, part of Global Cornell, has and four of the six are students from the 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频.
With support from the the Migrations initiative sponsors this annual competition open to Cornell undergraduate and graduate students. Six awards of $1,000 are made annually. The A&S winners are Ishika Agrawal 鈥23, Shehryar Qazi 鈥24, F谩tima Mart铆nez 鈥24 and Juan Harmon, a graduate student in poetry.
For the competition, Agrawal, who is part of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, wrote a set of three poems entitled 鈥淐reating Home.鈥 Each poem tells the story of a grandmother, mother and daughter from a family that emigrated from India to the United States. It explores the intergenerational relationships that immigrants retain with their homeland and its histories pre-migration, just after migration and a generation later.
Qazi鈥檚 entry is an essay largely about two novels: Mohsin Hamid鈥檚 鈥淭he Reluctant Fundamentalist鈥 and Tayeb Salih鈥檚 鈥淪eason of Migration to the North.鈥 In his essay, Qazi, a government and economics major, connects the two novels to his own identity as a Pakistani immigrant. Much of his essay explores complicity by many of what he calls 鈥渢he sharpest and most brilliant minds from home鈥 in exploiting the Global South and its resources, as well as how he views the two novels as cautionary tales.
Mart铆nez, a psychology major, used her entry to detail her experience on March 13, 2020, a day which she called 鈥渢he day the world stopped,鈥 but also the day she received her likely letter from Cornell. She explores how the roles of children and parents 鈥 in families in which only the parents were immigrants 鈥 reverses over time. In her view, the parents work hard to provide a better life for their children than the ones they left, but as the children grow up, they believe they need to aid and protect their aging parents.
Harmon鈥檚 entry takes the form of two selections. The first selection explores the story of immigrant mentalities, such as the opening lines of his poem 鈥淥nce a Month My Father Brought KFC Home for the Family,鈥 in which he states that his grandmother would 鈥渆at the bones if she could.鈥 His second selection explores the different worldviews between elder immigrant generations and their second- and third-generation descendants.
Jonathan Mong '25 is a communications assistant for the 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频.
More News from A&S
