Asociación De Mexicanos En Carolina Del Norte (AMEXCAN)

Greenville, NC

AMEXCAN lifts up the stories of migrant farmworkers in Eastern North Carolina through the creation of a mobile “living” sculpture – a school bus that includes art (inside and outside, including indigenous design elements and photographic portraits), audio that shares migrant workers’ stories, and interactive elements for community participation that will continue to evolve over time. This project was facilitated under the leadership of Sally Jacobs, a painter and multimedia artist based in Greenville, NC. Sally has spent three years in Eastern North Carolina building relationships in the farmworker community while co-directing the documentary, At A Stranger’s Table, which follows the lives of migrant farmworkers and introduces them to consumers in hopes of creating mutual understanding. Working with partners including Pitt Community College, Pitt County Arts Council, the East Coast Migrant Head Start program and East Carolina University, the Inclusive Public Art project creates a platform for farmworkers to tell their stories in their own voices, while highlighting the essential economic and cultural contributions of the migrant H-2A farmworker population and creates opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration and understanding. The bus itself serves as a metaphor, as gutted and repurposed school buses are the primary mode of transportation that farmers utilize to transport workers and equipment to the field and produce/harvests from the field in Eastern North Carolina. On the road, these school buses are hiding farmworkers in plain sight, which speaks to the isolation of this community. The mobile sculpture has a permanent home in Alice F. Keene District Park in Greenville, NC, but also travels to schools and other community events, as well as to farmworker camps.

The following segment premiered as a part of the PBS North Carolina Visibly Speaking series, which documents all ten Inclusive Public Art grantee projects from Cohort I.