This panel features projects led by young adults of color, high school students, college students and recent college graduates, narrating pandemic and protest, through the lens of the working-class and immigrant communities from which they derive.
The Long Struggle to Confront Anti-Black Violence in NYC: Undergraduates Archive and Analyze Stories from Peers and Elders Still Seeking Racial Justice
Samantha Ruiz-Correa, Guttman Community College
During World War II, Civil Rights leader A. Philip Randolph organized the Double V Campaign, demanding victory against fascism abroad and against racism at home. While Randolph’s movement led to significant gains for African Americans, today, yet another generation has been forced to continue the struggle for Black liberation. With more than 300 oral histories gathered over five years and in six languages, Voices from the Heart of Gotham: The Undergraduate Scholars Oral History Collection at Guttman Community College houses student-designed and produced interviews that elevate rich, complex and buried counter-narratives about the past and present focusing largely on black, immigrant and activist experiences in NYC. By collecting and writing about these oral histories, undergraduates at Guttman have become producers of knowledge amid a historic movement for Black Lives. NYC’s history of systemic violence against Black communities, and powerful movements of resistance, position our city as a site for critical racial history. For us, students at CUNY, our home has become a focal point in the struggle for racial justice. Given the experiences in our social networks and those of our peers, we realized the testimonies collected at Guttman were vital to challenging the white supremacist and nativist systems that founded the United States and have proven central to the shaping of diverse experiences in our city. This paper will focus on testimonies narrated between 2020 and 2024, centered on themes of protest in the aftermath of highly publicized incidents of police brutality. We will unveil and honor the pain and perseverance of largely working-class communities of color as they grappled with their place in society, often taking to the streets and their devices demanding a more just home.Digital Dreams and Hurricanes: 9th Graders Study Themselves Coming of Age in time of Protest, Pandemic and an Ever-Evolving Online Social Universe
Ixchel De Dios, School in the Square High School
We are the School in the Square (S2) Youth Research Collective; A group of rising 9th graders, who have worked with educators in Washington Heights, NYC since Fall of our 6th grade year to design a school-wide oral history project of our peers as a strategy to enrich the cultural and socio-emotional well-being of our school. Beginning with New York State’s required SEL intervention, we developed a Longitudinal Oral History Project, led by middle school students at S2, where we gathered peer-to-peer narratives about socio-emotional dynamics, from middle schoolers growing up in working-class and immigrant households in times of pandemic and racial uprisings. As we, the youth researchers, have taken more of a decision-making role in the project starting in 7th grade, we have evolved the study to look into our lives as mostly Latinx youth in Washington Heights. We are now studying a constantly evolving cyber universe that supercharges our anxiety, the impact of rising xenophobia on our immigrant families, and how the particularly brutal devastation wrought by COVID-19 on our community has shaped our childhood. As we begin life in high school, this paper will narrate rich and complex stories of joy, fear, courage, and care. We will detail how this project centers the expertise of students of color from immigrant families, coming out of COVID-19, in the throes of early adolescence, who found great relief in discovering that our fears and anxieties were widespread. Through this work we note the sense of empowerment we felt as our research project influenced school policy. Further, we will discuss the transformative impact of the oral history experience, illuminating new ideas for both interviewee and interviewer. The act of oral history in the context of this project nurtured a school consciousness with young people coming of age in times of pandemics, uprisings, and remote learning in a wildly unequal and segregated city. This presentation unveils the challenges and opportunities that this project presented in a difficult moment of national -- and local -- history.Parenting the Elders: First Generation Children Guiding Parents/Guardians Through Cultural and Legal Obstacles in Uncharted Waters
David Surrey, Saint Peters University
First generation children, usually the oldest and most frequently female, have traditionally had to play the role of interpreting for their elders the rules for adapting to the United States. This ranges from pleading with their grandmothers not to bargain for vegetables in the supermarket to filling at the right forms for admission to college. It is more frequently involving dealing with the related topics of immigration, housing exploitation and employment challenges. And finally there is the burden of raising their younger siblings in an environment that their own parents are not familiar with.Students from Saint Peter’s University, as first-generation immigrants, have been creatingOral history project to study their family dynamics in this age of increasingly harder challenges to their communities. They are trying to balance their roles as cultural interpreters and protectors with being college students in the face of a dwindling number resources. Their stories are a first-hand reality checks that we all must be made aware.
ABSTRACT: This panel features projects led by young adults of color, high school students, college students and recent college graduates, narrating pandemic and protest, through the lens of the working-class and immigrant communities from which they derive. Guttman Community College students and alumni, members of the inaugural School in the Square High School 9th grade class and activist undergraduates at Saint Peter’s University Undocumented Student Center will respectively present the ties that link each oral history project to the movements and struggles that their community and/or generation is pursuing and enduring. They will further explore the impact of oral history as pedagogy – how producing knowledge, by documenting marginalized lives, has transformed them and their informants. Further, these presentations will explore the social and societal impact of the pandemic and demands for immigrant/racial justice on city dwellers. This panel illuminates what it means to study oneself despite historic obstacles.
