Six days out of port their food and water ran out. Like thousands of others, they had fled their native Vietnam on makeshift barges only to have their exodus threatened by starvation.
From the scene of an Argentinean family hanging on a wall life-size silhouettes inscribed with names of loved ones who disappeared during the 1976-78 regime of General Jorge Rafael Videla to the image of a young Vietnamese man building his own prosthetic leg from wood, leather, and an old tire, the exhibit’s more than two dozen wall-size photographs attempt to portray the experiences of refugees and those they left behind in human rather than political terms. Rebecca Krucoff, the museum’s outreach coordinator, says the personal narratives–excerpts from interviews, articles, and journals–are meant to reinforce the human impact: the danger of remaining, the distress of fleeing, and the difficulty of adjusting to an often hostile new culture. “We in the first world can’t know or relate to what it really feels like,” she says. “And maybe we’re not supposed to. But what we can do is respect these people as individuals by hearing their story in their own voice.”
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Marjorie Byler, deputy director of programs for Amnesty International, says her organization’s primary interest in the exhibit was to foster support for a more equitable asylum process, especially in the United States. Despite the 1980 Refugee Act, which outlawed discrimination against asylum candidates because of their nationality, America still grants refugee status according to cold-war divisions. Byler says that only 2 percent of the refugees from Haiti, Guatemala, or El Salvador (more than one million Central Americans flee to the United States each year) are granted asylum in this country, compared to 95 to 97 percent of those from Eastern Europe. “What we have in 1991 is the practice of returning people to the country of origin that they fled out of fear,” she says. “It is an issue of bias on the part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Justice Department.” And it is de facto discrimination, she says, to place a detention center in Texas 20 miles from the nearest town, with no pay phone and no instructions on how to get assistance or even how to place a collect call.
