Historias de Quinceañeras
Elena Foulis, Texas A&M, San Antonio
Stephanie Aubry, Ohio State University
This presentation details the work to collect oral history of young girls and their mothers’ experiences of quinceañeras, in connection with Proyecto Mariposas’ Quinceañera event, a celebration that lies outside mainstream U.S. family practices and provides cultural continuity for recent immigrants, as well those who continue to celebrate and keep this tradition as part of their cultural identity. These interviews add to the Oral Narratives of Latin@ in Ohio (ONLO) collection, an already established and existing archive housed at the The Ohio State Univesity Center for Folklore Studies (CFS) Archives. The interviews seek to engage in dialogue about what it means to celebrate and participate in celebrations such as the quinceañera in a place like Ohio. Additionally, we find that this archive and this set of interviews, in particular, can provide much needed training to graduate and undergraduate students in preserving oral histories, working on transcriptions in English and Spanish, and material culture. Indeed, by including these archives as a primary source and these new “themed” oral histories, it allows students to contribute each semester without being responsible for the completion of research. As tied to a service-learning course, we find that we can mitigate a risk of university service-learning in which the project goals grow beyond semester limits and are ultimately abandoned. The ONLO project is guided by methodologies of community-engaged research defined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, predicated on the transformation of sites of marginalization into sites of knowledge, and on the encounter between academic ways of knowing and those of communities in resistance. This work is grounded on reciprocal practices between scholars, students, and organizations chosen for their community connections and ties with project members.
The Tejano Midwest in the Days Ahead: Imagining the Future through Oral History
Richard Cruz Dávila, Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University
Unbeknownst to many outside the community, from the 1960s to the 1990s Texas-Mexican music and dance flourished across the Midwestern United States, serving a vital role in processes of placemaking for Tejana/o migrants to the region. In the present, though, what I call the Tejano Midwest is in crisis. As narrators in my oral history of the Tejano Midwest have observed, since the 1990s, audiences at dances have both markedly dwindled and aged. The numbers of local groups, venues, and radio shows have declined precipitously. Few, if any, record stores that served Tejana/o communities survived past the 1990s. As “history” implies, my project is largely concerned with the past: the emergence of the Tejano Midwest during the Post-War economic boom and its eventual decline due to processes of deindustrialization and disinvestment that ramped up in the 1970s. Yet, a common theme in my interviews is speculation on what comes next for a musical culture whose glory days are behind it but that still maintains a hold among Tejana/o migrants and their descendants. Can the culture sustain itself into the future? If so, how? What events or processes could facilitate a revival of the culture? While I cannot provide answers to these questions, highlighting these discussions in my presentation demonstrates a clear concern among narrators in my study for the longevity of Texas-Mexican music in the region. At the same time, it demonstrates that oral history interviews can provide a valuable space for narrators to look to the future as they reflect on the past.
Unconsidered Memories, Lasting Effects: Community Memories of Colegio Jacinto Treviño and the Afterlives of the Chicano Movement
Derek Xavier Garcia, Concordia University
This presentation highlights the unconsidered memories of individuals not typically considered in Chicanx and social movement studies, specifically those of community members of Mercedes, Texas, home to Colegio Jacinto Treviño (1969-1976). The groundbreaking curriculum of the Colegio derived from a community-based ethos that incorporated the experiences of discrimination and migrant worker life of many of the founders and students, growing up in the Texas-Mexico borderlands and the fields of the American Midwest. These experiences of migrant work not only shaped the school’s courses but also the public performances of its theatre troupe, or teatro. These performances assumed an edifying role for the general public about labor abuse and social rights, underscored by the fact that they too traveled the same roads and picked same fields as their audience. I highlight the oral histories of three Mercedes community members who experienced Colegio Jacinto Treviño in varying ways: from attending a teatro performance as an adolescent, to recalling learning Mexican American folk songs as a child enrolled in the Colegio’s day care program, to being struck by the image of the red and black flag of the United Farm Workers Union blowing in a grocery parking lot. Through these recollections I ask: What is the historical significance of small, untraceable, yet profound memories such as these? Seemingly small events indicate the importance of seeking and interpreting perspectives of individuals not typically considered in Chicano Movement or educational activism studies. Like a ripple in a pond, events such as these resonated for individuals in profound ways, inspiring them to seek an education in law, history, and community advocacy. The afterlives of the Chicano Movement reside in these narratives, providing the often unquantifiable, undocumentable, affective impact that social movements and educational projects have on local communities.
