Hello and welcome back to Amplifying Identities, a podcast that explores stories from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and beyond. We're your hosts, Bailey and Breahna. We’re both graduate students at UTSA, and this semester 9Fall 2025) we’ve been working with Dr. Priscilla Martinez in our oral history methods course to build a whole season of episodes using the incredible oral history collections from Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History.

As a class we’ve explored some of the big historical questions that connect our communities across the borderlands, uncovered people’s individual narratives and experiences, and constructed episodes to inform you, our audience. Today’s episode is titled “Roots in New Soil: Building Vietnamese-American Life in Texas,” and we’re exploring the journey of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Texas after the fall of Saigon in 1975: their migration, the communities that helped them get here, and the ways they built new identities through family, faith, and food. And for the first half of this episode, I’ll be walking us through the historical and political context surrounding the refugee crisis and the arrival of Vietnamese families to the United States—especially to Texas. Then Bailey will pick up the second half to look at how people rebuilt their lives once they got here.

So sit back as we amplify these stories—layering personal memories with historical research—to understand how a community took root in Texas soil.

Check our our episode website at https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/onvW0RDkj3MUa to learn more about Bailey and Breahna's project.

Like and Subscribe to Amplifying Identities Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on Instagram at @AmpIdPod for all the latest updates and behind the scenes content!

Have you ever wondered how memorials play a crucial role in communities? What constitutes a memorial, and how does it impact our memory of an event, person, or item? Hello, my name is Iris Bas, and I’m Gabrielle Zepeda. We are graduate students at the UT San Antonio.

This Fall 2025, we are working with Dr. Priscilla Martinez in our Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History course to produce a season of the Amplifying Identities podcast. For this season, we’re collaborating with Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, using their extensive archives to explore some of the big historical questions that connect our communities.

This episode, titled, “What We Leave Behind—Resilience Through Memory and Memorials,” explores the oral histories of World War II service members Gerd Miller and Ruth St. Claire Murphy, their vastly different roles and experiences during the war, and how their individual memories impact the collective memory of WWII. We also analyze how individual and collective memory can either validate or contradict what monuments represent.

Our episode seeks to understand the complications and impact of trauma, power, and nationalism on post-war collective memory as well as address some of the silences.

Subscribe to Amplifying Identities wherever you listen to podcast! Follow us on IG @ampidpod for the latest updates!

For Further Reading, Listening & Viewing

Campbell, D’Ann. “Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union.” The Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993): 301-323. Accessed on September 22, 2025.

Doss, Erika. “War, memory, and the public mediation of affect: The National World War II Memorial and American imperialism.” Memory Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 227-250.

Meredith, William. “Ten- Day Leave.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse LXIII, no. V (February 1944): 243-244.

Miller, Gerd. Oral Memoir. Interviewed by Stephen M. Sloan. July 9, 2013. Texas Liberators of World War II Concentration Camps Project, Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Digital Collections. Transcript.

Murphy, Ruth St. Claire. Oral Memoir. Interviewed by Nathan Dale Howard. November 18, 1994. Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Digital Collections. Transcript.

National Park Service. “World War II Memorial.” National Park Service. Last modified October 4, 2021.

Power, Tom. “Geddy Lee on My Effin’ Life, Rush, and the story of Neil Peart’s audition.” Q with Tom Power. November 16, 2023. Video. https://youtu.be/IMUaFy-bJSs?si=Vpb8RoyDU1WAp9ay.

Resnais, Alain, dir. Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard). Text by Jean Cayrol. 1955; Paris: Argos Films/Cocinor and Janus Films. HBO Max.

Shanken, Andrew M. “Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II.” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (2002): 130-147.

Sonstein, Shelli. “Geddy Lee Tells His Family’s Holocaust Story.” Q1043 New York. January 26, 2019. Video. https://youtu.be/hPxwSF4CGyo?si=3gIhpu5Q0RpnqIkM.

Trouillot, Michael-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1995.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Winter, Jay. War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance form the Great War to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Welcome to Amplifying Identities, the podcast. My name is Dr. Priscilla Martinez, and I’m a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I work on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and I’m trained as an oral, public, and digital historian.

This semester—Fall 2025—I had the privilege of teaching one of my favorite courses, HIS 5823: Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to drag you through every theory or methodological debate we covered in this graduate history course. Instead, here on Amplifying Identities, I want to share with you some of the stories my students and I uncovered throughout our class together.

In this fourth season, we collaborated with Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, tapping into their expansive oral history collections to tell an incredible range of stories. From narratives rooted in our local communities to recollections gathered across the world, this has been one of our most exciting seasons yet. And my graduate students co-producers and I are genuinely thrilled about what we’ve put together for you.

Before we plunge into the season, I wanted to spend a little time talking with one of our partners, Steven Sielaff, the Senior Collections Manager at Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History (BUIOH).

BUIOH is a fantastic program and remain one of the leaders in oral history today. They’re home to the national Oral History Association, the Texas Oral History Association, and one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. I could gush about them all day long.

My hope, though, is that in this conversation with Steven, we’ll get into what oral history actually is, why it matters to historical inquiry, and why oral stories continue to be such powerful tools for understanding the past.

So without further ado, here’s my interview with my dear friend, Steven Sielaff. And of course—Sic ’em, Bears.

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This limited podcast series produced by Dr. Priscilla Martinez and her students for her HIS 5823: Theories, Methods, and Uses of Oral History class at UT San Antonio during the Fall 2025 semester.

Follow us on Instagram, BlueSky, and Facebook at @ampidpod, for added content. For more information about our episodes and our research process, visit us at https://amplifyingidentitiespodcast.com

You can contact us by email at amplifyingidentitiespodcast@gmail.com

Priscilla M. Martínez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

You can find her on Instagram @dr.priscilla.m.martinez; on BlueSky at @drprismmartinez.bsky.social ; or at her website www.priscillamariemartinez.com.

Thank you to Baylor's Institute for Oral History for partnering with us this season. For more information on BUIOH, please visit them at https://library.web.baylor.edu/oralhistory Thank you to CEDISH at UT San Antonio for your support during this season. For more information on CEDISH, please visit https://cedish.utsa.edu/

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