February 3, 2016 | At one point, I found myself considering the impact that the large Guatemalan Spanish population had on the local Spanish in Postville; "my" interviewee is from Mexico, but she was one of very few Spanish speakers from Mexico at least for the first several years, meaning when she spoke to those around her she was hearing mostly Guatemalan Spanish, which in turn was being influenced by Midwestern English. In a day and age when people are traveling more than ever, I would venture to say all languages are changing faster than we realize and in ways we can scarcely imagine.

January 14, 2016 | ...hearing of the interviewee's first-hand experiences during the raid brought home in the most significant way possible some of the real struggles many such individuals, as well as the communities they live in, face far more than we could ever see on the news.

January 14, 2016 | The Labor Center which I am interning with has an ongoing project, the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP), with which I am assisting in my own small way. ILHOP has been going on for more than forty years, interviewing the diverse individuals which have built the history of labor in Iowa, organizing unions and going through many struggles in their day to day lives to make things better for themselves and for future workers. In recent years, many of those workers have been immigrants, including some locally large numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants.