an american story part 1
Fighting fascism one generation at a time
Immigration
Dedicated to mothers and fathers everywhere, loving and longing for their children.
And to our brave sons and daughters, who should not have to suffer this way.
“I was thinking of many things while writing this song. All the stories of mothers fighting to keep their children alive.
My wishes for my son. To keep him safe. To keep him close.
A profound sense of the precariousness of it all. How close we dance to the edge every day. And it’s not always a dance.
More like hand to hand combat. With no armor and no back up.”
Though my team and I are not journalists or historians, we have tried our best to remain true and accurate throughout this post.”- Ellen Kaye
Immigration
“Here are the U.S. citizens caught in Trump’s immigration crackdown”
By María Luisa Paúl
Over a dozen U.S. citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, according to interviews, court records and news reports.
Updated May 3, 2025
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez — Florida
Photo Credit: Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez is reunited with his mother after he was released from Leon County Jail in Florida. (Thomas Kennedy/AP)
On April 16, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old citizen, was detained by Florida Highway Patrol during a traffic stop near the Georgia-Florida line, The Post reported. Despite presenting his birth certificate and Social Security card, he was arrested under Florida Senate Bill 4-C — a law targeting unauthorized immigrants in the state, which had been temporarily blocked by a federal court.
Lopez-Gomez, who primarily speaks Tzotzil — a Mayan dialect — was held in Leon County Jail for over 24 hours due to an ICE detainer, even after a judge verified his citizenship and dismissed the charges against him.
McLaughlin said Lopez-Gomez told officers he was in the country illegally: “Immediately after learning the individual was a United States citizen, he was released.”
Read more of the story here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/18/florida-immigration-hold-lopez-gomez/
and here:
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/18/juan-carlos-lopez-gomez-american-citizen-arrested-florida-illegal-immigrant/83154131007/
AJC NEWS
He was held by police for over 30 hours despite being a U.S. citizen
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S. citizen born in Georgia, was arrested by Florida police in mid-April after being labeled an “unauthorized alien” while traveling to Florida for a construction job. He was held in jail for more than 30 hours because of an ICE detainer, even after his mom proved his citizenship in court. AJC’s Lautaro Grinspan spoke with Juan Carlos and his mother about the trauma of the arrest, the racial profiling they believe played a role, and the impact it’s had on their family and community. As they are still processing the arrest, mother and son have yet to cross the state line and return to Florida for work. Lopez-Gomez’s attorney, Mutaqee Akbar, said his client’s attempt to declare citizenship and provide documentation to the officer is exactly what he should have done during the encounter. Akbar also said he is discussing a possible wrongful arrest lawsuit. Credits: AJC | @LlanosJackie / X | @tomaskenn / X | Silvia Alba / WTXL
Sleeping Shadows Lullaby
Live Performances & Inteviews Sleeping Shadows
Sleeping Shadows Lullaby Playlist
4:10
6:31
3:39
An Interview with Ellen
Sleeping Shadows Lullaby Playlist
2:21
0:51
0:53
2:45
Full transcript of interview with Ellen below
“Lulling your baby to sleep with your sing song words and melody.
But your deepest wishes and fears break through.”-Ellen Kaye
I wrote Sleeping Shadows Lullaby to tell the story of what it feels to be a young mother in a dangerous, chaotic world with your baby strapped to your chest or on your back with lips on your neck.
And you’re doing everything you can to protect it and to tell that the world isn’t as bad as it seems and to be reassuring and to sing and to whisper and to lull the child to sleep and also to look out into the world and say, you know, here are the beautiful stars. Here’s this beautiful planet that we’re living on and your whole life is in front of you. But in the song, the young mother is also on the run. So it’s that struggle of trying to keep the baby quiet so that, you know, the enemy, the predator, the hunter can’t hear you and yet to remain strong and fierce and optimistic that you’re going to get the heck out of this really bad situation, whether it’s a forest, a jungle, a city street.
So to a better and safer world, that’s what I’m trying to write about.
2nd Answer:
Sleeping Shadows Lullaby is the last song in chapter three and it’s part of the Seeker Song Trilogy. It’s from the point of view of a mother from any time, from any time since the beginning of time.
From the neanderthals to humans and it’s about being on the run, whether it’s in a forest or a jungle or in a city with your baby in your arms. Being chased and trying to lull the baby to sleep and hoping that you can make the child feel safe in an unsafe world.
I want listeners to love the young mother and her child and to think that if they were there they would do everything they could to protect them. And if they are a young mother and feel that the world is an impossible place, that this song gives them hope, you know, that there are ways out of terrible situations and there are people who will help you get out of them.
And mostly to kind of foster a feeling of love and sympathy for people that are in trouble and need us.
“I dreamed that we were far away and gone
on wings of birds, we flew at dawn
I dreamed I kept you safe and sound from harm
We left this earth and we were gone.”
