BY MCKENNA DECKER
Working at the National Museum of American History has allowed me to participate in projects that are both challenging and intriguing. Two of my main projects include transcribing oral interviews of a Sikh community conducted by my mentor, Dr. Sam Vong, in California’s Central Valley. The other project is designing an object case focusing on the rise of railroad in California and its relation with immigrant labor, focusing specifically on the city of Watsonville, near Santa Cruz.
The Watsonville Project and the oral histories are echoed in Margaret Salazar-Porzio’s "New Americans, Continuing Debates, 1965-2014" [1]. In this piece, Salazar-Porzio describes the “March
for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage” march where a Latina artist recreated the statue of liberty where she carried produce and was painted bronze to reflect the agricultural workers. The statue was meant to reflect the America’s diversity, challenge the status quo of white power, and protect labor rights in a world of the declining popularity and use of labor unions (218). These same issues that plagued America in the 20th century continue to do so well into the 21st century. She also takes note of the concept of the “melting-pot,” writing that this concept “required ethnic groups to assimilate to a generic European American model” (209). I found this to be true in one of the oral histories where a Sikh man described how his mother never dressed in American style clothing and was often the subject of gossip. Smithsonian curators, along with all public historians, help to draw these types of connections through helping to create exhibits in museums and writing about them. However, the Smithsonian curators offer a unique perspective when working with an exhibit. They will go out into communities to collect objects and build relationships with people, granting them the unique position to both collect objects and information.
While the actual act of transcribing the oral interviews is not difficult, they are a treasure trove of information. I have only been able to scratch the surface of one interview but it describes how cultural traditions and expectations from India have transferred to life in California as well as the problems that they faced, particularly racism in school leading to social isolation and a lack of a childhood. He recalls that by the time he was 13 or 14, he would work in the fields with his dad from dawn until dusk, six days a week in order to help sustain his family. He later attributes this lifestyle to strained relations within his family. It is one thing to read about the issues that immigrants faced when coming to America, but it is another thing to hear the voice of a son of immigrants who witnessed firsthand the issues his parents faced as well as the issues that he faced.
My other project is more difficult. For this project, I am working with my mentor to redesign an objects case in one of NMAH’s existing exhibits, America on the Move!, which chronicles the development of transportation in America and its effects on American society. The current artifacts on display are on loan from another museum and will be returned this spring. The goal is to find appropriate replacement objects within NMAH’s extensive collections. After establishing the general guidelines for what the case should contain, such as objects relating to Japanese migrant workers in Watsonville, I then set off on a quest for the objects in the Smithsonian’s object database. It felt like I was looking for a needle in a neddlestack in Wonderland. I had to carefully word my searches and even then, sometimes I would get thousands of results or none at all. The artifacts themselves also proved to be challenging. Some of them were from the right ethnic group but from the opposite side of the country or another part of the state. For example, there is a hat that belonged to a Bracero worker but he worked in Southern California, not Watsonville. On the other hand, I found objects that were perfect for the exhibit, such as images of the field workers in Watsonville.
However two glaringly obvious problems quickly arose when I found the perfect object, the first being that I could not find enough “perfect” objects to fill the case and display a cohesive narrative. The second was that the object would already be on display in another exhibit. The lack of artifacts brought the process of donating to the museum up as well as the idea of object loans. Currently, we are still trying to solidify what Smithsonian objects will be used before we really focus on donations and loans. Though I love learning about history and being in museums, an unexpected aspect of this kind of research was that it could get very monotonous, very quickly. It was easy to get frustrated with the lack of results, though I will say that there is an immense sense of satisfaction when you do find the perfect object.
Another aspect of designing a case is researching those associated with the artifacts. One example is a series of photographs about Watsonville, so I spent time researching the specific labor camp the photographer photographed and the photographer himself. So far, this has been my favorite part of designing the case because it is not a topic that I know much about. I was able to throw myself into the research much easier than the search for objects. I found that this type of research is very similar to the kind that I do for my history papers at SMC. However, searching the database for artifacts has allowed me to better understand the scale of the Smithsonian.
[1] Margaret Salazar-Porzio and Joan Fragaszy Troyano. Many Voices, One Nation: Material Culture Reflections on Race and Migration in the United States. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017.
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