ABSTRACT
In recent years, practitioners and scholars have devoted considerable attention to museums’ relations with the communities around them, particularly the communities they are mandated to represent (Watson 2007, 2-8).2 Their discussions most often address efforts by museum staff to reach out to and include a diverse array of stakeholder groups in the development of exhibits and long-term plans. In the pages which follow, I will explore another kind of museum-community dynamic, the occupation of France’s largest immigration museum (the only immigration museum in Europe to have national museum status), the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI)3 by five hundred undocumented immigrant workers, or sans papiers.4 I will situate the story of the occupation in the history of France’s undocumented immigrants and their struggle for regularization. From there, I will describe how various observers, participants, and stakeholders understood and evaluated this occupation. I will explain how this event requires us to rethink James Clifford’s concept of the museum as a “contact zone” (1997, 192-193). Finally, I will discuss the occupation of the CNHI as it reflects the potential of immigration museums to serve as theaters of struggle for immigrants’ rights.
