(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, an oral history project gives voices to incarcerated asylum seekers.

(Francisco) A huge number of those folks have spent time in these detention centers.

Many of the people who are spending time in these detention centers are people who have never broken a law.

(Tom) A trip to the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

(Daniel) We're very much a living culture museum, bringing music alive also through the artists that we know and love.

We have personal instruments of a number of artists from around the world.

(Tom) And a local professor's research gives us a better understanding of where COVID-19 started.

(Michael) We need to do these, what we call simulations.

We need to rerun the tape of this epidemic and the evolution of the virus over and over and over again.

And finally, we're able to use that same methodology to answer questions.

(Tom) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

First up, Detained: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System, Well, this is an oral history project, archiving the stories of asylum seekers who were incarcerated here in Arizona.

Now its organizers call it a counter memorial, intended to be a record of the emergent landscape of for-profit immigrant detention centers.

♪ SOFT AMBIENT MUSIC (Francisco) El propósito de este proyecto es colegir las voces y las experiencias de la gente que han sido detenidos, que han pasado por la frontera para llegar acá.

Y estamos buscando hacer un archivo de esas voces de esas historias, para guardar para la gente que tiene interés en este tema.

Entonces, para empezar, nada más quiero confirmar que estás de acuerdo en hablar con nosotros, participar en el proyecto y que estamos grabando la conversación.

(Elvín) Sí, mientras que sea uso de este... Pues yo nací en Guatemala en un poblado de Verapaz.

Este...pues hay muchas razones por la cual me vine acá.

Y, pues, vivir allá, cuando estaba allá era muy duro porque yo empecé a trabajar a los seis años más o menos.

(Francisco) I first started to spend time in these immigration detention centers a few years before the pandemic.

Literally just showing up at the detention center, sitting down with people at a table to say, you know, What are you experiencing?

How can we help?

There are very limited ways that we can help, but that can be really huge to somebody who's experiencing that kind of isolation over the course of months and years.

I think something that's really important to understand about these detention centers is how isolating they are.

They're geographically isolated off on farm roads, away from major towns and highways.

So they're not seen, they're sort of out of sight and out of mind, I think, for the majority of people who live in Arizona.

And then the pandemic happened.

The accompaniment work that we were doing switched to you know like, letter writing and phone calls only.

We started to think about now that we can't go into these spaces, what can we be doing to sort of still be working with these people and to still be raising awareness about this issue?

That's where sort of the seed of the idea to record conversations and archive conversations came.

(Greer) The Detained Project is an oral history archiving project of the experiences of people who have been in immigration detention here in Arizona.

There's currently three detention centers that house adult immigrants.

The two of them are for-profit facilities run by an organization called CoreCivic.

Our clients report conditions that are pretty alarming.

Things like medical neglect, asking to see a doctor multiple times and not being seen, poor food, not being given prescriptions that they medically need.

♪ MÚSICA SOMBRÍA (Interviewer) When you were first in detention, where was the detention center that you were housed at?

(Perla) Eloy Detention Center (Interviewer) Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like when you first got there?

(Perla) They weren't saying much of nothing.

So I was there for a whole, almost a whole year.

But I think for the first three months, they put me in the maximum security.

Spent like almost three months in that maximum security, which was terrible because you couldn't be in the yard with nobody else or you couldn't eat lunch or anybody else, we had to go at a separate time.

I mean, it's just terrible.

It's just the way they treated people.

And when the whole pandemic hit, it was bad because there was people that were getting sick.

Before, you know, we would go o lockdown, on random lockdowns.

They wouldn't say why or what.

It's just like we never knew what we were coming out umm because we didn't have, you know, our toiletries or we weren't even getting commissary.

It was just, it was bad.

(Interviewer) Did they-Did you ever have masks?

Were they ever?

(Perla) Yeah, they gave us masks.

But that was already after the fact that so many people were already ill.

I am asthmatic.

And of course, I was more prone to catching COVID.

♪ MÚSICA SOMBRÍA (Greer) A lot of what you imagine in a prison is also what we see in immigration detention.

Some of the facilities at times have even had mixed populations.

What this does is it really criminalizes migration.

And a lot of the people we serve, particularly the people who have recently arrived, will not understand why they are being put in such a harsh, punitive setting when they're just, for instance, seeking protection, seeking asylum.

(Francisco) Whether or not they have presented themselves for asylum legally, as prescribed by law, at a port of entry, a huge number of those folks have spent time in these detention centers.

