Plans for Winter Break

I am looking forward to Winter Break to get a decent amount of headway on my thesis. This semester has been full of difficulties when it comes to being able to put enough time into my project so this break will be a wonderful way to get thoroughly into this project. I hope to expand on my lit review during this break and go to the Rochester Museum and Science Center to look at their Latino Archives to learn more about the Puerto Rican community in Rochester. I also hope to begin reaching out to various members of the Puerto Rican community in Rochester, including the Ibero-American Action League. I also hope to begin work on my ideas for the interview, including an interview guide and beginning to find people who would be willing to tell me their immigration stories. I would like to also get in touch with some of the local colleges cultural and diversity efforts to reach some of these people.

Scheduling will be the most difficult thing in this upcoming break as well as the semester with work and holidays coming up. I hope to be able to work around all of this and really focus on my thesis. This project is one that is so incredibly important to me and the fact that I have not been able to put in my full efforts and time into this is a struggle. I am incredibly excited to be able to give this project the work and devotion such a project deserves. 

Over break I hope to stay in contact with my primary adviser Dr. Michael Brown and with Dr. Carroll so that my Interview guide and ideas are all complacent with the Oral History Associations best practices as well as being culturally sensitive and relevant. I think this break will be a great time for me to truly focus in on my work and meet with the relevant people and cannot wait for it to start. 

My thesis project

Immigration is currently one of the most hotly debated issues in our current political climate. With the recent news about DACA and Trump's comments on Latin Americans, Mexicans in particular. I find that no time is better than now to do a project centered around Latino immigrants. My senior thesis idea is to make a website with a collection of immigration stories straight from the mouths of immigrants. I will most likely be narrowing this idea down even further to have the stories of immigrants in the Rochester area. 

This topic is incredibly important to me as an immigrant and the daughter of an immigrant. So often people are detached from this issue and look at it as something that is black and white. I think that by handing the power back to the people whose story this is and giving them the chance to tell it, we can lessen the vilification that has been happening to the Latino community. Being bilingual will also help me gather these stories because I would like to make the interviewees as comfortable as possible in sharing something so intimate with me. I am hoping to provide transcriptions of these interviews as well as audio recordings to make the information as accessible as possible. I am incredibly excited to begin this project and cannot wait until I can put some leg work behind it.