Mark Hall-Patton (Museum Administrator, Clark County Museum System), Aaron Mayes (Special Collections & Archives Visual Materials Curator, UNLV Libraries), Barbara Tabach (Project Manager, Oral History Research Center, UNLV Libraries), and Claytee D. White (Director, Oral History Research Center, UNLV Libraries) discuss a major event in recent history. Attendees at the Route 91 Country Music Festival on the Las Vegas Strip numbered 22,000. As the final act of the three-day event began on the evening of October 1, 2017, shots rained down from the 32nd floor of the hotel across the street. 58 people were murdered and nearly 500 injured. Within days, and among other local emergency measures, UNLV’s Special Collections & Archives responded by meeting with the Las Vegas collecting community to develop ways to help their city and assist other cities in similar circumstances. They concentrated on digital remembrances, photographs, and oral histories, and envision these primary source materials being used by families, researchers, social scientists, and investigators from around the world. This panel reveals their strategies, issues, stories, and outcomes.
Students from Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida present student-led and -organized work recording the voices of DACA recipients and other undocumented students at the University of Florida. In recent years, undocumented student activists have been increasingly vocal in public spaces and in the media. However, for the sake of attempting to pass bipartisan legislation, their narratives have often been rhetorically constrained to portray innocent, hyper-patriotic, would-be ‘model citizens’ who are often expected to shift the blame for their status onto their parents. Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) interns in fall 2017 used oral history interviews to create spaces for undocumented students to speak more freely in their own words about their experiences and their hopes and expectations for the future.
Suzi Resnik (2017 James V. Mink Award recipient, SOHA; President of Viewing Voices), Annie Duval (organizer and oral historian, consultant with Viewing Voices) Jennifer Keil (Archivist for the Moulton Family Foundation, Co-owner of 70 Degrees, First Vice President, SOHA Board of Directors), Cindy Keil (Archivist for the Moulton Family Foundation, Consultant and Co-owner of 70 Degrees), Debi Salmon (Director, Del Mar Television Foundation), and Tensia Moriel Trejo (former President, Del Mar Historical Society and member of Del Mar Voices) present their shifting approaches with their interdisciplinary backgrounds, but their central goal is to find out how our communities remember the past and to make that past come alive in historic sites with city councils’ endorsement. Through site visits, they learned more about our respective communities’ heritage and facilities. They juxtaposed the seaside villages of Del Mar, Balboa Island, and Laguna in terms of the physical spaces and how the residents retain their localized narratives. They use film to visually capture and present their perspectives on local television; station producers are providing their technological resources for this unique programming.
Southwest Oral History Association 