As a longtime resident and recent expat of the Calumet Region, I have long been curious about the rich industrial heritage that surrounded my hometown of East Chicago, Indiana. This curiosity led me to make my hometown the center of focus for my current manuscript-in-progress, which I am working on while serving as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. I wanted to understand the world that led my family to the region as laborers in the railroad and steel industries. A community of neighborhoods, I often joked that I wasn’t from the North or South side of town but the tracks, as my maternal grandparents built their home across the street from what is now Pegasus Yard. It was a short walk from where my grandfather worked, Edward Valve & Manufacturing Co., a small plant that built steel valves and was no longer operational when I was young.
Edward Valve is a vital example of my interests in deindustrialization. As a former site — now demolished and replaced — of a city’s manufacturing and industrial heritage, what do those places mean for generations like mine, removed from the workscapes of the past? How should we invite the community as collaborative stakeholders in the preservation and interpretation of deindustrialized communities?
My interest in the working group stems from two particular projects. First, I am currently on the Board of Directors for the Calumet Heritage Partnership, a bi-state volunteer organization dedicated to stewardship and interpretation of the Calumet Region. As a part of this organization, I’ve agreed to develop a working group concerning education and interpretation, an admittedly daunting task at a level that includes numerous historical societies, public historians, educators at various levels, and invested residents. However, it has led me to consider the benefits of regionality in detailing connections across municipalities and communities. What histories and themes can both foster collaboration and engage residents?
Second, as someone interested in preserving and sharing the rich history of Latina and Latino communities in the Midwest, I am invested in understanding how we can collaboratively build archives to tell these stories and engage the communities; welcoming them as stakeholders and partners. Academic work often can appear extractive. For instance, in one interview, a community member mentioned loaning some personal papers to a historian to scan for a project; however, decades later they still had not been returned. Recognizing and respecting the shared authority residents have in our interpretative efforts means developing an ethical way of archiving and preserving these stories, particularly in light of documenting these absences in the archives.
Through these two experiences, I am developing a project that could blend the two into an opportunity to interpret the history of the region while embracing the often non-commemorated history of Latinas and Latinos in the Region. 2024 is the 100th anniversary of the first Fiestas Patrias celebration in East Chicago. Except for canceled parades during the Second World War and the COVID-19 pandemic, it is one of the oldest celebrations in the city and Midwest. The upcoming festivities in September 2024 offer an opportunity to invite the community to tell their story — a story rooted in resiliency in a deindustrialized community. Despite the decline of employment in the region’s steel mills and the divestment from core industrial communities to develop the sprawling suburbs, the Latina/o community continues to celebrate Mexican independence.
Although the festival has continued for almost one hundred years, there have been considerable changes over the years to the festivities. I would like to host a community-based collecting event at the two local library branches to both increase interest in the September 2024 parade and expand the network of stakeholders to the commemoration.
Ideally, the Fiestas Patrias celebrations will become a lens to understand the history of a changing community. The ethnic Mexican community arrived to the region en masse, originally as strikebreakers and to fill the labor gap during World War I era restrictions on ethnic European migration. The celebrations became visible examples of placemaking and a hub for building community in an unfamiliar region. While the area does not employ at the same scale as it did then, it has remained a site for both industrialization and migration, particularly Puerto Rican and continued migration from Mexico. Nearly one in five residents are foreign-born. This changing demographic profile of the community allows the festival to be viewed in comparison to the industrial story. As an instance of placemaking, the relationship the community has to the festival is also an extension of their story of migration to the region — either to work in industrial and manufacturing sectors or as a continuation of migration trends over the past century.
While the project is still preliminary, I am interested in seeing how younger generations comprehend and engage with the industrial heritage of the region and its impact on the built environment. I hope that the work on the festival will open opportunities for further community collections and collaboration. I imagine these could follow along a theme of festivities and cross-cultural exchanges. For instance, each July, neighboring Whiting celebrates the Pierogi Festival, an homage to their Polish heritage occurring in the shadows of a BP refinery. The town recently began an Empanada Festival, representing a nod toward the increasing settlement of Latinas and Latinos in the community in the past several decades. I anticipate a few obstacles, notably in ensuring availability and flexibility to invite working class communities to share their personal family stories, whether those be memories, photographs, home video, etc. Additionally, I am uncertain what the best collaborative format might be: an exhibit in a local museum, a documentary, or a series of short videos. I would like the final product to be both accessible and a byproduct of collaboration. However, at what stages to invite assessment and feedback is not as clear to me.
