make a reservation

• PRINT  | 
• EMAIL  | 
• MAP IT  | 
• GO METRO

Navy Pier

600 E. Grand Ave.

Chicago, IL

Room 328

Over one million people became legal immigrants last year, and another million — a record number — took the oath of citizenship. But becoming American is not merely a matter of arriving, or even of naturalizing, no matter the oaths taken, history studied, or democratic fundamentals understood. Immigrants and immigrant communities are in constant flux: as some immigrants become citizens, others return home; some maintain their native customs, languages, and rituals, others do not. New migrants arrive, renewing and refreshing memories and ways of home. With them, immigrant enclaves expand or collapse, interacting with their American surroundings. Illegal immigrants live in shadow, unable to fully participate in American society and unwilling or unable to leave it. And Americans always demand — vaguely but resoundingly — that immigrants integrate, never quite specifying what that process means for immigrants or for Americans. As pressure mounts for Barack Obama and Congress to enact immigration reform, writers, advocates, and political experts visit Zócalo to ask what — beyond mere legal status, paperwork and oaths — is required to make immigrants feel like a part of American society.

Keynote Speaker: Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea’s fiction and nonfiction works chronicle the Mexican immigrant experience. His best-selling The Devil’s Highway, about a group of immigrant men lost in the Arizona desert, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and heralded by critics around the country. His memoir Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life won an American Book Award. Urrea, who now teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago, visits Zócalo to explore the experience of moving from south of the border to the Midwest.

Panel One: From Surviving to Belonging
Immigrants to America face several immediate challenges: securing entry to the U.S. — whether through complex paperwork or by dangerous journey across the border — finding and holding on to work and shelter, learning English and American customs, managing finances. Zócalo invites a panel — including Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks USA, Gary Gerstle of the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities Jose Luis Gutierrez, and Duke University's Noah Pickus — to discuss how an immigrant, once he or she has mastered functioning, begins to feel at home in the U.S.

Panel Two: Is Assimilation Still A Bad Word?
Waves of immigrants from around the world, as the expression goes, have long been assimilated into the “melting pot” of American society. But in the last few decades, as racial norms radically changed and as the country grew more diverse and accepted more non-European immigrants, the notion of assimilation has come into question. Zócalo’s panel — including Stanford’s Tomás Jiménez, USC’s Dowell Myers, Peggy Levitt of Wellesley College, and Richard Alba of the State University of New York — will consider to what extent immigrants are expected to abandon, or adapt, their native cultures and languages, and what it means to be American.

This event is made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.