Modern Stories Along the Anza Trail

Listen to an interview with Emma

Interview Text

Interviewer: Emma, what is your full name?

Emma: My full name is Emma Lane.

Interviewer: And, how old are you?

Emma: I am 19.

Interviewer: How long have you lived here in the valley?

Emma: Since, my seventh grade year. I was born here. We moved to Colorado when I was three weeks old, and I lived there until I was 12.

Interviewer: And Colorado to here is quite a change.

Emma: Yeah, it is.

Interviewer: What, how… was that difficult?

Emma: Um, I think it was less difficult because in between living there and living here, I traveled around the country with my dad, and… well, my whole family traveled, but my Dad was in the agricultural business, so we went around.

Interviewer: Does your dad work in the agriculture … here in the valley?

Emma: Yeah, he does.

Interviewer: Do you think that you’ll wind up working in agriculture?

Emma: No, not at all (laughs).

Interviewer: What kind of thing would you wind up doing? Do you have an idea?

Emma: Um, exactly what I’m doing right now (laughs).

Interviewer: You want to be in the museum field?

Emma: I do. Yeah.

Interviewer: And, what, do you know what type of museum you want to work at?

Emma: Yeah, I want to work in a U.S. history museum. So, preferably on the East Coast, something that has to do with the Civil War.

Interviewer: You’re at uh….. Imperial Valley Community College right now?

Emma: I’m at San Diego State in Calexico.

Interviewer: So, can you do a full curriculum …?

Emma: You can. Yes.

Interviewer: And, so… is it, it’s like a satellite campus?

Emma: It is, yeah. We have a full library. We have… they’re mainly… now they’ve switched to E-books, so it’s a small library, but there… everything is available online. All the resources that you would get at the main campus… The teachers, some of them have taught at the main campus.

Interviewer: What drew you to decide that that’s what you wanted to do?

Emma: Um, to be, work in a museum?

Interviewer: The year that I traveled the country, my mom home-schooled me and she is very into history, and a lot of my family on my dad’s side grew up in North Carolina and South Carolina and Virginia. So, when we would go back there, we would visit all the battlefields and all of the, the sites that they have back there. All of the museums and, and everything, and it just really interested me because I had a hands-on experience with all of the history that was going on at that time.

Interviewer: You intern here at the museum?

Emma: Yes.

Interviewer: Other than school and internships, what do you and your friends do… do for fun?

Emma: (Laughs) Oh gosh. A lot of the time we travel to San Diego, to Yuma, even places in the valley. I really like to drive, so I like to… And I like to travel because I grew up with that. So, it’s not necessarily that these places have better things to do, but the journey getting there is what I like to spend my time doing.

Interviewer: And will you go with a group of girlfriends, or a mixed group or…?

Emma: Yeah! With whoever wants to go, even just one person if …

Interviewer: The one thing that I’ve noticed here is that the lines, the racial strictures, are much more fluid than what you would find in San Diego…

Emma: Umm hmm

Interviewer: …or in Colorado.

Interviewer: How does that play out in your own life?

Emma: I think that works in my favor, (laughs), a lot, because I am not Hispanic at all, and uh, but, I grew up, I like to say that I grew up here. My mom grew up here. My grandma grew up here, and they all… The culture that they celebrate is the Mexican culture. And I think that it’s so amazing that people that don’t have any, no Mexican in them, genetically, or anything, can celebrate a culture, and be part of the culture because it’s, I mean it’s what they grew up with.