Great Opportunities

by Janine Santiago

When I started the Ph.D. program at UB in American Studies, I had the Schomberg Fellowship. That's one of the things that made me stay at UB after taking my master's. I'm grateful to the Schomberg for supporting me through six years. It has been a great opportunity.

Through my department I had other great opportunities. For example, it's funny because you're interviewing me, and one of the areas that I consider myself most in love with academically is oral history. Through Mike Frisch, we had this graduate course on oral history, methodology, and theory. And then you go into the field and do oral histories.

Through that project I started to know artisans here in Buffalo, Puerto Rican artisans, because it forced me to go into the field to research a topic. That was one of the greatest courses, and I'm grateful because after the course - like two years after I took the course - I got a phone call from the Castellani museum at Niagara University. They were saying, "We're looking for a Puerto Rican oral historian, and we have been referred to you."

I said, "Oh my god, who referred you?" and it was Professor Frisch. So he was a great mentor. Through my graduate program, I was able to actually work on the curatorial team for the Castellani and be the oral historian.

I still have the data and the tapes, and once I finish my dissertation, I think I will publish some of the interviews in order to ask what culture is, and how culture remains alive once it moves out of the national territory, out of the context of Puerto Rico.