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Welcome to the Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive of California State University, Long Beach. This site provides access to the full audio recordings of oral histories that have been deposited in Special Collections of the University Library - enabling you, the user, to hear the voice, pitch, and rhythm of the narrations as well as the emotions these convey. You will hear the actual spoken words of oral history narrators, rather than seeing a written version of them in the form of a transcript.

The CSULB oral history collections have been assembled from a number of sources and cover topics ranging from women's social history and ethnic studies to Long Beach Area history and the Arts in Southern California. Some of the interviews in the Asian-American, Mexican-American and women's history collections date back to 1972 and include interviews with narrators born as early as the 1860s.

Presently, more than three hundred hours of Los Angeles basin oral histories in women's, labor history and Long Beach area history are available online, including forty hours of interviews with California women who were rank and file activists in the national suffrage movement. You will be able to listen to any segment of an interview, after reviewing the segment synposis, or you can select segments across interviews based on topic searches. While you will be able to listen to the streamed sound, you will not be able to download it without authorization. For a copy of any sound file, please complete the permission form and submit your request. A small fee will be charged for the shipping and handling of a CD or tape cassette.

The Real Audio player is required for listening to the audio segments. If you do not have the free player on your machine, please download it from Real Networks first (be certain to search out the free RealOne Player unless you'd prefer to pay for the extra features of the "plus" version and/or subscribe to their media channels).

This site incorporates alternative layouts for viewing the pages, one designed for the latest web browsers, another that will work better with older browsers, and one for use with audio screenreaders. You may switch back and forth among these by selecting the options page from the main navigation buttons.

If you have any questions about our collections, or seek authorization to use any of the oral histories that are on line, please contact Sherna Berger Gluck; if you have any technical problems, please contact ACS Faculty Project Support.

Play American Indian Studies

Founded in 1969, the American Indian Studies program at CSULB attracted a wide range of native community-based activists as well as non-native students interested in American Indian culture and society. Women played a very prominent role both in departmental activities and in planning campus events.

Although there was no sustained plan to collect oral histories, the women taking courses in American Indian studies and in women's studies frequently chose to interview their classmates and family friends. Some of these interviews are incorporated into the American Indian Lives series, although not all of them are full-length life histories.

In more recent years, a newer member of the faculty has been conducting interviews on the occupation of Alcatraz. A series comprised of at least some of these interviews will eventually be added to the American Indian Studies Collection.

Play Asian American History

Chinese immigrants came to California in significant numbers during the gold rush and in response to declining economic opportunities and discrimination, they also moved to coastal southern California. The CSULB oral history collection, simply by historic accident, acquired a few interviews with the children of those earlier immigrants as well as more recent arrivals. Most of these Chinese narrators are women.

Japanese immigrants, who came to California after further immigration of Chinese workers was made illegal in 1882, settled in various parts of southern California. Initially many worked as urban and farm laborers but moved into other jobs as they learned of better opportunities. Some worked as sharecroppers or leased land to farm; some became wholesalers and retailers of fruit, vegetables and flowers grown by Japanese truck farmers while still others opened businesses. Those who emigrated from Wakayama province, in particular, became fishermen and many of their wives worked in the canneries. The Japanese immigrants who pursued urban-based occupations settled mainly in the area known as Little Tokyo, with smaller satellite communities in places like West Los Angeles and Gardena.

The Japanese fishing village in Terminal Island developed differently than these other communities. Its uniqueness led CSULB students in the Asian American Studies program to interview some members of that community in the early 1970s. Because the community was physically isolated and anchored more in the San Pedro/Long Beach area than in the downtown Little Tokyo area, this series was incorporated into the Long Beach Area history collection.

Another major series of Asian American oral histories in the Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive focuses on the history, culture and experience of one of the most recent waves of immigrants from Asia, the Southeast Asians. Because the Cambodians and Hmong settled in and around the Long Beach area, they became the focus of interviews by students at CSULB, particularly Cambodian students and Khmer speaking Asian Studies students. These interviews have been incorporated into different series in a single Southeast Asian Collection.

While Asian American holdings in the CSULB Special Collections and Archive are incorporated in different collections, as described above, the interviews included in this Collection are limited to those independently collected by the South Bay Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. These narrators describe their experiences when they were ordered to leave the area during WWII and how the area became more suburbanized when they returned after the war.

Play Labor History

Los Angeles' reputation as an open shop city is hard to dispel, partially because it stands in such sharp contrast to its labor and union friendly neighbor to the north. Additionally, the open shop drive was dramatically exposed to the public eye with the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, a staunch opponent of labor. Despite this characterization of Los Angeles, there is a history of organizing among the building and printing trades, dating back to the late 19th century, though there is little documentation of the daily lives of these workers.

