Spatial Relations in Oral History: The Robstown Migrant Labor Camp beyond the Federal Period

Abstract

This article applies the “spatial turn” in historical scholarship to oral history research, and adopts a longitudinal, landscape-based analysis to examine the lived experiences and memories of people with connections to the Robstown Migrant Farm Labor Camp in South Texas. Established by the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration (FSA) as one of several labor camps in Texas, the Robstown Labor Camp was operated by the federal government for eight years before becoming a county-run migrant labor camp, hurricane refuge, nonmigrant housing project, and county park over the course of the next sixty-six years. We take an approach that is geobiographical, focusing on individuals’ experiences with a place over several generations, and use the Robstown Labor Camp as a memory device which can conjure feelings and memories of wider histories that transcend that physical locale. In so doing, this article both builds on scholarship which typically discusses the FSA camp spaces only when they were under federal control, and examines how oral history can capture spatial relations in people’s memories, helping to elucidate more complex, even dissonant, historical landscapes.