Sounding Out! Podcast #24: The Raitt Street Chronicles: A Survivor’s History

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Listen in as Kevin Cabrera, Nancy Charco, Monica Gonzalez, Jesus Lopez, Javier Morales, Marcus Medina Mendoza, Cynthia Zul, Jasmine Soto, Pablo Montoya, Alex Mendoza, Marilynn Montaño, Robert Salas, and Isabel Marin guide us through the soundscapes of Raitt Street, their neighborhood in Santa Ana. If you are interested in learning more about the Raitt Street Chronicles please listen to this interview with Manny Escamilla, the archivist for the Santa Ana History Room at the Santa Ana Public Library. Also, check out the Raitt Street Chronicles website where you can find narrated photojournals by the authors of this podcast.

This podcast was made possible through different individuals and institutions dedicated to the histories of Santa Ana. The Santa Ana Public Library partnered with Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center and the Studio for Southern California History to train teens to collect oral histories from the Townsend/Raitt neighborhood. Project mentors trained youth participants to collect, archive, and share the underreported stories of survival from one the nation’s most at-risk communities. Over the course of 12 months the participants recorded video interviews with survivors of violence. Community impactful projects like this are made possible through the generous support of foundations, corporate sponsorships, and the generosity of individuals who believe in the mission and purpose of such collaborative efforts.  This collaboration with Santa Ana Public Library has been fortunate to receive support from a Cal Humanities 2013 Community Stories grant, but additional funding and in-kind support is needed to realize this project, as well as other projects in the works, to their fullest and most positive impactful outcomes.

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Manuel “Manny” Escamilla – Is the archivist for the Santa Ana History Room at the Santa Ana Public Library. He received an AA from Santa Ana College in 2006, a BA in History from UC Berkeley in 2008, and is in the first year of his MLIS at UCLA as an Inland Empire LEADS fellow.  He has interned the Emma Goldman Papers at UC Berkeley, the Special Collections Department at UCI, and the Chicano Research Center at UCLA. With the aid of a 2008 McNair Scholarship, Manny organized an independent research project at the U.K. National Archives in London.  As the archivist for the Santa Ana History Room he has concentrated on increasing the archives collection of historically underrepresented minorities and creating innovative youth outreach programming for the ‘Teen Community Historians.’ As a 2010 Eureka fellow he completed the “Our Lives Our History” project that helped youth volunteers collect 35 oral history interviews of recent immigrants from various states of Mexico. He is currently the Project Director for ‘The Raitt Street Chronicles: A Survivors’ Oral History’ and the upcoming ‘Santa Ana Civic Archive: Connecting Future Leaders to their Community’s Civic Past.’ Additionally he serves as the Programming Chair for UCLA’s Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists and is an active member of OC REFORMA.

Since earning her PhD in History from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2002, Sharon Sekhon has explored the integration of critical local history into public discourse. Over 2003 – 2005, Sekhon was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. There, she worked with faculty in developing discipline-driven, multimedia scholarship and curricula. She was the Principal Investigator for the Holiday Bowl History Project, a place-based, cross institutional  online oral history project on the Holiday Bowl bowling alley in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. Sekhon founded the history  organization the Studio for Southern California History (Studio) in 2006. The Studio uses participatory methods to create conversations about our shared spaces across Southern California. The Studio’s work is showcased on the LA History Archive at www.lahistoryarchive.org. In addition, Sekhon has taught in the Department of American Studies at California State University Fullerton since 1999.

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