*Note: The author's name was changed to protect their identity amid the ongoing repression targeting student activists.
Gathering is a form of disruption.
Being in a space of community and love, you disrupt societal norms that reflect apparatus and timelines of death, carnage and violence. And when we gather we create places of belonging to share testimonies that allow us to grieve, bridge, and connect.
We resist against the oppressive forces that thrive from dividing us: And that liberates us.
I witnessed the power of gathering at last year’s Othering & Belonging Conference in Oakland.
As a first-generation 21-year-old college student—majoring in African American Studies and Social Policy and Public Service— I attended the three-day gathering that, for me, was transformational. It changed the trajectory of my career path. Not only did I gain a solid foundation of OBI’s bridging and belonging frameworks, I also left with an important understanding: That we are defined through the many stories we tell, and gathering in a space to tell those stories is revolutionary.
Whether it was the panel discourse around grief and the genocide in Gaza, the breakout groups that gave us small pockets of space to radically imagine a new future, or the Commons room that provided spaces to dance, meditate, watch films and express our creativity through art and poetry — the conference held our humanity in so many ways.
I realized that a conference can be more than just a collection of people sitting in chairs and taking notes. It is a space to listen to the stories of others. And that has helped me to tell my own story.
Dancers from OBI's Belonging Resident Company embrace during a performance at the Othering & Belonging Conference. (Photo by Nic Bruno)
“Standing under those helicopters”
I was born in Montréal, Canada, but at the age of 11 I moved with my family to the United States. Now, 10 years later, my life feels split between both places.
My parents, both from Vietnam, immigrated to Québec in the 1980s. My mom, a telemetry nurse, and my dad, a sushi chef but once a ballet dancer, embody resilience in quiet ways. I used to see their calmness as passivity, but now I recognize it as survival.
Leaving Vietnam as boat refugees was a secretive process for them. My mom once told me that she never really said goodbye because you couldn’t tell people you were leaving. It had to be done quietly, through discrete channels.
They were very young during the Vietnam War. My mom was 6, my dad around 11, and they didn’t fully grasp the political complexities at the time, but the war left an imprint on them: One thing they both still carry is a deep aversion to helicopters.
I learned this last year when I sent my mother a video of the police raid of my school's Palestine encampment. There were helicopters circling above and she immediately reacted with unease, saying that sound brought back a foreboding feeling from her childhood. Standing under those helicopters, in the midst of chaos, I felt a connection to my parents' past, as if their experiences were living through me.
... We are defined through the many stories we tell, and gathering in a space to tell those stories is revolutionary.
My parents don’t talk about their pain. Not because they lack emotion—if anything, they feel deeply—but because they’ve never had the space to express it. When I try to talk to them about these things, especially in the context of what’s happening in the world today, they often shut down, not out of indifference but as a form of self-protection. Even if they don’t say much about it, their actions have shaped my existence.
“A loss I’ll never forget”
When we first moved to the U.S., I was stateless for a few years—undocumented until I got my green card. I use the term "stateless" because it captures the complexities of living between statuses.
In 2020, we were almost deported, and the grief I felt was overwhelming—like a sense of doom. My parents, however, didn’t seem as shaken. At first, I felt disconnected from them, but then I realized this wasn’t their first displacement. They understood it differently, moving on faster while I remained deeply affected. I was angry, especially because we weren’t just leaving—we were being forced out.
My mom’s visa was under NAFTA as a nurse, and my dad and I were her dependents. While I was legally here, I had no work permit or Social Security number. When we tried renewing our visas in 2020, a small paperwork error—an oversight by the hospital—caused immigration officers to stop us at SFO airport. What was supposed to be a routine process turned into a 5-hour ordeal.
I wasn’t just upset about the situation—I was angry at the officers. They were young, people of color, people who looked like me. Weren’t their parents or elders once immigrants too?
It felt like a betrayal.
Being caught between places means losing parts of both...
During the interrogation, I had to translate for my parents, especially my dad. My mom sat there, hunched over, looking defeated. It enraged me—why should she feel guilty for a mistake that wasn’t hers? The system is intentionally difficult, with no clear guide on how to do things “right.” Yet they treated her as if she had done something wrong.
When they decided not to deport us, they justified it by listing our “value”—my mom’s job, my student status. But that only made me angrier. Would we have been deported if I wasn’t in school? If my mom wasn’t a nurse? Was my personhood measured by my vocational ability? Less eligible for deportation? I knew others in that room didn’t get the same mercy.
After that, my mom lost her job and had to move out of state for work, spending years in Washington while I stayed in California. Meanwhile, our precarious status meant we couldn’t leave the country, even when it mattered most. In 2022, my dad’s mother passed away, and he couldn’t go back to say goodbye. We missed funerals, milestones—moments we should have been there for.
Being caught between places means losing parts of both. We were denied our right to return home, to stand on our own land, to grieve with our family. That’s a loss I’ll never forget.
Witnessing the country’s current immigration policy illustrates to me that the Trump administration’s actions are not an outlier but a clear articulation and continuation of the U.S. fashioning itself through the violent displacement of others. However, the recent escalation targeting green-card holders, especially students expressing solidarity with Palestine, shows clear signs that arguments of “legal” immigration fall short.
... Crossing [the border] comes with a violence you can feel. And in feeling that, I’ve come to understand my parents in a way I never did before.
