The Molina Chronicles: A Family Oral History Project
The voices you are about to hear in this first podcast episode of The Molina Chronicles are the voices of mi familia — my family.
My father comes from a family of 11 children (9 sisters and 1 brother). The Molina family has always done a relatively good job of telling stories at family picnics, birthday parties, and over a holiday meal. Yet, we often have not done a good job at documenting our stories that involve our family’s history and lineage. My grandparents have been deceased for about two decades and my eldest aunts are aging. In light of the pandemic and the emotional rollercoaster of losing two elder family members, I have come to the conclusion that it is time to capture and tell the stories of my elder family members.
Click the text title below to listen to the podcast:
The Molina Chronicles: A Family Oral History Project
A Brief Reflection
My Leap 4 creative project was a fulfilling moment for me as an emerging digital author. It was also a challenging one. The first problem that I faced was the overwhelming thought of framing, selecting and adding narration to these stories. Of course, it was important for me to not leave out any details out of the overall project. So I decided in the beginning to gather as much information through my interviews as possible. I figured it was better to have more content to select from than not enough. Therefore, I sought out to interview six family members versus the three I had originally planned. This gave me over 3 hours of content that I could sift through and analyze. However, that led me to another set of problems — my time constraints became tighter as I approached my deadline and coordinating schedules with family took so much of that time.
My entire family lives in and around the city of Dallas. Being physically distant from them meant that I had to get creative in selecting the right tool to interview them from a distance and be patient to catch them all for a pocket of 30 minutes over the last few weeks leading up to my deadline. I used zoom to record the audio and video for most of my interviews. I had help from a couple of my cousins that were more tech savvy than my aunts. The coordination with them to get my two aunts logged into zoom at our scheduled time was quite the challenge. This gap in computer literacy skills is something I will need to consider as I will continue this project and interview more elders using zoom. Perhaps the simple solution is to make a trip to visit them in person to alleviate some of the technology barriers I faced.
The last obstacle I faced was my own novice skills in editing audio. For my previous podcast projects I have a colleague that does this really well. But, for this project I was on my own. I used Premier Rush to edit and Spotify for Podcasters to do the music layover. I’m an expert at Spotify for Podcasters but a novice at Rush. I had to learn to edit and use this new tool quickly. I found a rhythm and became more efficient with it over time. The audio still has some improvements I could make but I did the best with the time and skill that I had. I hope you all enjoy listening to the first episode of The Molina Chronicles!
