Today is Tuesday, October 27, 2020. It is currently Week 4 of the fall quarter and throughout these past weeks I have tried to really focus on how to narrow down all of my ideas down in my project. Originally, I wanted to focus on economic difficulties, educational barriers, limiting health care opportunities, agricultural aspects, and immigrant/personal stories. However, this is too much to try researching on. Yesterday during the Raab Fellows weekly zoom meeting, I had discussion with other students who are also telling oral stories. I realized that instead of trying to focus on all of these different aspects, I want to just interview people who live in the central valley and have worked in agriculture as fieldworkers. With this, I can then ask them the disparities they have faced, whether is focus on education, economic, health care, or citizenship status/journey coming to America.
Today I also spoke to my mentor for this project, Professor Williams. She is helping me with how to go about interviewing people and my project summary. Because my project is based on oral history, it is important to know how to approach others and get the most useful information from them, so Professor Williams sent me some very helpful articles to help me become a good oral historian. For the remainder of this week, I am going to look at these various documents below to better prepare me when I start interviewing. I am also going to revise and submit my project summary this week. I am pretty excited to have finally found a focus! I can't wait to see what my findings are.