Fostering collaborative, co-creative history projects is challenging for all the same reasons as are conventional studies. The most problematic, I think, is building consensus on the overarching themes. The spontaneous response seems to be some combination of ‘expert authority’ and ‘to each their own’ segmentation, rather than broadly participatory and a synthesis of common themes. Certainly, the common themes will be built from specific examples, but resist the pull of ‘interest group’ segregation. For example, the public festival (considered broadly) seems to offer a wide range of tangible and intangible cultural forms, and perhaps could be one unifying concept, explored for its range and illustrated by shared examples (e.g. music, dance, food, visual arts). An important organizing structure will be a committee of the whole that sees itself as such (and not as a group of ‘representatives’ of fractions of the whole), which is of course easier said than done, but quite possible.
Your case study made me think of the work of Christine Walley (Exit Zero) looking at Southeast Chicago. It also dovetails with my recent interest in developing a deeper history of the relationship between deindustrialization and the Puerto Rican communities in Lorain and Youngstown, Ohio. I concur with Kevin that your attentiveness to “extraction” is a key, as that is something I am working with on my project – trying to see this as something that will be dialogic, and maintain itself with and for the local community, as much as it might be an academic publication for me. I think the format of your project can be more than one thing – but I would wonder if the format should include elements that can sustain themselves with the community. That’s something I am considering as well. So collections of artifacts, oral histories, etc. that stay available and open, perhaps.
I like the idea of looking at deindustrialization from a regional perspective. Regions may offer a useful frame that differs from the global and local frames that we’ve been discussing in the group. I hope we’ll have an opportunity to explore possible statewide efforts. In what ways is the experience of the Calumet Region like or unlike that of central or southern Indiana?
I’m also looking forward to seeing your work on commemoration. Given that commemoration is explicitly about the past but often implicitly an effort to shape the present and the future, I’d like to see a comparison between the new, fresh forms of commemoration and the official commemoration promulgated by the elite earlier in the Region’s history.
What a great opportunity to develop your projects with the existing structure and stakeholders that the Calumet Heritage Partnership brings! I’d expect that the various organizations involved, each with their own stakeholders, will be very helpful especially as you touch on the broader, regional aspect of this ambitious project. Agreed with Marty that a regional approach feels like a good fit for your project, and we should plan to touch on the opportunities and challenges that a regional perspective might have for different initiatives when we discuss as a group.
Emiliano, I love so much about this project, particularly its regional approach. You are bumping up against so many of the ethical issues that public historians grapple with, and I can share what I have done to try to practice ethically. In terms of the younger generation, are there community activists/politicians in their 20s and 30s who are interested in this history or might be if they were introduced to it? That has happened in High Point and it has been a huge part of the revitalization effort that is happening in our city.
Emiliano, I love your emphasis on the regional approach to the history of deindustrialization and postindustrial communities who might not have living memory of the industry itself, but rather the histories of movement and community connections. Locating collaborative history building in the making of it seems like the right focus for your project, and I wonder if there is even more potential in reimagining the concept of “History Making” as the present and future effort of a whole range of community stakeholders?
The festival is history making in that there are people engaged with movement, space, work, food, music, and art. It invites a multiplicity of perspectives and specialties and voices while also generating a kind of self-sustaining momentum when it comes to the idea that history is a space that is continually made, engaged, interrogated, and then remade again.
I’m particularly intrigued by the generational aspect of your project, and its connection to the archive of the working classes in the region. Approaching the narrative from the perspective of a younger generation and how they interact with the industrial past could offer rich insight into the legibility of industry’s impact on a community over time. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to set up a program that allows for members of different generations to teach each other and to capture it for wider public consumption–I’m thinking of something like Story Corps, where two or three people can record a conversation about their experiences and the records/materials they have in relation to that experience.