History Colorado Center- Week One

I started at the History Colorado Center this Tuesday. I am working in the Education department on two fronts, to help develop and modernize school programs, and to help with a new online exhibit called La Gente (about the hispano community in Colorado) and to find and plan a new location for the physical exhibit El Movimiento (on the Chicano movement) which needs to be moved from its current location on the fourth floor to allow for a different exhibit. Everyone here at the History Colorado Center has been very kind and welcoming to me. On my first day I was given a few hours to familiarize myself with the exhibits and to come up with some ideas for the rail depot in the Keota exhibit. The Keota exhibit is the replica of a settler town that is used for school field trips, several parts of it are underused, including the depot. I had no idea all the work that goes into a 20 minute school program!

I am also working on updating the museum's artifact boxes that go out to schools. I was taken down to the trunk room, named so for the grandmother trunks it contains, to look at the recently updated Hispanic grandmother trunk and at the extremely outdated Japanese grandmother trunk, which I am working on.

Then I was hit by what the director of school programs calls the fire hose. I was asked to translate several documents for the programs into Spanish. I then was given a massive stack of reading on Amache, the Japanese internment camp in Colorado, for background reading for the grandmother trunk. I have a lot of reading to do since I know very little about Japanese American culture in Colorado. Just as I started sifting through it I was pulled onto another project: the La Gente Website and El Movimiento exhibit. I was asked to proof read the beta online exhibit and come up with extra resources that the site can link to, like the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the West High School Walkouts in Denver, before the advisory committee meeting this morning.




I thought that the website looked pretty good except for some minor typos until the meeting this morning. The advisory committee had pointed out so many things that I hadn't even thought about: the use of the phrase Columbian exchange,  the idea that the Chacoan trade routes were not just Chacoan and on and on. Their feedback was very valuable and I have a lot of research to do to help make some of those changes and additions before the next meeting. This afternoon I am going down to the Colorado Stories exhibit to take a look at the proposed new space for El Movimiento, and to try to come up with a way to get the exhibit on the new wall. We'll see if we can do it!


I never thought how much work and how many people are involved in each decision made at the exhibit. This morning I learned that they had been working on the digital exhibit for about 3 years! There are several people working on the trunks downstairs and years of effort into the El Movimiento exhibit could be squandered if the new move doesn't do the exhibit justice.


This internship experience connects directly to the discussions we had in Washington about bringing Latino culture into the community and into classrooms. The grandmother trunks are designed to spark conversations about different cultures in the classroom. The online exhibit discusses a lot of the issues we discussed as being underrepresented: indigenous cultures, the Mexican Revolution, etc. and El Movimiento is entirely about the Chicano movement. Meeting with the advisory board alone was a great experience. The advisory board is made up of Latino scholars from Colorado that advise the education department on how to incorporate more Latino history into the museum and it's programs. I'm very excited to learn even more about Latinos in Colorado!


Wish you all the best,


Ilse Meiler