Conducting ethnographic fieldwork as Evelyn Yoshimura, Community Organizing Director of the Little Tokyo Service Center, shares an oral history of her teenage years in which she attended the multiracial Dorsey High in Los Angeles, California.
This oral history collection is part of my developing research regarding racial formation in California.
Researching in the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO) archives, physically consulting images and documents regarding Black Homesteading and Settlements (reviewing promotional 1912 materials for the settlement of the all-Black town of Allensworth which was founded in 1908). This research informed the We Are Not Strangers Here Traveling Exhibit and the fourth and fifth podcast episodes which focus on Black settlements in rural California.
Consulting African American 49’er Alvin Aaron Coffey’s 1886 Society of California Pioneers certificate of membership within AAMLO’s archives. This research informed the We Are Not Strangers Here Traveling Exhibit and its first podcast episode which details the overland journeys of Coffey who, as an enslaved miner, travelled to California three times in order to earn his freedom and the freedom of his wife and children.
A handmade Family Tree made by Michele Thompson, Coffey’s great-great granddaughter, taken during a visit with her in her Walnut Creek, California home as I pre-interviewed her for the podcast.
My eight-year-old son reading Alvin Coffey’s 1856 Emancipation Papers housed within the archives of The Society of California Pioneers Museum and Library in San Francisco, California.
My son in a Durango, Colorado silver mine during a research trip consisting of field visits to various edutorism sites of Western remembrance and interviews with Terry Gentry, a docent at the Black American West Museum in Denver, Colorado and Patricia Limerick, when she was Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History. This trip informed my investigation of the (re)production, maintenance, and repair of the Myth of the West in popular culture products and practices within my dissertation and my in-progress monograph.