Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the research process for Nickels and Dimes, a choreographic work in which I embody the stories of Cuban children who arrived in the US in so-called Peter Pan flights in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Organized by the US Catholic Church, the flights transported around 14 000 unaccompanied minors to the US in clandestine fashion. The children went sent abroad by Cuban families that feared that Fidel Castro’s government would usurp parental rights over children’s education and that minors on the island would undergo communist indoctrination. In Nickels and Dimes, I revisit this controversial chapter in the history of US-Cuba relations against the background of ongoing mass migrations today—the stories of those Cuban children resonate with news reports of unaccompanied minors now crossing the US-Mexico border or sailing across the Mediterranean to reach European territory by the thousands. As an artist-scholar, my motivation for working on this topic is twofold: family history (members of my family were relocated to the US during the Peter Pan Operation) and a desire to document the stories of migrants through humanizing artistic portraits. This study analyzes the research process (oral history) of collecting testimonies from adults who recalled their migration as Peter Pan children. Also, it details my hermeneutical approach to identifying the potent moments from those narratives that found visual representation in Nickels and Dimes, while discussing the poetics of the work and the creative methods for embodying the stories choreographically.

Presenters

Maria Urrutia
Associate Professor in Theatre and Dance and Honors College, College of Arts and Humanities, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, United States