First Generation

HALIMA ADEN

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHANGE YOURSELF OR YOUR BELIEFS TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”

Halima Aden was born in Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya in 1997 after her parents fled war-torn Somalia. Today, the overcrowded camp houses more than 180,000 refugees living in tin-roofed huts. Halima grew up there with kids from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. “It wasn’t a matter of, ‘Oh, we’re in a refugee camp, my life sucks,’” she said. “It was ‘Okay. We’re in this predicament,’ but you know, ‘How do we go from here? What do we do?’” Halima and the other kids played together and learned Swahili to communicate. “As children, we were oblivious to race and religion,” Halima recalled. When her family resettled in the United States, six-year-old Halima was surprised to see kids playing in separate groups instead of all together in her new city of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

As a Muslim, Halima chose to express her faith by wearing a hijab (headscarf) to cover her hair. At first, this was because she wanted to be just like her mother. “Every little girl looks up to her mom so much—that’s your first hero,” Halima explained. But she also felt best when she was dressed modestly. “It’s how I interpret my religion,” she said, even though some kids at school stared and bullied Halima and her hijabi friends. “It was a tough time—everyone wanted to be mean.”

Flipping through magazines in her family home, Halima didn’t find anyone who looked like her. So, after graduating from high school, she decided to enter the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. “Not seeing women that look like you in media in general and especially in beauty competitions sends the message that you’re not beautiful or you have to change the way you look to be considered beautiful,” Halima stressed. “And that’s not true.”

Halima was the first contestant to wear a hijab. She didn’t win, but some of the world’s top designers invited her to walk their runways during fashion weeks in New York City and Milan. She wore beautiful headscarves and flowing, loose-fitting dresses and pants. “When I’m walking the runway I want people to see that, yes, I’m wearing a hijab—but I’m also a million other things. I want us to get to a place where we just see women.”

Halima Aden hadn’t planned to be the first hijab-wearing model on the cover of an American beauty magazine. But that’s what happened in 2017, and all because the Somali American woman refused to be anything but herself. “I think it’s important to be diverse and I hope we continue to see that as a trend in the fashion industry.”

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

“ONLY IN AMERICA CAN A REFUGEE BECOME THE SECRETARY OF STATE.”

Madeleine Korbel Albright spent her childhood being brave. At the start of World War II in 1939, Nazis invaded her home country of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), and Madeleine and her family had to leave—fast. Her father worked as a diplomat representing their country around the world, so his life was in danger. They escaped to England, where Madeleine dodged bombs that destroyed buildings so close to her bedroom she could hear windows shattering. But she also saw people helping one another and sharing what little food they had. Those experiences stayed with Madeleine when she and her family came to the United States as refugees.

As a teenager in Denver, Madeleine didn’t like being new in school or feeling different because of her accent. “I always felt I was a foreigner,” she said. Her parents didn’t have money for a car or a TV, so they invited people over to talk about the world’s problems. Since Madeleine spoke four languages and loved learning about politics, the visitors valued her opinions. She began to see her background as her greatest strength.

Madeleine earned a scholarship to Wellesley College and studied political science. It was the first time she felt like she belonged, since everyone in her class was passionate about politics. She learned why countries went to war and how they made peace. “Being raised in a free America made all the difference,” Madeleine said. That freedom made her question why more women weren’t world leaders. She knew that societies thrive when women and men have equal opportunities.

Politicians were so impressed by Madeleine’s views that she started working for the US government. As an ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine worked to end the war and build peace in the Balkans, a region near her birth country. In 1996, President Bill Clinton chose Madeleine to be the US secretary of state, the most important international job in the country. Everyone in Congress agreed. It was the first time in American history that a woman held this office.

Madeleine loved the job, but she didn’t like that critics talked about her clothes. They never did that with male diplomats. She made a statement by wearing a pin shaped from broken glass. It reminded people how she had broken through the glass ceiling of politics—a symbolic obstacle that kept women from being world leaders.

By breaking down barriers and embracing her heritage, Madeleine was able to create change in conflict countries. She saw beyond borders to the humanity in everyone, a quality that she says is very American. “We are a country,” she explained, “that has been created and populated by people from other countries.”

DIANA AL-HADID

“THE PROCESS OF MAKING SOMETHING IS A PROCESS OF LEARNING. IT’S MY LINK TO THE REST OF THE WORLD.”

Diana Al-Hadid works big. Some of her sculptures fill entire rooms. Her studio includes a welding station, huge power drills, and assorted hammers and saws. Sometimes she wears a protective hazmat suit when she’s carving. Working with heavy-duty materials such as steel, wood, fiberglass, and plaster, Diana creates sculptures that look like ruined cities, crumbling towers, and mythological worlds. “I climb over my sculptures…. They’re very physical,” she said, describing how she works. “I’ll break things and then fix things, and sometimes I’m… literally inside the piece.”

Diana’s family left Aleppo, Syria, in 1986, when she was five years old. She spoke only Arabic when the Al-Hadids arrived in Ohio, and she quickly had to learn English. “I remember rehearsing saying ‘I’m not from here, I’m from Syria,’ but people didn’t realize where Syria was.” Though she fit in pretty well in her new neighborhood, Diana said her parents maintained strict traditions at home. “I wasn’t allowed to go to prom,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend!” But she was free to pursue her love of art, and by the time she turned eleven, she was determined to be an artist.

Diana admired the Old Masters of Europe—painters like Goya, Botticelli, and Rembrandt—and she studied drawing and photography before turning to sculpture.

Sometimes her work draws on her Arab and Islamic background, but some critics have said she should do more to embrace those roots. “I am a Syrian artist, but that’s not the full story,” Diana said in reply. She is very concerned about the conflicts in war-torn Syria, where cities have been destroyed and thousands of people have been killed or have escaped as refugees. She also knows that opportunities for women in the arts and other professions were very limited in Syria even before the war. Living in the United States gave her the opportunity to create.

“Everything I do now is a product of my ancestry,” Diana said. “I think that’s a political enough statement: that I’m an Arab woman making sculptures. I wouldn’t be making sculptures if I was living in Syria.”

SERGEY BRIN

“THE U.S. HAD THE COURAGE TO TAKE ME AND MY FAMILY IN AS REFUGEES.”

It started in a college dorm room and developed into one of the world’s most powerful businesses. But long before Google founder Sergey Brin launched his company, he had a lot to overcome.

“I never felt like a part of the majority,” Sergey said. He’d been a child in the Soviet Union, where Jewish people were banned from many things. His father had wanted to be an astronomer but wasn’t allowed to attend graduate school because of his religion. He sneaked into classes and wrote a doctoral thesis anyway, and was eventually offered a teaching job at the University of Maryland, where he fled with his family in 1979.

In Maryland, six-year-old Sergey was teased by his classmates because of his heavy accent. But he was already used to being an outsider, and the private school he attended allowed him to explore his own interests. Working with puzzles, maps, and math games sparked his creativity. “I could grow at my own pace,” he said.