I think that’s kind of the heart of the tune. And it’s the dream, the dream that every parent has. And I think more than parents, I think it’s the dream that everybody has for the people they love. That they can protect them, they can set them free and they can take such good care of them that they will never ever be in want for anything.
Definitely my own experience as a mother is central to the tune. And I had my son Ian in a difficult time in my life and he was the most amazing gift to me. But there were circumstances that definitely were challenging.
So, I’m thinking of that when I was writing the song and I’ve always remained very aware of how hard it is to be a mother. In the beginning, in the middle, in the end. It’s just a difficult path. It’s one I highly recommend, but what it takes to do it and you just never ever know if you’ve ever felt that you’ve mastered it. And you always wish that you could have done some things differently. But mostly I think the longing to protect your child is elusive and somewhat delusional. So you’re kind of fighting that idea in yourself. And because you want to remain optimistic and you want to be strong for your children.
So I think all of that weaves in and out of “Sleeping Shadows Lullaby.”
2nd Answer:
I think the precariousness of existence and in particular the most vulnerable. But also I do believe that most people on this planet will be extremely vulnerable at some point.
Whether they see it coming or not and I’m looking to kind of dive into that about how on the edge everything really is and how fraught and what a daily fight it is just to put one foot in front of the other. So that’s I’d say that that was one of the deeper things that’s roiling underneath what I was writing about.
Pictures from our Old Bones stories below
Sources And Inspirations
Our songs that draw inspiration from stories like these
The Story
Sleeping Shadows Lullaby
” How it feels to have your heart filled to the brim with love and dread for your child.“-Ellen Kaye
With “The Unknown” and “Sleeping Shadows Lullaby” I’m trying to convey what it feels like to be the other, to be on the run, to be out in the cold, far away from friends, from those who love you. To be unprotected. Alone. And in this case, with a small child on your back fighting off your natural and unnatural predators.
Lulling your baby to sleep with your sing song words and melody. But your deepest wishes and fears break through. The lullaby is what is on your lips to keep your child quiet in dangerous places. But your thoughts and longings break through, soaring above the hushed whisperings, asking the universe to give you a goddamn break.
To be lost in another time, in another person’s story. To remember what it feels like to have everything on the line. How it feels to have your heart filled to the brim with love and dread for your child. To refuse to accept your destiny.
I was thinking of many things while writing this song. All the stories of mothers fighting to keep their children alive. My wishes for my son. To keep him safe. To keep him close.
A profound sense of the precariousness of it all. How close we dance to the edge every day. And it’s not always a dance. More like hand to hand combat. With no armor and no back up
Listen
The Story
Stardust At My Back
“That you could curse your destiny, upend it and walk away.”-Ellen Kaye
When I wrote this song I had a whole idea. I wanted to write about running off to sea. Of being exiled. Of immigration thousands of years ago and immigration now. Of choosing to leave because it is the smart thing to do. Of leaving because your children are hungry and you need to feed them. Because people hate you who have never met you and it will never change. Because the religion that dominates your country says you are responsible for the death of its savior. Because you were kidnapped and shackled and torn away from your home in chains. Or because you simply had the idea that there was something better, that this was not the life you had to lead. That you could curse your destiny, upend it and walk away. These seekers’ songs started out as stories each person in our world could sing. A window into the archetypal experiences of leaving home, of running, of searching for a new place, a new home, a safe place, through the eyes of very different people. I wanted to put us all in each other’s shoes, to feel what other people feel. To expand our understanding. To levitate.
Videos & Interviews
Stardust At My Back Playlist
0:59
6:31
2:01
Stardust At My Back Interview Playlist
0:51
0:56
0:33
0:59
Full transcript of interview with Ellen below
“I wanted to put us all in each other’s shoes, to feel what other people feel.”-Ellen Kaye
I had a whole idea. I wanted to write about running off to sea. Of being exiled. Of immigration thousands of years ago and immigration now. Of choosing to leave because it is the smart thing to do. Of leaving because your children are hungry and you need to feed them. Because people hate you who have never met you and it will never change. Because the religion that dominates your country says you are responsible for the death of its savior. Because you were kidnapped and shackled and torn away from your home in chains. Or because you simply had the idea that there was something better, that this was not the life you had to lead. That you could curse your destiny, upend it and walk away. These seekers’ songs started out as stories each person in our world could sing. A window into the archetypal experiences of leaving home, of running, of searching for a new place, a new home, a safe place, through the eyes of very different people.
I wanted to put us all in each other’s shoes, to feel what other people feel. To expand our understanding. To levitate.
I want them to feel less alone. And to feel inspired to leap. To leave the charted path.
“Across the sky, across the sea, every step in front of me, leads me into the unknown”
So many peoples’ histories along the path of our project have lead to this song. But first it was my own experience, being abused at home and deciding that I wasn’t going to live that way. So at fourteen I hit the road and hitchhiked across the country. I felt the very same feeling of uncontainable hope when I put my first foot on the highway and my thumb in the wind.