Many of the people who are spending time in these detention centers are people who have never broken a law.

So many of the people who we talk to in the archive describe, you know, never being able to imagine that they would feel so isolated and so, you know, disconnected, and all of that would happen, would be happening, you know, after their arrival like in this country, on the watch of our own government and our own policies and our own laws.

(Greer) If you are facing deportation, if you're arguing your legal case, even if you're a child, you don't have the right to an attorney if you can't pay for one.

What that means is most of the people we serve would have to defend themselves and argue their case against a trained government prosecutor in court.

Most of the people we serve don't speak English, don't have any familiarity with the legal system in the United States and are detained, all of which are incredible barriers to being able to meaningfully represent themselves in immigration court.

(Francisco) We have thought a lot about the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

That's something that when I was in high school, maybe there was a paragraph devoted to it in our history books.

That seems like a huge blind spot in how we think about what happened during that time domestically in our country.

And so we are guided by a desire to not have the same sort of like blank spaces.

(Greer) So in addition to these oral histories, you will see a collection of art, personal letters, notes, things of that nature that are part of the personal collection of Dora Rodriguez, who is one of our other collaborators on this project.

I am the director of a nonprofit organization in Tucson that is called Salva Vision that support asylum seekers, migrants at the Port of Entrance as well as detention centers.

When someone comes from their countries fleeing a war, hunger, the environmental issues that are happening in all these countries that take their lands, I wanna change the narrative that we are just these poor little people that is coming or these criminals that are coming from these countries to invade our country.

Please, it is not like that.

We are people of courage.

We are people of potential.

We are people of faith.

We are people of work.

We work.

I meet doctors, I meet lawyers, I meet a man from NASA who is from El Salvador.

You know, so we need to work on that.

We need to change the narrative of us being nothing but a problem for this country because we're not.

♪ MÚSICA SOMBRÍA En fin, logramos conseguir la casa, hace ya un año creo llevamos viviendo en nuestra casa.

Guau, felicidades.

[ SONIDOS DE BEBÉ ] Era la vida que me imaginaba cuando estaba yo en Guatemala.

Era esa vida la que yo vivía.

Por esa razón, también me vine acá porque quería un futuro mejor, quería tener una familia, quería cuidar de mis hermanos, quería alejarnos de mi papá para que no nos siguiera maltratando.

Lo logré, gracias a Dios pude lograrlo, ahora ellos están conmigo, tengo a mi esposa, tengo a mi hijo, tenemos una casa.

Trabajo en el roofing es algo pesado pero, ¿qué más puedo pedir?

Gano bien y no me quejo aunque ahorita con tanto sol sí, está muy duro trabajar afuera, pero bueno.

♪ MÚSICA SOMBRÍA (Francisco) Tucson and Phoenix are not unique.

Almost every major city in the United States has a detention center that is used for immigration detention within an hour or less.

The Florence Project has been serving detained immigrants in Arizona for 35 years, and our organization has grown exponentially in the last 10 years, and that is really a response to the increased need for services for people in immigration detention.

We're living in a moment where attacks against the right to seek asylum, attacks against immigrants in our community are happening all the time, both at the federal and the state level in terms of policies being proposed, legislation, things like that.

So I think bringing to the forefront the stories of people who are detained in these facilities, who are in our communities, is really important to push back against those attacks against immigrants and people who are migrating.

(Dora) History is watching us and I wish we can do better than that.

♪ MÚSICA SOMBRÍA (Tom) Next, we'll take you up I-10 to Phoenix to explore a hidden gem, the Musical Instrument Museum.

It houses the largest collection of musical instruments from around the world, offering a unique opportunity to explore global cultures through the power of music.

♪ AMBIENT MUSIC (Brian) I think MIM is such a unique institution and what we're trying to do here by representing the world in the way that we do.

It really captures that power of music and whether it's the artistic value of performance or the artistic quality of the musical instruments as objects or the stories of the people who play the instruments.

Our curators work really hard to collect instruments and pieces of material culture that really tell meaningful, impactful stories from all over the world.

(Daniel) We have the museum set up geographically.

So we have a gallery for each continent, and then we have an exhibit for each country, and then we have a variety of these thematic exhibits that are peppered throughout the galleries.

People and instruments travel across borders, and there's so much music and instruments that are so closely related and ethnic groups also that are on different sides of borders.

You get that experience because you're creating your own journey through the museum, and as you're traveling, you have your headphones on, and you're approaching close to a collection of instruments, and you're hearing the sounds of the music from those people from that place.

