History Colorado Week 3-Ashley Duarte

 Week 3!!

07/17: Today I was finally able to connect with Maria who is the Manager for the Museum of Memory at History Colorado. She is very kind and very very smart, I am so happy to have the opportunity to work with her. She is the only other Mexican individual that I have met, so it was nice to have this connection. I was able to learn more about what the Museum of Memory is. The M.O.M. is a very cool program form my museum that works together with Colorado residents to co-author a shared history. This program works with communities that have been pushed to the margins. They gather oral stories and photos directly from community members, school, resident teams, and community organizations. They do this through memory sharing workshops and story telling. I love the whole concept of this program because the stories of these communities are told directly from their members instead of someone telling the story for them. M.O.M. has worked with numerous neighborhoods and schools all over Colorado, you can learn more about the program and explore all the different stories, podcasts, poems, pictures and more from all these important communities here!https://www.historycolorado.org/museum-memory-initiative 

Me

 Anyway, after I learned all about M.O.M. Maria explained to me what project she needed me to help her with. They are currently working on a project called the Displaced Aurarian Memory Project. There is a community in Downtown Denver called Auraria that is now the home to the Auraria campus where CU-Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the Community College of Denver. 

My daily walk to work

Where these schools are now located, used to be a vibrant community that was home to many immigrants. Maria gave me resources to research more about the background of the Auraria community and I learned so much! I never knew this community used to live there and that unfortunately they all lost their homes for the campus to be built. After a flood occurred in 1965 Government officials looked for Denver redevelopment projects and for the campus being built there was an estimated $24.2 million cost. Members of this community tried to protest their homes being revoked to unfortunately no avail. Fortunately, through this project their stories and families will be forever remembered right on campus. The exhibit for the photos and oral stories taken from past members of the Aurarian community will be in the library on campus. What is nice is that I have a personal connection to this exhibit due to me living in Denver and going to one of the schools in the fall on campus! So, later this semester while I am studying for tests in the library, I will be able to see the exhibit that I helped put together!

Me cataloging the photos and stories!

So, basically what I will be doing is organizing all the photos in a final folder, cropping the pictures that need to be cropped, taking the information provided from the donors of these photos and putting it all on one spreadsheet. I am so excited to read stories of members that used to live in this community and learn more about Colorado history! I am also really looking forward to seeing an exhibit on my future school campus that I got to help put together! I am so glad that I got to experience being apart of YAP because I get the chance to create something that is extremley meaningful to the residents of Colorado.

I will get the chance to further my research, photo editing, and organization skills throughout this process. You can learn more about this project here: (a story from 9news) https://tinyurl.com/4a8zrcd8

I spent a majority of my day organizing these photos because they all need to be sorted by 07/28 for the exhibit to be up sometime before mid August. I spent a small portion of my day helping out with the kids programs that they offer at my museum! They have a lot of different summer camps each week where kids get to explore the different exhibits and learn more about Colorado history while doing fun educational activities to keep busy and active over the summer. I helped watch them while we were in one of my favorite exhibits and then we went down to "Camp Colorado" where students spend some of their time participating in activities, eating, and hanging out with other kids. This space was really nice.

1000 piece puzzle 

While I was at Camp Colorado I was helping a group of kids build this hugeee puzzle which was so much fun the kids were so into it. I also helped give out snack (and had one myself). Then Emily who was helping lead the program brought out this huge bison that they have in storage where she gave the kids a lesson on the Bison parts and what they are used for. The kids really enjoyed the bison because it was so huge. Then we went to a small town that is here in the museum that I thought was so cool. There is a fake store, barn, home, and other things that is supposed to be sort of like a replica of a town and it is really fun and interactive so the kids were all over playing cashier, riding in the car, going down a slide, and trying to collect eggs from this one machine that was there but the machine was not working and the eggs were not coming out ;'(, it was still very fun though and the kids really seemed to enjoy it, I know I did. 

Bison lesson

Day two!~

After really establishing what I was going to do for the Displaced Aurarian Project I got straight to work. I started cropping photos that needed to be cropped and filling out the spreadsheet. For every photo there is a community title, staff title, description from community, and other information that needs to be documented. Apart from filling this out for every single photo I also needed to scan the consent forms from each donor. It has been really interesting learning about each family from the community and I started noticing overlapping of street names, churches and other things which showed me really how connected this community was before being displaced!

The set up 

After a couple hours I really started to get the hang of it and I was speeding through the files and I had a really good routine of cropping, organiziing in the drive, and filling out the information in the spreadsheet. My supervisor Ani was out of town (sad) so I had the chance to use her cubicle which was really helpful because I had a lot of space and two desktops which made it a lot easier (I felt very girlboss and professional). This is again what I spent basically the whole day doing just because it is all due very soon. 

#beingrealwhilewritingrealstories

Then, on my way back to my cubicle from the printer room after scanning another consent form, I was stopped by April who is the Chief Education Officer inviting me to the meeting room with other people that work here at History Colorado that were celebrating Josie's birthday! I got to eat some birthday cookies and tell everyone a little more about me, the YAP program, and what I was working on with both Ani and Maria. They were very interested in what I had to say and it was fun talking to them about what they do and their days. They made me feel very welcomed and said they have to celebrate me on my last day which was nice. 

Left to right: April Legg (Chief Education Officer), Josie Chang (School Programs Manager), Rebecca Chickadel (Public Programs and Events Manager), and Brooke Gyermek (Digital Learning Manager)

Day three: For my last day at the museum this week I just kept working on the Displaced Aurarian Memory Project. I also got to work on my troubleshooting skills because there was a file that had a couple pictures missing so Maria helped me construct an email to reach out to the donor about potentially sending the pictures again. I am almost done with all the files which is very exciting!

Storytime day!: 

On Friday of this week I had my story time! It took place at a library in Denver that I had never been to before but this library was hugeee it had two floors and a really big kids section it was very cool. I was welcomed by staff who helped me find Desire who was the story time coordinator. I introduced myself and then helped her set up story time mats that she always puts out for kids that had all these cool designs and animals on them and then we waited for the kids to arrive.

At first I was a little sad and stressed because there was only two toddlers but then after some more time a bunch more kids showed up. It was 18 total. They were all under the age of 5 though but it was okay! They were all very cute and Desire made it so fun for them. She had a bubble machine and she played a bubble song and the kids LOVEDDD the bubble machine they were having so much fun. And then she took out her Ukulele and played an introduction song to introduce herself and I which the kids also loved and after playing with the bubbles some more I began to read my story. 

Desire playing her Ukulele

Kids playing with bubbles 

Me in the library

During my story time the kids were surprisingly very attentive considering they were mostly babies but they were very interested in the story which I was grateful for. I loved the story and the kids and parents did too. After my story Desire brought out a PARACHUTEE (a tiny one but still) and we played a parachute song and played with the kids and some of them were scared of it but I thought it was pretty fun. I really did appreciate the effort Desire put into the story time because everyone loved it and it made everything 10000x more fun. Then, the kids that wanted to stay for the activity book stayed (which was only 3) and we went into a separate room and started filling it out and coloring. I talked to the parents about YAP even though their kids were a little young for it still lol but it is okay! They seemed very interested in the program and thanked me for the Storytime. Overall I would rate my story time a 10/10 and I really enjoyed the experience and I appreciate YAP for this opportunity and I felt really prepared for it. 

Room set up for activity 

Me reading

Kids who participated in activities afterwards

Me

A bigger view of audience and me reading!