On April 15, Brooklyn College opened the exhibition “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices,” a multimedia showcase built from student interviews with immigrants and children of immigrants, many of them members of the students’ own families.
Held in the library, the exhibition drew students, staff, and faculty for its long‑awaited return. The work also pairs visual storytelling with digital access by placing QR codes alongside each oral history cutout. Visitors can scan the codes with their phones to listen directly to the recorded interviews, allowing them to hear the voices, emotions, and nuances behind each story while engaging with the display.
Produced by the Brooklyn College Listening Project, the exhibition features stories rooted in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Haiti, Pakistan, Albania, Grenada, Italy, and beyond. It first debuted on the Brooklyn College campus seven years ago amid heightened national debates over immigration and identity. After traveling to five venues across New York City, the exhibition returns newly updated and once again resonates with a political and cultural moment defined by questions of belonging.
(Left to right) Jesús Pérez, the director of the Brooklyn College Immigrant Student Success Office, Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, Professor Emerita Jessica Siegel, and Professor Joseph Entin.
Among those in attendance was Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams ’01, M.A. ’05, who visited alongside his mother, Patricia, whose own immigrant story is featured in the exhibition. Other speakers included organizers Jessica Siegel, professor emerita and the former director of the Listening Project; Jesús Pérez, the director of the Brooklyn College Immigrant Student Success Office, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1995; and Joseph Entin, the project’s current director and professor of English and American Studies. Together, they emphasized how the initiative bridges classroom learning with lived experience, positioning students not just as learners, but as knowledge makers.
Providing a brief history and impact of immigration over the past few decades, Entin summed up the initiative perfectly.
“The Brooklyn Listening Project flips the educational script,” Entin said. “We sometimes think that college students are missing something, that they come to college to get what they lack. The Listening Project turns that idea upside down. It says: what we need at the college is what students have access to, what students know, what their families know, what their neighbors know. Through the Listening Project, students become experts. So this project is designed to allow you students to really bring the world to us, to show us what you know.”
We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices will remain on display in the Brooklyn College Library through May 15.
More About the Brooklyn College Listening Project
The Brooklyn College Listening Project is an interdisciplinary oral history initiative that transforms how students engage with knowledge. Founded by faculty, it equips students to conduct interviews with family members, neighbors, and community members, building a growing archive of everyday experiences.
Across disciplines, from history and sociology to journalism, global languages, and the arts, students learn to listen with intention, document lived experience, and create original research grounded in real lives. In doing so, they help preserve stories that might otherwise go unheard.
With more than 150 recorded oral histories, the project stands as a living archive of New York City, one shaped not by institutions alone, but by the voices of the people who call it home.
