What the Liberty Bell Meant to Say

(Text from 2006)

On this July 4th, I thought I would share a text I wrote back in 2006 in Philadelphia. I was gearing up to start my journey through the Pan-American Highway a few weeks later, and for that reason questions of the visual representation of national identity were top of mind. I wrote the piece to jumpstart an online forum connected to the project ( a listserv where participants debated by email, the kind of things we would do during those primitive times before social media). The issues around immigration that I bring up in this piece feel now quaint in relation to what we are living now, but I decided to share it to share it here to offer some perspective around the issues that are not new, what has changed and what remains the same.

(La traducción al español de este texto se encuentra abajo)