Grantee Spotlight: Uprooted, An Interactive Exhibit

In 1980, there was an exodus of Cubans who left their homes for the United States as part of the Mariel Boatlift. It was a paramount moment of the Cold War. Almost 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S., including about 15,000 Cuban refugees who were sent to Fort McCoy in Sparta, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Humanities awarded a grant to the La Crosse Public Library in support of an interactive online exhibit called "Uprooted" about the history of the 1980 Cuban migration and the lives of some of those people who continue to live in Wisconsin. Uprooted: The Interactive Digital Exhibit Exploring the Mariel Exodus in Wisconsin is hosted by the La Crosse History Unbound, a collaborative project between the La Crosse Public Library Archives and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) Murphy Library Special Collections and Area Research Center (ARC).

"Uprooted" brought people together for a special event at the library in October and it continues to make ripples in Wisconsin and beyond. We are excited to share a Q&A with the project director Omar Granados and organizer Jenny DeRocher, who together collaborated on the project.

We are also excited to share the first episode of a podcast series called "Uprooted" produced by our friends at Wisconsin Life and WPR. That episode can be found on our Human Powered podcast feed anywhere you listen to podcasts. You can check that out HERE.

We hope you enjoy reading about the evolution of the idea and project, and all the things that were learned, in the Q&A below!

Uprooted: The Interactive Digital Exhibit Exploring the Mariel Exodus in Wisconsin

*Caption for the photo above: A group of Mariel migrant youth outside the Wisconsin State Capitol. Image courtesy of the La Crosse Public Library Archives and the U.S. Army.

Uprooted exhibit image, Cubans getting off a plane — Mariel migrants deplane at the La Crosse Municipal Airport and immediately board a school bus. Image courtesy of the La Crosse Public Library Archives and the U.S. Army.

Uprooted exhibit photos, mother and child — A Mariel migrant mother and daughter sit together in the Fort McCoy compound. Image courtesy of the La Crosse Public Library Archives and the U.S. Army.

Uprooted exhibit photo, youth on playground equipment — Mariel migrants rest from a basketball game on playground equipment at Fort McCoy. Image courtesy of the La Crosse Public Library Archives and the U.S. Army.

WH: Can you describe how the La Crosse Public Library started working with the partnering organizations to plan the project and events?

DeRocher: In 2019, Dr. Omar Granados held an on-campus event at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) called "The Lost Voices of Mariel: The Cuban Refugee Program at Fort McCoy," which included a panel discussion featuring a number of the Mariel exodus migrants living in La Crosse. I attended this event, and invited Dr. Granados to organize a similar event at the La Crosse Public Library for that fall. In working together, we decided to record an oral history with some of the Mariel migrants. Shortly after this, Dr. Granados was in contact with Fort McCoy about digitizing their photographs and they agreed that if he found the funding, they would allow him to digitize and make the images available. I believe this is around the same time that he was working with WPR on the Uprooted podcast. Dr. Granados quickly realized he needed one location where all of his research, interviews, and scholarship around the Mariel exodus in Wisconsin could be made more accessible. This is when he approached me about doing this project, and everything fell into place for all of the existing partners.

WH: How did the project evolve? What did you learn?

DeRocher: As we worked on the 2023-2024 grant project to digitize Fort McCoy's items and release Uprooted: The Interactive Exhibit, we learned a lot. Largely, our vision never really changed in what the end product would look like, but we had lots of changes throughout the development. One of Dr. Granados' initial ideas was to create an interactive day-to-day timeline of events at Fort McCoy in the summer of 1980, while the Mariel exodus migrants were detained at Fort McCoy. He had learned from Fort McCoy staff that there was a day book of events that we could digitize. However, when it came to us digitizing the materials with the Public Affairs Office, we were told that the Army would have to give permission for us to digitize every single page, which would take months, or even years. So, we were recommended to only pick a few dates that we wanted included in the project. We picked a few key dates and digitized just some of these documents.

