When I first began researching collections for museums and independent projects, one encounter changed how I think about authority in museums. I sat in a cramped community centre with a woman who had spent thirty years working in a food-processing plant. She described, in a voice that flickered between pride and fatigue, the rituals that structured each shift — the songs they hummed to keep morale, the mutual aid networks that supplied unpaid sick leave, the tiny marks they made on boxes to denote workmanship. She was undocumented, and she told me outright that formal institutions had never asked for her story. That omission felt like an active erasure.
Why do we even ask oral histories from undocumented workers?
People ask me: what value do these testimonies bring to national narratives? At a practical level, oral histories enrich the archive with lived experience that rarely appears in official records. Undocumented workers rarely feature in census reports, corporate press releases, or the descriptive labels of national museums. Yet they are often the backbone of industries — hospitality, agriculture, construction — and their labour shapes the everyday material culture that museums collect and display.
But there's a deeper reason: museums claim to tell stories about a nation's past, present and future. If those stories omit people who live and work invisibly, the narratives are incomplete and politically skewed. Oral histories from undocumented workers counterbalance institutional silences. They introduce complexity, contradiction and intimacy — elements that conventional archives often sanitize away.
What can museums practically do with these testimonies?
There are several ways museums can and already do integrate oral testimonies into exhibitions and programming. Some practical examples:
- Exhibition labels and audio stations: Installing audio testimonies alongside objects — a worker's voice talking about a tool, a uniform, or a meal — recontextualises the object.
- Digital archives: Creating accessible, well-indexed oral history repositories that can be used by researchers and the public.
- Co-curation: Inviting undocumented workers to co-curate displays, ensuring their perspectives shape interpretation.
- Mobile and pop-up projects: Taking stories out of the museum and into workplaces or neighbourhood hubs where undocumented communities feel safe.
But aren’t there ethical and legal risks?
Absolutely. This is one of the most frequent and thorny questions I get: how do museums protect storytellers who may be vulnerable to immigration enforcement or workplace retaliation? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but responsible practice includes:
- Ensuring informed consent is truly informed: explaining how the material will be used, for how long, and who will have access.
- Offering anonymity or pseudonymity as options.
- Securing recordings and metadata with robust privacy protections (encryption, controlled access).
- Working with community organisations and legal advisers to understand local risk profiles.
- Supporting participants with material benefits — stipends, access to services, or referrals to worker support groups.
How does this change the "object-focused" nature of museums?
Museums have long prized objects because they are tangible anchors for story-telling. Oral histories complicate this by foregrounding people and relationships. An undocumented worker’s account teaches us how a seemingly mundane object — say a textile, a packed lunchbox, a worn pair of boots — carries social meaning that catalogues may miss.
To illustrate, I made a small comparative table in a recent project that contrasted standard catalogue entries with oral-history-augmented descriptions:
| Standard Catalogue Entry | Oral-History-Augmented Description |
|---|---|
| Woolen coat, c. 1980s. Donor: Manufacturing company. Used in factory. | Woolen coat, c. 1980s. Worn by Maria*, who worked night shifts at the plant. In her testimony Maria describes modifying the coat's cuffs to prevent snags, sewing in pockets to hide bus fare, and passing down the coat to a colleague when she left — a tangible sign of solidarity and shared survival strategies. |
*Name changed for privacy
Does this mean museums must become advocates?
People worry that integrating oral histories with advocacy could compromise institutional neutrality. I don't see it as binary. Museums can remain spaces for inquiry while acknowledging the ethical imperative to protect and amplify voices that have been marginalised. That may look like providing resources for workplace campaigns, or simply lending institutional prestige to under-heard narratives. Being transparent about curatorial choices — why a story is shown, who was involved, what risks were considered — fosters trust.
What about accuracy and reliability?
Another common concern is the reliability of memory. Oral histories are not unvarnished fact; they are interpretive, partial, and shaped by emotion and time. That is not a flaw but a feature. Memory reveals how people make sense of events, how they narrate identity and agency. Good practice is to triangulate oral accounts with other sources when possible — workplace records, photographic evidence, policy documents — while respecting that some aspects, especially undocumented experiences, may only exist through personal testimony.
Are there successful models to learn from?
Yes. A few projects stand out for their sensitive, community-led approach. The Migration Museum in London has run oral-history projects that collaborate closely with migrant communities, producing multimedia exhibits that centre lived experience. In the United States, worker-centred oral history archives have been developed by labour museums and university projects that prioritise participants’ control over their narratives. These models share common traits: long-term relationships, ethical consent frameworks, and co-creative practices.
How do visitors respond?
Visitors often react with surprise and empathy. I’ve seen audiences move from abstract policy debates to visceral understanding when they hear a worker describe the humiliation of wage theft or the pride in passing skills down generations. Oral testimonies humanise policy issues and can shift public sentiment. But they can also provoke discomfort — and that’s necessary. Museums are spaces where difficult conversations should happen, if handled thoughtfully.
What are the practical next steps for institutions?
If a museum wants to begin this work, my practical advice is:
- Start small and relationship-first: invest time in community trust-building before recording.
- Partner with community organisations, unions and legal clinics.
- Create clear, participant-centred consent protocols and privacy safeguards.
- Design exhibitions that balance objects with voices — audio, transcripts, contextual panels.
- Allocate resources for long-term stewardship: oral histories require ongoing care and access management.
When undocumented workers’ stories enter museum narratives, the effect is not merely additive. It reorients how we understand the provenance of objects, the labour behind cultural life, and the very criteria of national memory. These testimonies complicate tidy histories, highlight structural inequality, and illuminate forms of creativity and resistance that institutions often miss. For me, the question is not whether museums should collect these stories, but how they will do so with the humility, responsibility and radical listening that such work demands.