Collaborating on stories with WeaveTales: Experiences from the UF English Department

Written by Laura Gonzales and Allytah Baquero,

Edited by Sheridan Block

UF students in Dr. Gonzales’ class learn about Haitian mac and cheese while enjoying a sample. (Photo Courtesy UF English Department)

As faculty and students at the University of Florida, we have a responsibility to engage with and support the communities around us. This semester, students in the Community Engagement Honors Seminar at UF’s English Department are working with WeaveTales to write immigration stories about two amazing individuals: Linsey Derival and Mustapha Mohammed.

Linsey is an undergraduate philosophy student at UF and is also the interim-Vice President and Gala Director of Club Creole, the university’s Haitian American Student Association. Linsey was born in Haiti, moved to the Dominican Republic, and has Cuban ancestry. Mustapha — who also goes by “Kofi” — is a doctoral candidate at UF’s Anthropology Department. He teaches History of West Africa in the History Department and Akan-Twi language for the Center for African Studies at UF. He is from Kumasi, Ghana.

We are working with Kofi and Linsey to write and share their immigration stories with WeaveTales. These stories highlight the connections between race, Blackness, culture, and immigration, and emphasize Black immigrant experiences in Florida.

In order to write these stories, we needed to spend time reading, listening, and learning. We began the course reading articles about community engagement from scholars such as bell hooks, Eve Tuck, adrienne marie brown, and Estrella Torrez. They teach us about the importance of navigating power structures, positionalities, and institutional contexts when doing community-engaged work. From this research, we were inspired to conducted our own in our Gainesville community.

One student, Sydney ElDeiry, researched mutual aid in Gainesville.

“Over the past few months, I’ve been interested in the way that mutual aid has the ability to help members in communities immediately and effectively, and how powerful it can be in creating connections between people,” she said. “In this project, I wanted to locate the ‘hub’ of mutual aid in Gainesville and see how modes of aid and connection were distributed via a few main places.”

Sydney mapped out mutual aid resources on this website.

“While definitely not an exhaustive list, the sources that I found are consistently providing mutual aid and are beneficial for anyone seeking to help and be helped,” she said.

Alec Kissoondyal researched prison labor in Gainesville and created a resource site, while Grayson Williams mapped out resources for formerly incarcerated community members in Gainesville. These projects connected us Gainesville Books to Prisoners, a non-profit organization that sends books to incarcerated people in the state.

Students listen to a presentation from Gainesville Books to Prisoners on their work with incarcerated people. (Photo courtesy UF English Department)

Zen Panos mapped out Asian Restaurants in Gainesville and discussed how different Asian and Asian American cultures are included (or not) in community resources, while Malena de Tomas explored racial disparity in literacy in Gainesville. By learning about our local community, we were able to better understand how issues like race, class, gender, and migration are all interconnected.

Bruno Assakawa mapped out the services offered to immigrants around Gainesville. He pointed out there are certain criteria that cities must meet to be considered a “Welcoming City”. A “Welcoming City” is a city that attends to the needs, education, and safety of immigrants. While Gainesville does not meet this criteria at the moment, it is taking steps to reach this goal.

Once we completed our independent research projects, we began interviewing and working with our storytellers Lynsey and Kofi. We plan to expand WeaveTales’ successful Journey to Jacksonville exhibit by adding their stories to the WeaveTales storyboard, and by sharing these stories in Gainesville and beyond.

Allytah Baquero reflects on her experiences with this work:

“In the amount of time we have been working together we have all learned new things about women’s rights, the prison literacy system, immigration, refugees, and so many other things I would have never known otherwise. The impact of reading, cooking, and activism on our community runs deep.

Linsey taught us how to be confident in identifying with our heritage; Basma showed us that it is okay to leave everything behind to start anew; and Kofi gave us an outside perspective of our community.

Through the participation of our class, the hard work of our professor Dr. Laura Gonzales, and the wonderful, informative people who allowed us to interview them have created a safe place for learning and exchanging information in itself in our own little community.

I feel like this experience working with WeaveTales has instilled a true sense of community in our classroom. This class is unlike any other and we are all grateful for the opportunity to make a difference in our community and the chance to really understand our community and our part in it.

When I first joined this Community Engagement class, I didn’t truly know what to expect. But over the course of this semester it has become increasingly clear how effective and powerful community engagement and our role in it as students is.

Through these hands-on experiences of meeting and engaging with people who genuinely contribute to our community, I feel like we have really made a breakthrough in successfully integrating local organizations and storytellers into our classroom. I truly believe that these interactive interviews create a genuine sense of community and highlight our social responsibilities and values.

Getting to hear other people’s stories face-to-face like Linsey’s made the experience even more memorable than if we had simply read the article online.”

Please stay tuned for the publication of our stories, as well as other updates about how we will be sharing this work with the community in the weeks and months to come!

Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WeaveTales and its employees.

Want to tell your story?

For more information contact our editorial admin at contact@weavetales.org.