Artwork by Dr. Priscilla Martinez, Copyright 2024
About Season 1
Welcome to the Amplifying identities, the podcast, my name is Dr. Priscilla Martinez and I am a postdoctoral fellow and faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I’m a specialist in the US-Mexico borderlands as well as a trained oral, public, and digital historian.
And, this semester, Spring 2024, I had the privilege of teaching one of my dream courses titled, “Digital History: Storytelling and Podcasting.” Don’t worry I won’t bore you with all the digital theories and historical methods covered by the course. Instead, in this podcast Amplifying Identities, I’d like to share with you some of the stories my students and I uncovered and constructed during our class.
In this, our first season, we focused on local San Antonio history in the late-nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries as we worked with several local archives including the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas A&M San Antonio, the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, and our very own Special Collections at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Topics for this season vary and range from racial integration in education in SAISD, to the creation of SA’s HemisFair Park for the World Fair, political activism during the Chicano Movement, labor activism in South Texas for farmworker’s rights, to stories of important Fiesta traditions in the making of queer San Antonio, these are just some of the many stories we are excited to share with you in our inaugural season.
So sit back and listen as we Amplify some local stories for you. You can find us wherever you listen to podcasts. Please listen, rate, and subscribe, to catch our latest episodes. It also helps people find us.
And follow us on Instagram and Twitter at @ampidpod for some behind the scenes content as well.
We hope you enjoy this season!
Special Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the College of Liberal and Fine Art (COLFA) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) for awarding this project with the COLFA Digital Humanities Fellowship. This fellowship helped us purchase some podcasting kits for this course. Thank you to Dr. Miles Friday, Assistant Professor of Digital Music at UTSA, and his Digital Music class who helped compose original music for some of our stories and helped edit some of our episodes.
Thank you to the local archives who partnered with us including UTSA's Library and Special Collections, the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM), the Special Collections at Texas A&M at San Antonio, and the Archdiocese of San Antonio. We would like to especially thank Elvira Kisser, Head Archivist at the Archdiocese of San Antonio, for her hours of attention as I compiled primary source pools for the students in this course. Thank you to UTSA's Adobe Specialist Willie Schaefer for his help fielding my countless questions and for helping students navigate Adobe Audition.
Thank you to Dr. Wing Chung Ng, Chair of the History Department at UTSA, office manager Nicole Poole, the department's student workers, and the UTSA History Club, for your encouragement and support as we publicized our work. Thank you to Dr. Jerry Gonzalez (UTSA Mexico Center), Dr. Sylvia Fernandez (UTSA Community-Engaged Digital Scholarship Hub), and Veronica Rodriguez (Head of Digital Humanities and User Engagement at UTSA), for their support in promoting our social media features on their platforms. Special thank you to Gracie Martinez of the Mija, Listen Podcast for sharing our work on her local platform as well as offering advice on our social media campaigns.
And, most importantly, thank you to this season's production team: Brady Burbank, Melayah Espinosa, Abigail Matherne, Leila Mills, Mars Montufar Soria, Zac Price, Robert Ramos, and Sailor Stanley. Thank you for all of your hard work and creativity throughout this course. Very well done.