The Immigrant Experience in California through Literature and History

FAIN: ES-267111-19

San Jose State University Research Foundation (San Jose, CA 95112-5569)
Matthew Spangler (Project Director: February 2019 to April 2025)

A two-week institute for 25 K-12 teachers to explore California’s immigration history through literary and historical texts.

"The Immigrant Experience in California through Literature and History" (San Jose State University, July 12-26, 2020) explores the history of immigration to California through a collection of literary texts: Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams, poetry written by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station as collected in Judy Yung's book Island, and Luis Valdez's Valley of the Heart and Zoot Suit. Authors Kingston, Hosseini, Lam, Yung, and Valdez are institute faculty members and will lead sessions on their respective works. Participants will take field trips to sites around the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Spanish Mission in San Juan Bautista, Angel Island, downtown San Francisco, and San Jose's "Little Saigon" and "Japantown." Participants will create classroom lesson plans based on the institute material, or on the immigration literature and history of their home regions of the country.