[Workshop Reflection] Lilian Jimenez and Oral History Documentaries

On March 14, Lillian Jimenez spoke at the Columbia University during a workshop about the creation of her film “Antonia Pantoja: ¡Presente!,” the power of oral history, and her activist work in the community.

Before the public event, Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) students had a discussion with Jimenez about how she used a seventeen-hour oral history conducted with Dr. Pantoja as the primary source material for the film.  Jimenez said, “The film was built around the oral history.  I finally figured out what the narrative was, what’s the story I wanted to tell, and that I took that from the oral histories in order to tell that story, and then outside of oral histories I interviewed a lot of her cohorts in order to fill out, give texture to the story of her life and work.”

The star of Jimenez's documentary, Dr. Pantoja, was an educator, social worker, feminist, civil rights leader and founder of ASPIRA. She arrived in New York City in 1944 from Puerto Rico. Working long hours as a welder in a lamp factory, Dr. Pantoja learned of the harsh racism and discrimination against Puerto Ricans and the lack of knowledge to overcome these challenges in the United States. Her most notable contribution included the creation of ASPIRA, a Puerto Rican/Latino leadership organization that has helped guide thousands of young Americans into post-secondary schools and professional lives. The documentary, guided by Dr. Pantoja's life history, sheds light on the positive contributions of the Puerto Rican community to New York and their work to shape the country's bilingual education system.

ANTONIA PANTOJA: ¡PRESENTE! by Lillian Jimenez Premieres Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 10PM (check local listings) ANTONIA PANTOJA: ¡PRESENTE! tells the story of educator/organizer Antonia Pantoja, founder of the New York-based advocacy organization, Aspira. A passionate, indomitable leader, Pantoja worked with Puerto Rican "immigrant-citizens" to fight against second-class citizenship and to secure a bilingual voice.

Lillian Jiménez has worked as a media activist, independent producer, and educator for the last three decades.  Her interest in media literacy led her to conduct workshops on Latino stereotypes, self-representation, and positive self-imaging as a way to counter the images and messages of the mainstream press. Jimenez explains, “Much of our history is a hidden history but the stereotypes prevail to the extent [that] people still cite mainstream media as a way to define and determine who we are, historically.”

Furthermore, Jimenez explained how her film served as a platform for open discussion and amplified the voices of silenced groups in the community. “So, when I first started showing the film a lot of people from the older generation who had never been asked, 'What was it like growing up in a time of rabid racism against Puerto Ricans in New York?' They had never been asked.  People would get up in screenings and start like yelling and I was like they’re venting, they’ve never been asked and here’s an opportunity for them to say what happened to them.”

A great supporter of Oral History methods, Lillian told the workshop attendees, “Go to your mothers, go to your grandmothers. Nobody has ever asked them. You have people that nobody ever asks and then you finally ask. 'Oh my God,' you know.  I said before, that when people do oral histories, they change before your eyes.  They become young again.  They become those people they used to be and it’s a pleasure to watch them.  It’s a pleasure.”

This post was written by OHMA students Sara Sinclair and Sewon Chung.

[Workshop Reflection] Voice of Witness: Refugee Hotel

Meet the authors of Refugee Hotel:​

Current OHMA students had a conversation about careers, interviewing, and the relationship between oral history and journalism with Gabriele and Juliet before their public talk. Watch a video of the talk here. Here are some highlights:

Q : We were struck by the size of the book, how did you choose the style and format?

Q: How did this project develop. What inspired you to do this project? 

Q: How did you get involved with Voice of Witness?

Q: What were you told is the difference between oral history and journalism?

​A Personal Reflection on the Voice of Witness:  Refugee Hotel

by Maye Saephanh

In an effort to shed light on the lives of refugees starting from their point of arrival in the United States, journalist Juliet Linderman and photographer Gabriele Stabile offer a collection of photographs combined with text narratives in their new book, Refugee Hotel.  As part of the Voice of Witness series, the book takes an oral history approach to collect the stories of refugees from Myanmar, Burundi and South Sudan to give context and narrative to the pages of stark images. It is an interesting way to merge the fields of journalism and oral history.

The field of oral history often emphasizes the creation of meaning and narrative as a subjective process that occurs between the interviewee and interviewer.  In the example of Refugee Hotel, this emphasis is seen in the testimonials provided in the text where the voice and presence of the refugees themselves are shared.  The stories as narrated by the refugees provide a first-hand account of the challenges and bewilderment they experienced upon arriving in the U.S.  In contrast, the images captured in the book give a startling visual account of these same experiences--but through the lens of an experienced Western photographer.

