This evening in the Rose Café, Esmeralda Arrizon-Palomera, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English, talked about the Undocumented Youth Movement and the cultural production that has emerged out of it.

One aspect of the conversation that stood out to me was when the rejection of the term DREAMer was discussed. This term is a very narrow narrative about who the undocumented immigrants are and what the experience is like.

I strongly related this to “The danger of a single story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

We are impressionable and vulnerable in the face of a story. Showing a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, creates a single story and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by a phrase “to be greater than another.” Who tells these stories, when are they told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.