AJ Kim

Inspired by Dolores Hayden’s vision for “freedom of the streets”, and in partnership with immigrant and refugee-serving organizations in the the Atlanta metropolitan region, immigrant residents shared with me their cognitive maps of home, work, school, leisure, safety, and freedom (or limits thereof) as they move through and around the Atlanta area. Hayden’s version of cognitive mapping has linkages to both Kevin Lynch and William Whyte’s understanding of how to “map” urban spaces, with the notable intervention that Hayden’s cognitive mapping exercises seek to activate “hidden” or untold stories, mark unmarked landscapes and histories that are important to women and people of color– groups whose experiences are often unmarked and erased in public histories and geographies. There are cities all over the Atlanta MSA that suddenly find themselves to be more than 50 percent immigrant, and yet most City Councils and elected officials do not reflect the same residential diversity of these places. The vast majority of all immigrants have settled in suburban and rural edges of the Atlanta MSA—but are also remarkably diverse and divergent in terms of race, class, and citizenship status. Even as majority foreign-born places now populate the landscape across Georgia, tract-level segregation remains high, between groups, and many immigrants continue to experience cultural and linguistic isolation, barriers to services, jobs, and housing, as well as targeted anti-immigrant legislation at the State level.

By creating their own maps of Atlanta, participants show how the immigrant experience is shaped through edges, nodes (of interaction), boundaries, contested legalities, and social relationships. Cognitive mapping operates as a unique form of auto-biographical and ethnographic storytelling. Participants illustrated their vision of “what home is” and how they might move through a given city-scape or city-space: maps are drawn at a variety of scales, depending on an individual’s knowledge and comfort with an area. Maps from immigrant residents largely ignore the City of Atlanta itself—instead concentrating on suburban mobility. Maps also were often intensely neighborhood-scaled, leaving out commonly illustrated macro-scale boundaries like freeways—when questioned, one participant responded: “I go to school, work, and home; I try not to stop anywhere else since I never know when I might get pulled over. Being pulled over means I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back home, back to my family.” This project includes geocoding of importance places, cognitive maps with residents (selections from N=45), and interviews with immigrant rights advocates in Georgia (Welcoming Atlanta; Welcoming America; Advancing Justice; Freedom University Georgia, Latin American Association; Latino Community Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center; Southern Center for Human Rights; Black Alliance for Immigrant Rights, Refugee Women's Network).