AHA Session 64
Labor and Working-Class History Association 7
Labor and Working-Class History Association 7
Friday, January 9, 2026: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Adams Room (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Marla Andrea Ramirez, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel brings together a group of interdisciplinary historians who center oral histories, community memories, and public and digital humanities in their approaches. Their works look at the histories of transnational migration, labor, and resistance from Minnesota to California to the Texas-Mexico border. This panel will provide an enriching discussion on the possibilities of public and digital humanities works that center community-based methodologies and voices. Saeeda Islam's paper uses oral history and digital humanities to explore systemic violence and incarceration in the U.S., focusing on Stockton, California. It examines how race, gender, class, and citizenship affect black and brown communities, and highlights the role of federal policies and local activism in addressing these issues. Meanwhile, Lucero Estrella examines the methods used to preserve and share the histories of Japanese migration to the Texas-Mexico border region, emphasizing the role of collaborative methods in this process. She highlights the various digital humanities projects that play a role in documenting local stories passed down as generational memories, and used to create a sense of belonging with a larger transnational Japanese diasporic community. Clara Mejía Orta's paper explores the long-term effects of the 1984 UFCW Local P-9 Hormel Strike in Austin, MN, particularly its impact on developing Latine leadership within the Union. A central part of her scholarship is the way she utilizes public history and digital humanities to make her research accessible to the networks of union members and labor organizers she collaborates with. Andrew Hernandez’s article explores utilizing mapping as a method for documenting schools as sites of violence in Southern California’s Inland Empire. His work looks at how Black and Latino students resisted the attempts of the Ku Klux Klan to recruit white students from their schools. While their works look at distinct Latine, Black, Asian, and Asian-Latine histories and geographies, their work and methodologies are grounded on a common goal of digitizing scholarship, materials, and other findings to increase accessibility, preserve information, and enable broader engagement with histories of ethnicity, race, and migration in the U.S.
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