For this project, I appropriated one of eight oral history interviews with Lottie Kaplan Spitzer, a woman who immigrated to the United States and worked as a garment worker and union organizer in Chicago during the 1910s. The original half-hour interview, collected by Senior Honors and the Feminist History Research Project  and made publicly available through the California State University Long Beach’s Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive, covers Spitzer’s experiences navigating the job market, learning skills in various garment factories, and enduring the long hours, meager wages, and harassment that many workers (particularly women) were subject to at that time.

By dicing and reordering audio from the original interview, this project offers a  reimagined oral history that dramatizes the sometimes hostile work environment that Spitzer experienced as well as her response and relationship to both the individuals and conditions of that environment. The conflicts in the original interview (such as slapping her boss in response to sexual harassment and disappointing her highly educated father by working in a factory) are spun to highlight the presence of men’s power in her life but also her defiance of that power.

While I have spent some time removing background noise, the audio could still use some refining to clarify the voices and hide “the stitches” between audio clips. Though, I appreciate some of the moments where the cohesiveness of the storytelling voice falters and becomes disjointed.

As for the theoretical implications of this project, some questions that are currently on my mind include:

  1. What are the implications of creating an oral history that’s fictional but still sounds archival? (Is this propoganda or is it creatively “lying the truth”?)
  2. Since this interview was originally conducted in the 1970s and subsequently made digital and public, what does the material translation of this interview imply in terms of power and access to the archives? I’m considering Derrida and Mbembe here.
  3. How is this project similar to and different than poems I’ve created using found text from archival documents? The creative processes felt very much the same, although the media are completely different.