Category: Oral Histories

The Bronx has collectively endured years of adversity and hardship. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, residents faced down the social impact of segregation, privation, and political marginalization. Despite the stagnation of top-down progress, The Bronx remains activated through its decades-long history of mutual aid. Coming Full Circle amplifies the stories of those who survived and built community networks to reverse these harms. Schools, religious institutions, and grassroots organizing joined in tandem to strengthen this resilience.

The Bronx Community College Archives teamed up with Photoville and the Friends Of Aqueduct Walk (FOAW) to support Coming Full Circle: Practices of Resilience, a public exhibition featuring Aqueduct Park located across the street from the Bronx Community College campus, to produce a public exhibition with historical and community photos of local Bronx residents who grew up in and around this park.

The exhibition was unveiled on December 4 and includes Cynthia’s oral history interview with Reverend Jim Fairbanks, a pastor of the United Church of Christ and long-term Bronx advocate who shared his memories of the neighborhood as well as efforts to preserve and maintain this vital yet overlooked neighborhood green public space for the community. Listen to the short audio clip here. The full-length interviews are processed and made available at the BCC Archives’ Spotify channel. Many thanks to Bronx Community College fellow alumni Jacqueline Johnson-Carmichael who served as the project’s curator and oral history contributor, Pilar Maschi from Partnership for Parks/FOAW, Jasmin Chang from Photoville, and our oral history narrators Renea Bush and Jim Fairbanks.

This interview was part of the collaborative exhibit, Coming Full Circle: Practices of Resilience, conducted in partnership with Photoville and Partnership for Parks.

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These and other interviews are now available on our Spotify channel.

For more information or questions, please reach out to Prof. Cynthia Tobar.

American Icons SPCUNY

Mutual aid is an act of solidarity and care between neighbors. It stands in opposition to charity and top-down giving, because it is planned and executed by a community, for a community to not just provide food and essential items but also to educate and organize. Together, Bronx Community College Archives and Mutual Aid NYC (MANYC) have formed a partnership to collect oral history interviews from community mutual aid organizers across the Bronx. In collaboration with BCC students, the Archives created this oral history archive to document these Bronx stories. Ultimately, our hope is that these stories collected during the COVID-19 crisis will be made available to organizers, while also preserving documentation of mutual aid work for scholars and activists.

Following in the footsteps of earlier archives initiatives that acknowledge the impact of COVID-19 on our campus and community in the Bronx, the BCC Archives has teamed up with Mutual Aid NYC to develop a digital library and archive of mutual aid organizing tools and oral histories-created for, by, and in collaboration with mutual aid organizers in NYC. The Archives is particularly interested in documenting how these efforts fit within the larger history of community organizing and how this leads to residents feeling safe and secure during these turbulent COVID times. Thanks to funding by the Equity in Action program at METRO Library Council, Prof. Cynthia Tobar trained several Bronx Community College students over the summer of 2021 to collect interviews from Bronx-based mutual aid organizers as a part of the project. 

These last few months, we’ve been collecting stories of mutual aid in the Bronx, documenting the amazing grassroots efforts and care networks that have emerged locally in response to COVID-19. The students have collected stories from South Bronx Mutual Aid, North Bronx Mutual Aid, Rap4Bronx and Friends of the Aqueduct/Devoe Park. We are now working on sharing these back with community members and the general public. 

We wish to thank Metro’s Equity in Action program for giving us the opportunity to collect and archive organizing materials and oral history interviews from mutual aid organizing members who have worked tirelessly to care for their neighbors in the Bronx during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Community Care during COVID Oral History team, including BCC student interviewers with their paired narrators

• Cynthia Tobar, Head of Archives
• Ariadna Phillips (South Bronx Mutual Aid), interviewed by Jorge Guzman
• LoriKim Alexander (North Bronx Collective), interviewed by Andrew Roland
• Chef Geneva Wilson (Friends of the Aqueduct Walk/Devoe Park), interviewed by Elizabeth Asemota

These and other interviews are now available on our Spotify channel.

For more information or questions, please reach out to Prof. Cynthia Tobar.

• VIEW DIGITAL COLLECTION IN VIMEO

“Raising Ourselves Up”: Oral Histories from First-Generation College Students at BCC is a Collaborative Experiential Learning Pilot Project to build a video oral history archive to document the stories of first-generation college students on our campus. Each student’s time at BCC is unique, yet all students are bound to each other by the shared sense of struggle towards achieving a college education. Using video oral history interviews, students will examine the challenges faced by low-income, working-class groups of peer students from various ethnic, racial, and immigrant backgrounds, groups that BCC is dedicated to serving and who have been historically underrepresented in higher education. Our project will be a team effort, combining resources provided by the Archives (Prof. Cynthia Tobar) and Student Support Services/General Counseling Department (Dr. Nelson Reynoso). Beginning with interview collection in Fall 2016, this project will help inspire resiliency among BCC students by showing positive examples of overcoming adversity to attain a college education. 

• VIEW DIGITAL COLLECTION IN VIMEO

The Archives’ purpose for this oral history project is to collect the vivid and provocative memories of BCC from students, faculty, staff and alumni. This collective effort will include several voices: from the student who struggled against all odds to get their degree, to the instructor who recognized the potential of teaching nontraditional students, and alumni on their college experience and how it helped shape them into the people they are. The focus of our oral history work will be to document the era of 1970s when BCC moved into the University Heights campus to the present day. We will capture the history of political and cultural ferment, progressive and retrogressive changes, the antiwar movement, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the feminist and gay liberation movements, immigration and the Dream Act, and diverse challenges and success to these moments as experienced by members of the BCC community. We are also interested in collecting stories from student groups and clubs, department chairs, retired faculty, and past and current administrators.