Quilting Stories: Amplifying Community Voices and Histories

The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub’s 2024-2025 season hosted a diverse array of projects that strived to be a welcoming and inclusive way to practice community engagement. A recent Hub residency, “Quilting Stories: Remapping Twin Cities Narratives with Black Elders and Ecuadorian Migrants,” was organized by Sonja Kuftinec, a Theatre Arts & Dance professor, and  Maria Asp, Director of Education and Community Engagement for Speaking Out Collective (SOC) and Co-Founder for Million Artist Movement (MAM). 

Both SOC’s and MAM’s missions aim to center untold, silenced, and/or underrepresented stories in the Twin Cities with particular focus on Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities. SOC works primarily with schools, domestic violence shelters, and childcare and community centers, using storytelling, story-making, and the arts to question, create, and reimagine narratives. MAM, a collective of artists, works on movement building to dismantle oppressive systems to ultimately rejoice in liberation. 

“Quilting Stories” nurtured two strands that expanded on broader “Truth Telling” initiatives created by SOC and MAM to strengthen ties between both community organizations and University of Minnesota experts and archivists. 

Tell us about your project. 

In this new phase of the project, we expanded, amplified, and better archived interviews we’ve completed with Black community elders and the countless ways that they correct and redefine our Twin Cities’ history. Supported by funding from the Immigration History Research Center, the residency conducted additional interviews, including filming interviewees when possible; hiring a Black artist to create a multimedia documentary film that weaves together stories, videos, and images; and hosting a public event at The Hub to unveil a teaser of the film in spring 2025. 

We also hosted an event with playwright Lester Mayers, who developed  a script about the 1969 Morrill Hall takeover, at The Hub in fall 2024. This play combined Black oral histories, artwork, music/songs, and images to map historical events centering Black narratives, such as the destruction of Black neighborhoods via the construction of highways, the formation of Black arts-based community centers, and the student activist movement that led to the creation of the Department of African American and African Studies at the University. 

Through the residency, we also aimed to build trust and relationships with Ecuadorian families. Hub support furthered the project by supporting Spanish language story circles with a Minneapolis elementary school, whose student population last year saw a dramatic increase in Ecuadorian students. While we initially intended to work with both children and their parents, safety concerns under the current federal administration precluded work with parents. We were, however, able to proceed working with the students and facilitated sharing their stories with parents and other students as audience member

How did your project align with the purposes of public engagement in the humanities?  

Both strands of this project helped individuals navigate difficult experiences of community separation through shared storytelling. The Ecuadorian strand guided contemporary debates about migration and border politics by weaving together personal stories with politically-informed framings about the factors that push and pull migrants to leave their homelands. Most migrant stories currently exist only in a few interviews in local newspapers. We aimed to weave a “quilt” of stories that offers a range of perspectives from those with lived experience, as well as experts on the political and economic systems that fuel migration. 

The second part of the project amplified community voices and histories, while also preserving culture, by centering oral narratives. Many of the stories about Black cultural history in the Twin Cities, particularly stories of resilient community-building through the arts and movement building through student-professor alliances, have been undertold. 

Finally, both projects expanded educational access by crafting plays from Black archives with grade school students and by conducting story circles for migrant Ecuadorian students. Both projects incorporated “languages” (e.g. theater, Spanish) that are not frequently centered in educational curricula.

How were equity and reciprocity in community partnerships integrated into your project? 

At every step of the way, SOC and MAM have centered reciprocity and equity. The Black elders oral history project emerged from community requests. The resulting play documenting the Morrill Hall takeover was chosen by students and picked up by a local theater company director with ties to MAM. Interviewers and interviewees received stipends. The documentary commissioned a Black artist. The migrants project emerged initially from a commitment to redistribute financial assets in the service of recognizing community cultural wealth. Ecuadorian students and their families are often positioned in terms of deficits (English language learners, lack of formal education, unhoused, etc.). Through this project, we worked with communities to highlight their assets–particularly their linguistic and navigational capital. We also checked with all participants to ensure their approval for any edits to or use of their stories. 

The Quilting Stories team and friends group photo after "An Evening of Storytelling in Film".

What’s next?

We are going to do a little more filming this fall and hope to have a screening of the documentary by the end of the year. We plan to continue the storytelling programs with Ecuadorian students, as well.   

This story was written by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.