Oral History Project

A picture of my grandfather holding my older brother when he was a baby.

I interview my older brother Daniel but we called him Danny, when I first heard about this project not going to lied but I was scared because I didn’t know what to talk about or even worst who to interview, couldn’t figured out, I called the person who I knew would help me quickly and that was my mom, I told her about the project and without hesitation she knew who was the ideal person for this interview, she told a brief story of the event and for me was BINGO, at first I thought I was going to be a very basic and normal interview, just basically him telling me how he got the t-shirt and maybe a silly history from the behind the scenes, before doing the interview he told me the actual meaning of the T-shirt and it was in that moment that I realized this was not an ordinary T-shirt, this had so much meaning behind. My grandfather had a T-shirt that he would always wear, I don’t know if it was his favorite T-shirt but all I know is that he used to wear that T-shirt a lot, my mom conserve that T-shirt for 19 years, until one day my older brother Daniel ran out of T-shirts at the beach house and needed to borrow one, so he asked my mom for one, she without knowing gave him my grandfather’s T-shirt, immediately he knew that belong to him, he told me that the first thing came to mind when he hold the T-shirt was the spare parts store that he used to owned, he told me that he even sense the smell of the store, when he touched the T-shirt. The interview was conducted in Spanish because we are from Ecuador and my family still lives there, a way that I can think of being able to be translated and if the technology lets me do it, would be through YouTube put subtitles, if that is possible. My interview technique was doing it as fluid as possible, at the beginning I was mostly using the questions that we were given, but throughout the conversation, I kind of made my own questions because I notice that not all the questions were related to his history and our flow of the conversation, I also didn’t want to make it a fake interview. For me it felt amazing how I thought this was going to be an ordinary interview, but knowing that for my brother the T-shirt had so much meaning, it felt incredible, knowing that for him it represented union and family because that was what my grandfather used to taught him all the time and knowing that he wants to passed that T-shirt to his sons makes it incredible, sort of legacy for them to know how important it is to have your family by your side, because sometimes we don’t think or realized how important family is and how valuable it’s the time and memories that you spend with your family, no matter what they are the ones that would support you and honor all your goals, they would love you no matter what and that is something that teenagers or nowadays the new generations are not aware because technology is keeping us apart, being constantly on our phones in a family reunion to the point that you won’t even ask your grandmother, uncle or cousin how their day was, getting to the point that playing Fortnite is more important that playing board games with your family, so the message about this interview is never lose the affection and connection with your family.

This collage shows old pictures of my grandfather and my older brother.

As well of the T-shirt that belonged to my grandfather and him wearing it and on the right side is a picture of the T-shirt nowadays, for me this college represents union and home.