Students like me, whose families have sacrificed everything to put their children into higher education, are being detained for exercising our first amendment right. I am realizing that there is no “legal” way to contend with borders—the border itself is illegal. Although my family and I have a renewed sense of fear, I’m affirmed that the border is predicated on othering, and immigrant statuses are being weaponized to dehumanize, detain, and deport immigrant students, workers, and community members.
The phrase “No one is illegal on stolen land” comes to mind.
Turning anger into activism
In Black Studies, there is this idea that children are living archives, proof of history’s continuation. I don’t see myself as saving my parents—I’m not their savior. But I am excavating their stories, bringing them to the surface, understanding how their struggles are still alive in my own experiences. Even though the border between Canada and the U.S. is thin, crossing it still comes with a violence you can feel. And in feeling that, I’ve come to understand my parents in a way I never did before.
But with that knowledge comes a lot of anger, anger that I have found a way to channel into activism. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true. In high school, one of the hardest things was realizing I couldn’t apply for internships because I didn’t have a Social Security number. Then I discovered a summer fellowship for undocumented students. That became a turning point for me—I joined as a communications fellow and worked with their labor center.
As a student, I also incorporated OBI’s frameworks and toolkits into a three-day conference that I co-led with another student. We built the entire thing from the ground up—all as students. That experience pushed me to create and engage in spaces where I could make sense of what happened to my family as part of larger social inequities. When I reflect on our deportation story now, I do so with more knowledge, more intention—but at the time, I was just trying to find ways to understand.
UC Santa Barbara professor Sherene Seikaly speaks to conference attendees about the impact on children of Israel's nearly 2-decade-long siege of Gaza. (Photo by Nic Bruno)
Holding our grief with care
As a student attending OBI’s conference last year, it was an emotional and complex experience. At the time, major pro-Palestinian student protests were unfolding—Columbia had already been raided, and my own school was launching one. I was heavily involved in organizing with the Divest Coalition, and I remember feeling torn, wondering, “Why am I here when I should be on the ground organizing?”
Despite that internal conflict, I found solace in the relaxation and meditation room. It gave me space to collect my thoughts, to journal, and to process everything happening around me. The conference itself was deeply impactful, though holding my role as a student-activist while being in that space was challenging.
But I deeply appreciated how panelists created space—not just to discuss Gaza but the grief we were all feeling and how to hold it with care. Basima Sisemore’s poignant introduction to the panel discussion about the grief and the genocide in Gaza acknowledged our shared sadness, frustration, and humanity.
It moved me to tears.
The discussion that followed was equally powerful. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a key voice in the Vietnamese diaspora, highlighted the deep “othering” at play, connecting it to nation-states displacing people. Naomi Klein’s reflections on unlearning and re-learning Jewish history were introspective, not defensive. Sherene Seikaly brought urgency, sharing how the Israeli occupation’s limiting of food over its almost 2-decade-long siege of Gaza has left children physically smaller.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen at OBI's 2024 conference. (Photo by Nic Bruno)
Most refreshing of all, they skipped self-aggrandizement and got straight to the heart of the issue unfolding on the ground. It was humble, grounded, and deeply impactful. I loved it.
The heartbeat of this work
Attending the conference also made me feel fully integrated into the OBI community. Seeing the frameworks in action, engaging with people who are wrestling with these ideas in real time—it made the work so much more tangible and urgent.
I feel like at OBI conferences, you get to model what belonging looks like, what bridging looks like, and the space is really just a sharing of testimony.
Michelle "Mush" Lee performs a poem at OBI's 2024 conference. (Photo by Nic Bruno)
Attending the conference I also realized how much I love research—it feeds my curiosity and helps me thread connections between people, ideas, and movements. Initially, I wanted to be an attorney to protect my family, but research has shown me how archiving and documentation disrupt and shape narratives for future generations.
Conferences and convenings are critical—they create spaces for visioning, organizing, and policy change. The 2022 Woori Ujima conference hosted by Undocumented Black Network, for example, profoundly shaped my academic path to major in African American Studies. OBI has also expanded my thinking, especially on accessibility and prefigurative politics—modeling liberation rather than just theorizing it.
“Our stories are our voices”
Observing how people engage with OBI, from attendees’ expectations to the way belonging is embodied, has deepened my understanding of how movements evolve. Conferences don’t just collect ideas—they create a lineage of thought, resistance, and action: A new way of language and being.
When you're in that space, on that stage and you listen to those testimonies, grappling with all that is happening in the world, you come out of this place feeling not as defeated or small as you think you are.
You gain your agency back.
A poet performs at the Commons area in OBI's 2024 conference. (Photo by Nic Bruno)
So, that's how I feel about conferences, and how OBI’s has impacted me as I move forward in my education and career. OBI’s conference tells the story of us. In a sense, it’s the same way I see my parents' stories, as part of a larger history, and that feels very comforting to me. We are human but we are also part of a bigger collective. And conferences really illuminate that connection for me.
Our stories are our voices. They give us and our ancestors life. And when we gather to tell those stories, we combat oppressive structures based on narratives of dominance, of deportation—of fear.
Naming harm—acknowledging and legitimizing it—changes you. It transforms how you understand it. I would be remiss not to acknowledge how indebted I am—not just to my parents, but to everyone who came before me. Their silence was a way of enduring, of bearing the weight of what they had gone through. But I don’t want us to just bear it—I want us to have more.
I want us to dream, and to carry forward my ancestors’ dreams.
It would be a disservice to simply move through life without recognizing all the sacrifices that made my path possible. It’s incredible, and I don’t take it lightly.
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Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