THE UNKNOWN
Listen
Videos & Interviews
The Unknown Playlist
1:25
6:31
2:20
The Story
The Unknown
“It is the saddest story ever told. With the boldest beginning. But the darkest flaw is in our making. “-Ellen Kaye
My own experience led me to writing this song. Being forced to leave home at an early age to save myself. Leaving everything I knew, the world I loved. And then being exiled for almost two years from fourteen to sixteen on Hart Island, the home to Potters Field.
Of course, being half Jewish probably has a lot to do with writing this song as well. I was raised on Fiddler On The Roof. And the song Anatevka haunts me to this day. The Holocaust was a running history in my mind from my earliest memories.
My father wias diagnosed with cancer six months before I was born.
And then my very early years growing up both in the South and the North and understanding the horror of slavery, in the way a small child can, then a teenager and later as an adult. Seeing quite early, in my own home, that many Americans would not face it. That people in my immediate family were living in an alternate reality of the lost cause.
In school, I began to grasp the tragedy of our Native American First Peoples history. Horrifying. It’s a strange history, our American story. The people who live here now have so many different pasts behind them. That’s our great experiment. I love our country so. But it breaks my heart. Like having a mother who can’t stop drinking. It is the saddest story ever told. With the boldest beginning. But the darkest flaw is in our making.
It’s funny to me, that with all the thousands of years of original sin conceptually, we never seem able to apply it to ourselves in the most important matters of state. Like a childlike patient on a psychiatrist’s couch, we can’t move forward. We can’t see ourselves. We can only project the fear and shame from our past failures onto the people we have failed the most. And the new people who need us now.
I have felt displaced since I was forced to leave my own home. I was never able to resume my old life. Left out to sea. Never feeling at home again. That led me to more easily imagine how other people might experience their lives now and in the long lost long agos.
On Passover we talk about being the stranger, of being kind to the stranger, of how we can all be strangers in a strange land. Here, in America, we have made people who were here before us into strangers. Strangers in their own land. We dragged people here in chains hundreds of years ago, people whose family lines have been here now much longer than most of our own family lineages, and we have kept them strangers in their own country. Strangers to the rights of full citizenship. Strangers in a country that never loves them.
I understand what it feels like to be born into a family that doesn’t love you. In a world that keeps insisting that it isn’t true. To a mother who doesn’t love you. When the world says mother’s always love their children. That was the first lie. And why it was so easy for me to see the next one. And the one after that.
The Unknown Interviews Playlist
1:02
1:00
0:28
1:14
Full transcript of interview with Ellen below
“…the whole Seeker Song trilogy kind of leads into the longing in myself for America to…embrace the stranger and to find ways in our daily lives to love and be compassionate toward the stranger.”-Ellen Kaye
Well, first, it’s my own experience. Being forced to leave home at an early age to save myself. Leaving everything I knew, the world I loved. And then being exiled for almost two years from fourteen to sixteen on Hart Island, the home to Potters Field.
Of course, being half Jewish probably has a lot to do with writing this song as well. I was raised on Fiddler On The Roof. And the song Anatevka haunts me to this day. The Holocaust was a running history in my mind from my earliest memories.
And then my very early years growing up both in the South and the North and understanding the horror of slavery, in the way a small child can, then a teenager and later as an adult. Seeing quite early, in my own home, that many Americans would not face it. That people in my immediate family were living in an alternate reality of the lost cause.
In school, I began to grasp the tragedy of our Native American First Peoples history. Horrifying. It’s a strange history, our American story. The people who live here now have so many different pasts behind them. That’s our great experiment. I love our country so. But it breaks my heart. Like having a mother who can’t stop drinking. It is the saddest story ever told. With the boldest beginning. But the darkest flaw is in our making.
It’s funny to me, that with all the thousands of years of original sin conceptually, we never seem able to apply it to ourselves in the most important matters of state. Like a childlike patient on a psychiatrist’s couch, we can’t move forward. We can’t see ourselves. We can only project the fear and shame from our past failures onto the people we have failed the most. And the new people who need us now.
That we are listening. That we have suffered. That we can imagine their suffering. And we want it to end.
A map, a plan, a distant land
It tears me from my home
I miss my old world
Need my old world
Long for my old home
I have felt displaced since I was forced to leave my own home. I was never able to resume my old life. Left out to sea. Never feeling at home again. That led me to feel how other people might experience their lives now and in the long lost long agos.
On Passover we talk about being the stranger, of being kind to the stranger, of how we can all be strangers in a strange land. Here, in America, we have made people who were here before us, strangers. We dragged people here in chains hundreds of years ago, people who have been here now much longer than most of us, and we have kept them strangers in their own land. Strangers to the rights of full citizenship. Strangers to a country that never loves them.
I understand what it feels like to be born into a family that doesn’t love you. In a world that keeps insisting that it isn’t true. To a mother who doesn’t love you. When the world says mother’s always love their children. That was the first lie. And why it was so easy for me to see the next one. And the one after that.