This post is part of the COVID Recollections series. The series features stories, dispatches, and reflections from the COVID-19 American History Project, a Congressionally mandated initiative of the American Folklife Center to create an archive of Americans’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The American Folklife Center is proud to announce that the first collection of interviews documented for the COVID-19 American History Project is now available online. To view these materials, visit the COVID-19 American History Project collection on the website of the Library of Congress. The collection features twenty interviews with service and hospitality workers in New Orleans, Louisiana, collected from October to December 2023. The interviews, documented by Dismantle Media and Culture Alliance, detail frontline workers’ experiences with the COVID-19 and the changes they navigated in their personal lives because of the pandemic. In the coming months, approximately 50 additional interviews with child care workers in Appalachia and funeral professionals in various parts of the United States, documented by Nicole Musgrave and Gran Enterprises respectively, will be added to this online collection.
These first twenty interviews represent a crucial snapshot of working Americans’ lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. The city of New Orleans is highly dependent upon the thousands of tourists, who eat in the city’s restaurants, stay in its hotels, and visit its historic sites, each year. As Sara Bernstein and Elise Chatelain of Dismantle explain in their excellent Folklife Today blog post, New Orleans is the third most tourism-dependent economy in the United States and over 90,000 people—almost 1/5 of the area’s workforce—were employed in accommodation and food service in January 2020 (see Ghandi 2020, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2023). Dismantle also reports that, in April 2020, just weeks into the pandemic, half of these workers has lost their jobs (see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2023). One such worker, Ezra Ciereszynski, a restaurant professional, described the days leading up to COVID-19 being declared a pandemic in his oral history interview. Cierezynski says, “[Just before the pandemic] I was hearing . . . hushed murmurs about people being worried and people trying to convince other people not to be worried, saying ‘No, there’s no chance we’re going to shut down or anything. It’s crazy. Everything’s going to blow over in like two or three weeks.’ But there was sort of a sense of anxiety that started creeping in right before it was announced that everything had to be shut down. And yeah, it made the work environment a little tense. Everyone was on edge because they thought they might lose their jobs for a good bit. Which they did.” Many of the frontline workers in this collection shared Cierezynski’s sense of uncertainty just before the pandemic.
At the same time, these interviews open a window into the creativity of frontline workers and how they attempted to make the best of the pandemic’s precarity. Shaquita Griffin, a hospitality professional, explained that she began working as an online, stand-up comic during the pandemic to connect with people and to satisfy her need to socialize. Thomas Edwards, a nightclub manager on New Orleans’ popular Frenchman Street, also moved his DJ’ing online during the pandemic. For Zelda Parquet, a tour guide, the pandemic was a time to rekindle her interests in sewing, reading, and solo travel. As she explains, “I would talk to people and they’re like, ‘Oh, my mother’s depressed,’ or, ‘This person is, she’s suffering from depression.’ I’m like, ‘This can’t—I ain’t going to, no, that’s not going to happen.’ So I started to find things to do to keep me busy and that all worked out.” Explore the collection to learn more about these workers’ experiences.
“The interviews we’ve collected through the COVID-19 American History Project represent communities of frontline workers who have made crucial contributions to American society during the pandemic, but went largely unnoticed by traditional media outlets,” says Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center. “These interviews not only give us a broader understanding of working Americans’ lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic but will serve as important historical documentation for future generations.”
The online publication of these twenty interviews represents a significant milestone in the COVID-19 American History Project. Mandated by an act of Congress in 2023, the COVID-19 American History Project is an initiative to collect and make available pandemic oral histories from frontline workers and other Americans affected by COVID-19. To meet this directive, the American Folklife Center has created a website (with StoryCorps), called the COVID-19 Archive Activation page. Here, anyone with an internet connection can record their COVID-19 experiences or interview someone else about their pandemic stories. All recordings collected with the COVID-19 Archive Activation page will be preserved at the Library of Congress and at archive.storycorps.org. For researchers, the American Folklife Center has also created a Research Guide, listing existing COVID-19 collections at the Library of Congress and at other libraries/archives. In 2027, several interviews collected for the COVID-19 American History Project will be featured in the Library of Congress’ Orientation Gallery—a new exhibition of collection items from across the nation’s library. For more updates on the COVID-19 American History Project, please stay tuned to Folklife Today and the American Folklife Center’s Facebook page.
Collection Connections:
The Nocturnists: Stories from a Pandemic collection
Pandemic Pregnancy Project collection
Pandemic Folk Architecture: Outdoor Dining Structures in New York City
Works Cited:
Ghandi, Mitul. “U.S. Cities Most Reliant on Tourism.” SEO Clarity. Sept 29, 2020. https://www.seoclarity.net/blog/us-cities-most-reliant-on-tourism.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “All Employees, In Thousands, New Orleans-Metairie, 2013-2023.” Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject. Retrieved on November 1, 2023. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/SMU22353807000000001?amp%253bdata_tool=XGtable&output_view=data&include_graphs=true