1st Annual Symposium for Latino Oral History

Online · November 6-7, 2026

Listening as Resistance: Oral History, Memory, and the Latino Experience

Hosted By:

HOLA – Historia Oral de los Latinos y Archivo Digital (Oral History of Latinos and Digital Archives)
Montclair State University

Symposium Theme:

Este simposio explora la historia oral como una práctica viva, política, estética y ética dentro de las comunidades latinas en las Américas y la diáspora. Invitamos a académicos, artistas, archivistas, historiadores comunitarios, educadores y activistas a participar en una investigación colectiva sobre cómo la voz, la memoria, la migración, el lenguaje, la performance y los futuros digitales configuran la experiencia histórica latina.

Buscamos contribuciones que integren el testimonio oral vivido con la reflexión académica, enfatizando la autoridad compartida, la escucha ética, los archivos comunitarios y metodologías experimentales.

Proposed Thematic Axes for Call for Papers

1. Voice, Power, and Representation

  • Who Gets Recorded, Who Gets Silenced?
  • Listening as a Political Act
  • Counter-Archives: Oral History Against Official Narratives
Subtopics
  • Testimonio vs. institutional oral history
  • Ethical listening
  • Extraction vs. collaboration
  • Silence as historical data
  • The politics of transcription

2. Migration as Lived Narrative

  • Crossing as Story, Not Statistic
  • Border Voices, Border Memories
  • Exile, Return, and Imagined Homelands
Subtopics
  • First crossing narratives
  • Undocumented storytelling
  • Memory of the journey
  • Trauma and storytelling
  • Nostalgia vs. survival memory

3. Language, Accent, and Identity

  • Speaking with an Accent: Linguistic Authority and Shame
  • Spanglish as Archive
  • Translation as Betrayal and Bridge
Subtopics
  • Accent discrimination
  • Code-switching as cultural memory
  • Indigenous languages erased from national archives
  • Who translates oral history—and how

4. The Politics of Memory

  • Who Owns Memory?
  • Archiving the Margins
  • State Archives vs. Community Archives
Subtopics
  • Institutional control of memory
  • Community-based archival models
  • Museumization of trauma
  • Consent across generations
  • Memory as contested territory

5. Intergenerational Transmission

  • Stories We Inherit, Stories We Refuse
  • Grandmothers as Living Archives
  • Post memory in Second and Third Generations
Subtopics
  • Epigenetic memory
  • Family silence
  • Dictatorship memory in exile
  • Children of migrants
  • The emotional labor of inherited narrative

6. Orality as embodiment, gesture, breath, rhythm, silence.

  • Testimony as Performance
  • The Body Remembers What the Archive Cannot
  • Theatrical Oral History
Subtopics
  • Gesture as historical evidence
  • Trauma and embodiment
  • Theater based on testimonios
  • Sound, breath, and rhythm
  • Silence as performance

Fees

Presenters$70
Presenters - Early bird (until Sept 30)$60
Participants$30
Participants - Early bird (until Sept 30)$20
Students$10
MSU StudentsFree

Program

Friday, 11/06/2026

9:00am-10:30am

Opening + Panel 1

Speaker(s): To Be Determined

Language: TBD

10:30am-12:00pm

Panel 2

Language: TBD

12:00pm-1:00pm

Lunch

1:00pm-2:00pm

Keynote Speaker with Q&A

Language: TBD

2:00pm-3:30pm

Panel 3

Language: TBD

Saturday, 11/07/2026

9:00am-10:30am

Panel 4

Speaker(s): TBD

Language: TBD

10:30am-12:00pm

Panel 5

Language: TBD

12:00pm-1:00pm

Lunch

1:00pm-2:30pm

Panel 6

Language: TBD

2:30pm-3:00pm

Closing/Special Event

Language: TBD

decorative banner