“The Creation of an Emerging Latino/Latinx Oral Historians Fellowship Program”
The goal is to create a team of oral historians and to provide them with mentors and training to further develop an existing historical timeline for Rhode Island Latino history. By training the next generation to become oral historians Marta will show how oral history could serve as a significant resource for making transformative histories, and therefore, can have a significant impact in a community that has been historically silenced or left out.
Marta V. Martínez, PhD is the founder and current Executive Director of Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA), where she has led the organization since 1988. In 1991, she also founded Nuestras Raíces: The Latino Oral History Project of Rhode Island, and in 2014, she published a book which features her oral history collection, and now being used in local middle & high schools and universities. See more at https://www.nuestrasraicesri.org/.
“The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project”
The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project’s goals are to document, analyze, archive and share the history and impact of Picture the Homeless (PTH). Through a participatory approach to oral history, the project engages leaders of the organization who shaped PTH’s organizing methodology. The oral history interviews contextualize the archive, creating a counter-narrative to the on-going stigmatizing media coverage of homelessness and mainstream approaches to housing policy, social services, policing, and advocacy work – offering both organizing lessons and solutions to homelessness.
Lynn Lewis works at the intersection of community organizing, oral history and popular education, focusing on documenting grass roots leadership in social justice movements. She received her MA in Oral History from Columbia, after working with Picture the Homeless for seventeen years. She is inspired by revolutionary struggles in the U.S. and internationally to construct justice, and is a mother and a grandmother residing in NYC. https://www.listeningandlearningtogether.com
“Solidarity in Action”: A Collaborative Oral History of the Fight Against Mineral and Uranium Mining in the Black Hills, the Origins of the Global Indigenous Movement, and the Ongoing Struggle to Protect the People who Protect Mother Earth”
“Solidarity in Action”: A Collaborative Oral History of the Fight Against Mineral and Uranium Mining in the Black Hills, the Origins of the Global Indigenous Movement, and the Ongoing Struggle to Protect the People who Protect Mother Earth” will be a collectively advised oral history project in which I will explore how an intersectional and politically diverse alliance of organizations and worldviews came together locally and globally to stop a transnational corporation from mining uranium.
Dr. Elizabeth “Beth” Castle works at the intersection of media, scholarship, and activism as a Shawnee-ancestored anti-racist educator committed to liberating and sharing unknown histories of resistance. She started the Warrior Women Project to preserve the oral histories of Indigenous activists and disrupt the dominant historical narrative – best witnessed in the Peabody-nominated film Warrior Women she co-directed. See more at www.warriorwomen.org
“The Invisible Town: A Critical Oral History of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina”
This project will grapple with the partially hidden histories of Black Chapel Hill using a combination of archival research and the Critical Oral History methodology which both writes and rights history. Participants–both interviewers and narrators–in critical oral history projects aim to contextualize stories and make the voices and perspectives of those who have been historically marginalized heard and listened to.
Danita Mason-Hogans is a native of Chapel Hill NC for seven generations of “movement people” on both sides of her family. Danita is public memory worker who works with school systems, universities, activists and historians to document local and national history from the “inside out” and from the “bottom up”. https://www.danitamasonhogans.com/
“Separated: An Oral History Project”
“Separated: An Oral History Project” aims to document the lived experiences of families separated by U.S. immigration policies. The project seeks to record the personal narratives of the families directly impacted by separation and to ensure their stories of resistance and solidarity are also entered into the historical record. The project will also document the work of human rights workers who search for separated families deported to Central America and Mexico. In this project, narrators and oral historians will work together to ensure that the repository is used to educate and build collective memory about how separation reverberates within families, communities, and nations.
Fanny Julissa García is a Honduran American oral historian contributing work to Central American Studies. She has been active in immigration justice as a translator, legal assistant and advocate. Prior to her contributions as an oral historian, she worked for more than 15 years to combat the public health and socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on low-income communities, and supported survivors of sexual violence. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA and Master’s degree in Oral History from Columbia University. For more information about her work, visit www.fannyjgarcia.com
“The Invisible Monument”
This project will produce an incisive oral history of creating the Visitor Contact Station (VCS) at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument (the Monument) in northern Maine. The completed VCS (2023) will represent a groundbreaking collaboration between Indigenous Wabanaki peoples, Maine conservation organization Elliotsville Foundation, Inc. (EFI), and the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). Interviews will elucidate what Wabanaki Board member Natalie Dana-Lolar, Passamaquoddy, terms the “Invisible Monument”: the collective emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience of creating the VCS while grappling with, and finding healing from, legacies of colonialism, erasure, appropriation, discriminatory policies, and genocidal actions against Wabanaki people.
Colette Denali Montoya-Sloan is a member of Isleta Pueblo and a descendant of San Felipe Pueblo, living in Lenapehoking. As a queer, Indigenous librarian/archivist, she works at the intersections of oral history and memory. A community college reference librarian, as well as an audio archivist at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Colette connects people to stories and knowledge. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison and earned her Master of Library and Information Science at the City University of New York – Queens College.
“Green Card Youth Voices: Afghan Refugee Experience in Minnesota”
I will document 30 stories of recently-arrived Afghan refugees resettled in Minnesota, and attending local public high schools. My goal is to accurately and compassionately document these refugees’ stories using audio, video and photographs and use the content and resources in a way that can prepare the receiving community, social service agencies, school systems and other stakeholders to better understand their stories and the trauma many of them have experienced. Ultimately, this will build stronger community integration.
Tea Rozman was born in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. She worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations working with refugees in Former Yugoslavia and in the U.S. Tea has a M.A. degree from NYU in Near Eastern Studies and a Ph.D. in Cultural History, specializing in oral history, from the University of Nova Gorica. As part of her Ph.D. thesis, she interviewed 15 Srebrenica genocide survivors and 15 UN peacekeepers who failed to prevent the genocide. In 2013, she co-founded Green Card Voices based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and since then interviewed over 450 first-generation immigrants and refugees from over 140 countries throughout MN, WI, ND, NY, CA and GA. Green Card Voices is dedicated to sharing authentic narratives of refugees and immigrants with a goal of creating communities where all people share a sense of belonging. See more at https://www.greencardvoices.org/.
“Ni Santas: The Unruly Intimacies of Working Class Latinx”
This oral history project seeks to document, preserve, and make available the intimate histories of working class Latinx, Afro-Latinx and Indigenous people in Los Angeles with the goal of recovering and recording the experiences and rebellious ideas that inform the ordinary lives of women who are invisibilized when not stereotyped. This oral history project asks: What can collecting stories about the intimate lives of BIPOC women teach us about disrupting oppressive systems and beliefs that limit people’s freedom to be?
Virginia Espino is the daughter of Mexican parents. She grew up in the barrios of northeastern Los Angeles where she currently resides. She holds a PhD in 20th Century U.S. History with a focus on the Chicanx experience from Arizona State University. She is an oral and public historian whose interests include the intersection of race, class, and gender in working class culture and identity formation. Much of her work over the past 10 years includes the recovery of lost or hidden histories through oral history interviewing and making those histories available to the public at large. Espino is the Producer and Lead Historian on the award winning documentary, No Más Bebés. Based in part on her dissertation research, No Más Bebés investigates the history of coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles-USC Medical Center during the 1970s. She currently lectures for Chicana, Chicano and Central American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA and serves on the board of the California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.
“Indigenizing the Legacy of Federal Indian Boarding Schools”
This project seeks to center the oral histories of boarding school survivors as primary sites of truth, authenticity and power–and as “texts” that should be respected and included in scholarly research and other forms of representation and historicization. The project privileges the interpretive primacy of boarding school survivors and their descendants, as well as their stewardship over the sharing and preserving of their oral histories. This project will work collaboratively with families and tribes to seek appropriate and impactful platforms for sharing their stories, memories, and calls for justice.
Veronica Pasfield is an Anishinaabekwe and citizen of Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Pasfield is an oral historian, tribal consultant, curator, repatriation officer, and museum decolonizer. Pasfield earned a PhD in American Studies (Native Studies concentrator) and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. Her doctoral research examined Hawaiian and American Indian boarding schools as expressions of U.S. empire. Though forbidden from using oral history in her dissertation, Pasfield has found other ways to privilege the lived stories and agency of boarding school survivors in her subsequent work.
“In Colors”
“In Colors” seeks to create a new blueprint for institutional approaches to collecting inclusively and intersectionally while identifying and amplifying communities that are vital to the art history of the United States. The project will happen in partnership with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Oral History Program.
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral historian and creative practitioner working in the US and in Ecuador. She holds an MA degree in Oral History from Columbia University and is the co-founder of two oral history collaborations: Decentering Dominance and Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero. See more at www.fernandaespinosa.com
“In Their Own Words: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School Oral History Project”
In Their Own Words centers former Oakland Community School students, staff, parents, and community supporters. OCS was a flagship Black Panther Party program and this multimedia project archives the history and creates publicly accessible digital-humanities products. The project emphasizes narrative collection and locating supporting multimedia content.
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest’s work focuses on American History post-1965, with an emphasis on the Modern Black Freedom Struggle. She is a graduate of Harvard University with a BA in Afro-American Studies and graduated from Stanford University with an MA in American History. See more at https://www.angelaleblancernest.com/
