Money Talks: Narrator Compensation in Oral History

ABSTRACT

There is little public discussion about the compensation of narrators in oral history and no guidelines regarding the practice. This article seeks to open up a conversation about this issue. Drawing on our experience developing an oral history project with Central American migrant families, we discuss why we came to believe that paying project participants was appropriate and necessary. We review arguments for and against compensation and make a case for situated compensation: the idea that decisions about whether, how, and how much to pay narrators are project-specific and must take into consideration a series of factors, including the profile of the narrators, the nature of the interviews, the context of the project, and its goals or deliverables. We describe lessons learned from our experience and identify considerations that project designers should take into account as they assess decisions about narrator compensation. Conversations about payment should engage not only project designers but also funders, administrators, and narrators themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• narrator compensation
• oral history ethics
• payment
• project design

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following interlocutors for generously sharing their thoughts and experiences and helping us to think through the issues discussed in this article: Isabella Cosse, Danielle Dulken, Sarah Dziedzic, Jess Lamar Reece Holler, Premilla Nadasen, Gabriel Solis, Amy Starecheski, and Erin Vong. We also greatly benefited from conversations with Virginia Espino and Alisa del Tufo on other ethical aspects of our project. Participants in the Columbia Latin American History Workshop offered invaluable feedback, as did two anonymous readers and editor Abigail Perkiss. Mariana Katz, graduate project coordinator, has been an indispensable collaborator and intellectual partner. We thank Kari Steeves of Barnard’s Office of Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research and Sarah Greene, project administrator, for generative dialogues on the issue. The Barnard and Columbia students in successive iterations of Seeking Asylum: Politics, History, and the Search for Justice at the US-Mexico Border have contributed to this project in innumerable ways—so, too, have our collaborators at Women’s Refugee Commission and Justice in Motion, including the defensores. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge funding from the Mellon Foundation’s Barnard Engages grant.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. The names in this anecdote have been changed.

^2. All quotes from narrators are from the interviews conducted as part of this project. For now, we have opted to share these excerpts anonymously. For more on the project, visit the website https://separatedoralhistories.org.

^3. Danielle Dulken, “‘Fuck You, Pay Me’: An Argument for Payment in Oral History,” a paper she presented at the 2018 Oral History Association conference, https://www.danielledulken.com/writing/paymentdulken; Jess Lamar Reece Holler, “Equity Budgeting: A Manifesto,” http://marionvoices.org/equity-budgeting/

^4. H-Net, H-OralHist thread, “Payment for Interviews,” May 2015, https://networks.hnet.org/node/16738/discussions/70916/payment-interviews.

^5. As Sommer and Quinlan note, projects may also use “a contract form, stipulating, for example, a token $1 payment or promising the narrator a bound copy of the interview transcript.” Either way, the framing assumes that the transaction involves a donation, not a sale, and any money given the narrator is understood as “a token”; see Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 18.

^6. Conversation with Erin Vong, June l7, 2021. Sommer and Quinlan’s Oral History Manual mentions compensation only in passing (“generally narrators are not paid, although in some circumstances, a gift may be given,” p. 18); Yow’s 1994 Recording Oral History briefly mentions the issue but offers no definitive guidance in the matter (p. 106). Interestingly, a more recent edition of the guide eliminates mention of narrator compensation altogether; see Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage: 1994).

^7. Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Last “Black Cargo” (n.p.: Amistad Press, 2018); On the Federal Writer’s Project, see https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/; Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970); Alessandro Portelli, “A Dialogical Relationship. An Approach to Oral History,” http://oral-history.ir/?page=post&id=4185; Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 2010); Lee Ann Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (New York: Routledge: 2017).

^8. On the historical roots of Central American migration, see Aviva Chomsky, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence and the Roots of Migration (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2022). Journalistic accounts of Central American migration include Oscar Martínez, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America (London: Verso, 2017); and Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (New York: Random House, 2007). For a journalist’s account of “zero tolerance,” see Jacob Soboroff’s Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (New York: Harper Collins: 2020).

