Fernanda Espinosa to be a Smithsonian Fellow in Washington, DC

Fernanda is spending her Summer at the Smithsonian Institution in America’s Capitol

Ecuador native, New York based, Fernanda Espinosa is off to do a Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Museum Studies Program (LMSP). She will be working with Ranald Woodaman, Director of Exhibits and Public Programs (and LMSP alumn) – Smithsonian Latino Center, on the Latino DC History Project: Muralism project research.

The Latino DC History Project is a multi-year initiative to document, preserve, and share the stories of Latino/as in the institutions, culture, economy and daily life of the nation's capital. Working with the Smithsonian Latino Center (SLC) Exhibitions and Public Program Director, Fernanda will explore the feasibility of a long-term muralism project in DC as a component of the Latino DC History Project.

Fernanda Espinosa is an Andean immigrant based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a cultural organizer, language justice advocate, and oral history artist.  She is currently a Master of Arts candidate at Columbia University’s Oral History Program and holds a BA in Anthropology as well as in Latin American Literature.

Fernanda is a steward and co-founder of the People’s Climate Arts group, a diverse network of artists and cultural organizers that uses art and culture to help support, mobilize and amplify social movements, while simultaneously creating space for local, long-term projects. The group was a recipient of the 2015 Rauschenberg Foundation Artists as Activists fund. She also co-founded and is a project coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), an art and oral history collective working with interviews, murals, and other visual and audio tools. CC 1/19 received The Laundromat Project’s 2015 Create Change commission award.

As part of her thesis at Columbia Oral History MA, Fernanda is working on Hogar de la Distancia (Home of Distance), a sound and visual art project documenting stories of immigrants from Ecuador, one of the largest migrant populations in New York metropolitan area. The interviews and participatory efforts serve as points of departure that inspire audio-visual portraits put together in conjunction with the CC 1/19 collective. In addition to documenting the voices, the project seeks to make visible, honor and recognize the memory and experience of people who migrate and must navigate complex relationships with their loved ones and their homeland from a distance.

With the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Fernanda hopes to expand her experience in intentional cultural work and continue to create bridges between institutions and Latinx communities by making visible their histories in the United States.  She is also excited to learn more about these communities in Washington through her practicum in muralism research.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research complex, with 19 museums and galleries and the National Zoological Park. On July 1, 1836, Congress accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation by James Smithson and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust. The total number of objects, works of art and specimens at the Smithsonian is estimated at nearly 138 million, including more than 127 million specimens and artifacts at the National Museum of Natural History.

If you would like more information about this Smithsonian Internships, Fellowships, and Research Associates, please contact the Office of Fellowships and Internships at 202-633-7070 or check out their website smithsonianofi.com

The Role of Public Memory in Rural Prison Towns

Sara Jacobs is a current part-time OHMA student. In this post, she discusses the Prison Public Memory Project and the complex relationship between prisons and rural communities.

As OHMA students, we frequently consider how our work in oral history can contribute to public dialogue about pressing issues faced by our communities. It is a challenge to take longform interviews, with all their depth and complexity, and integrate them into community conversation. How do we reconcile the time-intensive nature of oral history with the urgency of movements for social change? Over the course of the year, we have seen a variety of innovative projects seeking to address this question from different angles.

On Thursday, April 21st, Tracy Huling, Quintin Cross, and Brian Buckley of the Prison Public Memory Project joined us from Hudson, New York to discuss their work. The project, founded by Huling in 2011, “uses public history, art, and new media technologies to engage communities in conversation about the complex roles of prisons in society,” with the goal of working “with local individuals and organizations across the country to recover, preserve, interpret, and honor the memories of what took place in these important institutions.”

Hudson’s history as a prison town goes back to 1887.  Brian, the site coordinator for the Hudson project, walked us through the prison’s different eras, from the House of Refuge for Women (1887-1904), to the NY State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), to the Hudson Correctional Facility (1976-present). Knowing this history is an important foundation for exploring how a prison’s presence affects the community. Quintin, a 5th generation Hudson resident and coordinator of the project’s work with the African-American community, illustrated this point with an anecdote about mentioning the Training School to his family, thereby eliciting a stream of memories and recollections not found in history books.

Hudson Correctional Facility

Through engaging with local community history, the Prison Public Memory Project addresses an increasingly widespread trend that is crucial to our understanding of how mass incarceration functions in the US. Since the 1980s, the location of prisons has shifted almost exclusively to rural towns, “with a prison opening somewhere in rural America every fifteen days.” (Huling, Building a Prison Economy in Rural America page 1). Prisons have deceptively been sold as a panacea to the financial trouble brought on by the decline of industry, leading rural communities to compete fiercely to host correctional facilities as a last ditch effort to revive their failing economies. It is one of the largest growth industries in the rural US and its effects require deep investigation. Oral history can help us break down the large systemic issue of mass incarceration by exploring how it plays out on an individual and community level. The Prison Public Memory Project, by engaging with historical memory, is sparking a conversation about the role of prisons in small towns and exploring the many complicated ways correctional facilities insert themselves into people’s lives.

