Sullivan High School in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood is home to many refugee students.
UWM journalist’s d It was 2017. President Trump had just taken office. One of his first acts was to declare a ban on incoming travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, and Elly Fishman was angry. “Like many people watching the news, I was shocked and motivated to protest what I thought were these draconian new rules, so I went to a protest at O’Hare Airport in Chicago,” she recalled. “While I was there, I was looking around and there were so many people holding up signs. … It made me think about who was on the other side of the wall. Who were these people who were stuck at immigration and unable to enter the country?” So Fishman, who was a writer at Chicago Magazine at the time, began looking for refugee communities in Chicago. She was quickly pointed to Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the northeast side that is among the most diverse locales in the city. “I’ve always written about young people. I’ve always been fascinated by how they see the world and how they move through the world. I was immediately curious about where young refugees landed, and it became clear quite quickly that Sullivan High School (in Rogers Park) was the place,” Fishman, now an instructor in UWM’s Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program, said. She began speaking with students at the high school and her resulting article, “Welcome to Refugee High,” was published in Chicago Magazine that summer. But it wasn’t enough for Fishman. “I spent two or three months reporting the article, and I felt like I barely touched the surface,” she said. So, she wrote a book. Her debut work, “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America” was released on August 10. Writing a refugee narrative The book follows four students at Sullivan High for one school year. There is Belenge, who, though from the Congo, was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania; Shahina, a young woman from Myanmar who escaped an arranged marriage; and Alejandro, who, days before graduation, will find out if he is allowed asylum in the United States or will be deported back to Guatemala. Another young woman and her family fled from violence in Iraq. Fishman was inspired to tell their stories in part because this is a part of refugee narratives that are rarely told: What happens after they flee war, famine, or oppression and are resettled in a new home?
4 • IN FOCUS • September, 2021
Fishman spent the last three years with these students, visiting their houses, talking with them and their families,
