One Saturday morning this fall I sat at a table in the Socorro High School library as a high school student interviewed the grandmother of a fellow classmate. The interview was part of the Oral Histories in the High Schools Project (OHHS) that my graduate students and I organized through our class, History 5304: Studies in Public History through the Department of History at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). As the interviewee talked about attending school in the Lower Valley in the late 1940s, she mentioned that she had not spoken a word of English when she began school. The student’s eyes lit up. He had not spoken English either when he began school. As the two, a teenager and a grandmother, talked about their shared experiences, I witnessed something momentous: generations connecting through the sharing of life stories. Furthermore, my presence as a university professor added another dimension. Not only were generations coming together through the process of recovering community history, the university was part of this moment.

My personal journey to connect the university with the community had its roots in my undergraduate days at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1977, I participated in a project titled "Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective." Through this project, undergraduate students conducted interviews with Mexican American women and men who told us about great historical events such as the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, and World War II. They also painted moving portraits of their daily lives. In addition to conducting oral histories with my now deceased parents, Esther and Gerónimo Leyva, I was charged with teaching a class in oral history to community members in east Austin. Twenty-four years later, I found myself remembering my first experience in oral history, realizing that the excitement and dedication to oral history as a way to connect people and recover unrecorded histories was stronger than ever.

The Oral Histories in the High School’s Project brought together graduate students from UTEP, Socorro High School students and teachers, as well as community members from the lower valley. The goals of this project were several:

1. To gather local oral histories from community members in order to preserve them and make them available to researchers, interested individuals, and future generations.

2. To promote the field of public history and oral history among several constituencies, including university and high school students, teachers, and the community at large.

3. To generate interest and further knowledge of local histories in order to build a solid and enduring sense of community.

Public history, most simply defined, is the practice of interpreting and presenting history to the community outside of the academic classroom. It recognizes that history is important in people’s everyday lives. Oral history, a significant component of public history, uses interviews to recover people’s memories about their lives. Oral history builds on the understanding that, throughout time, generations have passed history down by word of mouth.

Although Juan García, a Socorro High School social studies teacher, and I were officially the "teachers" within the OHHS project, we realized that each group had much to teach each other about how they viewed their world, community, and history. We learned a great deal this semester as we planned and implemented the OHHS project. We learned that public history is a collaborative process where everyone must work together for it to succeed. We discovered that high school students want to learn about their community and its history despite public debates that decry students’ lack of interest in history. Moreover, we learned that sharing life stories, person to person, becomes a powerful act when connecting individuals, institutions, and communities.

We hope that you enjoy Socorro and the Lower Valley: A Legacy of the Past. We offer it as a small gift to the community who shared so much with us.