Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West is an edited collection of essays based on oral history work conducted by scholars on people living and working in Utah, Nevada, Colorado, California, and Alaska. One of the main points of the book, stated in the introduction by Jessie L. Embry and reiterated throughout the essays, is to illustrate the utility of oral history, and in this regard the book accomplishes that goal. The essays cover a range of perspectives, but the majority record the working experiences of groups frequently left out of the historical record. Georgia Wier, for example, writes about the experiences of Japanese Americans in Colorado; Claytee White documents the history of African Americans who migrated to Las Vegas during World War II in search of economic opportunity; and Skott Brandon Vigil writes about the migrant working conditions of his own Mexican and Ute family, which took them out of New Mexico to Colorado and then on to California. In some essays, the focus is less on work itself than on the results of work. Leisl Carr Childers’s essay, for example, is based on interviews with “downwinders”—people who were affected by radiation as a result of the Nevada Test Site—and a government federal radiation monitor. In other essays, work is background while leisure is foregrounded; José M. Alamillo discovers that Mexican Americans working in southern California lemon groves created community outside the workplace on baseball fields, in Cinco de Mayo celebrations, and around church-related activities.
Apart from giving voice to minority groups, another way in which the book demonstrates the usefulness of oral history is that, in some cases, the authors’ work invites us to reconsider commonly held presumptions and stereotypes. William Bauer’s essay provides a Native point of view on their own labor conditions in California, and he notes that not only did American Indian people work (he writes, “there is a prevailing belief that American Indian people are either perpetually unemployed or ‘lazy’) but also that these Native oral histories clash with “some interpretations of migrant labor in the American West, which depict the migrant western workforce as male and atomized” (62), since Round Valley Reservation workers were clearly both male and female and strongly connected socially. Joanne L. Goodwin’s essay is part of a larger oral history project on women in Las Vegas at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She illustrates that the expanding postwar economy of Las Vegas attracted many women, who came in search of opportunities and stayed because work was plentiful, contradicting the popular notion that postwar women were homemakers rather than wage-earners.
The work done by Mormons and the work of building Mormon communities is featured prominently in the book, although only Linda M. Meyer’s essay, which documents the experiences of building an LDS community in Fort Collins, Colorado, makes the Mormon community the explicit focus of analysis. Other essays that deal with LDS communities in some way are John Sillito, Sarah Langsdon, and Marci Farr’s contribution, which outlines the history of the Dee School of Nursing in Ogden, Utah; Melanie Newport conducts interviews with members of the Utah Eagle Forum, a controversial, far right-wing conservative group; and Kristi Young writes about a Mormon orchard-growing family in Utah.
Most of the essays do not theorize the practice of oral history, but rely on it rather straightforwardly. One of the more interesting points is made by Barbara Allen Bogart and taken up again in the afterword by noted historian Clyde A. Miler II. Bogart writes that in the process of conducting and presenting publically oral histories to the community, the oral history itself helped create and shape a sense of community; she thus points to the intersubjective ways in which the past is created and remembered. This point is also taken up in Laurie Mercier’s essay, in which she illustrates how changing political circumstances can change the construction of public and private memory. In some cases, the essays connect the immediate material to broader trends. Vigil’s essay, for example, offers details on the somewhat conflicted relationships between employers and migrant laborers, while Wier’s essay is contextualized within the larger narrative of Japanese incarceration. Others, such as the essay by Sandra K. Mathews about her aunt’s experiences as a female teacher in Alaska in the 1950s, focus more on the details of the findings and leave it to the reader to draw the broader connections and implications of the work.
To their credit, many authors emphasize that oral history is not a replacement for traditional historical methods, but rather a supplement to it. The authors are careful to note that oral history is not always factually correct, but that it should serve as a supplement to currently existing written records and documents upon which historians traditionally have relied. That caveat, however, does not in any way detract from the contribution of this book, which is to offer emic perspectives on work and working conditions by a variety of groups that actively participated in the western labor force but that, in part due to the lack of written sources, have been overlooked. Claytee White, for example, notes that there are virtually no written records on African Americans in Las Vegas; this fact alone should stand as testament to the importance of oral history as a means of constructing alternate narratives. Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West will be of worth to anyone interested in oral histories, work, and/or the American West.
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[Review length: 911 words • Review posted on December 10, 2014]