Throughout the ACR Conversation some of the various historians, in this case\u00a0Seed,\u00a0Kozol, and\u00a0Connelly,\u00a0brought up the\u00a0idea of the study of migrations and\u00a0the subsequent interactions of the movements of people as a fundamental component of transnational history. I must admit that this facet of the field had never\u00a0occurred to me, but when it did a\u00a0collection of memories came to my mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two summers ago, in my hometown I decided to work in our local museum. It wasn\u2019t a grand thing, as it had neither the funding nor the resources to be especially during the start of Covid, and I was mostly confined to scanning old photos and newspaper clipping from the 1970\u2019s and 80\u2019s to make sure there were digitized and not lost forever. My favorite thing, however, was to go into the main entry room of the museum where a particular almost gazebo-like display sat telling of the origin of the various peoples of Bakersfield. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It displayed what I\u00a0always known\u00a0that my hometown of Bakersfield:\u00a0that it\u00a0is an immigrant community and\u00a0that\u00a0it\u00a0always has been. A classic farming town\u00a0nestled at the bottom of the Great San Joaquin Valley, work on the farms has attracted journeyers looking for work\u00a0throughout history. Whether it was the Chinese,\u00a0Filipinos, and Basques of the turn of the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century or the influx of Latinos and \u2018Oakies\u2019, a term I\u2019ll use here as it how many locals refer to their past, fleeing the dustbowl or ill prospects as the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century wore on\u00a0Bakersfield was home to many shifting peoples.\u00a0On\u00a0the display, too,\u00a0it further showed the\u00a0how\u00a0small Native American presence gone now, that though mostly gone, once thrived.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now while I loved this exhibit, I never truly understood why it always resonated with me until I read that ACR Conversation: Connections. What I was staring at in that showcase of people was a confluence of thousands if not millions of connections coming together. Infinite stories of an uncountable number of people who had lived and died in the city I grew up in. It struck me that I didn\u2019t, nor that I probably couldn\u2019t, know a fraction of them, but for some odd reason that didn\u2019t, and still doesn\u2019t annoy or sadden me. I realized that in doing transnational history, for the small part that it is, one can uncover and connect these threads of the world and put them in clear vision. That it becomes possible for a historian to illuminate a beautiful tapestry previously unknown. That thought alone made me pleased, and the contemplation that I had merely thought of my own, relatively small, town made me even more so. I now anticipate and am still thinking about the endless connections that must exist out in the world, just waiting to be linked. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Throughout the ACR Conversation some of the various historians, in this case\u00a0Seed,\u00a0Kozol, and\u00a0Connelly,\u00a0brought up the\u00a0idea of the study of migrations and\u00a0the subsequent interactions of the movements of people as a fundamental component of transnational history. I must admit that this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-D2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420\/revisions\/2422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}