The testimonials by the interviewees in Refugee Hotel conjure up memories of my own family arriving in San Francisco, CA.  Although I was only six years old at the time, I can remember the foreboding sense of the unknown that awaited us on the other side of the “arrivals” corridor.   Born and raised in the refugee camps of northern Thailand, I didn’t know one English word and nor did my parents.  We were shepherded between each leg of our flight by stewardesses and assistants coordinated by the UNHCR and the U.S. government.  I remember a long night spent laid over in a high rise hotel in Hong Kong.  As I looked out the window of our hotel room, the bright lights of that great city glared back at me, leaving me in shock.  We had been transported—overnight—from the cramped, dirt grounds of the camps in rural Thailand to a lit up concrete jungle where the entire world laid below our feet.

It was bewildering.  It was fascinating.  It was incredibly foreign.  In my six-year-old mind, it was a world straight out of a scene akin to the animated show, The Jetson’s--an image I could only articulate years later after watching enough American television.  My parents no doubt felt some level of fear and a great deal of anxiety over the unknown that awaited us on the other side of the Pacific.

Based on my personal experience as a refugee, the images found in Refugee Hotel fill me with an array of conflicting emotions. Looking back on that journey, I cannot imagine having those moments of uncertainty and anxiety captured on camera.  As refugees who had lived in dire camp conditions, getting our photographs taken were considered special occasions when my parents went to great lengths to make sure we were scrubbed clean at the public baths and then dressed in the finest clothing we owned.  Candid shots of our day-to-day existence in settings we did not willingly choose to place ourselves in were not welcomed.   In fact, I remember most of the refugees would shy away from the cameras of foreigners unless they were dressed in their finest.  How they were presented in photographs mattered a great deal even if they never saw a copy of the photograph themselves.

Although my family was placed in a decent hotel in Hong Kong while we waited for the next leg of our resettlement journey, I still can’t imagine having our feelings and experiences captured in a book.  If we were to permit any kind of documentation of that experience, I know my parents would deem it important to have a voice in deciding which pictures ended up getting published. Instead, as uneducated and illiterate refugees who were unaccustomed to dealing with Westerners, my parents would not have felt comfortable voicing their real feelings or opinions.  In their minds, Westerners were authority figures because they represented the educated class.  They saw themselves as inferior to all white foreigners. My parents would likely have asked themselves, “Who are we to know what is best when the white foreigners are the ones who can write down our names and birth dates?”

Linderman and Stabile want the voices of refugees to be heard. They reached beyond the traditional protocols of journalism by incorporating an oral history approach to capture the narratives of the refugees.  Therefore, they intentionally included the refugees as part of the storytelling so they are not relegated to simply serving as subjects of a story. However, this is an incredibly challenging endeavor.  The power differential between those who hold the camera and those standing in front of the lens cannot be overlooked--even in spite of the best intentions of the most experienced oral historian or journalist. Could there have been greater consideration of these issues within Refugee Hotel and a more expansive explanation of the role refugees played in shaping their representation in the book?

It is impressive so many refugees agreed to participate in documenting their transition to life in the United States by granting interviews and agreeing to be photographed.  Their experiences and views are important and need to be heard in the public sphere.

Post by OHMA students Kyana Moghadam, Sam Robson, Maye Saephanh

[Alumni Profile] Writer, Educator and Oral Historian Svetlana Kitto

This March OHMA alum Svetlana Kitto will be teaching an exciting new literature and writing workshop at the Brooklyn Historical Society called Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person, which will focus on fiction, memoir, oral history, and essay forms that reflect experiences of race and identity. This workshop is part of Brooklyn Historical Society's Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) oral history project and public programming series, which examines the history and experiences of mixed-heritage people and families, cultural hybridity, race, ethnicity, and identity. Several OHMA alums and current students have conducted interviews for this project, and we are excited about this new workshop, which continues to build on the many productive connections between OHMA and the oral history program at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

We’d like to use this opportunity to launch a new feature on our website: Alumni Profiles, in which we check in with OHMA alums and hear what they’ve been up to since graduation.

Svetlana came to OHMA with an interest in the relationship between oral history and literature, and writes fiction, memoir, and essays with an eye toward everyday history, memory, and place. Most recently, her writing has been featured in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and the book Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, published by Verso Books, among other publications. Her time at OHMA culminated in an interview-based memoir about her grandparents and the Holocaust in Latvia, as well as an oral history project with artists, writers and activists called to action in the early years of the AIDS crisis. She presented that project at the 2010 Oral History Association “Times of Crisis, Times of Change: Human Stories on the Edge of Transformation” conference and the Northeastern Modern Languages Association conference in 2011. In October 2012, audio from those interviews were part of an exhibit for National Coming Out Day at the gallery Space on White in Tribeca; the project is currently making its way to the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Since graduating, Svetlana has shared her skills by working as an oral history workshop leader. In spring 2011, the international law firm Clifford Chance sponsored her and an artist to develop an art and oral history program for a high school Gay-Straight Alliance. Through the course of a semester-long series of workshops, the students developed large-scale banners that addressed issues related to identity, visibility and acceptance, culminating in an exhibit at the law firm. She presented these banners at the 2011 OHA conference as well as the Oral History Mid-Atlantic Region conference later that year. She has also taught art and oral history workshops at the Lincoln School in Rhode Island, Elders Share the Arts in Brooklyn, the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Brooklyn Museum, and a creative writing workshop at a homeless youth drop-in center in Chinatown, NYC.

