This is an oral history project conducted by the students of Gregorio Luperón High School in New York City.

In 2021 with the support of Taconic Fellowship Chloe Smolarski (Pratt Institute) and Tasha Darbes (Pace University) launched Community Response / La Comunidad Responde, a participatory media lab pilot program to address the lived experiences of the students of Gregorio Luperón High School, a bilingual STEM school that serves Latinx immigrant youth in NYC. The project blended Critical Media Literacy, Oral History, and Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodologies to investigate creative forms of co-creating knowledge production at the intersection of research and the media arts. Centered on three interrelated themes: historizing lived experience, community empowerment and nurturing creativity – students were trained as oral historians, media makers and artists. As Covid -19 closed the school, effectively causing immigrant students to experience displacement once again, we pivoted and developed a process of participatory oral history to co-investigate and respond to issues of loss, isolation and precarity in and outside their school. Leveraging Bahkhtin’s dialogic narrative framework that places the concept of polyglossia at the core of the novel, the oral history collection functions as an unfinished living history told from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders from the community. Placing knowledge production and creativity at the center of youth empowerment and community agency, students then instrumentalized the themes that surfaced in the oral histories to create short, poetic videos which serve as both artistic forms of expression and data visualizations.