Phi Eta's History Blog

For my oral history recording I listened to a recording from NPR about the childhoods of two young hispanic women living in Nebraska during the 1960s. They described being discriminated against in school for being Latina. When she and her sister went down to the main office to try and sign up for the SAT test, their counsellor said that they would not need to take it because all Latina women ever do when they grow up was have children. This did not go over well with her older brother who took them down to the school and made it clear that they were going to take the test. Both girls did extremely well, and the woman's sister received a 4 year scholarship, eventually completing medical school and becoming an OBGYN practitioner.
The recording itself was very powerful simply because it was the woman telling a story about her own experience. I think that these sorts of recordings are extremely important to catalogue through recordings for a number of reasons. First of all, they highlight the fact that only a couple of decades ago, this country was very different from what it is today, and that while change can happen, it does take time and understanding by those who are trying to bring it about. Secondly, the emotion associated with the study of history is oftentimes overlooked. People read stories about people in massive dry textbooks and they never really get any sort of feeling for what it was like for the people living at that time. These recordings help listeners to really get a sense of how truly stifling the racial sentiments faced by Latin americans were during this time period. So low were the expectations of these populations that they could be denied the equality of educational opportunity. This is important to understand because the 60s are seen as a decade of social progress and coming together by young people in the US. In fact, there were many parts of the country that were not experiencing this sort of change, but you might never hear about a story like this one when reading text books about the US during the second half of the 20th century.