We Make History, a collaborative project between the National Domestic Workers Alliance and team of faculty from Smith College and UMass Amherst, including Professor Diana Sierra Becerra of the UMass Amherst history department and public history program, won of the most significant awards in the field of public history: the Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History (NCPH). The award recognizes projects annually that contribute “to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice.” The major national professional organization in the field of public history, the NCPH strives to make the past useful in the present and promote collaboration between historians and the public.
The $2.3 million project, We Make History, uses history as an organizing tool to mobilize domestic workers on a national scale. The project puts domestic worker history in domestic worker hands — and brings to public view the rich tradition of domestic worker organizing for a more just economy and democracy. From 2018-2021, NDWA worked in deep collaboration with activist scholars Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, and Diana Sierra Becerra to produce a multimedia suite of tools available in 6 languages, English, Spanish, Tagalog, Nepali, Brazilian Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. It includes a digital timeline on the history of domestic worker organizing, four educational videos, biographies and hand-painted portraits of twenty-one movement ancestors, and a website for curriculum facilitators. The materials empower domestic workers to organize for better working conditions, and they educate audiences interested in labor history and women’s history. From September 2020 to May 2021, Sierra Becerra trained a cohort of sixteen domestic worker leaders as labor historians. In May 2022, forty affiliate organizations of NDWA will have taught and graduated from the curriculum.
The National Council on Public History describes the We Make History project as a “stellar digital public humanities and social justice project that serves multiple functions and audiences; engages the past to advocate for a better future for domestic workers; and educates leaders and students alike.” In exploring the history of the domestic worker movement, the materials reveal how systems of oppression have shaped the sector, how organizers in generations past waged powerful campaigns to win recognition and respect, and built liberatory movements, and how history can inform organizers’ current strategies to build working class power.
In the words of the nominator, the We Make History project helps “today’s domestic workers identify with the long arc of history, and inspires contemporary strategies based on past experience. It is an inspiring example of activists and public historians coming together to create history that not only inspires but actively creates social change.”
The UMass Amherst Department of History and Public History program congratulates Dr. Sierra Becerra and her colleagues on this accomplishment to empower and educate domestic workers.
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