The Center for Global Migration Studies provides a distinctive institutional home for interdisciplinary research, for training faculty and students, and for distributing information about the history of the immigrant experience to a broad public. In 2012, the Center established the Archive of Immigrant Voices to collect stories of the experience of migration. The purpose of the archive is to create, accumulate, and preserve a repository of memories that will not only reveal living history and features of the recent past, but will also document the fine lines of social change that might be otherwise ignored or lost to history. These stories will provide the basis for understanding how newcomers adapt to challenges and successes. The Archive unites the Center's mission to advance scholarship and teaching while enhancing the Center's connection to migrant communities by capturing, recording, and preserving the experience of migration, dislocation, and community formation as immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and other newcomers themselves understood it. Interviews represent a way to capture and preserve the stories of recent immigrants to the United States as a source for scholars, a classroom tool for teachers, and a resource enabling immigrants themselves to share their experiences and memories.
Currently, all interviews are conducted and transcribed by students at the University of Maryland. The questions asked or comments provided are not necessarily a reflection of the Center for the Global Migration Studies. The Center's archive also contains interviews that may only be accessed in the Center itself. Please contact us if you are interested in accessing these interviews.
If you are in possession of an oral history collection and would like to donate to the Archive, please contact us at globalmigration@umd.edu..