Although the most vigorous organizing took place following the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) in 1933, the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) in 1935, and the founding of the CIO in 1933, many workers did organize in the first two decades of the century. These included the workers in both the garment and oil industries, who had AFL union charters issued in the 1910s and 1920s respectively.

The four series in this collection focus on the lives and activities of workers in five industries, and cover the period from the 1920s and 1930s to the 1960s: petroleum extraction and refining; men's and women's clothing; furniture; and aircraft and shipbuilding. The series on the latter two industries focus on the efforts to end discriminatory exclusion and segregation in the unions that represented the workers in these two industries. None of the series is intended as a comprehensive history of the workers lives and activities nor a history of the Los Angeles labor movement. Rather, to varying degrees they do represent a snapshot of the life experiences of workers and their relationship to each other and their unions.

In addition to the series focused on four specific industries in Los Angeles, interviews with four others are incorporated into a separate series of oral histories of individual activists. Both Elinor Glenn's and Stan Weir's activism played out in Los Angeles, in the SEIU and ILWU respectively, but their interviews do not neatly fit into the Los Angeles series. On the other hand, Genora Johnson Dollinger's and Mary Oneal Thomas' stories play out in Michigan and Colorado, in the Flint strike and the Ludlow massacre, respectively. All four of these oral histories add greatly to our more general knowledge of labor history.

Play Long Beach Area History

Long Beach started out during the real estate boom of the 1880s as a resort and farming community. Soon its rail and port connections made it a commercial and transportation center for southern Los Angeles and Orange counties. In 1910, Long Beach was the fastest growing city in the United States. Nearby on Terminal Island, beginning in 1907, first generation Japanese fishermen and their families created a vital community.

In Long Beach, another boom followed the discovery of oil in 1921on Signal Hill, north of town. In 1933 an earthquake destroyed some of the results of the boom but the rebuilding effort did aid in the recovery from the Depression. Prosperity was fully restored by both the discovery of a new oil field in the harbor area and the economic stimulus of World War II. At the same time, the Terminal Island Japanese community was eradicated, as its residents were rounded up and placed in concentration camps.

Long Beach's prosperity continued after the war in new suburban neighborhoods and shopping centers. In one east Long Beach neighborhood, civic leaders provided a site for a new state college. But these new suburbs, along with the sinking of the harbor as oil was pumped out from under it, led to a decline of the central business district and older neighborhoods.

Since the 1970s, redevelopment has begun downtown, the college has become a university (CSULB) and the people it attracted to the community have become integrated into local social and economic institutions. The university, along with Long Beach's recreation and convention facilities, and its port, oil related and manufacturing businesses have made it a major city. Nevertheless, Long Beach remains in the shadow of its larger neighbor and its history largely hidden from the broader Los Angeles basin community.

Play Mexican American/Chicano

People have been crossing the border that now exists between the United States and Mexico since before either of them became a nation. That crossing continues, sometimes in conformity with the laws of both countries, and sometimes not. When railroad tracks were laid on both sides of the border, and then across it, the flow of people increased.

Transportation, manufacturing and agriculture expanded in the American southwest at the same time that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was beginning. The revolutionaries were fighting against the political and economic oppression of the Porfirio Diaz regime; many of them promised to bring more social and economic equality to Mexico and improve the lives of people who had been exploited and discriminated against by Diaz and his supporters. First, however, they had to fight against the Mexican Army that supported Diaz. Then they fought among themselves for control of the new government and to make sure it carried out their promises. The chaos this created made it hard for many Mexicans to find a safe place to live, or a job. It attracted more of them to the United States. Many of these emigrants were witnesses to the Revolution, or had read or heard about its details. They brought their experiences and stories with them when they came north. Some of those stories were collected by student interviewers and are part of this collection.

One of the places those Mexican emigrants found jobs in the early part of the twentieth century was on ranches and farms in southern California. Rancho Los Alamitos, just east of the town of Long Beach, was one of them. On this ranch, owned and operated by Fred and Florence Bixby, Mexican workers tended sheep, cattle and horses, as well as raising fruits and vegetables, and weeding flower gardens. The discovery of oil on the ranch allowed the Bixbys to maintain their rural lifestyle, even after the end of the Second World War, as commercial and residential developments approached its boundaries. Interviews with Mexican ranch workers were conducted by one of the Bixby's granddaughters, Joan Hotchkis, as part of her research into her family's history.