Svetlana has also been working as an interviewer and oral history project manager. Her background in art and design journalism led to a commission from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, where this spring she will be doing an oral history of the American Design Club for the museum’s “American Design Now: After the Museum” exhibition, slated to open in March, which will present a series of installations and programs that reveal the largely hidden research component of the design practice, while examining cultural institutions’ role in the shaping of design. She is also the project manager and head interviewer on an oral history project of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, one of the major global centers for academic scholarship in Jewish studies that has produced some of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the past century. She’s also, of course, part of the interviewing team for the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations Project. As of this writing, there are still a few slots left open in her workshop this month – check it out here if you’re interested!

[Workshop Reflection] Doug Boyd Discusses Future of Online Oral History Access

On Thursday, February 14, Doug Boyd, Ph.D. spoke in open dialogue to the current Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) cohort before addressing a larger crowd at an event open to the public. Boyd currently serves as Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, and is renowned for his extensive work on Oral History in the Digital Age. Watch a video of his talk here.

In the early component of the session, Boyd traced his career from early studies in the discipline of history and an interest in music to a focus on folklore and audio restoration. While addressing the specifics of his background in the field, Boyd excitedly spoke about his graduate work in noise reduction while digitizing the tapes of Henry Glassie. Citing direct experience, Boyd noted how ambient noise can be mistaken for the standard ‘pop’ well known to analog, as was the case when Glassie’s tapes picked up the sound of burning peat during field recordings across Ballymenone of County Fermanagh in the north of Ireland.

Speaking to the writing of his most recent book, Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community, Boyd detailed the process of compiling a historical portrait that includes time period documents alongside oral histories. He especially discussed how differences in interviewing style can change the type of information that is unearthed and the perspective conveyed about hidden stories within a community.

From this initial discussion, the OHMA cohort was given an energizing perspective on the multitude of career paths that lead to work in the field of oral history. We ourselves make up a diverse group of graduate students, ranging from those who were introduced to the discipline while studying history or anthropology in college to professionals and filmmakers who have long been working out in the field. Boyd’s honesty and insight provided a point of enthusiasm, especially for the countless possibilities that the digital age brings to oral history interviewing.

The second part of the talk included a comprehensive look at the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), a program Boyd has had a hand in developing, that matches oral history audio files with their written components in online displays. Of particular interest to archives that are digitizing their interviews for public access, the coming release of OHMS as an open source program can alleviate some of the pressures of transcription by providing audio and text link ups based on indexed metadata.

Boyd spoke with passion about the possibility of reaching out to the communities with whom the oral histories were conducted to engage them in the process of tagging the interview themes through OHMS. While such crowdsourcing sounds appealing, it is another question whether it is reliable, practical, and ethical when it comes to managing the contents of oral history interviews. But these, too, are the issues that one must already consider when contemplating the release of interviews to digital access on the internet. Certainly, legality in terms of the narrator’s rights and intentions must be examined before providing such services.

The program is still in the development stage as a plug in for Omeka, a publishing platform popular for online museum and oral history exhibitions, but is currently utilized by the University of Kentucky Libraries. OHMS shares functional similarities to the qualitative analysis software NVivo with the exception that the focus in this case is on making the interviews available for public access rather than research processing. Interestingly, it also offers a different approach to other services in the field, most notably, in comparison to the work of Michael Frisch’s The Randforce Associates, LLC, which instead segmentizes the oral histories into passages in order to manage recurrent themes throughout collections.

Overall, Doug Boyd provided a refreshing balance between exciting the crowd with the impressive opportunities of the OHMS program and providing relatable reflections on the progression of research and education in the digital age. While the release date of OHMS for open access has not been finalized just yet, us oral historians will be waiting with bated breath until that day arrives.

By OHMA student Erica Fugger

[Workshop Reflection] Alisa Del Tufo: Surfacing Solutions

In Alisa Del Tufo’s talk on Thursday, January 31st the oral historian and activist sought to inspire her large audience with the story of her life’s work. Watch a video of the talk here.

