El Hogar es Donde Está el Corazón: Making Meaning Through Oral History Interviews With Family

• In Event: 70.030 - Honoring Legacies of Resistance: Engaging Oral Life Histories of Mexican Immigrant Parents

Abstract

Portelli (2006) writes, “Storytelling is a natural part of the human experience” (p. 149). It is in telling stories about ourselves that we can understand one another better and critically analyze the worlds we come from. This project analyzes the life stories told to me by my parents, José and Virgilia through an oral history lens. I traverse different bodies of literature to demonstrate how economic, political, and social conditions and discourses shaped their arrivals and settlement from General Hermenegildo Galeana, Durango, Mexico to the Chicagoland region. My analysis centers on themes that emerged from three sets of individual interviews I conducted with parents in Spanish. I focus on their informal and formal educational experiences, their stories of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and life in a new country, along with examining their evolving understanding of what home means to them. Interwoven into their accounts, were issues about race, class, gender, and language.
I embrace an oral history methodological approach given that these narratives provide for valuable opportunities for researchers to engage, listen, and learn from people on an individual level; the interview affords us the opportunity make connections in the interpretation of history (Thompson, 1994) that comes through “act of oral face-to-face-communication” (McMahan, 1989, p. 5). Yet, oral history has not always captured a diverse set of experiences. My study captures the oral histories of individuals whose experiences are not found in traditional archives. Although much is written about Mexican immigrants across subjects, little is known about them in oral history scholarship (Noriega and Barnett, 2013). While there is a small body of oral history literature examining the Mexican immigrant experience in the U.S, my study broadens the scholarship by going beyond the U.S. Southwest. In writing about Chicago, Arredondo (1999) posits that Mexicans living in Chicago, “do not share in the “legacy of conquest” that has informed the Mexican experience in the Southwest. The Midwest is begging to be studied, “on its own terms and in all its particularities” (Fernandez, 2005).
Like other immigrants living in the U.S., my parents have compelling stories to share and oral history serves as an ideal platform to present their accounts. Their stories provide us with meaning that allows us to critically examine the world we live in. Through oral history interviews, valuable opportunities surface that allow researchers to engage, listen, and learn from people on an individual level. It is important as Ruíz (2006) puts it, to “reimagine an American narrative with Latinos as meaningful actors” (p. 656). By casting a wider scope and incorporating marginalized people, we can capture and understand individual perspectives and how events in their lives shaped them and their loved ones.

Author

• Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign