Fighting national myths by saving home-town history

Dr. Tina Zarpour is the Vice President of Education, Collections, and Community Engagement at the San Diego History Center, where she founded the All-In Community Archiving Initiative. This interview was conducted by Morgan Kriesel on August 11, 2026.

“..if I'm trying to develop authentic stories about the past, and that material culture… is not there, then I can't tell those stories.”

So, I wanted to start with the beginning of the All-In Initiative. Where did the idea come from? And why did you start it?

I've been in the museum field, mostly in history and cultural heritage museums, for about 25 years. Working in all different capacities on the programmatic and, what I like to call the functional end, of museum work. All the things that make a museum a museum. So, everything from education, to exhibits and exhibition development, to collections and the curatorial sides of the house.

So part of the initiative came from a growing experience with what I call community-based exhibition development, or community-responsive exhibition development. In that, some of our strongest exhibition products were made in collaboration with the community. Not just the obvious loans, but in the ideation, and content development, and integrating it—the bones and the meat of the exhibition.

And so I built up a repertoire of experiences and skills in working with all different manifestations of community in those processes. And then my background in applied anthropology also gave me a perspective and a skillset around working with contemporary people in groups that are passionate about something.

You know, the History Center is nearly 100 years old. We were founded as the San Diego Historical Society, and like a lot of historical societies, there's a residue of… who controlled the narrative? Why were these entities started, right? And a lot of it was about being elite members or residents of a place, and wanting to protect the historical narrative and the sort of pioneer sense of, “We are the founders of the community.” But of course, and my observation is not unique, there's a lot of people left out of that narrative.

Who's not included? That's the applied anthropology kind of perspective—who's not at the table, whose voices are not being heard. And in museums that collect material culture, there are a lot of repercussions when we don't have that material culture to draw from. It limits the amount of stories we can tell. It limits the type of stories we can tell.

And you don't notice it when you're in that moment, but you notice it [when you’re looking back]. Like, me as a historian and applied anthropologist, if I'm trying to develop authentic stories about the past, and that material culture—either through the archives, or through the objects, or the photographs, or the historic clothing, or oral histories—is not there, then we can't tell those stories. And it's almost compounded over time, right?

So I got a real strong sense that we're at an incredible disadvantage, as a museum, if we don't start collecting now, and we don't start to try to backfill those gaps that we have, because we'll never be able to dig ourselves out of that hole.

And many museums are under-resourced in this country. It's not something that's new. Very few museums are in a place where we can actively solicit collections. Many of us aren't in a place where we can pay for collections. I mean, we don't have an acquisitions budget at all. So we rely on what's called passive collecting. We rely on people that are out in the community to self-nominate and say, “I think this is important. I think the History Center should have this.”

And who are those people? Those are the people that already think that their history counts, and feel that we would be interested in their history. So even in that, there's an absence.

So, the All-In Initiative is a method to remedy that. Because it goes from just passive modes of collecting to actively seeking materials. And we're not defining what those materials are, we're engaging and working with different groups of people to learn what those materials are, what those significant historical sources are, what those significant stories are that we need to document.

The other way that it's different is that we try not to be extractive. In this day and age of technology and the digital world, we don't need the physical materials in order to safeguard and steward those histories and those stories. So it is a digital-first model, so [we] digitize and return. And that's also for practical purposes. One purpose is that sometimes—especially when working with families, and family heirlooms, and precious family stories—people don't want to give those up, understandably. The second reason is that space is limited, right? And space is literally money for us, because, when we preserve something, when we take something on, we care for it in perpetuity. Our commitment is to take care of it forever and ever and ever. And that comes with space costs, it comes with material cost, it comes with HVAC. We maintain museum standards of temperature, and humidity control, and safety, and security, and fire suppression. So, we want to be very careful about what we physically collect.

Going back to perspectives that have not been included in history, what specific perspectives, what communities were those, in San Diego?

Now this, the All-In San Diego Community Archiving Initiative, is not that old. I would say we formally launched in January of 2024, with our first hire. And that first project was called Missing Pieces, and it was to document Black history in San Diego.

And that's because we had some experience with collections reflecting African American life in San Diego. And also some experience with an African American advisory group for our museum, and with exhibits reflecting Black history in San Diego, as well as several Journal of San Diego history articles. One of the articles, that is well known, is called Black Pioneers, which we published in the 80s. And people still reference that. That's one of our most popular journal issues.

So we had a record of work and archival materials to begin to show to the community. One of our most well-known photographic collections is the Norman Baynard Collection. And he was an African-American studio photographer located in Logan Heights that was active from probably the 40s to the 70s. And after his passing, his son very generously donated his father's archive to the History Center, to the Historical Society. It's just an amazing archive, and fountain of scenes capturing African American life in San Diego at mid-century. Incredibly unique, because he was documenting the community, essentially.

Another one that we did early on was in collaboration with a local musician and artist. The project was called Rap Diego, and it was in collaboration with a podcast on KPBS. It was the physical material that represented hip-hop history in San Diego for 40 years. That was really fun.

Another one that we launched, at the beginning of the year, was the City Heights project, partially funded by Price Philanthropies. That project was to document the refugee and immigrant communities in City Heights, and relate City Heights’ past and present, and look into the future as well.

So along with Missing Pieces, which was Black history, later that same year we also launched a Filipino history project, which we're finishing up on. And every project we've learned from, and we've grown, and we've expanded. They've all gone in different directions, they've ended up in additional, what I call, public history products. So sometimes it's an exhibit that we've worked on together, sometimes it's a series of community events. Sometimes, one of them started off with an exhibit, it ended up as an archive.

What else? That would be La Neighbor. La Neighbor was about a settlement house in Logan Heights. And we interviewed 19 people that had been, who are elderly, senior citizens now, but at the time were youngsters going through the neighborhood house and going through its services. Talking about how the growth and development of the neighborhood house mirrored the growth and development of Logan Heights, and how the role of a settlement house in terms of quote-unquote “immigrant acculturation,” really paved the way for people to understand and learn about civic participation, and become activists and leaders in the Latino community and the Chicano community in San Diego.

Right now, we are putting the finishing touches on a Memorandum of Understanding for a new project with three additional organizations that reflect Chinese American history in San Diego. So that will be a partnership of four entities, with the repository being held by the San Diego History Center.

Most of our projects actually base themselves in oral history first because, what I found is, oral history is a wonderful entree into a story, into a community. Because it's first-person dialogue, essentially. So, much of the material you'll see on the All-In website or platform are oral histories.

When you were starting the initiative, did you have any specific questions you were trying to answer, any history mysteries? You talked about backfilling this gap of perspective, but did you have any specific answers you were trying to find?

No, not really. I think that's to be defined with each group of people that we work with, or that's to be defined together.

Like one of the things that's emerged from Missing Pieces (we've launched that project and now it's in a bit of a pause), was Black fraternities and sororities and their role in the community. And then, as a next step, we want to investigate Black churches in San Diego—Black churches as a central place of keeping history and keeping community memory. So, we’re thinking of how we're going to design a program or project around that with the resources that we have.

One of the mysteries was, I guess, those early San Diego Chinese families. What were the businesses that they were involved in, and what was the institutional life that they were involved in? Because we have some material that's being held at our museum, and at the Chinese Historical Museum, but there's no centralized place where we have that. And we have the descendants of those families in San Diego still. Again, this was defined by the entities that we're working with.

Okay, so for the La Neighbor project, was the question there like, “What does ‘assimilation’ actually look like? What does it look like for the people who have to go through it?” Is that something that ended up being answered by the project?

Yes, I mean, I think there was a new insight that I got from doing the project. So, I didn't start off with thinking about the archive, I started off thinking about the exhibit and how all these things are going to translate into the exhibit.

I'm not the first person that has looked at the Neighborhood House. There had been previous scholarship on it, including a local historian, Maria Garcia, who wrote a book called La Neighbor, and she started off with the interviews. So, Maria Garcia and Augie Bernio were my interlocutors in this process of helping to choose who was going to be interviewed, and they conducted the interviews themselves, with me in the background.

But then there'd also been some master's level work back in the 70s and 80s on the impacts of the neighborhood house, and then there had been another historian scholar named Kyle Siani that had done some research on the neighborhood house.

I don't know if you're familiar with settlement houses.

Not really, no.

In Chicago, New York, Boston, these eastern cities in the United States, [settlement houses were meant to] assimilate Irish and Italian immigrants. Chicago was very famous for the Hull House. It was sort of the beginnings of social work as a profession.

These settlement houses are designed as all-in-one entities to “solve the issue of the immigrant problem.” We don't use the word “assimilation” so much anymore, but they use the word “assimilation.” You know, “How do we Americanize these immigrants to make them more like us?” That was the narrative. So, the programs were like, hygiene, and nutrition, and teaching them how to put together an American meal, and definitely learning English, and things like that.

San Diego being on the border, [the Neighborhood House was geared toward “Americanizing” Mexican immigrants] and it was started much later. What was interesting is not the top-down Americanization, there was that, but how the neighborhood house modified itself to fit into the neighborhood as well. That's the thing about acculturation, it flows both ways. It's not this sort of unidirectional, like, the immigrant will become more American, the host entity is also changing in the process.

So you have these youth going through all different types of programs. There was camp programs, there was sewing, there was recreation, football, baseball, everything. Things were very gender-specific. Girls were allowed to do certain things. Boys were allowed to do certain things, you know, boy activities and girl activities. And, there was a community oven, so people during the Depression would bring their food to cook in the oven. There were no showers, and most people didn't have running water in the neighborhood, so [the Neighborhood House] was where, you know, people went to get clean. They had milk distribution, and well baby initiatives, and all kinds of social services that we see today, in different entities.

But among that kind of youth aspect, or as the youth were getting older the neighborhood house served as the place for their clubs. There were a lot of youth-initiated clubs. They called one the Jacket Club, so they would have these 50s-style, 60s-styles kind of Letterman jackets. And they would do dances, and plan social events, but they would learn things like Robert's Rules of Order, and how to put together an event—how to do sponsorship, and how to sell tickets, and all this sort of stuff. So it was kind of this training ground.

For organizing?

For organizing, exactly.

Yeah, that was my “Aha! This is where they learn to self-organize and become that generation of activists, and educators, and people really doing things out in the community.” I mean, they were directly involved in the Chicano Rights Movement.

Wow, yeah, that's really interesting, because I'm sure that wasn't the intention, right? They were like, “Here's how you throw a garden party.”

That wasn't the intention of the program designers, no.

“…we use real things of the past to tell those stories. You can't argue with an archive.”

So, you're mostly working through partnerships, and you had some of those partnerships beforehand. How do you go about forming new partnerships, like with the Chinese American Historical Museum?

Well, we've known each other and we've worked together on other things, but that came through two local scholars that work in Chinese American history.

One of them is named Susie Lancastle. She is at CSU San Marcos, in ethnic studies and, I think, literature. She had been working with different organizations locally, and suggested this, because we had some archives that we shared from this particular person that was active in the community doing oral histories, I think in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. The interest was in taking an inventory of who had what, and making sure that things were properly archived. And then another person named Michael Yee, who is a public historian working in Chinese American history, who’s volunteering for the project.

It came at their suggestions and their sense that there were (again) missing pieces, that there was more to the story, and that we needed to work together to find what those missing pieces were, and work together to archive them.

And so these partner groups are the ones who have the relationships with the actual community members. Are they the ones soliciting materials and getting the oral histories and all that?

It's a joint effort, so we have the facility and the ability to do the oral histories, physically, on site. But, for instance, we will depend on others to help carry them out, and to identify whose story needs to be preserved.

Do you have any insight on how that identification process works? What are they looking for, that kind of thing?

You know, as a social scientist, I invest a lot in the concept of snowball sampling—the idea that you start with one or two things that you know, and then you go from there, and way leads on to way. And I would say it's very emergent. It's not a study that we are designing and have to figure out our exact method ahead of time. We have a general sense of our capabilities and our methodologies, and it's really collaborative, and we're working together to figure out what's next, and what we can do.

One picture I have for this initiative is a machine. Call it an input-output machine, that kind of Rube Goldberg thing, you know?

A typical input in a museum, or historical archive, is we accept materials, you sign a form, we keep them forever, and they sit on a shelf. And we might work with a historian, or a curator, to have the, come and flesh out what it is and what the significance is, right? But that's very passive, and we have to wait for that.

So, All-In is an input-output machine where we have totally compressed the input to the output. We've tried to create systems where things aren't sitting on a shelf. We are quickly digitizing them, quickly describing them, trying to understand their significance, and putting them out there for people to digest, turn into a book, use in a paper, understand their family story, understand their neighborhood story. I see it as a service model.

But it's our goal that there's accountability along the way, because also we're borrowing materials to digitize, or we have a temporary custody of the materials. And that comes with certain practices of caretaking, and keeping organized, and making sure that the paperwork is signed, and those materials are returned in a timely manner.

The hardest, most challenging part of all this—I mean, there's figuring out how we're going to work together with each project, but the hardest part is really understanding each of the assets, and understanding the significance. In the archival biz, we call that the metadata.

When you have a set of photographs, you can digitize them, but if you don't know who's in the photograph, what dates they represent, the story of the photographs, what's being told, why is it important, what's going on—it doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't mean anything to anybody else. So, [we have to] derive that information in the most complete way possible while we're working with that community group, because it's really hard to go back and backfill that. If we're not gathering the context and the significance at that moment, then we've almost lost the opportunity to gather it at all.

I think that’s really interesting compared to what's happening at the federal level. Instead of addressing these holes in history, the Trump administration is taking down national park signs, attacking universities and programs that attempt to do that backfilling of history. I'm interested in these local programs as a solution to this problem.

I wanted to get your feedback on that, and—is there an advantage to going about this history-filling at a local level? Is it a little bit more insulated from the people who would rather not have to rethink their history? Is it easier to have that reflective moment when you're talking about your neighbor and your neighborhood legacy?

For sure. We've seen a lot happen with the Smithsonian American History Museum in the last couple weeks. Like, directly attacking their director, Anthea Hartig, and putting her on the stand. I think the Smithsonian is under unique pressure, because they do receive federal funding, I mean, it's a major part of their budget. I want to say in the realm of 60%. When you have to tell those master narratives, those grand sort of stories [about the nation as a whole], it's very hard, and they've tried their different museological ways to get around that.

I think, as a local history museum, we're doing a disservice if we're not telling the San Diego side of the story, whatever that is. One of the exhibits we opened, for America at 250, is called, “America 250, San Diego 1776-2026.” And it was through 100 objects, that was the device [to tell the story], the 100 objects. The way I was describing it to people was, it’s those moments when San Diego intersected with that national narrative, and when that deviated from that national narrative. You know, we're not saying San Diego is this, or was this, or is becoming this. We're saying these are 100 objects through time, make your own interpretation of it.

Doing visitor research, what we found is people don't want to be told what to think. There is a lot of resistance to that. They want to make their own informed choice, and that is our job as a museum—not to tell them what to think, or tell them how to think, but present the materials. And our bread and butter is our primary source materials. We use archives, we use objects, we use real things of the past to tell those stories. You can't argue with an archive. You can argue about the interpretation of it, or how it's used, but you can't argue that it's not there and [that is doesn’t say] what it says.

Like, when we have a restrictive covenant that says that people of color can't live here, how are you going to argue that's not what happened? When we have KKK materials on display from the local KKK chapter, you can't brush that under the rug. We have the physical materials right here to show that, right?

I feel like the pandemic taught us that, for better or for worse, visiting a museum is never going to be replaced. It's not replaceable. We want to have those analog experiences, those “Aha” moments with the real physical stuff. But a digital archive can have greater breadth, and greater reach than a physical exhibit. I mean, it's not one or the other. Every responsible archive wants to get their materials out there, into the hands of people, so they can figure it out for themselves.

So, having that information available for people, having it be on a digital archive, do you get inquiries from researchers and historians about it?

We've found the most traction with local educators, especially in middle school and high school. I think there's a real hunger for ethnic studies content, for better or worse, because that is a new requirement at the state level—to teach ethnic studies in high school. So we are helping to fill that gap, because we are providing those local resources, and the local stories.

They're not just learning about Cesar Chavez, you're not just learning about Harriet Tubman, you know, everything that's in a traditional history book. We've got the San Diego spin on it, and the San Diego uniqueness.

One thing, for example, that's unique about San Diego in terms of that ethnic studies curriculum and that larger narrative, is the Lemon Grove school desegregation case from the 1930s. Lemon Grove predated Brown v. Board of Education. And that's huge. That's a big deal for San Diego to be on the national map of [desegregation].

It's not part of the All-In Archive, but we have the Journal of San Diego History Archive on our website. We've been publishing the Journal of San Diego History since the 1950s, and all of the articles are scholarly articles that are peer-reviewed, and they are all full-text searchable on our website, free.

So, one of our most queried articles is about the Lemon Grove school desegregation case. And that was from 1986, and written by Robert Alvarez, who became a ethnic studies professor at UCSD (he's now retired). His father was the plaintiff in that case as a youngster. And, as he was doing his PhD research, he uncovered the story about this case that had been buried in his family, and hidden, so nobody would have known about it had he not brought it to light and published it in the Journal of San Diego History.

“the belief is that the more stories we have, the more that we document, the richer that we all become…”

I recently came across this report from Vanderbilt University. It was criticizing anthropology, and the humanities in general, and saying that, “It has an angle to it, it's not neutral, it's not objective.” And Linda McMahon cited [this report] in a recent letter calling for universities to comply with the Trump administration.

Well, you saw that years ago with the Florida governor Rick Scott basically saying, “What's the point of this degree?” It's really undervaluing, I mean, half of a lot of universities.

We can poke a lot of holes in [that argument], why that's not true. You're assuming objectivity—in what fields? What fields are objective? And I think, yes, there is bias in a lot of places, but as humans, we have to be aware of that. Any human endeavor is going to have bias.

Yeah, I think this narrative is appealing because a lot of people feel talked down to by academic institutions in general, but especially by these [humanities perspectives] that are like, “We have to reexamine the power in this country.” People take that as, “You're trying to make me feel guilty, you're trying to make me feel bad.”

So I'm really interested in these community programs that, like you said, invite you to engage with your community, and your surroundings, and get you to—it's fun, right? It's interesting, and it's fun, and it takes you out of that space of, “You are attacking me,” to something like, “I'm discovering hidden knowledge.”

Yes, exactly.

We have a huge stakeholder list, a very diverse stakeholder list, of people all across the political spectrum. So while most people are supportive of this initiative, when we were promoting it, a couple of people on our email list said, “What are you doing? You're too woke.”

I think people sometimes feel that this is a zero-sum game. If we are paying attention to this history, it must mean we're not paying attention to some other history. But that's just not the way that it works. It's not an either-or type of thing. I mean, the belief is that the more stories we have, the more that we document, the richer that we all become, [in terms of] what we have to choose from and how we understand ourselves.

It's not any different than science. Science understands that it may be wrong, right? The scientific method allows for that—that theory, that hypothesis, may be wrong. And knowledge is cumulative. It's building, it's building, it's building, and sometimes it course corrects and it self-corrects. That's all part of it.

Yeah, do you think that's maybe easier to do on a local level? Because people's experience with their local community is a bit more varied and [they have experience with its nuances and faults]. Where, the national myth—it's a myth.

I would say, the place that we encounter those types of myths are what I call the California myth. And there is a generational difference and a generational divide.

There's a lot of mythology around the mission system, the romantic notions of the mission system bringing civilization to Indigenous people, that conversion was good for them, and that there was no suffering. I didn't go to elementary school in California, but for people that were raised here, especially before a certain generation, the mission system in the fourth grade was a big part of their understanding [of California]. Your fourth grade project is selecting a mission and putting together [a diorama based on it].

Well, that's considered downright offensive to some people now, right? Because it obscures the fact that missions were also places of brutality, right? We're not trying to de-center the idea that the founding of California is tied into the missions, but they were the beginning of a lot of brutality that came after that, after the Spanish presence.

We still encounter people that are very tied into the dominance of that narrative, and are very protective of it. I think less and less as time goes on, but we've definitely seen that in some of the work that we did.

We have two facilities, two museums. One is the Serra Museum in Presidio Park, which is our founding museum. And that was at the site of the first mission in Alta, California. Our founder, George Marston, built the museum to commemorate that. So the founding of the organization in 1929, it was closely tied to this mythic, romanticized, casting of California history being tied to Spanish colonial history, and this effort to position our history as just as important as Plymouth Rock, or East Coast history.

You know, you learn about historiography, and you learn how history is actually constructed. It is constructed at different moments of time, at every point along the way.

Oh, that's really funny. It was kind of an East Coast versus West Coast thing.

Yeah, “We have this deep national history that you don't have,” and “We're also historic.”

How do you respond to those kinds of comments? Do you get those a lot with your exhibits on the missions?

When we first opened that exhibit in 2019, I think we got accused by some folks of selling out to the native people, or being bought out by the tribes. Which is very interesting to me. I mean, we're underfunded, I would love to be bought out by the tribes, you know? But that did not happen at all.

But I do think that pendulum, or that trend, is going in a different direction. I'm also in a position in my daily work, where I'm not interacting as much with museum guests. So I'm always interested to hear from our welcome desk people, and the feedback we get tends to be positive. Because the exhibit there is integrative of the stories.

One of the things we're trying to say is, “this Presidio site is a very complicated site.” It is literally, and figuratively, layers of history. So what does the Presidio mean to these particular Indigenous people? What does it mean to a historian? What does it mean to these two archaeologists? What does it mean to a California descendant? So for a visitor to hear those various first-person perspectives, and they literally do, because these are these big videos that pop up, they're like, “Oh, I get it, it's complicated, and I don't have all the answers for it, because it does mean different things to different people.”

Would an All-In initiative for another community be possible? How would you advise a community to go about starting something like this, where they're inviting more varied perspectives into their collections?

I think it's totally replicable. I don't think there's anything unique about what we're doing.

Yeah, I think having a method of public delivery [is important], a way to churn it out, whether that's a series of exhibits or an online digital repository like we have. And then having the bandwidth of staff.

Our model is—we have wonderful Collections and Archive staff, but they don't have the daily kind of bandwidth for the community engagement part. So we have a manager position that is that intermediary between our internal Collections and Archive department, and the community, committees, and advisory groups. They're attending the meetings, they're interfacing with people, they're propelling that project forward. So I think somebody that's devoted to that role is also necessary. In our case, it's called All-In San Diego Community Manager.

What's the feedback been like from the groups that you're representing, and also from the wider community?

It's, “I didn't know you were interested in my story. Here's what else we have. Let's talk more.”

We don't ever want to close the relationship. We want to launch something, and have it on the website to just get it out there, but we want to keep that dialogue and that conversation going, because those insights are still going to be coming. Like, so much about this type of work is unfolding and emerging. We do something together, get it out there, and then reconvene, talk some more, then find another project to work on.

And I do this in my daily life, I have a different timeline than somebody that's essentially a volunteer for us and this is their passion project, but it's not their line of work. So we have to be respectful of the community timeline, which is different than our timeline.

You know, I'm a strong believer in process rather than product. I think we learn so much by going through processes together that help shed light on the appropriate next step to get to that really insightful, important collection of materials.

Yeah, I would agree with you. I'm very much about the process. It's hard to maintain that with how fast-paced the digital world is.

Yeah, and this isn't a big gala. It's not like a big unveiling. It's quiet work, and it's a cumulative project.

“Even now that people are losing faith in news, they still trust museums. And that's a lot of responsibility.”

So you were at the Smithsonian History Museum? I'm curious about why you left, and how you ended up at the San Diego History Center.

Yes. I left a long time ago. I was hired as the program assistant for the Latino History and Culture program, which was brand new at the time. I was the first hire, and I was hired before they found the director of that program, who's my colleague and mentor, and who's still there.

I left because I wanted to pursue graduate school full-time, essentially. I had come up to the end of what I could accomplish with a bachelor's degree, in terms of the Smithsonian system. So I basically went back to school, finished my master's, and then got a full ride into that PhD program.

I think I ended there in 2006, then did some contract work for them, then got my job here at the History Center in 2015.

I was wondering if there was an element of like, “I'm done with this national-level stuff, I want to go local.”

There was a little bit of that. A lot of my work for those two years I was there was focused on getting a local audience to come into the American History Museum. So I was working with groups representing Central American populations, because DC, Maryland, Virginia are a site of settlement for Central Americans (and many different immigrant groups as well).

So, it was like, how do we cater ourselves? Where's the interest point? There was some of, “Why aren't [Central Americans] coming to us? Why aren't they coming to the American History Museum,” at the administrative level. So, trying to understand what program design—where could that tie be?

So, what did you find? Why weren't Central Americans coming?

Well, it's an issue of relevancy. You know, “How do I fit into this national narrative? I don't see anything of myself here. Why would I come?”

Yeah, that’s interesting. We were talking about how the national myth is unrealistic in the way that it can't [incorporate diverse perspectives]. But it's also unrealistic in the way that some people don't want to engage with it at all.

Or just don't see themselves in it. And that's because myths leave so much out, but also, when you're only relying on surface-level details of something, there's no opportunity to find those connection points that go a little bit deeper.

And I think that's the thing about museums, it's our job to interpret something that's potentially esoteric and hard to understand for everyday people. I've done architecture exhibits, and I don't know anything about architecture, but it's my job to understand and find those connection points for people, to bring them into that understanding as well. It's also the job of the museum to make it relevant and palatable for as many people as possible.

I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what separates museums from academia. Academia can exist in this pure-thought space, and museums are making it human, and bringing in those perspectives, which I think kind of insulates them from this anti-intellectualist wave.

No, that's a very good way of putting it.

And we participate in the National Survey of Museum Goers, it's a collaboration with the American Alliance of Museums. We send out the survey to our stakeholders, and a lot of museums participate, and then they do a comparison to non-museum goers. Incredibly interesting datasets.

But one of the things that comes out consistently is that museums are among the most trusted institutions. Even now that people are losing faith in news, they still trust museums. And that's a lot of responsibility. That's a lot to hold and take care of. And we want to keep that public trust.

Yeah, how are you addressing that? How are you keeping public trust going forward?

Well, trying to present our materials in a nonpartisan way. We're not having overtly political or politicized messages. We try to present multiple angles, but still sort of a consensus view of history. We are very deliberate in how we word something and how we say something.

In terms of best practices in writing, our labels are aimed at a 6th to 8th grade level. Most of our content is translated into Spanish for the physical exhibits, not so much online.

And raw materials, you know, we're using the real things. I think that counts for a lot, too.

What's an example of looking at something with multiple perspectives?

I think the KKK materials that are part of our America 250 exhibit. We're talking about what they represent, of course, part of that project was working with UCSD history undergraduates and a graduate student from San Diego State to interpret that. I think we can try to be as straightforward as possible about what they are, who they came from, why the person donated them, what they represent. That exhibit isn't just about, “Rah-rah San Diego, tourist destination!” We try to put the not-so-nice stuff out there, too.

We have another exhibit called Lost Neighborhoods that's about gentrification, and the removal of people from spaces in their neighborhoods because of freeway development, and the kind of the uneven impact of freeway and highway development—which neighborhoods got selected for destruction and for removal. We have some multimedia clips from the time period, and those multimedia clips talk about freeway development, “Well, we need freeways for the growth and jobs they provide.” They're from the KNSD Archive and the KFMB Archive. But then we present the newspaper sources at the time, the photographs that we have, and people talking about, “Well, we don't want this highway here. This highway is going to tear our community apart.” It really isn't us saying these things, it's using those accounts to show those multiple perspectives as much as possible.

Gotcha. So for the KKK outfit, it would be, “This is what it was, this is what the people who used it believed, and then also this is the impact it had on the community,” maybe?

Just alluding to some of that, because the other challenge is that people don't like to read. Very few people read, so my direction to the students was 150 words or less.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, and that's a lot. Because you have to think about people standing, there's nobody sitting and reading on their screen, or reading a book, laying down, or sitting down. There's a definite [set of] best practices for label writing. Word count is one of them.

Is there anything that I missed? Anything you want to shout out about the program or the museum?

Yeah, we have Community Research Access Days for the archives. Typically, most of the week is one-on-one appointments, which are at cost, but there are community research access days at least monthly. People can sign up to visit the archives and do the research themselves.

Awesome, who usually shows up to those?

Oh, all kinds of people. Well, we have members, we have journalists, we have genealogy people, we have historic house people. We have people that are like, “I just want to look at the photos. I'm interested in my neighborhood, what my neighborhood looked like.” People doing legal research, graduate students, other types of students.