elisa's notes Posts

After lots of reading and discussion about what oral history is, its possibilities and limits, Tucker’s reading for this week made me realise how difficult it is to manipulate an OH product in order to publish it as a book.

A few years ago, I read Svetlana Aleksiévitch’s The Unwomanly Face of War (first published in 1983), an astonishing book that presents the experiences of the Soviet women that fought in World War II collected by the author in OH interviews. Aleksiévitch’s work was structured in way different than Tucker’s: the Belarusian chose to start each chapter with a personal reflection either about her goals, what she heard, how she felt during the interviews and writing about them, and then transcripted a few long excerpts of the interviews, without a mediation in between. I did miss something else when I was reading it: what were her questions to those women? Did all of them start to talk and never stop or Aleksiévitch at some time needed to intervene?

I remember this now as I finished Swing Shift with a bunch of other questions: how did she choose those little quotes she decided to transcribe? Doesn’t the idea of creating a narrative comparing all the experiences make justice to the individuals and the hours spent talking about themselves? Translating a speech from an interview to a third-person objective narrative does not subvert the idea of the interviewed own agency?

That is not to say I dislike the book, even because the position assumed by Tucker seems to be a good example of how to successfully develop a OH project. If she wasn’t open to acknowledge misconceptions, shift her motive and to expand the project scope, she might have found herself “producing a separate history of skilled women instrumentalists” (p. 7), instead of addressing both gender and race as elements of power embedded in the swing discourse. The author’s focus in the 1940s provided national and international context to the women’s strategies and experiences during that time, and makes it possible for the reader to find parallels and ruptures between the life of black and white women in other roles.

My doubts are far from being critical; rather, I am just trying to figure out which way is better to present an OH interview in a commercial product, or what are the obstacles to each one of the strategies established. For me, it’s a paradigm: at the first sight, I would definitely say that using long quotations allows me to feel present to an extent, as if I could almost be a third person in the interview room and make the narrator feel seen and heard. After reading Tucker’s work, though, I believe it is safe to say her narration provides a meaning that would otherwise have been forgotten or taken as granted.

The Centro de Memória Sindical (Trade Union Memory Center) is a Brazilian inter-union institution organized in order to preserve the memory of workers, their life stories and its intersection with union struggle. Founded in 1980, when Brazil was still under a military dictatorship and unionized workers were conscient about their role in fighting for both better work and payment conditions and democracy, a group of journalists had the idea of recording their testimonies about the strikes that took place in the metropolitan region of São Paulo from 1978 to 1980. Although academic researchers played important roles in the project, the board of presidents is constituted by representatives of affiliated unions. The CMS collection houses historical documents about clashes, strikes, achievements, union campaign propaganda and oral history testimonies, in addition to offering seminars and producing specialized literature.

For this week’s assignment, I watched the testimony of Geraldino dos Santos Silva, interviewed by Carolina Marina Ruy in 2015. Before talking about the interview itself, it is important to point out that CMS was very active until 1990’s and then mobilized again in 2010. Some of the OH interviews were collected by the sociologist Carmen Evangelho in the 80s, but the most recent are those from the 2010s, mediated either by the journalist Carolina Marina Ruy or the historian Maíra Estrella. The difference between them is that the first ones are accessible only through transcripts, and the second may have been recorded in video (that is the case here). Each one has their own way to publish the transcripts: Carmen does not position her questions with interrogation marks, but as reflections with three dots; she certainly does revisions to alter the interviewed speech to a formal Portuguese; and there is no proper end to the dialogue. Meanwhile, although Carolina states that there are no cuts, her voice does not appear either in the transcription or the video (in Geraldino’s testimony, her voice sounds much lower that you have to make an effort to hear), and the text form is sectioned by themes and no questions at all. Finally, Maíra does present herself as part of the first interview question, and her transcript appears to be the closest one to what usually happens.

With that being said, Geraldino worked in the metallurgical industry and, by the time of the interview, he was executive director of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo and secretary of the Força Sindical Nacional. By watching his testimony, it becomes visible that they both have a good acknowledgement of each other’s work and have previously established some friendly relation that made Geraldino comfortable enough to speak his truth about being an unionized worker and militant. For a black man coming from the Nordeste region to São Paulo in 1974, he believes that his trajectory is an exception because of the acceptance in the society and the promotions he received in Probel despite being unionized. Although the testimony focuses on the Metalworkers’ Union, the one he has been affiliated with since 1979, the interviewer asks about his personal life too, promoting some personal insights about his leadership skills since the infancy. Ultimately, he reflects about how respect, sense of collectivity and mobilization shaped his experience and made others rely on him as their representative at the union, even by accessing his faults and limitations.

Since our first conversations in class, it has become clear that Oral History (OH) has had both a huge appeal and concerns regarding its reception by historians. This week’s authors lead ourselves through this path, helping us to identify tendencies and contextualize the intrinsic nuances that come within.

