but to tell their stories as beautifully complicated human beings with biographies, love stories, drama, tragedy, drudgery, family, dreams and the full spectrum of human experiences.