From Silenced Past to Empowered Future: A Currere-Informed Approach to Community Archiving

• In Event: The Personal as Political, and Pedagogical: Currere as Foundational Research Praxis

Abstract

Drawing from my lived experiences as a first-generation Latine youth growing up in a segregated suburb and returning to serve as an educator to Black and Latine youth, in this presentation I use currere to examine the roots and process of a youth-led, participatory oral history project in my home community. Monolithic portrayals of suburbs as white and middle-class have often led researchers to overlook the inequities faced by racially and linguistically minoritized youth in these spaces, despite their growing numbers (Diamond & Posey-Maddox, 2020; Lewis-McCoy et al., 2023). This erasure of diverse experiences perpetuates harmful stereotypes and hinders understanding of the complex realities within suburban communities. My upbringing in a suburb defying the monolithic narrative, rich with both a deep Black history and evolving Latine diaspora, sparked a deep curiosity to explore and document the historical experiences of both Black and Latine communities in this shared space. As I engaged with the local mainstream archives, I witnessed archival injustices as Black and Latine voices were silenced. As a result, I conducted oral histories with Black elders, uncovering a silent past of Black removal, school closings, and police brutality, amongst other injustices but also determination and community. Discovering this silenced history filled me with a sense of empowerment and a deep rage as I questioned historical gatekeeping. How would knowing these stories as a young person have shaped who I am today? What is happening now within our community that will not be documented for our future generations to learn from? How can we amplify counter-stories?

Critical reflection on my own educational journey and community ties inspired me to intervene against historical erasure, leveraging my role as a critical educator from the community to collaborate with students in reclaiming our collective narratives. I integrated oral history methodologies into the curriculum, guiding my students as they collected testimonios (Delgado-Bernal, 2012) from Latine residents in both Spanish and English. Latine counter-stories unveiled a hidden narrative of discrimination, cultural resilience, and community building within a changing suburb. We preserved the testimonios in a digital archive shared with the community and deposited into the mainstream archives. This youth-led participatory oral history project confronts the political issue of archival erasure, revealing how dominant power structures silence and marginalize the histories of marginalized communities (Hartman, 2019; Caswell, 2021).

This project embodies the tenets of critical race/feminist currere (Taliaferro-Baszile, 2015) as it is rooted in critical reflection of past educational experiences, motivating me to act and shape curriculum that not only addresses historical erasure but also encourages students to contemplate their desires for the future. By examining the intertwined relationship between past injustices and future aspirations, students can better understand the present and purposefully engage in their learning and community. This process of synthesizing thinking across temporal moments empowers them to actively participate in shaping their community's collective memory.

Author

• Michelle R. Ochoa, Graduate Center - CUNY