Once we begin with Nevins (1966) and Starr (1977), the idea of Oral History as a potential revolution in historiographical work seems to have prevailed in the face of the supposed obstacles overseen. Besides the issue of financial aid, which should not be ignored or minimized, Nevins points out a growth of new OH products – exponential volumes of interviews and transcripts – and works beyond the United States borders. These statements are corroborated with the quantitative work presented later by Starr, with a first peek of American programs and articles on OH in 1970, a few years after the establishment of the Oral History Association. In order to be institutionalized as a valid product within the pairs, practice guides and manuals were written, serving as promotional material but mostly as a way of creating basic standards.But there was an issue back then, which we should be familiar with: whenever something new comes up, people tend to either discredit all of the efforts or romanticize it as the solution for all of their problems. This may be the case of OH as its own method was still being developed during the 70s and the 80s; what seems to have happened is that people were so amused by the idea of being closer to the truth that they understate the difficulties of implementing the use of oral sources in a human science so attached to the writing. Although someone could argue that the next were only ways of saying, or attempts to make oral histories appealing to funding institutions, statements about how OH “saved from death’s dateless night”¹, how a good interviewer may help someone to “stuck closer to the path of truth”² or how oral histories allows someone “to bring to light a genuinely subterranean history”³ probably influenced the avant-garde in taking a step back. This is not saying that our authors believed that there is a truth, even because all of them emphasize the need of crossing-evidence and bibliography, as well as the importance of pair review to enhance the practice of OH. On the other hand, this certainly helps to crystallize the idea that the past can be discovered by an objective and neutral historian. Well, this is the key question I would like we could discuss: does it make sense to worry about those statements or is it merely a linguistic problem or a figurative type of language? Did you feel the same once reading it or it comes in a natural way? Are there any implications to our work by addressing those or not?

Portelli’s work made me feel welcomed in these matters. If OH is capable (and I believe we all agree with it) of filling lacunae left by a historiographical tradition based primarily on writing, understanding its limitations is equally important for our work. After all, our professional education does not train us to reveal the past as it really happened, but to give it meaning in a cohesive narrative through a critical analysis of the inherently subjective sources that we have at our disposal. Not only are our sources produced and preserved by human action, but our interpretations of what they say and mean are also shaped by our individual and collective experiences in the time and space we occupy today. Rather than being a bad thing, acknowledging this emphasizes our capacity to be responsible for our historical production.

My name is Elisa Venzon, and I am from Brazil, where I earned my Master’s degree in History and graduated as a History Teacher at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. In the Fall of 2025, I began the PhD program in the History Department at Temple University.

The path of discovering my intellectual interest dates back to 2019, when I found myself absorbed in readings about the criminal justice system and penal institutions, motivated by an abolitionist perspective on prisons. What started as a personal interest developed apart from my studies, made me later understand that what kept me most excited was not the history of crime itself, but the history of prisons, the critics towards them, and the way they establish a relationship with justice systems, media, activists, the urban space, and society in general. For my undergraduate thesis, I studied the restorative justice program Justice for the 21st. Century (Brasil, 2005-2008), and used the discourse analysis as both theory and methodology to read the program’s documents and understand the socio-political paths that led the legal community to think, propose, and execute alternatives to the retributive criminal justice system.

In 2025, I completed my master’s thesis on the final years of the Casa de Correção de Porto Alegre and its role in the prison system of Rio Grande do Sul state, regarding the discussion and debate within the local society. By characterizing prison as a social institution, I understand it as a non-natural apparatus for regulating and organizing human conduct while establishing and (re)producing political, economic, and social relations between intra and extramural. This notion, combined with the concept of representation, guided the research and enabled the creation of a logical, rational, and meaningful narrative about the socio-spatial dynamics inside that house of correction.

Since the beginning of 2017, I have focused on experiencing all opportunities that History led me to. First, I joined my University’s museum as part of their educational section, at the same time I enrolled in an extension project as a translator of African women’s biographies from English to Portuguese. I was also part of a scientific research about the remission of prison sentences by reading; a volunteer teacher to 9th-grade students; and, eventually, the Editor-in-Chief of Aedos, the students’ journal from my Postgraduate History Program. Although I truly enjoyed all of these projects, my main goal is to have a career that allows me to continue the research I’ve been doing in the last five years, regardless of the place or institution. Because I have a specific goal but a broad path that can guide me to it, besides being an academic professor, I would like to get closer to Public History practices to expand my future possibilities. Although they are not synonymous, I believe Oral and Public History are embedded in each other’s theory and practice, in addition to the value both of them can bring to enhance my studies in the social history of carceral institutions.

If you are interested, please contact me at elisavenzon@gmail.com.