As an oral history interviewer for Landmark West's "The Many Lives of San Juan Hill" project, I conducted recorded interviews with former residents, community members, and stakeholders to document the forgotten story of this vibrant Manhattan neighborhood. San Juan Hill was systematically erased from public memory after being designated a "slum" on July 1, 1958, leading to its demolition and the displacement of thousands of families for urban renewal and the construction of internationally-renowned institutions. Through these interviews, I helped capture firsthand accounts that challenge the reductive "slum" narrative that justified the neighborhood's destruction. The project recognizes that San Juan Hill's rich immigrant history and cultural significance have been largely obscured, reduced primarily to references in "West Side Story" while the lived experiences of displaced families remained untold. My work supported Landmark West's mission to create a more complete historical record that illuminates both the human cost of eminent domain policies and celebrates the resilience of communities that once thrived in this diverse area. These oral histories serve as crucial primary sources for understanding structural racism and urban renewal's impact. Listen to the oral histories here.

Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity preserves the voices of families torn apart by the Trump Administration's Zero Tolerance Policy through more than 45 oral history interviews. This collection documents the human cost of family separation between 2017 and 2018, featuring firsthand accounts from separated parents and children, human rights workers who searched for deported family members across Central America and Mexico, immigration advocates in the U.S. who helped reunite families, and lawyers who fought for justice through litigation. These interviews reveal both the devastating impact of forced separation and the remarkable solidarity that emerged in response. The stories demonstrate how international collaboration, rooted in respect for human dignity, became essential to reuniting parents with their children. By centering the voices of those most affected, Separated creates a vital repository that serves as both historical record and educational resource, ensuring these testimonies will inform future generations about the human consequences of immigration policy.

Show Me Your Hands: A Salvadoran Refugee Woman Shares Her Story was an exhibit for the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia. The exhibit reimagined the dwelling spaces left behind in the narrator's country of origin and explored the symbiotic relationship between agency, anonymity, and body language as a rejection of the tragic figure or supplicant tropes most often assigned to immigrant narratives.

In the 10 ft x 10 ft space in the Social Hall of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the exhibit re-constructed the narrator's garden, living room, and dining room from the narrator's memories in attempt to create a familiar container for the narrator's lived experiences. Interspersed throughout the space were short audio clips with themes about loss, motherhood, and migration and detention. The narrator contributed personal items for the exhibit including a tiny prayer book and two rosaries the narrator and her daughter carried on their journey from El Salvador to the United States.

Exhibit attendees each received an exhibit booklet which contained information about immigration and detention in the United States, and the transcriptions of all the audio excerpts used in the exhibit in both English and Spanish. To learn more about the exhibit, read Decolonizing Cultural Spaces To Tell Refugee Stories.