Gate City Arrivals

Project Vision

The Greensboro History Museum will work with new immigrants and their advocates to pilot an engagement program, Gate City Arrivals: Translating Greensboro Immigration Stories Over the Centuries, to both convey and grow Greensboro’s shared history of immigration.

As part of the Fostering Critical Conversations with Our Communities pilot initiative with Smithsonian Affiliations and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, this program explores the history of Greensboro, the "Gate City," through over three centuries of migration stories. 

By developing this narrative in collaboration with immigrants and descendants, the newest arrival stories can be understood as part of our city’s shared history.

We aspire to design components that can present the story of Greensboro’s immigration history in different languages at

• partner organizations supporting new arrival families

• schools serving ESL students

• the museum

Museums and Immigration

As both a preserver of the past and facilitator of community participation in the present, museums hold significant potential in promoting thought, dialogue, and action on the local, national, and global issues of immigration.

Immigrants bring cultural and economic vitality to communities, and they are often welcomed by public and private organizations. Yet immigrants also face challenges, from structural inequalities to currents of xenophobia.

With Gate City Arrivals, the Greensboro History Museum endeavors to serve both immigrant and non-immigrant communities in Greensboro with a project that can serve as a model for others around the world.

Community-Led Practice

At the core of Gate City Arrivals is community-led practice. By partnering with immigrant communities in Greensboro and delegating power to them in this endeavor, we aim to ensure the project is valuable to Greensboro immigrants and refugees (and the organizations that serve them) and to make the program as welcoming and interactive as possible for all residents of Greensboro.

Components of our community-led practice include:

• Consultations with immigrants

• Including immigrants as board members and/or advisors

• Creating other spaces of leadership for immigrants

• Providing programs in multiple languages (we have translated a presentation into Congolese, Nepali, and Vietnamese, and we are currently developing translations into Arabic and Spanish)

Our partners include:

City of Greensboro - Department of Human Rights

City of Greensboro - International Advisory Committee

Greensboro Public Library

Guilford College - Every Campus a Refuge

New Arrivals Institute

Senior Resources of Guilford - Refugee Outreach Programs

UNC Greensboro - Honors College

Become a program partner! Contact museum@greensborohistory.org to learn more.

Greensboro

Before the city of Greensboro was officially founded in 1808, the area had already witnessed the arrival of different American Indian communities for around 10,000 years and of European settlers and enslaved Africans starting in the mid-1700s. In the following centuries, first and second generation Europeans continued to migrate to the city, and from the 1950s onward immigrants have increasingly arrived from East, Southeast, and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean as well.

In 2008, Greensboro established the first elected municipal International Advisory Committee in the United States. Comprised of foreign-born residents of Greensboro, the committee members study and report on issues relevant to local immigrant communities to the city government.

As of 2021, Greensboro and surrounding Guilford County has roughly 59,000 foreign-born residents (11 percent of all residents), and students in the county's school district represent over 125 languages and 140 countries of origin. Greensboro remains a popular destination for economic migrants and refugees, who are supported by local and national organizations in their arrivals to the Gate City.

Evaluation

Through the use of surveys and interviews of participants in and contributors to the Gate City Arrivals pilot, we aim to evaluate:

• What participants learned about the history of migration to Greensboro

• Whether the history of migration to Greensboro was viewed as relevant to participants' own lives, and why

• How the program might better serve the needs of new immigrants to Greensboro

• How the program can be more fully integrated into the overall work of the museum

• How we can diversify the numbers and types of contributors to the program and keep it sustainable over a long period of time

• How we can better reach both immigrant and non-immigrant communities in Greensboro and beyond, especially in community spaces outside the museum

• How we might connect Greensboro to larger regional, state, national, and international initiatives on immigration

Other Projects

Here is a selection of other projects from which we are drawing inspiration for Gate City Arrivals:

Food for Thought: Migration:Cities Project

Migration and Museums – a review for the Migration Network 2020/21

¡NUEVOlution! - Levine Museum of the New South

Learn More

If you are interested in learning more about the history of immigration to Greensboro and North Carolina, here are a few options to explore:

Gate City Arrivals YouTube Playlist

Lauren Elizabeth Raper, “‘Blest Be the Ties That Bind’: The 1986 Montagnard Resettlement to Greensboro, North Carolina and the Reshaping of the Memory of the Vietnam War” (2009)

Barbara Lau, From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians (2004)

Latino Migration Project

Hannah Gill, The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina, Revised and Expanded Second Edition (2018)