As you move, you start hearing these wonderful connections.

There's difference, but there's also similarity in rhythm and melody, instrument types.

We give equal celebration to all cultures.

So you can have a violin made from a humble village in Paraguay, where they're taking the recycled materials from the largest landfill there and creating instruments for children that have transformed their lives band their story told next to a Stradivari violin, for example.

♪ CLASSICAL VIOLIN ♪ (Brian) Then we take that gallery content and we adapt it into educational programming.

Start with early childhood movement and music classes, progress all the way through K-12, and then continue on into adult learning and other programs for seniors.

One of our most popular programs is our STEM programming.

We have a beautiful space here at the museum called the Collier STEM Gallery that is dedicated to telling the intersections between science and music.

We dive into the physics of sound waves and acoustic properties of musical instruments.

I think that having a musical instrument museum where guests don't get the opportunity to play something maybe falls under cruel and unusual punishment.

We definitely want to give guests the opportunity to play instruments.

We have our Experience Gallery, which is the main hands-on space.

And then we have the Encore Gallery that was designed with an early childhood focus.

Objects in there are hung at a lower level to be more friendly to smaller bodies.

It's just another wonderful hands-on space where people can actually release their inner musician and really try and make some music themselves while they're here for a visit.

We get the question a lot what the largest instrument is in the collection.

And a lot of people will think that it's the Octobase, which is the 11-foot-tall stringed instrument that we have in our Orientation Gallery.

But it's actually the Orchestrian, the Apollonia Orchestrian, in our Mechanical Music Gallery.

This is a huge dance organ that, back in the day, was carted around to different outdoor festivals in Europe on the back of flatbed trucks.

We have it fully assembled in our Mechanical Gallery.

We're very much a living culture museum, bringing music alive also through the artists that we know and love.

We have personal instruments of a number of artists from around the world, many of them also from the United States and even Arizona.

It's kind of an endless list, but what makes it particularly exciting is that we have a really vibrant theater here that does almost 280 concerts a year.

That theater is an extension of the mission of MIM.

♪ SAM GRISMAN COVERING "FRIEND OF THE DEVIL" ♪ all different styles and genres of music, local, national and international artists.

♪ 25-STRING KAYAGUM One of the greatest Ngoni players from Mali, Basuku Kuyate.

(Bassekuo) I play Ngoni, African banjo.

My father is playing Ngoni.

I play Ngoni.

My son plays Ngoni.

My grandfather plays Ngoni.

My grandfather is playing Ngoni.

Before Jesus Christ, my grandfather was playing this instrument.

He is really a tradition bearer, but also somebody who has spread this music of Ngoni and popularized it.

J'aime bien que vous aurez moi, je suis la gardien de cet instrument.

Donc je dois lutter pour cet instrument.

C'est pourquoi j'aime cet instrument.

Je veux que ce soit les joueurs de Ngoni Moi, je préfère que ce soit le nombreux comme les joueurs des guitares.

Beaucoup de gens jouent la guitare.

Beaucoup de gens jouent pas le Ngoni.

Donc je veux que ce soit nous aussi, que soit nombreux, le Ngoni soit partout.

Ça dit, c'est ça, j'aimerai faire la promotion pour cet instrument.

Yeah, I like music, I like it a lot.

(Daniel) It's exciting because we have these very same instruments on display in our galleries and even kind of a history of how the Ngoni has spread through different names, to different cultures, through different parts of Africa and even going back to ancient Egypt.

The idea that music is so important to humanity and culture is something that we need.

It's not just purely entertainment, it's a basic human need.

I think MIM really transmits that and when you go through this museum, you feel that connection across all people and cultures and it's really inspiring and exciting to know that in a very experiential way when you come here to MIM.

♪ WELE CUBA - BASSEKOU KOUYATE & NGONI BA ♪ (Tom) The origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a heated and politicized debate.

Was it a lab leak or did it jump from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market?

Enter Michael Worobey, Department Head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at the University of Arizona.

His research has yielded definitive evidence of a market origin.

Yet public opinion has been slow to catch on.

Where did COVID-19 come from?

At the moment, it raises more questions than clear answers.

The head of the FBI in a brand new interview is saying the agency thinks COVID may have originated, may have started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

For me, I went through the process myself where I thought a lab origin was much more suspicious than now I realize it was.

(Newscaster) The theory that thevirus may have escaped from a lab in China has been a heated issue.

