Migration and Inclusive Transnational Heritage: Digital Innovation and the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative

Digital, Internet-based technologies present oral historians with opportunities to build an "inclusive transnational heritage" that enables users, especially migrants, to get a better understanding of countries to which they plan to immigrate or of the developments and changes in the countries from which they emigrated to document their experiences moving to and settling in new destinations. In this article, we offer new insight into the kinds of oral history practices that can advance a paradigm of this inclusive transnational heritage with migrant populations. We describe new tools and strategies designed to facilitate global access to oral histories and engage migrants and other public audiences in heritage initiatives. This recent project of the New Roots/Nuevas Raíces Oral History Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created an Internet-based digital information system and bilingual website by innovating with the open-source software Omeka. We describe the process of designing this system collaboratively with migrant narrators, Latin American scholars, and K-12 teachers and describe the technical aspects of tools we developed to map migrant journeys, sync data from institutional archival systems, and facilitate the online presentation of content in two languages. We consider the ethical and methodological challenges of engaging with internationally mobile populations who settle in new regions where they face linguistic, socioeconomic, and legal challenges that hinder access to educational and governmental resources.