I dove right in this morning after reading the post by Margaret Lincoln in the TPS Commons about the Immigrant Archive project and its addition to the Library of Congress's collections. It has great details and a link to a lesson plan by Mary Johnson --do read it!

https://tpsteachersnetwork.org//tps-commons/the-immigrant-archive-project

Looking through the resources of the site, https://immigrantarchiveproject.org/, including 45 video interviews, I moved to the more skimmable blog posts, which allow teachers like me to more readily see the content I might use in teaching and sharing resources with others. 

Right away I was drawn to a prose poem of sorts, "Letter to my younger self," led by side-by-side photos pairing a black and white vintage school photo of a 14-year-old girl and a color photo of a mature woman.

https://immigrantarchiveproject.org/letter-younger-self/

I can imagine offering this as a choice of writing assignment to students to compose such a letter in the empathetic voice of an adult in their own lives whose childhood they have learned about, or a historical figure whose lives they have studied. In any case, reading this together as a class would support a rich discussion. Here's  the beginning of this piece:

_______________

Letter to a 14-year-old Maria Concepción Vázquez, when leaving central Mexico in 1962:

Dear younger self,

I know you are afraid of leaving your hometown in Michoacán, México to emigrate to the United States. Even though you are coming with your mother, you still feel worried, but there are a lot of things you are going to experience—some good, some bad.

You will sometimes be very timid and at the same time very brave.

You will arrive with your mother in DePue, Illinois, a small town about one hundred miles west of Chicago. You’ll live with your aunt and her family. You’ll be forced to go to school, even though you don’t want to. The first day you attend school, you will feel very strange and out of place. You will feel embarrassed for having to sit there not understanding anything that is going on. You’ll have to depend on a boy to be your interpreter with your teacher for everything you need in the classroom.

The only class you will like is math because you’ll know how to do that. And you’ll like when the teacher calls you by her desk half an hour each day to read with you the Spanish and English book titled El Camino Real because it’s bilingual. These experiences will help you progress...

 side-by-side photos