Del Tufo credits inflection points, or life changing moments, with the direction of her career and her inspiration to use oral history to surface new solutions to domestic violence. The first major such inflection point was in 1987. The case of Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg, in which a young girl, Lisa Steinberg, was killed at the hands of Joel Steinberg, stirred significant public controversy and prompted Del Tufo to explore the link between adult domestic violence and child maltreatment; which up until this point had been ignored and unexplored.

In 1991 Del Tufo left Sanctuary for Families, which she had founded in 1984, and began the oral history project that ultimately opened up New York City’s eyes to intimate violence.  To hear Alyssa explain the project, the ah-ha moment that led her to try oral history as a method and what she learned, listen to the following clip:

Conducting these interviews was a second inflection point for Del Tufo and what surfaced in these conversations with battered women inspired her to begin meeting with influential feminists, politicians, and community activists to begin to make a change. The primary result was a domestic violence handbook, “Behind Closed Doors: The City’s Response to Domestic Violence,” which brought the issue to the front and center of the city’s politics.

In oral history, we look at “a-ha moments” as moments when the narrator is able to create a new thought or response though the process of the oral history interview, “I didn’t know I felt that way” or “I’d never thought about it that way before.”  This is not entirely different from what Del Tufo deems an inflection point.  Both are self-imposed structural shifts in the narrative.  When using oral history as a tool of activism, it is the a-ha moment or inflection point that recognizes the problem and can lead to the corresponding action.

As aspiring oral historians themselves, the authors of this blog post experienced a few inflection points/a-ha moments during the discussion.  Sara was challenged and motivated by Del Tufo’s assertion that in order to make change, one must choose the right moment. As oral historians looking to make an impact on the world, what is our moment?  Is it possible to not only choose the moment, but to create the moment? Can one document the present to change the future? Ellen’s inflection point came when Del Tufo discussed altruism as a motivation for battered women to tell their stories. Many of the women Del Tufo interviewed agreed to these intimate conversations not for their own well-being, but because they believed their stories might help others in the same situation. Should we assume (or hope) that these altruistic motives can be found in other at-risk communities? Towards the end of the discussion several people discussed other issues to which Alisa’s methods might apply – such as elder abuse and sex trafficking. How can we tap into and encourage this community service model elsewhere?

For more information on oral history projects inspiring social change, check out the following sites:

Groundswell http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/

Tibet Oral History Project http://tibetoralhistory.org/index.html

Voices of Rwanda http://voicesofrwanda.org/

Khmer Legacies http://khmerlegacies.org/

It Gets Better http://www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject

Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHRkPuJfasg

Other organizations founded by Alisa Del Tufo:

Connect http://www.connectnyc.org

Threshold Collaborative http://www.thresholdcollaborative.org

(post by OHMA students Sara Wolcott and Ellen Brooks)

OHMA Associate Director Amy Starecheski moderating Roundtable on Refugees with Momofuku and Voice of Witness

Spring Workshop Series Schedule Now Available!

From the Columbia Center for Oral History

We are delighted with the success and overwhelming response to our fall oral history workshop series, which featured presentations by Michael Frisch and the 198 String Band, Voice of Witness book editors Sibylla Brodzinsky and Max Schoening, oral historianSuzanne Snider, Oral History Master of Arts Program alum Andrea Dixon and many more. We are now gearing up for an exciting spring semester in our series that is funded through the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series for programming that embodies the late Professor’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance. The series is co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). All of our workshops are free and open to the public and will explore the myriad of ethical and practical issues raised by the practice of oral history in the different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

Thank you for your continued interest and support, and we look forward to seeing you soon!

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS: SPRING 2013

January 31, 2013
Alisa del Tufo, Social Reformer
Surfacing Solutions: Using Oral History to Find New Solutions to Intimate Violence
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: Columbia University, 509 Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street[More Information]

February 14, 2013
Doug Boyd, Director of the Louis B. Nunn Oral History Center
Search, Explore, Connect: Enhancing Access to Oral History
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: 523 Butler Library

February 21, 2013
Gabriele Stabile and Juliet Linderman, Voice of Witness Publication Series
Everybody is a Stranger When They First Arrive: Refugees’ Experiences in America
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: Stabile Student Center, Journalism School

March 14, 2013
Lillian Jiménez, Filmmaker
Uncovering Hidden Histories: The Making of Antonia Pantoja: ¡Presente!
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: TBD

April 11, 2013
Sarah Mountz
Both Our Voices: A Feminist Relational Approach to Life History Narratives of Previously Juvenile Justice Involved LGBTQ Young Adults
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: TBD

April 25, 2013
Jennifer Scott, Vice Director/Director of Research, Weeksville Heritage Center
Movement Creates Museum: the Activist Beginnings of Weeksville Heritage Center
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm. Location: TBD