Celebrating our everyday histories
By hola | Published | No Comments
“Everybody wants a piece of East Boston,” Eva Biscegli observed in an oral history interview recorded in the late 1990s. Decades later, as developers move in, those words still ring true…
Oral history is one of our favorite things here at Hola Cultura. Over the years, we’ve participated in well over a hundred in-depth interviews with people about their everyday lives and personal histories in Washington, D.C. So as we expand, it’s been exciting to work with the digital community archive Boston Research Center (BRC) to take the voices of East Boston residents – past and present – liberate them from their digital archives and share them with you.
Today we publish “Everybody Wants a Piece of East Boston,” the first of three audio programs that combine interviews with Eastie residents recorded decades ago with more recent commentary from residents living in the neighborhood today. Hola Cultura remixed existing audio and oral histories of the East Boston Greenway Council with more recent interviews also publicly available in the Northeastern University Digital Repository Service.
Part of the BRC’s Sidewalk Stories collection funded by the Mellon Foundation, the three programs Hola Cultura produced focus on East Boston’s history of community activism. As we gear up for “Tide Talks,” Hola Cultura’s first oral history project in East Boston this summer, we were honored to work with the BRC and be part of a local initiative that engaged several other organizations, including Zumix, Maverick Landing Community Services, and the East Boston Social Centers.
Listen now to the thoughts and recollections of Biscegli, as well as Renée Loth, Chris Marchi, Liliana Tirado Arteaga and Kannan Thiruvengadam.
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