Archives and Interviews

Hey everybody! This last week has been crazy! Which is a definitely a good thing. I conducted my three interviews and got a huge amount of work done at the archives. I have been at the archives for at least five hours a day, every day of the week. It has been such an amazing experience (I got to read newspapers from 1904!!)s. It sure is a lot of work though, and it doesn’t stop when I leave the archives, once I get home I have to organize all of the data I collected that day so that I don’t loose track of it all, prepare for the next day or for interviews, and when all that is done with, I have to hit my grandfather’s archive! The archives at the newspaper are organized into giant books. Each book contains every single newspaper issued during the whole month of any given year. So, for each year there are twelve books, one for each month. Now, these books ain’t no skimpy little things, they are massive (I’ll try to upload some pictures in a later post, the Internet isn’t working very well here. I suspect Greg will encounter the same problem when he gets to the Guat). It may seem tedious, going through each month page by page for every month from 1976 to 1983, but it really isn’t. It has easily been one of the best experiences of my life. Certainly the best experience of my academic life. Aside from being really fun and so incredibly interesting, it has also been quite challenging (which I guess just makes it more fun and interesting). Because there is so much information at my disposal, I have to be really well prepared every day before I begin. I have to have a list of the events that are key, so that I make sure that I get everything relating to those events recorded for sure; I have to decide for myself at the archives, while I’m going through articles, what articles I need and don’t need; which ones I have time for; and which ones I should have time for. Luckily I have done a lot of research and am able to make these decisions, though it isn’t always easy. Now on to my favorite part of this whole experience—the interviews! I conducted all the interviews that I had scheduled and planned to conduct. They were so amazing. I interviewed the former chief of photography, and editor in chief of La Voz del Interior as well as a very important and prominent journalist who wrote for La Voz. Each of these journalists worked during the 70’s and they each had a different perspective. It was really amazing to sit down and talk with these gentlemen, who are so intelligent and knowledgeable and friendly and interesting, after having read all the articles because knowing all the facts is one thing, but hearing about how they lived that time and what they experienced is something completely different, that a newspaper article could never give me. I was really blown away by the interviews; they were surreal. I could have sat there and talked with all three of those gentlemen for hours and hours. Each interview lasted about 20 minutes, meaning I only recorded about 20 minutes of our conversation, and then we just talked for another two hours. It was so interesting.

In conclusion, this has been the coolest thing I have ever done. I really hope I have the opportunity to continue to do projects like this in the future.

Until next time,

Agustín