Letting History Speak for Itself

About this Fundraising Campaign:

The mission of Voces Oral History Project at the School of Journalism within the Moody College of Communication, is to capture, preserve, showcase, and disseminate depth interviews with U.S. Latinos and Latinas who served their country in different capacities.

We believe that stories are powerful ways to make sense of our past -- and of our present. These stories, with men and women who have too often been left out of historical accounts, are crucial to telling the American Story.

In 2017, supporters helped Voces work through the UT Libraries to build a beautiful new website. Now it’s time to share some of those interviews on that website. Right now, our website includes hundreds of journalistic treatments of the interviews. We also have a few short documentaries from those interviews on YouTube and Vimeo.

The Voces Oral History Project has videotaped over 1,000 interviews since 1999, writing journalistic treatments from those interviews. But those journalistic stories are interpretations of the actual interviews. Our goal is to post entire transcribed and synchronized interviews online, allowing viewers to access them remotely as primary sources from anywhere in the world. We've done of few and this is what it would look like.

Other than the few we have created, the only other way to view entire interviews is to visit Voces’ physical archives at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

Will you help us raise $10,000 toward those online interviews by making a gift today and sharing this project with your friends and family? That funding will cover the cost of creating as many as 200 of these synchronized transcribed videos.

One of the Stories Captured through Voces:

Conditions were bleak on Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, where the Americans had retreated in January 1941. They had no supplies and had to rob their own Army trucks to get food, said Abel Ortega, an Austin native.

"We ate all of the horses of the cavalry . . . all of the water buffalo . . . all of the monkeys, and all the snakes, and everything else that moved in order to stay alive," he said. "It was a horrible ordeal."

The Americans also lacked medical supplies and soon the U.S. soldiers began to succumb to malaria, dysentery and other tropical diseases, as well as to combat fatigue.

Despite the monumental difficulties, the American troops -- and their Filipino allies -- on Bataan were able to fight off the Japanese landings until April of 1942. Finally, it became clear that an American surrender was inevitable; the soldiers were ordered to destroy their equipment so it would not fall into enemy hands.

"We were overwhelmed," he said. "There were just too many . . . Japanese."

The 22-year-old Ortega knelt down next to his half-track and prayed, "Oh God. I don't want to die."

About The Voces Oral History Project:

Voces Oral History Project is a research unit housed within The University of Texas at Austin Moody College of Communication, School of Journalism, in collaboration with the UT Libraries. It was established in 1999 by Journalism professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez. The project initially focused solely on the WWII generation and then expanded its collections to include Latinos and Latinas of the Korean War and Vietnam War generations. In 2014, it added the Political and Civic Engagement. And in 2017, from donations of previously donated interviews, it added the Barrio Dog Prods/Jesús S. Treviño Collection and the Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco Collection.

Getting More Involved:

If you are interested in joining the Voces Resource Council to help raise funds, or want to learn more about leadership level giving opportunities for the Voces Oral History Endowment, please contact Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez at mrivas@austin.utexas.edu or (512) 471-1924.