UNM Law School professors Gloria Valencia-Weber and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez are in London, England presenting at the Once Upon a Legal Time: Developing the Skills of Storytelling in Law Conference, July 18-20.
This conference, sponsored by the City Law School of City University, London and the Legal Writing Institute, will discuss the role of narrative communication in legal practice and legal education. Topics discussed will range from telling stories of children in child welfare systems to the importance storytelling can have in legal reasoning.
Professor Valencia-Weber and Professor Sedillo Lopez will be giving a presentation entitled Immigration Stories in the U.S. and Mexico: The Rhetoric and the Realities. The presentation will describe some of the immigration stories that circulate in the media and throughout the public on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Among the stories shared with the audience will be the story of Pablo Lewis of the Tohono O’odham tribe, whose land crosses the U.S.-Mexico border. Lewis, a former U.S. marine who served in World War II, cannot prove his U.S. citizenship because he was born on Tohona O’odham land in Mexico.
“We are excited about the opportunity to present our most recent research on immigration and transnational communities at this conference,” Professor Sedillo Lopez said. “We recently compiled stories from both sides of the United States-Mexico border to examine what kinds of stories are being shared with immigrants.”
The stories of immigration to the United States vary greatly. Some of them appeal to a sense of adventure and daring inherent in crossing into the U.S., others tell the stories of wildly successful immigrants to justify the risks taken and some stories warn about the danger of crossing the border.
Professor Sedillo Lopez and Professor Valencia-Weber credit their work with the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute and the American Indian Law Center for providing them with the opportunity to compile the information that made the presentation possible.
“If I hadn’t been in Guanajuato over the last several years, I would not have seen and heard some of the stories that are integral for a presentation like this. The trick is to find the truth behind and underneath the stories,” Professor Sedillo Lopez said.