Students Chronicle the Lives of Immigrant Neighbors—One Story at a Time
Learning about immigration in America can be as simple as talking to your neighbor—especially in a community as richly diverse as Poughkeepsie. That’s the idea behind Somos Vecinos (We Are Neighbors). This Vassar-based oral history project is creating a rewarding exchange among students and local immigrants one life story at a time.
“We have amazing programs where we can go abroad, but you can also do a lot of that exchange-type work just by getting out in the community here,” notes Assistant Professor of History Daniel Mendiola, who leads the project.
Somos Vecinos began as a Ford Scholars project in 2024 before evolving into an intensive course taught by Mendiola in 2025, which will be offered for the second time this fall. As part of their coursework, students recruit Latin American immigrants who run businesses in the community to participate in wide-ranging, Spanish-language interviews about their life experience. The students record the interviews, then translate them into English. Housed in Vassar’s Digital Library, the collection so far numbers 11 oral histories, about half of which can be accessed even by those without a Vassar affiliation. As the collection continues to grow, more will be open to the public, says Mendiola.
The project was born in Roatan, a Honduran restaurant that was on Main Street, where Mendiola and his summer research assistant, Daniel Duque Hernandez ’27, liked to meet. While talking to the owner, they realized a pattern that tended to emerge in places like this.
“A lot of time, we’ll go to a little local restaurant at some weird hour, so it’s not very busy, and then the owner of this little place just starts telling you their life story because they just want someone to talk to,” explains Mendiola. “And there’s so many beautiful moments where we’ve just been, like, I just went to have lunch, and I was gonna read a book, but then I ended up having this amazing conversation with an amazing person. And so, we thought, Well, what if we just kind of try to take that dynamic and turn it into an oral history project?”
Once Mendiola secured funding through the Ford Scholars Program and the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, his team conducted the first three interviews with members of the family that owned Roatan. They also created some short videos that the interviewees could use to promote their businesses.
“Along with my original research assistant, we’ve had six students who have been working on this so far, and that number’s growing,” notes Mendiola.
One of those students is Damaris Caballeros ’27, who collected the oral history of Jackie Rivas, a small business owner from Puerto Rico. “We met at the Arlington Street Fair and spent a lot of time talking about our families and our life stories,” says Caballeros. “My favorite moment was when she invited me to her family’s Christmas dinner. I already had plans to fly home, so I couldn’t accept her invitation, but her kindness truly touched me. In many Hispanic cultures, Christmas is one of the few holidays when the entire family comes together to cook a large meal and spend quality time together. I was glad to see that she thought of me as someone who could share her family traditions and food. I still keep in touch with her to this day.”
Mendiola and at least one other professor has started using the interviews in various courses. For example, in a class on borders and migration, Mendiola used the oral histories to add depth to a purely academic source by asking his students, “How does this complicate the academic text that we read, how does it supplement it, or add to it?” He was pleased with the results: “Seeing what students write when they’re incorporating this as a primary source, or when they’re doing reflections on it, has been really, really beautiful and really powerful,” he says.
Whether talking to a restaurateur from Honduras, a baker from Mexico, or a Deece worker from Puerto Rico, “the main common thread,” says Mendiola, “is a sense of optimism. Regardless of what someone has been through, how difficult that was, how difficult it still is, there’s just a sense of optimism about being here in Poughkeepsie. The fact that you can build a community here is really the source of that optimism.”
This can be heard loud and clear in the interview with Genesis Sachakov, a thrift shop owner from Venezuela, who had this advice to share: “Be brave, don’t give up, never give up, always keep going . . . we can always achieve what we set our minds to. Even if we are in a different country, dealing with a different language and customs, we can always fulfill our dreams and always keep moving forward despite the ups and downs that may present in your day to day.”