Youth as Interpreters of History: Lessons from the Nuestro South Project
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm
Workshop
Abstract
Since 2018, the “Nuestro South” project has provided a platform for Southern Latinx youth to explore their identities through the lens of history. Oregon-based historian Julie Weise and North Carolina-based nonprofit administrator Erik Valera had minimal experience with social media when they first connected in 2016. Since then, their project has received substantial grant funding and engaged youth storytellers in creating a podcast, YouTube series, and social media presence. In this workshop, they will share project content, explain its development and greatest challenges, and provide feedback on workshop participants’ ideas for public history endeavors engaging youth and/or social media.
Latino/a Public History and Memory South 20th CenturySession Participants
Dr. Julie Weise, University of Oregon
Chair; Presenter
Julie M. Weise is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. Her first book, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), received the Merle Curti Award for best book in U.S. social history from the Organization of American Historians among other honors. The NEH OpenBook program has supported a permanent open-access version of the entire book.
Her current project, “Guest Worker: A History of Ideas, 1919-75,” explores the histories of transborder labor migrants in the Americas, Europe, and southern Africa. Weise’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Her public history work on the youth-focused “Nuestro South” podcast and Youtube series has been supported by the Whiting Foundation among other sources. Together with colleagues in History and Sociolinguistics, she has pioneered a bilingual Latinx History college curriculum, which can be found as an open access resource at http://teachinspanglish.org
Mr. Erik Valera, El Centro Hispano
Presenter