2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Oral history with Latinx communities centers on cultural practices rooted in testimonial traditions,
comunidad, and cariño. Over the past two decades, projects centered on Latinx communities have been foundational to our understanding of their contributions. Amplifying our knowledge are the fantastic recovery efforts of practitioners and the promotion of findings through presentations, publications, digital archives, traveling exhibits, and primary study texts. As such, it is crucial to learn to engage with this community and how to promote ethical practices where narrators, scholars, and students experience mutually beneficial outcomes from these interactions.

In this plenary, Dr. Elena Foulis, Assistant Professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University—San Antonio,
will discuss with Dr. Maria E. Cotera, Associate professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at University of Texas, Austin, and Dr. Jesús Jesse Esparza, Associate Professor of History at Texas Southern University, how they have used oral history to develop their projects and the future of Latinx oralhistory.

Join us for an upbeat mix of showing and telling. This plenary will focus on Cincinnati's historic African American neighborhood, the West End. We will begin with an interactive "how-to" session with the local story-centric non-profit, A Picture's Worth, then lead into our panel with a brief historical sketch of the neighborhood and its partial destruction. The session will conclude with a roundtable discussion from three oral history practitioners working with the last generation of African Americans to have lived in the lower part of the West End before it was destroyed. These resilient elders saw their homes, churches, schools, and entire neighborhood demolished, weathered displacement, and reestablished themselves in new neighborhoods throughout the city. The three projects presented will show us how they are preserving and sharing their stories.