The goal was to take the national discussion about immigration and bring it home to the Connecticut River Valley, to shift away from an abstract policy debate and instead to consider individual accounts by immigrant neighbors that focused on topics such as leaving one's homeland and resettlement abroad. Noted Latin Americanist Ilan Stavans (Amherst) organized this project and partnered with John Voci (NEPR), who became the director of the project's radio and online elements. This beautiful, 200-page volume grew out of a larger, collaborative Words in Transit project that began as an initiative between the Copeland Colloquium at Amherst College and New England Public Radio (NEPR) from 2014 to 2015. The book Words in Transit: the Stories of Immigrants is exemplary in its treatment of an immense, controversial, and timely issue in a meaningful and engaging manner. Documentaries, museum exhibits, monographs, and readers-theater scripts are all effective vehicles to present oral histories. Next we must curate the wisdom of our narrators in a compelling, concise fashion so that others might benefit from their stories.
Oral historians know that collecting wonderful interviews on a complex topic, such as immigration, is laborious and rewarding but really only half the job.
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