In a black-and-white photo that Anna Crosslin, International Institute president and CEO, shares on her computer, a group of Mexican immigrants dressed in their Sunday best stand in front of the boxcar where they are living. The adults in the photo stare directly at the camera with friendly but serious expressions. The children, seemingly restless, look off in different directions. In the back corner stands a volunteer English teacher in a suit and bow tie.
“When we were founded in 1919, we went where the need was,” says Crosslin. “The volunteer teacher would go over there [to Illinois] and the box cars would get moved so it was always difficult to find the box car that they had used the previous week for their class.”
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The International Institute is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Crosslin has been in her current role with the Institute for 41 of those years, so long that it’s hard to think about the Institute without also thinking of her and vice versa.
Crosslin was born in Tokyo and says she’s always felt like she’s had her “foot in two cultures.” Her mother was a Japanese immigrant and her father, an American in the U.S. military. Taking the job at the Institute was “just a natural next step in my life experience,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in other parts of the world and multicultural approaches to things.”
Crosslin moved to St. Louis from Seattle to attend Washington University where she majored in political science with a minor in Asian studies. After graduating, she briefly worked at Wash. U. before accepting the position at the Institute when she was 28 years old. “It basically has been a life of two jobs,” she says.
Even if it didn’t always seem that way.
Issues surrounding immigration and refugees are in a constant state of flux, so her work always seems to change every five or so years.
“The International Institute was very different than it is today,” Crosslin says. When she first started, it was located in an 1890 Victorian mansion in the Central West End. The staff of nine had to learn how to use the space that was available to them in creative ways. English classes were taught in the attic and in the carriage house in the back, and job placement offices were located in the kitchen.
The Institute is now located on Aresenal Street in a building that once housed St. Elizabeth Academy. There are currently around 90 staff members after recent reductions due to cuts in refugee resettlement numbers.
Although the work ebbs and flows depending on the needs of the populations the Institute is serving, there are services that every newcomer needs. English education has always been an integral part of the Institute’s work. “The ability to communicate in English is probably the single most important factor in immigrant success in this country,” says Crosslin.
Cultural orientation is another aspect of their work that is very important in helping the newcomers understand things that we learn along the way. “We know the consequences if we don’t put money in a parking meter, but newcomers don’t even know what a meter is,” Crosslin explains. “So the learning process is very deep, and we make this assumption that they should just know.”
Advocacy work in the community has become increasingly important as the Institute is trying to combat narratives that permeate our media. “Anti-immigrant rhetoric and harassment of the newcomer is not new,” explains Crosslin. In the early 19th century, the Germans who arrived to St. Louis didn’t like the Irish who came after them. What is new is the ability to spread information through social media and the 24-hour news cycle that “emphasizes the differences rather than the commonalities.”
“You can’t build a society based on diversity,” says Crosslin. “Diversity is about appreciating differences. You build a society on what is shared: values, behaviors, importance of family, the appreciation of the right to vote.”
Once relationships are developed and a level of trust is established, Crosslin says, “then people can talk about differences and see it as a uniqueness instead of a way to divide.”
“That’s why we do Festival of Nations,” she says of the popular festival that brings thousands of attendees to Tower Grove Park in August each year. “The festival is about promoting and preserving culture. Promoting so we can create those linkages with the broader community.”
“Sure, the food is wonderful, but it’s really about helping people explore those parts of our culture in which there are similarities,” she says.
