With the exciting development of the Inclusive History and Images Project (IHIP), an important component of Loyola Marymount University’s ongoing institution wide anti-racism initiative, Margarita R. Ochoa, Ph.D., associate professor of history at LMU, saw a unique opportunity to offer students the chance to be involved in the project through a uniquely designed semester-long course.
“History may not be something you ordinarily think of venturing when you go to college,” she said, reminiscing about how she first started understanding the significance of her own story.” Usually, we tend to go to the natural sciences, or the biological sciences, so we can come back to our communities and provide those services.” Ochoa did the same, until she took her first Latin American history class during her senior year. She was stunned to learn how rich and complex the history of her people was, and it changed her profoundly. “I had an epiphany: if I can learn about my roots and feel such a sense of empowerment, maybe I could pass that along, maybe I could do the same for someone else.”
This same sense of empowerment and purpose is what drives her today. Being part of IHIP’s planning and implementation committee has enabled her to engage with other members of the community, to really understand the gaps and imbalances in representation the institution may have incurred in the past. The Oral History of LMU class she teaches as part of IHIP is aligned both with her fervent passion of teaching inclusive narratives, and her ambition to see more varied histories represented throughout LMU and beyond. In a testimony interview she conducted as part of the project, she asked Cheryl Grills, Ph.D., professor of psychology at LMU, why she had chosen to participate in the oral history documentation effort of the institution. “We’re an untold story,” Grills responded. “And if I can help correct that, I’m right there.”
I had an epiphany: if I can learn about my roots and feel such a sense of empowerment, maybe I could pass that along, maybe I could do the same for someone else.
The course, in itself, recognizes the fact that there are stories that have not been documented and experiences that have not been expressed. In particularly, it highlights that these untold and overlooked stories often involve Black, Latina/o and Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and differently embodied members of the LMU community. Historically marginalized and underrepresented communities have often relied on oral narratives to preserve their rich cultures and traditions, often passed down from generation to generation, through their elders, the griots, and other unofficial members of the community who are keepers of their communities’ histories.
This way of passing down cultures and traditions is something that is done formally and informally, at family gatherings, during shared meals, when celebrating holidays, and other events that usually bring multiple generations of the same community together. There is sacredness in this ritual of storytelling, there is perseverance, there is an imagining of a future world, and future generations that will need to know their own stories of origin, the stories of their own communities to understand their paths, to carve our new purposes for their lives. But for so long, institutions have galvanized teaching history based on traditionally accepted accounts – accounts that, for the majority, needed to be documented, one way or another. What makes oral narratives radical in their stance, is the fact that they prioritize the same people they belonged with; in other words, oral narratives rely on the testimony, community, and shared memory of people whose histories have often been ignored, neglected, or otherwise re-written by members who did not belong to those communities. The re-writing of history is not something new; however, excluding the full breadth of our history from future generations can also be a form of erasure.
This is exactly how Ochoa felt when she first took history courses that referred to Latin America only through peripheral and superficial manners. She didn’t yet know the real history and culture of her people and communities, she didn’t understand the rich and complex narratives that stemmed from Latin America, that later helped shape her identity and motivated her to become a history professor.
“This project is about telling the history of people of color from the mouths of people of color,” she said. These voices are important to build and shape a history that has only started to get recognized in the past few years. In fact, IHIP itself is a project undertaken in direct response to the call of the Black community at LMU after the racial reckoning the nation experienced in 2020. Since its launch, IHIP has endeavored to accumulate, archive, and amplify the untold stories of its communities, to elevate awareness and promote proactive diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. As an audio and visual archive, it has served as a living resource for scholars, researchers, and the great public through the William H. Hannon Library’s University Archives and Special Collections. Recently, the IHIP committee held its second open forum to mark its progress and share insights into the institution’s history. Emelyn dela Peña, vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion said that the project is the effort to remind the university of its commitments, of its mission, of its ties to social justice.
This was not lost on Aoife Gorshow, a history senior who has taken the oral history class with Ochoa this semester. “The class reaffirmed to me how complex history truly is and the importance of utilizing multiple forms of sources to create a more nuanced understanding of the past,” said Gorshow. “By conducting oral histories, I was able to hear firsthand accounts of events that impacted LMU alumni and faculty that would have most likely never been documented and forgotten with time if this project didn’t exist.”
This project is about telling the history of people of color from the mouths of people of color. These voices are important to build and shape a history that has only started to get recognized in the past few years.
Oral narratives have been part of the fabric of our society in different shapes and forms. At their best, they have been used to preserve cultures, to pass down traditions, to correct histories and bring new perspectives. Oral narratives are also a powerful way to embody social activism. Ochoa recalls learning about Cesar Chavez not from history books, but from the gatherings of her community in central California during the labor strikes, when her own family was involved with labor activism. This project has even inspired her to engage in oral narratives within her community and start to document the lives of her family members and their extensive work of labor activism.
“This is a necessary project not just for history students, but for all students,” she said. “All students need to have some grounding in history to understand their own selves, to understand the world around them, not just the local community, but the global world too.”
