New Postcard Project Aims To Tell The Stories Of The Undocumented

How can you tell the stories of the ignored? A new collaboration from Stanford Professor Antero Garcia and Mexican filmmaker Alix Dick uses postcards to solicit stories from undocumented people living across America. The Cost of American Convenience postcards aim to capture the stories of people who are often portrayed as a burden on American society and flip the narrative to explore a different question: "what are the costs to them and their lives? What’s been taken? And how and why do they continue to pay these costs for living in America?"

The project is an example of what Garcia calls autoethnography, a process that involves "individuals naming their own experiences and relating them to the world around us." Along with the postcards, the efforts include an online magazine that features heartbreaking posts from undocumented writers struggling to find their place in a country with a biased system that continually holds them back.

One of my aims with my writing has always been to shine a spotlight on the stories of people who are too often ignored. This project struck me as a perfect example of that.