America 250 · Oakland · Saturday, September 12
Three hundred drones over the Coliseum at 9:15 pm, ten minutes, twenty formations. One story: the people who came here from somewhere else and built the place we call home.
The land under the Coliseum is Lisjan Ohlone land, and the Ohlone are still here. Every American immigration story starts there. So does the show: an oak tree drawn in light, the tree Oakland is named for, roots first.
a spreading oakAlexander Hamilton arrived from Nevis as a broke teenager and built the country's financial system. Lafayette was nineteen when he sailed from France to join Washington. Von Steuben, a Prussian, taught the army to drill. The founders knew America was an idea people could choose, not only a place they were born.
a quill and the year 1776Hundreds of thousands of Africans were brought here in chains, and their forced labor built the early republic's wealth. The show opens this act with broken chains. Then the builders who came by choice: Chinese and Irish crews who met in Utah in 1869 to finish the railroad, and the Punjabi, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers who have fed California ever since.
broken chains, wheat, crossed pickaxesEllis Island processed twelve million people, then the 1924 quotas shut the doors for forty years. The few who got through in the 1930s changed everything: Einstein fled Germany in 1933, Hedy Lamarr left Austria in 1937 and co-invented the radio technique behind Wi-Fi and GPS, Fermi built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago football stadium.
radio waves, E=mc²An eleven-year-old refugee from Prague became the first woman Secretary of State. A toddler from Havana grew up to put Latin rhythm on American pop radio. An Austrian bodybuilder ran California. A singer from Barbados and an actor from Canada became two of the most recognized faces on earth.
a handshake around the globe, a microphone, a crownJensen Huang came from Taiwan at nine and co-founded NVIDIA in a San Jose Denny's. Sergey Brin came from the Soviet Union at six and co-founded Google. Nearly half of America's largest companies were founded by immigrants or their children. The next 250 years are being built by the same kind of people.
a glowing chip and a constellation networkThe flags of every country of origin spin into the American flag. The flag becomes a glowing 250. The sky spells out five words. Then a raised hand lifts a torch, the way the statue in New York Harbor has for 140 years. Over Oakland, for ten seconds. Look up.
a hand with a torchSwipe, drag, or use the arrow keys
Production inspired by
Born Charlestown, Nevis · Arrived New York, 1772
An orphaned clerk from a small Caribbean island, he talked his way to a New York education, became Washington's aide, and then the first Secretary of the Treasury. He designed the national bank, the mint, the customs service and the Coast Guard, and wrote most of the Federalist Papers.
Born Ulm, Germany · Arrived Princeton, 1933
He left Germany weeks after Hitler took power and never went back, settling at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and becoming a citizen in 1940. His 1939 letter warning Roosevelt that Germany could build an atomic bomb changed the war. His physics changed how we understand space, time and energy.
Born Vienna, Austria · Arrived Hollywood, 1937
She escaped an arms-dealer husband and a darkening Europe to become one of MGM's biggest stars. Between films she invented. In 1942 she and composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping radio system to keep torpedoes from being jammed. The Navy shelved it. The idea became the basis of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.
Born Prague, Czechoslovakia · Arrived New York, 1948
Her family fled the Nazis in 1939 and the Communists in 1948, landing in the United States when she was eleven. She became a citizen at twenty, a professor, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and, in 1997, the first woman to serve as Secretary of State.
Born Havana, Cuba · Arrived Miami, 1959
Her family left Cuba when she was a toddler. With Miami Sound Machine she put Latin rhythm on American pop radio, sold more than a hundred million records, survived a 1990 tour-bus crash that broke her back, and was back on stage within a year. Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2015.
Born Saint Michael, Barbados · Arrived New York, 2005
Signed at sixteen after an audition in Barbados, she moved to the United States and became one of the best-selling artists in history, with fourteen number-one singles. Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with forty foundation shades and reset the industry's idea of who makeup is for. In 2021 Barbados named her a National Hero.
Born Tainan, Taiwan · Arrived Kentucky, 1973
Sent to the United States at nine, he washed dishes at a Denny's before studying engineering at Oregon State and Stanford. In 1993, back at a Denny's in San Jose, he co-founded NVIDIA. The chips it built for video games became the engines of modern artificial intelligence.
West and Central Africa · 1619 to 1865
Honoring the millions whose involuntary labor, resilience and unyielding strength laid the physical and economic foundations of the nation. By 1860 nearly four million people were held in slavery in the United States. They cleared the land, raised the crops that made the country rich, and built the Capitol itself, without freedom, pay or citizenship. The show opens its second act with broken chains, for them.
Philippines · Punjab · Mexico · 1900s to today
Punjabi Sikh farmers were working the Central Valley by the 1900s. Filipino field crews followed in the 1920s, and Mexican workers have fed California in every decade since. In 1965 Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong walked out of the Delano vineyards and Cesar Chavez's union joined them. The strike lasted five years and won the first farmworker contracts in the country.
Immigrants, we get the job done.
Stay in your seat when the match ends. The show starts at 9:15 pm and flies over the field.
Each formation holds for about ten seconds before the drones re-form into the next. The whole story, prologue to torch, takes ten minutes.