The REgenerations Collaborative Oral History Project

In collaboration with three other museums, we documented the resettlement experiences of Japanese Americans after their incarceration in internment camps--roughly the time period between 1945 and 1965--in four different geographic areas: Chicago, Los Angeles, the Santa Clara Valley, and San Diego. JARC/M was in charge of documenting resettlement in the Santa Clara Valley. Within the span of about 50 years, this valley went from being largely agricultural to being the center of information technology. For demographic reasons like this, the Santa Clara Valley was a particularly interesting region to research.

Through community forums, JARC/M solicited input from the community as to the kind of information we should strive to gather from our interviews. Based on that input, the REgenerations team selected 10 individuals who resettled in the Santa Clara Valley and who, in our opinion, represented a good cross-section of the Japanese-American community in this region.

In June of 1997, the REgenerations team completed its final interview of the first phase of this project. To celebrate this accomplishment and to honor our 10 distinguished interviewees, JARC/M threw a party at our new, permanent home at 535 North Fifth Street.

JARC/M hopes to continue documenting Japanese-American history in the Santa Clara Valley through oral history. We believe ordinary citizens possess an enormous amount of valuable historical knowledge, not perhaps, from having studied history but from having lived it. If you would like to participate in this or other oral history projects, either as an interviewer, transcriber, videographer, or interviewee, please contact us.