2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Oral Histories of Home Moviemaking
Agata Zborowska, University of Chicago

In this paper, I examine oral history interviews and vernacular moving images as sources for studying the diasporic identity of Polish Chicago. Due to the number of incoming emigrants since the late 19th century, the city was colloquially referred to as American Warsaw (thus referring to Poland’s capital). Home movies offer a unique insight into intimate moments in the lives of individuals and families, both ordinary and unusual, trivial and serious. Analog home movies were created primarily for an intended audience of family members and friends. Their fragmentary nature and lack of immediate context make them both fascinating as well as challenging historical sources. Their understanding and analysis pose particular difficulties for viewers who did not participate in the recorded events. One possible research approach that can compensate for this lack of contextual information is ethnographic methods, particularly in-depth interviews with amateur moviemakers and their family members. This analytical approach allows me to analyze not only the content of the movies and their aesthetics but also the practices related to their creation, viewing, sharing, and their role in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. The paper presents the first results of my research that explore the movie-interview analytical unit to challenge and broaden understanding of evolving migrant and diaspora identities in the XX century. I will juxtapose collected home movies with conducted interviews with their creators to uncover the complex family memories. Analyzing this particular example will allow me to discuss methodological issues related to using diverse source materials and their possible interplay.Neoliberal Transformations of Work and Workers’ Lives at New Bedford’s Fish Processing Plants, 1980-2006
Gaye Ozpinar, University of Massachusetts Amherst

By using oral history interviews of fish processing plant workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts the presentation will detail the connections between de-unionization efforts with the production of an undocumented, precarious labor force. This project contributes to histories of racial capitalism and historicizes how "illegality" took on a whole new meaning in the neoliberal era.

ABSTRACT: Every day, across U.S. food industries, including slaughterhouses, poultry farms, canneries and fish processing plants undocumented migrant workers toil away. Despite being considered essential workers, they work under precarious and coercive conditions. My paper will detail how undocumented-ness in the neoliberal era has become another form of racialization. By using the oral history archives of The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, my presentation will describe the lived experiences of fish processing plant workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts from 1980s up until 2006. Despite New Bedford being the highest-grossing commercial fishing port in the U.S., undocumented migrant workers work under exploitative conditions at the fish processing plants for below minimum wages. My paper will historicize the transformation of work and working class lives and argue that the attacks on organized labor and the de-unionization campaigns of the 1970s and the 1980s is closely connected to the production of a deportable and precarious labor force. Prior to 1986, the industry was unionized and the workers and the fishermen were predominantly from the Portuguese-American community. By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, an influx of Maya K’iche from Guatemala, arrived in New Bedford. More Central Americans followed and although most of them were fleeing civil wars, violence and death threats they were labeled as unauthorized “economic migrants.” The digital archives contain numerous oral history interviews with Portuguese-American, Mayan and other Central American workers. Historians have only recently turned to neoliberalism, to explain the interconnections among empire, labor and migration networks. My paper will contribute to labor and migration histories by relying primarily on oral interviews and provide a critique of racial capitalism by detailing the workers’ lives.Moveable Feasts: Using Foodways as a Lens to Consider Intersubjectivity, Intersectionality and Migration Studies
Johnnie Anderson, University Strathclyde, Glasgow

A discussion on the the balance of status, intersubjectivity, intersectionality and oral history practice in early career research.

ABSTRACT:This presentation is based on the ongoing work of a PhD project focused on the role of food and culinary culture in facilitating the acculturation of migrant communities in their new home city. Focused on late twentieth century Glasgow, and using the city’s South Asian diaspora as a case study, this project seeks to demonstrate how food is used as a tool to facilitate cross-community communication. Oral history is front and centre in this project and considers the lived experience of those moving to, and navigating, new surroundings in Glasgow during a period of significant personal and societal change. This presentation will focus on the challenges encountered through the process of conducting and collecting oral history for this project. Primarily, the presentation will discuss challenges around the researcher’s process of balancing intersectional and intersubjective considerations with the broader aims of the project. As an ‘outsider’ from the target participant community, and someone with inherent beneficial outcomes as an early career academic, a researcher in my position must constantly assess how to ‘pitch’ the project to my participants. Thus, the ethics of conducting such research persists at the forefront of all considerations. Additionally, in considering the themes of this conference, this presentation will proceed to consider how oral history can be used in addressing migration and diaspora studies. This presentation will discuss the role of oral history participants with historical ties to the final days of Britain’s imperial project, and link them to the way the identity of a modern, multicultural city like Glasgow has evolved a new identity. In doing so, this presentation aims to highlight how a project such as this can bridge the historic and the contemporary, and how oral history can facilitate a wider understanding of how a society evolves an understanding of itself over time.Black, Native, & Otherwise: Re-imagining Diasporic Past, Present, and Futures in Oral Travel Accounts of Black Seminole Women
Mark Mallory, Texas A&M University

This presentation builds on oral travel accounts of women within the Black Seminole diaspora to highlight the active and ongoing role of Black Seminole women in interpreting, navigating, and forging their Black and Native identity. These accounts offer new ways of thinking about Black Seminole diaspora identity in the past, present, and future.

ABSTRACT: This presentation centers oral travel accounts of women within the Black Seminole diaspora from south Texas. It emphasizes the agency of these Black Seminole women in navigating racialized categorization as Black and Native and highlights the historically contingent construction of these modern colonial categories. The Black Seminole diaspora, emergent in the late 17th century when African fugitives from slavery found refuge among Native people of the nascent Seminole nation, exists at the historical intersection of chattel slavery and ongoing settler colonial genocide. In addition to physical dispossessions and displacements from Florida to Oklahoma and then to Mexico, Texas, and beyond, the Black Seminole diaspora faces continuous external forces seeking to reductively categorize this Afro-Native community in mutually exclusive modern colonial terms as either Black or Native. When Black Seminole history does manage to be articulated within U.S. history,