Becoming American

Sunday, May 17; 5pm PT/8pm ET

FREE// If you can, please support our memory activism collective by a tax-deductible donation to >> vanportmosaic.org/donate

We are heartbroken by the news that Ramiza Koya died of breast cancer Friday, June 5. She was 49 (here a beautiful tribute by Amy Wang/The Oregonian). Ramiza participated in the Virtual Vanport Mosaic Festival just a few weeks before, and we are honored she chose to share the gift of her time and voice with us, and grateful to Sankar Raman/The Immigrant Story and Laura Stanfill, her publisher at Forest Avenue Press, for making it happen. Please continue sharing her voice, and reading her book, The Royal Abduls. Here is the full recording of her interview, exploring our question Who Gets To Be American?:

Who gets to be “American?” How many generations does it take for one to become an American?

These questions of American identity have long surrounded the immigrant experience and its answers are tangled in our country’s webbed history with immigration, racism and xenophobia.

Join author Ramiza Koya and founder of The Immigrant Story, Sankar Raman as they bring their unique perspectives and explore ideas of “Americanness” as a part of the virtual Vanport Mosaic Festival on May 17 at 5 p.m..

Koya, a second generation Muslim American, joins the conversation with observations from her experience growing up in a multigenerational migrant family. Her debut novel, The Royal Abduls, explores the dynamics of growing up in an ethnically mixed, minority family living in post 9/11 America. Raman’s work at The Immigrant Story and the hundreds of immigrants he has interviewed about their experiences of coming to the United States has given him broad insight into how many different immigrants deal with identity in their new home. Together, they discuss questions that have defined members of the United States since its foundation.

Ramiza Shamoun Koya is the author of “The Royal Abduls” (Forest Avenue Press, 304 pages, $16.95 - her debut novel that reveals the devastating cost of anti-Muslim sentiment in Post 9/11 America.
Ramiza Shamoun Koya has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in publications such as Columbia Review, Lumina, Washington Square Review, and Mutha Magazine. She has been a fellow at both MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center. Her father was born in Fiji, her mother in Texas, and she was born in California.

Sankar Raman is the Founder and Director of The Immigrant Story a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon. Raman came to the United States for graduate school as an immigrant from India. After the 2016 presidential election, he decided to use his photography and his passion for immigrant stories to create an organization that works to counter the climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence. TIS documents and archives the voices and stories of immigrants in short, accessible, visual and written
formats.