Through a sea of emphatic hand motions, exotic accents and first-person accounts, one woman spoke for thousands Thursday at UF's Constans Theatre.
Judith Sloan, an actress and artist who helped conceive the Crossing the BLVD project, which portrayed through multimedia the trials and tribulations of the people who live, work and sleep in the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States - Queens, N.Y.
Sloan and project co-director Warren Lehrer fused a series of anecdotes with a rolling slide show of the characters to show their differences and give a sense of hope that people can overcome their fears and live peacefully together.
"You can be phenomenally expanded by people who are very different from you by just figuring out how to engage in them," Sloan said. "I think the profundity of some of the people we interviewed blew us away."
One Arab man they interviewed owned a coffee shop shortly after Sept. 11.
One night, six men trashed the store, smashing mirrors and breaking chairs and tables. When the police came and handcuffed the culprits, the shop owner said he would not press charges because he understood the men's frustration.
The police were forced to let them go, and a few hours later the men came back and apologized. The shop owner and the men talked around a coffee table through the night and came to appreciate each other's differences.
Lehrer and Sloan started the project in 1999 and worked on it for three years. They listened to hundreds of immigrants' stories and took pictures of each subject.
"I was always interested in people that come up from the bottom and pull themselves up from nothing," Sloan said. "People were surprisingly cooperative, and they received so many stories that they had to turn some people away."
"I think there is so much miscommunication, especially with people who are refugees who fled," she said. "They wanted to have their stories told."
Sloan said Crossing the BLVD is the only project of its kind whose footage stretches before and after Sept. 11.
The attacks marked noticeable changes in people's attitudes, Lehrer said.
Another story they told was about a man who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after his wife and daughter were murdered. The man could not get a passenger flight out of the country, so he was forced to ride in the cargo hold of a plane to an unknown destination.
When he arrived in Queens, the man was horrified to learn about the detention centers set up after Sept. 11.
Although Lehrer does not like to travel, he said he loves that in Queens you can go "around the world" with a subway pass.
There are 138 languages spoken in Queens, Sloan said.
"The airports are now the main ports of entry for immigrants and refugees from all over the world making Queens a modern-day Ellis Island." she said.
Sloan and Lehrer are performing Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America across the country. They also have a traveling exhibition, a book and an audio CD.
They are each working on their own projects now, but in the future they hope to do another joint documentary on the American's sense of home.