The Project raises many important questions – what happens to a community when a prison becomes its lifeblood? How are people, both inside and outside of the walls, shaped by the rural prison trend and in what ways does it influence their daily lives and collective memory? What are the challenges of doing oral history in small communities and how do we reconcile the sometimes-competing demands of our individual relationships and accountability to our community with broader goals of promoting social change?

This workshop made me think deeply about my own community in downstate Illinois and the opportunities and challenges of organizing in prison towns. As someone with many incarcerated or formerly incarcerated family members, prisons have always been a part of my life. They have not only made their presence felt personally, but also on a wider level. Prisons are part of the scenery. I remember driving to high school and seeing men in orange jumpsuits landscaping the Governor’s Mansion, repairing the asphalt, cutting the grass by the highway. I saw the constant chain of buses shipping people from Chicago to small towns, often 5 hours or more away from their families. Prisons also make themselves felt in personal relationships. The last time I visited home, my cousin, who was under house arrest at the time, and I went to play basketball. We shared the court with two guards from the prison he had just left. We all waved and said hello.

Illinois districts with the largest prison populations, concentrated in rural downstate (http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/illinois/importing.html)

Addressing the complex ways that prisons make themselves part of the social fabric of their host communities is an important part of organizing against mass incarceration and the rapid growth of the prison industry. The Prison Public Memory Project asks the community to contemplate the implications of having a prison in their backyard and opens the door for collective reflection on the promises that prisons make and the reality of life after they come to town. It is an inspiring fusion of historical memory, the current moment, and oral history that creates a rich and multilayered account of an ongoing systemic issue. It gives us a solid foundation that can inform our community organizing efforts and make our movements for social change stronger.

“You Can’t Just Create a Beautiful Space. It Also Has to Feel Safe to Be There.”

A Q&A with How We Go Home editor Sara Sinclair

Voice of Witness shares an inside look into one of the newest oral history projects from Voice of Witness: How We Go Home. Sara is an OHMA alum and is currently Project Coordinator for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research's Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.

We’re excited to share an inside look into one of the newest oral history projects from Voice of Witness: How We Go Home.

How We Go Home will illuminate the experiences of Native peoples living on reservations in the U.S. and Canada. Narrators will describe the impacts of forced assimilation, displacement, and the human rights violations emerging from institutional problems within the reservation system, while revealing Native society’s incredible capacity for resistance, healing, and survival.

How We Go Home is one of six projects Voice of Witness is currently incubating through the VOW Story Fund, which provides oral history training, editorial guidance, and project funding to human rights storytellers in need of institutional support.

Hudson Prison Public Memory Project

Mario Alvarez is a full-time OHMA student. In this post, he writes about the Prison Public Memory Project and the ethical issues that arise between oral history and public-facing work.

On Thursday, April 21st, 2016, we OHMA students were treated to a workshop led by three leaders of the Prison Public Memory Project. These three individual had distinct responsibilities for the organization: Tracy Huling, the founder, directs and writes; Brian Buckley, the site coordinator, does digital humanities work; Quintin Cross does vital work connecting the organization with the local African-American Community. These members took the time to speak to us about their project and about the challenges that arise out of addressing the role that the local prisons play in this community. I was struck by the collaborative approach of their project – even during this two-hour workshop, Tracy, Brian, and Quintin approached the audience as equals with the potential to improve their already impressive work.

The Public Prison Memory Project, in addressing issues of incarceration and racial inequality, are handling some sensitive issues. Implementing oral histories is integral to their efforts to preserve the history of the local prisons – the personal testimonies of former prison employees (and prisoners) paint a fuller picture of what these institutions (and their surrounding areas) were like. The project deserves commendation for addressing the nuanced and oft-forgotten topic of prison towns (and ex-prison towns). I also admired our guests’ openness about the moral gray areas that arise out of this sort of work.

Aerial view of Hudson Correctional Facility, formerly New York State Training School for Girls (source)

Brian and Quintin each took time to explain their contributions to this project in detail. Brian presented a shortened history of the New York State Training School for Girls, a reformatory school for young women that closed in the mid 1970s (it is now a prison for young males). It was during this presentation that Brian complicated people’s typical understanding of prison towns, showing us that although the prison was home to an (unspoken) history of abuse, it was also a large employer for the town that helped create an African-American middle class in the community.

Quintin, whose ties to Hudson go back several generations, spoke of his personal connection to the community. He was responsible for bringing in many of the narrators featured on the project’s website, most of whom had worked for the NYS Training School for Girls decades ago. He spoke in further detail about the school’s treatment of its prisoners of color, who were subject to harsher conditions than their white counterparts. He revealed to us that there was a widespread code of silence among black employees in the prison, many of whom chose not to speak out on the various inequalities that occurred there for fear of losing their well-paying government jobs.

