Latino Virginia oral history project to get wider audience

An expansive oral history project that captures the life experiences of Latinos in Virginia will be previewed this weekend at a Virginia Commonwealth University symposium, with a public unveiling planned for this fall.

Latinos make up 10.5% of the state's population, and more than half of them are immigrants, according to the 2020 census. But "Latinos have largely been left out of the historical record in Virginia," said Gabriela León-Pérez, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology and co-leader of the VCU-based Latino Virginia project.

On Saturday, VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences is presenting the Migration Studies Research Symposium, a daylong event at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. The program includes a preview of Latino Virginia, which has conducted more than 100 interviews so far with individuals from every Latin American country and whose roots span South and Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico.

The initial set - 33 oral histories, with audio files and transcripts - has been posted in the Latino Virginia Oral History Collection in Scholars Compass, which is VCU's open-access institutional repository. Of the 135 interviews completed to date, 75 percent will eventually be published.

"A strength of our project is that it captures a wide variety of migration stories," León-Pérez said. "There is a belief that Latin American immigrants come in search of better work opportunities. That experience is certainly represented in our oral histories, but we also have many other individuals who came for other varied reasons, including family reunification, health reasons, violence or insecurity in their origin communities, and escaping political persecution or domestic violence."

Latino Virginia is led by León-Pérez and associate professor of history Daniel Morales, Ph.D., who have mentored roughly 40 students over the past two years in sociology and history courses. The faculty leaders received funding from the VCU Quest Fund, the Division of Community Engagement's Community Engaged Data Dissemination projects fund and VCU's Transformative Learning Fund, which allowed them to develop a Vertically Integrated Project for students to collaborate on the project.

VCU Libraries serves as the digital steward for Latino Virginia, and Digital Initiatives Librarian Irina Rogova has organized and processed the interviews.

"The Latino Virginia project is a crucial addition to expanding whose voices are included in the historical record of Virginia," she said. "Due to the human tendency to simplify and classify characteristics, a lot of nuance within racial and ethnic groups often gets erased. These oral histories demonstrate a lot of variety in the experiences of Latinos who live in Virginia."

The Migration Studies Research Symposium on Saturday will bring together scholars from the Southeast to discuss research and provide feedback on publications and best practices in teaching. While the Latino Virginia project will be previewed there, a public unveiling is being developed with a community partner, the Sacred Heart Center, for September.

Individuals interested in being interviewed for, or referring a subject to, the Latino Virginia project can email [email protected].