Gate City Arrivals
Translating Greensboro Immigration Stories Over the Centuries
Project Vision
The Greensboro History Museum will work with new immigrants and their advocates to pilot an engagement program, Gate City Arrivals: Translating Greensboro Immigration Stories Over the Centuries, to both convey and grow Greensboro’s shared history of immigration.
As part of the Fostering Critical Conversations with Our Communities pilot initiative with Smithsonian Affiliations and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, this program explores the history of Greensboro, the "Gate City," through over three centuries of migration stories.
By developing this narrative in collaboration with immigrants and descendants, the newest arrival stories can be understood as part of our city’s shared history.
We aspire to design components that can present the story of Greensboro’s immigration history in different languages at
partner organizations supporting new arrival families
schools serving ESL students
the museum
In recent years, Spanish-speaking peoples from Latin America (especially Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) have become the largest foreign-born group in Greensboro; Manuel Salvador and Teresa Perez Espitia (top right) moved to the city from Mexico in the 1990s in search of economic opportunity and there established a family, a painting and drywall company, and premarital workshops for Spanish-speaking couples
Interested in helping?
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Museums and Immigration
As both a preserver of the past and facilitator of community participation in the present, museums hold significant potential in promoting thought, dialogue, and action on the local, national, and global issues of immigration.
Immigrants bring cultural and economic vitality to communities, and they are often welcomed by public and private organizations. Yet immigrants also face challenges, from structural inequalities to currents of xenophobia.
With Gate City Arrivals, the Greensboro History Museum endeavors to serve both immigrant and non-immigrant communities in Greensboro with a project that can serve as a model for others around the world.
The Greensboro History Museum recently hosted a roundtable of public history leaders from around the world discussing museums' approaches to the topic of migration
Community-Led Practice
At the core of Gate City Arrivals is community-led practice. By partnering with immigrant communities in Greensboro and delegating power to them in this endeavor, we aim to ensure the project is valuable to Greensboro immigrants and refugees (and the organizations that serve them) and to make the program as welcoming and interactive as possible for all residents of Greensboro.
Components of our community-led practice include:
Consultations with immigrants
Including immigrants as board members and/or advisors
Creating other spaces of leadership for immigrants
Providing programs in multiple languages (we have translated a presentation into Congolese, Nepali, and Vietnamese, and we are currently developing translations into Arabic and Spanish)
Our partners include:
City of Greensboro - Department of Human Rights
City of Greensboro - International Advisory Committee
Guilford College - Every Campus a Refuge
Senior Resources of Guilford - Refugee Outreach Programs
UNC Greensboro - Honors College
Become a program partner! Contact museum@greensborohistory.org to learn more.
The earliest migrants to the area that would become Greensboro were American Indians, first arriving at least 10,000 years ago and including members of the Catawba, Eno, Keyauwee, Sappony, Saura, and Shakori Nations; in the photograph above local American Indians participate in a Guilford Native American Association annual pow wow
Greensboro
Before the city of Greensboro was officially founded in 1808, the area had already witnessed the arrival of different American Indian communities for around 10,000 years and of European settlers and enslaved Africans starting in the mid-1700s. In the following centuries, first and second generation Europeans continued to migrate to the city, and from the 1950s onward immigrants have increasingly arrived from East, Southeast, and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean as well.
In 2008, Greensboro established the first elected municipal International Advisory Committee in the United States. Comprised of foreign-born residents of Greensboro, the committee members study and report on issues relevant to local immigrant communities to the city government.
As of 2021, Greensboro and surrounding Guilford County has roughly 59,000 foreign-born residents (11 percent of all residents), and students in the county's school district represent over 125 languages and 140 countries of origin. Greensboro remains a popular destination for economic migrants and refugees, who are supported by local and national organizations in their arrivals to the Gate City.
The earliest European migrants to the region that would become Greensboro included English, Scotch-Irish, and German settlers; Daniel Gillespie (above), of Scotch-Irish descent, moved to the area in his twenties and fought in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (1781) as a US colonel and participated in the founding of Greensboro (1808)
Evaluation
Through the use of surveys and interviews of participants in and contributors to the Gate City Arrivals pilot, we aim to evaluate:
What participants learned about the history of migration to Greensboro
Whether the history of migration to Greensboro was viewed as relevant to participants' own lives, and why
How the program might better serve the needs of new immigrants to Greensboro
How the program can be more fully integrated into the overall work of the museum
How we can diversify the numbers and types of contributors to the program and keep it sustainable over a long period of time
How we can better reach both immigrant and non-immigrant communities in Greensboro and beyond, especially in community spaces outside the museum
How we might connect Greensboro to larger regional, state, national, and international initiatives on immigration
The first African arrivals to Guilford County were enslaved peoples, while in recent decades Africans from many countries (especially Nigeria and Sudan) have freely moved to the area; Nathaniel Nkanta (above), a student from Nigeria, became the first Black graduate of Greensboro College in 1971
Other Projects
Here is a selection of other projects from which we are drawing inspiration for Gate City Arrivals:
Food for Thought: Migration:Cities Project
Migration and Museums – a review for the Migration Network 2020/21
The largest Montagnard community outside of Vietnam is in Greensboro, formed by refugees who came to the United States beginning in the 1980s; here Greensboro Montagnards conduct a celebratory dance in cultural dress
Learn More
If you are interested in learning more about the history of immigration to Greensboro and North Carolina, here are a few options to explore:
Gate City Arrivals YouTube Playlist
Barbara Lau, From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians (2004)
The German-speaking Andrew Leopold Schlosser migrated from Presov (then part of the Austria-Hungarian empire, today part of Slovakia) to Greensboro in 1900, where he established a stonemasonry business that built many of the buildings and bridges of modern Greensboro and founded a meat market that he operated with his sons