Another example is when Dr. Granados attended a conference on immigration policy in summer 2024 and met with other international scholars studying U.S. immigration and detention policy history. After that conference, he felt inspired to refocus two sections of our exhibit on this national history that Fort McCoy is a part of.

WH: Can you describe one of the more unique components of the online exhibit?

Granados: Every image that we found in the archive and digitalized for the LPL project tells a unique story of a refugee experience. These images had not been published previously, and they bring the viewer into very intimate moments of these stories of migration, moments that are usually hard for the general public to imagine beyond the framework of the infrastructure of immigration services of the federal government. The images are very humanistic, and many of them give us perspective on private Cuban lives, as well as the relationships that developed at Fort McCoy between soldiers, volunteers, refugees, and children. When we think about immigrants today, it is often difficult to imagine a person beyond the stereotype that the media has constructed for migrants, young men that are dangerous and uneducated. The images we included in the exhibit tell real stories about lives interrupted in Cuba that were forced to continue at Fort McCoy.

We also particularly like the bilingual newspaper that was published at Fort McCoy daily, called "El Mercurio de McCoy." Although this publication offered mostly a censored view of daily life in the camp, it was published in English and Spanish and it included some profiles about refugees' past lives, comics, poetry, and songs by Cuban refugees. It is an invaluable historical document of the Cold War era.

WH: What did funding from WH allow you to do?

DeRocher: Without this funding, we could not have paid the local Mariel migrants to participate in the project, which was crucial. The funding allowed our team to make our vision for this exhibit come to life! Most of the representation that the Mariel exodus migrants get in pop culture and in history books focus on criminal records and violence. And very few historians look at the experiences of the refugees while they were held in detention centers after arriving in the U.S. The WH funding allowed us to produce an exhibit that gives the Mariel exodus migrants a platform to tell their own histories in their own ways, and focus on this history from the immigration detention lens.

WH: What kinds of impacts do you feel came out of the project in the greater La Crosse community? In the Cuban community?

DeRocher: Many people in the greater La Crosse community who were alive in 1980 remember the Mariel Boatlift Crisis in the way it was being portrayed on the news, in the newspaper, and through local gossip. All three of these avenues were riddled with racism and xenophobia, and so the local collective memory is racist and xenophobic. Over the holidays, I was talking to my dad about this grant project, and he repeated a lot of the same racist narratives and comments that Dr. Granados hears in every audience that he presents to. These are beliefs that are deeply embedded in our communities. Every time I read through Dr. Granados' history of the events leading up to the Mariel Boatlift, and the events that followed, I am reminded of the power of retelling the histories that we think we all know, but we only know one side. I imagine a lot of local people who haven't been engrained in the lives of the local Mariel migrants feel this way when interacting with this project.

I cannot speak on behalf of the Cuban community in La Crosse, but I know that every time the local Mariel migrants have been given a platform to share their stories and perspectives, attendees have been full of gratitude. La Crosse is their home, and all they want to do is connect with their community members. Whenever I run into Ernesto, who was one of our Humanities Experts, he asks me, "Okay, what's next?"

WH: How is this connected with the podcast from WPR?

DeRocher: WPR's Uprooted was produced in partnership with Dr. Granados. Uprooted: The Interactive Exhibit is meant to pair with the podcast and be a place where folks can view the primary source material that backs a lot of Dr. Granados' research that he shares in the podcast. Some people learn better by reading, and some people prefer to hear the spoken word. So, we sprinkled the WPR podcast throughout the online exhibit so people can have both options, though there is unique information shared in each platform.

WH: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Granados: The project would not have been possible without the collaboration from our friends in the Cuban community. We received the advice and recommendations, as well as real testimonies, of several Cuban refugees who were at Fort McCoy in 1980 and still live in La Crosse. Their voices are fundamental to our project, and we are grateful for their willingness to revisit this traumatic experience and share their personal journeys though the American immigration system and their later resettlement in the La Crosse region.

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