ArtBreak with Professor Caroline Nagel
Anila Agha’s artwork highlights the challenges that newcomers face in the United States, as well as the hopes they bring for a better future. These immigrant stories reveal this country to be both a melting pot that has absorbed millions of people from different places and cultures and a place of deep, persistent exclusion. Caroline Nagel, migration specialist and professor of Geography at UofSC, considers the conflicting impulses that run through America’s immigration history. Drawing on her own family’s immigration story and on contemporary narratives of the U.S.-Mexico border, she shows how “becoming American” is, above all, a struggle over the boundaries of the national community.