Storytime Vielka Ebadan

When my great-grandmother was on her deathbed, I heard her speak for the first time. Through her shaking words and glittering gaze, she transported me to her teenage years. Describing living during the era of Rafael Trujillo, a time of harmful, racist policymaking, she showed me a lost side of history: her history.

My great-grandmother was a high school dropout, and at the age of fourteen she became a seamstress, starting her own sole-proprietorship and joining a community of indigenous women. However, even as I found my eyes buried between the covers of books that sought to recount this time in the Dominican Republic, I didn’t hear about the women like my great-grandmother, the uneducated, and the impoverished class who worked with their hands for a living. I didn’t hear about the indigenous women who, amidst fervent bigotry, ached to preserve a part of their culture. Where were their stories?

The narrations of the elderly have opened a portal of discovery for me, a world of untold stories that must be heard. Stories such as these have the power to draw an individual narrative in a broader landscape. It is in that pursuit that I wish to study sociology alongside public policy. To find the intersection between individuals,...