Revisiting Minnesota's "Open House" Exhibition in the Age of ICE

"Five thousand Minnesotans came out in the frigid January cold on opening weekend to see an actual house that had been reconstructed inside the museum, like a ship in a bottle. Successive generations of Americans—more than fifty families, across more than a century—had lived in the house, at 470 Hopkins Street, wave after wave of newcomers and immigrants, travellers who made Minnesota, and the U.S., their home."

"This weekend, on the streets of Minneapolis, masked agents of the federal government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency shot and killed another American, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti. He, like the poet Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE earlier this month, was among thousands of Minnesotans who have taken to the streets, even amid brutally cold temperatures and a howling snowstorm, to protect immigrants in their state from assault, arrest, separation from their families, and deportation."

"U.S. immigration policy had become a travesty under the Biden Administration. But nothing about repairing that policy justifies the Trump Administration's savage, vengeful, and unconstitutional "surge" deployment of ICE agents in American cities, their lawless, masked and wanton violence, or their immunity from prosecution. All over the Twin Cities, immigrants, whether they're in the U.S. legally or not, have been hiding in their houses, afraid to leave, afraid, even, to peer out a window."

Twenty years ago the Minnesota History Center opened an interactive exhibition, "Open House: If These Walls Could Talk," reconstructing an actual house inside the museum. The exhibit presented successive generations of residents—more than fifty families across a century—whose arrivals shaped Minnesota and the United States. The show won awards, broke attendance records, and became an archive of a vanishing America. In Minneapolis this weekend masked ICE agents shot and killed a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, following an earlier killing of poet Renee Good. Thousands of Minnesotans have protested in freezing conditions to protect immigrants. Immigrants are hiding in homes, fearful of arrest, separation, and deportation. The contrast between preserved immigrant histories and current enforcement violence highlights deep tensions over belonging and safety.

Read at The New Yorker