News Archives - 2009

Love story reveals broken immigration system

Next week Augsburg will hear from Giselle Stern Hernández, a Mexican-North American writer and performer who is an important voice in the U.S. immigration debate.

Stern Hernandez was born and raised in New York and has lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico since 2001. In her solo show The Deportee's Wife, her marriage is laid out on the front lines of the North American immigration debate.

In April, 2001, her husband Roberto was deported from Chicago, Illinois, and she moved to Mexico to live with him in August of that same year. While Stern Hernández she was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico and was legally married, her husband was deported with the order to stay out of the U.S. for twenty years. And in 2007, he also was prohibited from entering Canada.

In The Deportee's Wife, Stern Hernández takes the audience through her journey to face hard truths about how race, class, white U.S. privilege and gender intersect within the structures of a badly broken immigration system. Through her words and images, she reveals a complicated love story.

Giselle Stern Hernández received her BA in English from Hunter College CUNY, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In 2005, she was awarded a Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa. She is also the recipient of a Ford Foundation Multicultural Playwriting Grant. Giselle has performed her solo shows in Mexico and the United States since 2007.

The Deportee's Wife will be presented on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 6 p.m. in Foss Center. It is free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the show. Sponsored by ALAS, Hispanic/Latino Student Services, A'viands, CSA, and ASAC at Augsburg College, and La Raza Cultural Center at the University of Minnesota.