Before freshman orientation, I didn’t know Rondo was a community in Minnesota. I thought that because I grew up in Saint Paul I knew everything there was to know about the city. Yet, in actuality, I know none of the history surrounding this city, or the communities that make it up. During orientation, Jennifer Arnolds took a group of students and me on a bus tour of the Rondo community. While on the bus I remember thinking about how I knew these buildings and physical spaces that we were occupying, but the stories that Jennifer was telling were unfamiliar to me. I-94 has been a staple in my life as long as I can remember, it’s the freeway to get to our Santa pictures in the winter, and the road that brings me home after spending the day at …show more content…
He has lived in East side Saint Paul his entire life, and I assumed that because of this he would know about the Rondo community. However, this wasn’t the case. He turned to me and said that he never went there, that that space wasn’t for him. What he meant was that as a young German man it was not a space where he belonged. He was white and this meant that he couldn’t go into Black neighborhoods, not that he wanted too because according to him it wasn’t a safe area. The way that he spoke about Rondo was not the same way that Jennifer or even the books we have read did. How my grandpa perceived the Rondo community was very different than how members of the community saw Rondo. This differences in perception made me take a look at how other perceive my community, and how I perceive other people's communities. I thought a lot about East side Saint Paul during this class. I thought about how the community on the South side of I-94 was safer than the North, and how if you are North of I-94 as long as you don’t go to Maryland and Johnson Parkway then you will be fine. Then looking at these bounds I thought about the people that lived in these areas. South of I-94 is an older white community. While in contrast, the Johnson area is home to a large portion of Minnesota's Hmong population. Unconsciously I placed values on how safe different areas are based on the …show more content…
I’ve always assumed that when I read history book the information came from someone who was there at the time. I assumed that this one person just kept really detailed notes about what happened. Nonetheless, this class taught me that there is much more to history than this ill-conceived notion. Planning the History Harvest really but the idea of active history into context for me. It showed me that my original assumption of history is incorrect and that to find the history of a community it takes a lot of intentional actions. At the start of planning the event, I thought we would place out some flyers, people would come and then we would have the history of Rondo. But I soon realized this isn’t what was going to happen. Even after reaching out to the community and putting up flyers there was a small turnout to the event. I felt like we had somehow failed as a class to advertise for the event and that as a direct correlation we weren't collecting history. It took me a couple days but eventually, I came to the realization that once something has happened it’s hard to go back and try to learn about it if it wasn’t properly documented the first time. Many adults from when I-94 was put in have passed, and their children are the ones left to tell the history of their community. This loss of a generation makes it harder to collect the history that we want, but it’s not something we can control.