Unearthing and Preserving Community Oral Histories of Love and Learning in a Latine/x Colonia

• In Event: Comunidad Por Medio de Cuentos: Community-Centered Storytelling and Story-Gathering Praxis

Abstract

Oral history interviews ​​document “the complexity and richness” of individual lives contextualized within “social, cultural, political, and historical” circumstances and structures (Ishizuka & Nakamura, 2013, p. 31). Oral history research with racialized and colonized communities turns a lens of human experience on social, economic, and political forces impacting a region or population at a certain time. It helps make sense of why national mythologies—or majoritarian narratives—may not correspond to a marginalized community’s historical experiences. Moreover, oral history with communities honors the expertise of community members about their own experiences and acknowledges the ways their lives and knowledge shape history (Yow, 2015). This paper focuses on oral histories as a window into community education, exploring relationships of caring, teaching, and learning across three decades. By exploring the history of Cameron Park, a borderlands colonia, through the personal stories of its Latine/x residents, I aim to disrupt prevailing narratives of poverty, low educational attainment, and deficit coming from popular media and academic sources. Rather, from an asset-based perspective, I examine how people from Cameron Park see themselves and their community and how forces of racism, colonialism, and community care have shaped their experiences over time.
Utilizing a lens of critical race storytelling and anti-essentialism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2013), colonial theory (Fanon, 1967; Maldonado-Torres, 2007, 2008; Wynter, 2003), and mattering (Love, 2020), this study nuances the ways that race shapes the experiences of Cameron Park residents within the colonial context of both their neighborhood and the borderlands. The tendency of education research on colonias to bypass race altogether may suggest that scholars find it unnecessary to discuss the racialized experiences of some Latine/xs in regions that are predominantly Latine/x. This highlights a need for an antiessentialist, intersectional lens of race as socially constructed. Collectively, this framework serves to center the salience of race and racism, the colonial nature of external power relations in Cameron Park, and community strength and love.
Too often when communities lack the social and economic means to lead their own research and formal record-keeping initiatives, outside agents create the official narratives of what it means to be from those places. These story-warping practices cannot be separated from the increasing militarization of the border and the ongoing social and political persecution of immigrants and people of color. For Cameron Park, this definition-by-outsiders, including academics, has centered poverty, environmental hazards, poor health, and low educational outcomes. Even asset-oriented studies on colonias have frequently centered outsider teachers and researchers, not colonia residents themselves, as educators and change-makers. This paper employs oral storytelling as a means of centering the voices of Latine/x community members as they reflect on their experiences of educating, organizing, and advocating in radical acts of love and freedom in the face of oppression. This ongoing study constitutes my dissertation research and will contribute a digital archive of the community oral histories of Cameron Park, accessible to both community members and the public.

Author

• Anna Rodell, University of Florida