This oral history project, organized by Dr. Whitney Chappell in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, explores COVID-19’s impact on San Antonio’s Hispanic community. Our goal is to share lived experiences, amplify local voices, and document this challenging period in our shared history. In each of the individual stories below, our narrators reflect on how COVID affected their health, family, employment, use of technology, community, and other areas of life in English, Spanish, or Spanglish. Please click on their names to hear their stories.
More information about this project
In line with UTSA’s commitment to community engagement and multicultural traditions, the present oral history project documents the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has altered lives within San Antonio’s Hispanic community. With the ultimate goal of creating a large-scale, open-access bilingual corpus of recordings about lived experiences during this period, a trained team of bilingual UTSA students (Ada Zamarripa, Lydia González, Ana Juárez, Aidee Larios Palomera, Yedid Mejía-Vázquez, Leticia Medina, and Samantha Villarreal) conducted oral history interviews in San Antonio from November 2020-December 2021. The team recruited local participants interested in sharing their stories in the language of their choice, and a contactless interview approach (recorded interviews in Zoom) was used to keep both interviewers and narrators safe. In the 100+ interviews presented here, each narrator answered a series of open-ended questions about their experiences, guided by their interviewers. Interviewers and narrators were compensated for their time, and narrators generously donated their interviews to this project. All interviews have been fully transcribed, with subtitles and transcripts available for each story.