Then Tracy opened up the floor to us, the audience. We were split into two groups, each tasked with a different case study. Each of these scenarios were real-life ethical quandaries that the organization is currently facing in balancing the aforementioned code of silence among former prison workers and the project’s desire to bring a history of inequality to light.

When reflecting on these case studies, I couldn’t help but come back to an overarching question: where does one draw the line between one’s efforts towards social justice and one’s allegiance to his or her narrators? Can one be both a fully-committed activist and a full-time oral historian? This is something that we as students often tackled in class during this past academic year. Our conversations, though enlightening, failed to settle on a clean way of addressing this tension. This project hopes to “unlock the future” (per the home page on their website), revealing its public-facing aspirations, but I cannot help but wonder if oral history, when compared to more journalistic approaches to interviewing, can sometimes an obstacle to these hopes.

That being said, I was glad to be in the audience for this workshop. It opened up a number of challenging questions, the kinds that can only arise in difficult projects like this one. I look forward to hearing future developments from the Prison Public Memory Project. 

Alumni Updates: Spring 2016

It’s time for another series of updates on the diverse set of projects our alums are championing! Several of them have announcements for our blog readers.

Photo by Suzanne Snider

Laura Barnett

Laura Barnett OHMA '15 is a 2016 grantee recipient from The Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) for the oral-history based project: CREATING THE URBAN CANVAS: LAND ART ON A BROOKLYN STREET CORNER, which she has been working on in collaboration with artist Alfred Evans. She developed the project during Fall 2014 at OHMA and conducted interviews as part of Jerry Albarelli's class.

The grant, in the interdisciplinary category and supported by The Brooklyn Arts Fund, which is funded by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and will result in a public project to be completed by the end of 2016.

 

Carrie Brave Heart

Carrie Brave Heart (OHMA class of 2014) has been awarded an Oral History Grant from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for 2016-2017.  The title of the project is, “Agnes T. “Mary” Crawler (Ta-sina-mani-win) Native American Warrior Woman.”

Sewon Barrera, Nicki Pombier Berger, Cindy Choung, Sarah Dziedzic

Sewon Barrera, Nicki Pombier Berger, Cindy Choung, Sarah Dziedzic have founded In Context Journal, an independent quarterly platform for oral historical work and thoughtful explorations of what it means to listen, to speak, and to be heard. We welcome dialogue and engagement with practitioners of any field.

Call for Submissions for In Context Journal – Deadline June 1, 2016

“Questions,” for many of us, drive the work we do. As scholars, journalists, caregivers, oral historians, documentarians, and artists in many forms, our curiosities and those of our audiences propel and shape our work. We also attend to how we ask those questions––it invokes our ethics, affects the people we interact with, and determines whether we and our audiences deem our work a success or failure. But none of us have all the answers. We work in hopes of learning from doing, and in hopes of continuing to be surprised, humbled, and awoken to new questions. By starting with the theme of “Questions,” we seek to provide a forum that honors thoughtful inquiry, protest, and exchange within our community.

With that, we invite submissions to our inaugural issue on “Questions.” We encourage visual, audio, and textual works that provoke thought or discussion on this theme and which resonate with the mission of In Context Journal.

Submissions Guidelines

Submissions can be of any medium, length, and/or file size but if you plan to send us a file larger than 25MB, please email us with a project description first. In Context Journal particularly encourages submission of works exploring new and innovative angles of consideration and reflection. We also accept submissions that have been published previously and compelling works in progress. In acknowledgement of the best ethical practices in oral history, please submit work only if appropriate permissions for your sources have been obtained. Currently, we do not offer compensation for publication. Send submissions to incontextjournal@gmail.com by June 1, 2016.

Andrew Viñales

Recently, I was hired as an Oral History Researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) at Hunter College. I am one of many oral historians at Centro responsible for interviewing nominated Puerto Rican leaders, activists, and notable figures. Our goal is to generate a wealth of material for researchers and other people interested in Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. Or contributions, struggles, and visibility, on a national scale with other oral historians working in Chicago, Florida and Philadelphia (and we are expanding further!). I am honored to be on part of this team and the opportunity to interview folks I have grown up hearing about!

Liza Zapol

Liza Zapol will be presenting at Celebrating the City: Jane Jacobs at 100.

As part of the Municipal Art Society of New York’s festival Celebrating the City: Jane Jacobs at 100, join us for free outdoor drawing sessions inspired by our unique urban landscape and the stories of the city. Create your own cityscape while local artist and oral historian Liza Zapol shares stories and insights that delve into the evolving visible skyline from the Whitney’s terraces.

Watching what Jacobs called the “intricate ballet” of the city streets below, we’ll look closely at layers of history in the streets and buildings, hear stories about the people who have haunted the area, and learn about the artists who were inspired by this landscape. Visitors will be invited to share their own stories and sense of place through a mapmaking exercise. Drawing materials and stools will be provided.