Voices from the Factory Floor work to initiate the process of centering the history of Acme Steel, a regional steel economy, and the industrial, working-class heritage of the Calumet Region from the factory floor outwards. In doing so, the project will start an oral history project to complement the rich material collection and create a small pop-up exhibit to share initial findings. The primary goal will be to develop narrative threads that will foster further work, research, and cataloging of deindustrialization in the Calumet Region.
Through this grant, we can continue the work made possible by a previous grant to inventory the relocated collection and begin making it accessible to researchers and the public. The primary objectives of this funding would be in four areas of continued conversations. First, to continue creating detailed finding aids to encourage research by scholars and to invite former plant workers and the general public to engage in the artifacts. Second, to invite former plant employees to the archive to share their institutional knowledge and experiences from the factory floor. Third, beginning to distill findings and stories from the collection and oral histories to venues and online. Lastly, as an opportunity to invite additional stakeholders, a small pop-up highlighting the collection will be held.
We would like to conduct oral histories with former employees to make the collection more usable. This will allow Calumet Heritage Partnership, the archivist team at Purdue University Northwest, and partners at Field Museum an opportunity to invite additional stakeholders, such as the United Steelworkers District, and re-engage initial partners in the collection efforts, such as the Steelworkers On Active Retirement (SOAR) and the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. Collecting these histories will allow an opportunity to contextualize the Acme Steel Company's material collection while enriching the workers' life narrative. As mentioned, the intrinsic value of the collection is its ability to tell the story from the inside out. These histories would prove instrumental and allow us to highlight Acme Steel, the regional industrial economy, and working-class neighborhoods from the factory floor. In conjunction with SOAR and the United Steelworkers District, partners at Purdue University Northwest and Calumet Heritage Partnership will identify 15-20 initial steelworkers from Acme to interview. This sample will include individuals from various departments with overlapping tenures in the mill. Through these initial interactions, we will also gather their colleagues' contact information for additional interviews at a later phase to build a list of stakeholders and guests for events related to the collection.
Emiliano Aguilar is a political and labor historian of the United States, specifically the Latina/o Midwest. His manuscript-in-progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana navigated machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics. The project further outlines this inclusion’s costs (and paradoxes) for generations of residents and reformers. In grappling for political power and claiming rights to their community, these Latina and Latino residents renegotiated their place within the city, particularly under the threat of urban renewal and later deindustrialization.
Joseph Coates is Assistant Professor of Practice/Assistant Director, University Library at Purdue University Northwest. His focus is public history, oral history and information literacy. His focus is to ensure students, faculty and staff understand information literacy concepts, the dangers of fake news and the preservation of institutional knowledge. He is active in the Society of Indiana Archivists, the Midwest Archives Conference and Academic Libraries of Indiana.
