Remembering Refuge
Between Sanctuary & Solidarity
And the officer told me, you know, you make a crime. I said, "I didn't kill nobody." Because I didn't know this word, you know, in English. And he said, "You know, when you cross the border you make a crime." I said, "No, I didn't make a crime, because I just crossed. I know, I understand I cross illegal, but because I want to go to Canada.
Why individual stories?
Whose stories are told and by whom? People’s accounts of crossing the Canada-US border to seek refuge are foundational rather than peripheral to the histories of this border. Remembering Refuge archives individual stories as a way to interrogate how the border functions and counter state-driven narratives of border crossings.
How counter-archives work
Counter-archives are political, resistant, and centred on lived experiences. They have the "explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts of history" (Chew, Lord and Marchessault 2018, 9). This counter-archive activates the oral histories of people from El Salvador and Guatemala who sought refuge in Canada and the advocates they encountered near the Canada-US border.
What is in the counter-archive?
The counter-archive contains three key elements: the Oral Histories; a series of Provocations; and a set of Education Resources including teaching guides, videos, archival materials, music, and links for further interest.
Invitation into the Oral Histories
By making recordings of the oral histories accessible online, we hope that hearing the voices and the perspectives of people who have had to make this journey across borders will shed light on histories of the countries they came from, of the US and Canada, and about how borders work. We also hope to inspire others who have made the same journey across borders to make new lives to include their experiences and perspectives in the counter-archive. In this section, you are invited into fourteen stories of people who either crossed multiple borders or work as advocates in border communities. You have access to the full audio and/or text-based histories (in English and/or Spanish). Within each Oral History, you can follow your own curiosity by engaging with additional materials such as news footage, images, videos, and other archives as you interact with the story. Each story is organized by themes (Tags) and highlights Key Moments to provide additional ways to consider elements of the stories. They are also linked to overarching questions that we call Provocations designed to emphasize the interconnections across stories.