2017-2021
Begun just weeks after Hurricane María made landfall in the Puerto Rican archipelago, this mass-listening project included hundreds of undergraduate students at UPR Mayagüez from all disciplines and majors who were trained in the ethical recording, transcribing, translating, and editing of oral histories. These students, all survivors of the hurricane themselves, entered their home communities to interview the people who mattered most to them about the issues that were most important to them. Some of these narratives were included in the book Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico (Haymarket Books, 2021), part of the Voice of Witness book series, others were included in the Humanities Action Lab exhibition Climates of Inequality, and selections were preserved in the Oral History Archives at the Columbia University Library. This project was funded by Voice of Witness, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Modern Language Association, and the Canada Council for the Arts / Conseil des arts du Canada. Undergraduate student Brenda Flores Santiago, a long-term collaborator on the project, won a 2021 Medalla de la Juventud Puertorriqueña from the Governor of Puerto Rico for her contributions to this project, the course sequence affiliated with this project won the Oral History Association Postsecondary Education Award in 2020, and project director, Ricia Anne Chansky, was recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center / Museum of Tolerance as a Global Climate Justice Leader for her work on this project. The children’s book Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobrevive el huracán (Arte Público Press, 2021) was also published in conjunction with this project.
