The Oral History Lab @UPRM: Decolonial Practice On, Across, & Beyond Campus

Abstract

In September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall in the Puerto Rican archipelago, triggering floods and mudslides, washing out roads, destroying homes, farms, and businesses, causing the largest blackout in US history, knocking out communications, leading to food, water, and gasoline shortages, and ultimately causing thousands of deaths. Just weeks after the hurricane, faculty at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez began a bilingual, mass-listening project that placed hundreds of undergraduate students in their home communities to record the stories that mattered most to them told by the people most important to them. Trained in antiracist and decolonial methodologies as well as trauma-informed approaches, students and faculty have recorded almost 500 oral histories to date that are focused on the stratified disasters of hurricanes, an ongoing earthquake swarm, COVID-19, a worsening economic crisis, and the complicated relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. The panel includes three presentations, each one dedicated respectively to: (1) The oral history courses that we have developed on the UPRM campus for undergraduate students, ones that serve as general education courses on a campus in which the majority of matriculated students self-identify as English as a second language speakers; (2) The training and mentorship program that we have developed for community partners across the Puerto Rican archipelago to support them through the development, archiving, and dissemination of their own oral history projects; and (3) The oral history digital archive @UPRM—and its bilingual metadata scheme—as both a means of teaching students and community partners how to reposition their perceptions of themselves as knowledge producers and a repository established to aid global research. The three presentations on this panel articulate some the ways in which multiple on-campus assets and off-campus community organizations can collaborate on oral history for social justice projects. Furthermore, these presentations theorize oral history as a decolonial pedagogical model that undermines traditional, counterproductive divisions between both academic discipline and on- and off-campus communities as they work to record, archive, and disseminate essential stories of climate disaster and community ingenuity.