Oral History as Recuperation of Collective Memory and Feminist Methodology

• In Event: Participatory Action Research as Site of Student Agency, Social Transformation, and Resistance in Puerto Rico

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to present a digital oral history project of seven women of the town of Cayey, Puerto Rico done collaboratively through a participatory action research course. These oral histories serve as a tool for memory recuperation and collective resistance within Puerto Rico’s colonial context. As a decolonizing methodology (Smith, 1999), oral histories are a way to connect generations, create collective understandings of culture, and shift dominant narratives, reclaiming situated knowledges. Participatory action research is a methodology “that can yield real and useful knowledge about place” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015).

This study takes a feminist and decolonial methodological approach to interviewing, where the women’s stories and experiences were foregrounded (DeVault, 1999). In alignment with participatory action research, each participant was actively involved in shaping the interview questions and later had access to the interview transcripts and the opportunity to modify any portion of the interview. This digital oral history project foregrounds place and its centrality in community (Deyhle, 2009). Oral histories of seven women of the town of Cayey, Puerto Rico, were collected during the Spring of 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic. The interviews were done remotely, yet most participants had a chance to meet with their interviewer before the mandatory lockdown. The oral histories of the women of Cayey presented the various challenges facing women in this particular town, and in Puerto Rico broadly. Common themes included land dispossession, gender inequities, school closures, and class stratification in the urban hub of Cayey. This project is framed within the larger process of participatory action research, “a collaborative practice of critique performed in and through a collaborative practice of research that aims to change the researchers themselves as well as the social world they inhabit” (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005, p. 578). This study contributes approaches to participatory action research that incorporate oral histories as an educational tool that counters colonial narratives and male-centered understandings of history.

Author

• Michelle Roman, University of Puerto Rico - Cayey