Workshop by Fanny Julissa García and Nara Milanich
About this event
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Mexico and Central America (CeMeCA)
This presentation explores lessons we’ve learned in the course of an oral history project with Central American families. The project, commissioned by the policy advocacy organization Women’s Refugee Commission, has several “applied” objectives: to shape public messaging on border issues, to inform government policies to reunify migrant families separated at the border, and to create an archive of state violence with the aim of preventing future abuses.
We think through the theme of “relationship" in two ways. The first is a methodological consideration. How do we form relationships in the context of a transnational, all-remote oral history project in which we will only ever “meet" our narrators over the phone? The second concerns the relationship of oral history to politics. How can oral history help to shape public policy and public narrative? What does it mean to collaborate with an advocacy organization—and what happens when narrators' stories don’t “fit” its message? Finally, how do we center the stories of victims of state violence without leaving out the political and historical context that produced this violence in the first place?
Fanny Julissa García is an award-winning oral historian contributing work to Central American Studies. She currently serves as oral historian for the Storytelling Project at Women’s Refugee Commission which documents the stories of immigrant families separated at the U.S./Mexico border. Prior to her contributions as an oral historian, she worked for more than 15 years as a social justice advocate to combat the public health and socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on low-income communities, worked closely with organizations fighting for the end of family detention, 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, visit fannyjgarcia.com.
Nara Milanich is Professor of Latin American History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches and researches the history of family, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law. Her most recent book Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explores the quest for a scientific proof of paternity and the social and political issues that, over the course of the twentieth century, these new genetic technologies were called on to address. Milanich has volunteered as a translator and legal assistant for Central American mothers and children incarcerated in the U.S.’s largest immigrant detention center, located in Dilley, Texas. She has written about this experience in the Washington Post, Dissent, and NACLA. For the last three years, she has taught a class on the history and politics of Central American migration organized around a collaboration with a migrant rights organization. She currently directs the new Center for Mexico and Central America at Columbia.
Image Description: Detained moms and children at the country’s largest ICE jail, the euphemistically named South Texas Family Residential Center. Pairs of moms and children in colorful t-shirts walk in a procession down a sandy gravel path past wide spaced one-story buildings. Some moms hold children in their arms, others walk side by side holding hands.
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