After the violence of the Mexican Revolution subsided, Mexicans continued coming to the United States. Meanwhile, the children and grandchildren of those who had arrived earlier began to demand more opportunities and an end to discrimination. In the 1960s, some of them advocated better schools, labor unions for farm workers, an end to the Vietnam war, greater access to higher education and more relevant school curricula. When changes were slow to develop, they organized demonstrations such as the East Los Angeles high school strike of 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium march of 1970. College and university students, who were among the leaders of these and other actions, organized themselves into Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MEChA). And in the 1970s, students in some of the early Chicano Studies classes, created as a result of this organizing, conducted interviews with some of the participants in these events. Although their interviews are short, they offer some useful insights into these significant events.

Play Musical Developments in Southern California

The cultural foundation, musicians and institutions during the early and mid 20th century is the focus of the Musical Developments in southern California collection. The oral histories of both native Californian and relocated musicians provides insight into concert life, repertoire and its acceptance by the public, and significant musical innovations during this period.

The collection is comprised of four series, the first of which is focused on performing and composing musicians active in southern California, 1920s to mid-1960s. The oral histories with some of the narrators (Wesley Kuhnle, Gerald Strang, Dane Rudhyar and Richard Buhlig) complement their papers and other materials held in the CSULB Library Archives.

The Institutions series focuses on the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and its early founding members (part of its repository in the Archive); chamber music in Los Angeles, 1922 to 1954; and the Long Beach Symphony. The University Composer series, which includes some narrators who were not residents of Los Angeles, explores how American composers became concentrated in higher education institutions. Finally, the growth and influence of jazz in southern California, 1920s to the present, is traced through a set of interviews with practicing musicians.

Play Southeast Asian Communities

Southern California is home to a large and diverse population of Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. While the Vietnamese are concentrated in several communities in Orange County, California, the Cambodians and Hmong from Laos have been concentrated in the city of Long Beach. Both these populations began arriving in large numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as elaborated in the descriptions of the series included here.

The interviews with members of the Cambodian and Hmong communities that are included in the Southeast Asian Collection were initiated in the late 1980s. Both the Cambodian Life Histories series and the Hmong series are in English. Interviews in a third series focus on life in Cambodia from 1979, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, to the early 1990s. These were all conducted in Cambodia and all but one are in Khmer. The summaries for these Khmer language interviews, however, are in English.

In addition to the three series included here, other interviews with Cambodians that were conducted in both English and Khmer are available onsite at the CSULB Library Special Collections/Archive. As a result of problems with the audio quality, these are not available online. For some valuable interviews that were conducted, but for which there are no recordings, narrative summaries are available onsite at CSULB, as above.

Play Women's History

While earlier 20th century historians, like Mary Beard, focused on women's history, it wasn't until the later 1960s, that a growing number of historians - primarily women - began to develop a more comprehensive field of study. Initially, attention focused on the history of the women's rights movements. Like others involved in the new social history movement of the late 1960s, however, women historians shifted their focus from the lives and experiences of the more famous to people's everyday lives.

The CSULB Women's History Collection reflects both the initial focus on movements for women's rights, like woman's suffrage, and the broadening focus on women's work and daily lives. These interviews were initiated in 1972 as part of the Feminist History Research Project (FHRP), a community-based project co-founded by Sherna Berger Gluck and Ann Forfreedom at the Westside Women's Center in Los Angeles. Students in women's oral history seminars at UCLA in 1974-1975 and in a special 1977 senior seminar at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, along with a labor researcher in Chicago, contributed their interviews to the FHRP. Over the years, these were all transferred to CSULB Library/Special Collections and Archive.

Starting in 1976, women's oral history became a component of women's studies at CSULB. The interviews conducted by students in women's studies seminars over the next two decades were deposited in the CSULB Archive and made available for use, greatly expanding the scope and the historical timeline of the collection. Additionally, in the 1980s, two collections related to women during WWII were archived: interviews with aircraft workers in Los Angeles, the Rosie the Riveter Revisited project, funded by NEH and Rockefeller Foundation grants; and a series of interviews with women who served in the military conducted by DC area independent researcher, Eleanor Stoddard.

The resulting Women's History Collection derived from these various sources is comprised of eleven series which focus on different historical periods/moments in twentieth century U.S. history: the early 20th century (4 series); World War II (2 series); and the 1960s and 1970s (5 series).

The early twentieth century series includes: suffragists; reformers and radicals; professionals and entrepreneurs; and women's lives, i.e. a variety of "everywomen" interviews focused on women's daily lives and women and work. (Interviews with labor union activists are included in the Labor History collection.) Women in World War II is comprised of two series: Rosie the Riveter Revisited; and women in the military. The six series for the 1960s and 1970s all focus on women's movements and include: Asian American activists; Chicana feminists; feminist health movement activists; Los Angeles feminists (including members of NOW, radical feminist and lesbian feminist groups); and the welfare mothers movement.