ABSTRACT
Ellis Island Immigration Museum is located on a small island in New York Harbor between the iconic Statue of Liberty and the omnipotent skyscrapers of Manhattan’s financial district. Formerly, the buildings on Ellis Island were used as a federal immigration station as well as a detention and deportation facility. Between the years 1892 and 1924 over 12 million people passed through the buildings on Ellis Island (Moreno 2001) on their way to a new life in a new land. For many of these people, the site itself was a crucial part of the experience of migration: “what I, Georges Perec, have come here to examine is dispersion, wandering, diaspora. To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile, that is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere” (Perec and Bober 1995, 58).