(Michael) At the heart of this, is this idea and we can call it the Jon Stewart fallacy.

(Jon Stewart) China what do we do?

Oh, you know who we could ask?

The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.

The disease is the same name as the lab.

(Michael) There actually is a lab in Wuhan that studies these viruses very extensively.

But it turns out our own research has shown what I would describe as decisive evidence that this market was the site where this first started spreading and likely jumped from animals into humans.

(Newscaster) Researchers now believe it's clear that the virus came from the Wuhan market and not the lab.

(Michael) That's where the science is.

The public perception is not there.

And in part, it's because there's not that many people who've spent 10 to 16 hours a day for four years trying to integrate all of the information.

And that's what you want to do as a scientist you don't want to advocate for one hypothesis or against another hypothesis you want to advocate for what the data actually tells you 50 nucleotides for the fragments because this genome that we have in 100 nucleotide fragments, we need the reverse confluent.

I am an evolutionary biologist, but my area of specialty is the evolution of viruses.

And evolutionary tools like creating family tree of viruses can help you answer questions like when, where, and how pandemics begin and spread around the world, how they could be prevented.

Somewhere between the ancestor of the closest relatives in birds and cattle.

HIV and influenza have been two of my major focuses.

And so I've done work on HIV working out how that pandemic started including doing fieldwork in the Congo to collect samples from chimpanzees who have related viruses.

And then on the flu side, I developed a way of accounting for what we call local molecular clocks So molecular clocks are a way that we can look at viruses that are collected over weeks, months, years.

They evolve so have quickly that you can see this mutations accumalate in real time and it was sort of magic that you put that together and all of a sudden the confusing differences kind of snap into place.

And in many ways what I've done now with COVID is a direct parallel with that.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC Okay, so fast forward to early 2020 There are reports of this virus, and people who have mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, in China China has more than 200 confirmed cases of coronavirus, it's called, which produces pneumonia-like symptoms.

(Michael) What I knew I wanted to do was take that outbreak and model it on my computer.

We need to do these, what we call simulations.

We need to rerun the tape of this epidemic and the evolution of the virus over and over and over again.

And finally, we're able to use that same methodology to answer questions, not just about how this virus spread to different parts of the world, but how did it get into humans in the first place?

Of the 174 earliest onset COVID cases that are known, there's an astonishingly clear signal of where they lived.

Our most recent analyses show that if you take the center of those residential locations of the early cases, it's just at the entrance to a parking lot at the Huanan Market, of all the places in a city, 8,500 square kilometers.

So unlike any pandemic in history, we have the addresses of these folks.

It's incredible data.

And then the genomic information strongly suggests that there wasn't just one jump of these viruses, that there are two early lineages.

That's a scenario that makes perfect sense at a market where you have sustained infections with animals.

If you then are thinking, "Okay, someone got it at a lab and then brought it to the market," that's weird enough because there's 10,000 other places that the person could go, including their own workplace.

But then you're saying, "Okay, it happened," and then it happened two weeks later.

What we don't have is a sample from an animal at that market that had the virus.

But we were able to show that if you look where the virus was found in, in what we call environmental samples, so this is just basically like a Q-tip that you swab on a doorknob or an animal cage or a floor, and then you see, "Is there SARS-COV-2 in it?"

The real hotspot in the whole market was a particular stall that sold wildlife and the Chinese group that collected those samples, collected them in January of 2020 sequenced them and had the data that, you know, raccoon dogs were there, both lineages of the virus were there.

We have an environmental sample literally from one of the cages in this stall, and it has the virus You know, we have a real, really good understanding of how this one happened, but there's almost no discussion of what are we going to do now today to stop animals that we know harbor potential pandemic pathogens from being sold in the heart of big cities.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC (Newscaster) China has started to reopen its wet markets The virus likely spilled over into humans there, (Michael) And so sad, frustrating, but what do we have?

We've demonstrated that what we call this genomic epidemiology is incredibly powerful.

Millions and millions of the genome sequences of these viruses that helped us learn when a new variant was spreading.

More than half of them were sequenced using, in part, technology developed in this lab.

And so that is an example of what we call basic research.

You just want to answer a question, can then actually feed into tools that can make the world safer The world needs to know the origin of COVID-19 to prevent the next pandemic.

When I see a question that I want answered, I will find a way to answer that, whether it means going to the Congo or developing a new methodology or working with people who can help develop that.

Holy smokes.

I just wanna find the answer because that answer will help protect us from the next one (Tom) Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again next week.