^9. Rachel Nolan, “A Translation Crisis at the Border,” New Yorker, December 30, 2019.

¹⁰ “Executive Order on the Establishment of Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families,” February 2, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/02/executive-order-the-establishment-of-interagency-task-force-on-the-reunification-of-families/.

^11. It is worth noting that human rights violations at the border neither began with Trump nor ended with him. While the situation undoubtedly worsened during his tenure, the Trump administration was hardly exceptional. It reflects a longer-running normalization of illegal, unethical, and ultimately ineffectual immigration policies pursued for particular political ends.

^12. “Trump’s Separation of Families Constitutes Torture, Doctors Find,” Guardian, February 25, 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/trump-family-separations-children-torture-psychology; Sam Levin, “‘We Tortured Families’: The Lingering Damage of Trump’s Separation Policy,” Guardian, January 4, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/04/trump-administration-family-separation-immigrants-joe-biden; “Ocasio-Cortez Wants ‘9/11-Style Commission’ on Family Separations,” Guardian, July 20, 2019, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/20/ocasio-cortez-911-style-commission-migrant-family-separations.

^13. “Hundreds of Migrant Children Remain Separated from Families Despite Push to Reunite Them,” PBS, February 26, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/hundreds-of-migrant-children-remain-separated-from-families-despite-push-to-reunite-them.

^14. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis,” Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (April, 2022): 3.

^15. The apt term opportunistic redistribution was suggested to us by Caitlin Liss.

^16. Terje Skjerdal, “Checkbook Journalism/Payment for Coverage,” in International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2019), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0082.

^17. First quote is from: Daphne Patai, “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake?” International Journal of Oral History 8, no. 1 (1987): 15; the second two quotes are from the 2015 H-OralHist thread cited above.

^18. The phrase is from Martin Wilkinson and Andrew Moore, “Inducement in Research,” Bioethics 11, no. 5 (1997): 373–89.

^19. Neal Dickert, Emanuel Ezekiel, and Christine Grady, “Paying Research Subjects: Analysis of Current Policies,” Annals of Internal Medicine 136, no. 5 (2002): 368-373.

^20. That is, there was variation across different studies in the same institution as well as across different study sites within the same study; see C. Grady et al., “An Analysis of U.S. Practices of Paying Research Participants.” Contemporary Clinical Trials 26, no. 3 (2005): 365-375.

^21. On oral history’s relationship to IRBs, see: https://oralhistory.org/information-about-irbs/.

^22. Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

^23. There is a large literature on the social and cultural meanings of money, including its relationship to social intimac; see, for example, Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy; and Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy.

^24. We later went back and compensated these individuals.

^25. In one example of many, CBP disputed allegations of child abuse based on children’s testimonies: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/cbp-fails-discredit-our-report-abuse-immigrant

^26. We struggled with what to call this (payment? stipend?). Compensation seemed best because it linked the money to something—in this case, the narrator’s participation. But our conversations brought home the lack of a standard language to talk about these issues.

^27. It is worth noting that these interviews were not discernably different from those in which the narrators did not inquire.

^28. These quotes come from our interviews, which are not yet publicly available.

^29. Wilkinson and Moore, “Inducement in Research,” 376-7.

^30. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy. The tendency to treat stories as sacred touchstones also contradicts the “settler proprietor” logic that, Crystal Mun-hyen Baik notes, informs oral history practice (Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational.”) We thank Amy Starecheski for making this observation.

^31. Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, The Oral History Reader, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 39.

^32. Alessandro Portelli, “A Dialogical Relationship: An Approach to Oral History,” Expressions Annual 14 (2005): 1–8.

^33. Anna F. Kaplan, “Cultivating Supports While Venturing into Interviewing during COVID-19,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (July 2, 2020): 218; Baik, “From ‘Best to Situated and Relational,” 3.

^34. Conversation with Gabriel Solis, June 18, 2021.

^35. Danielle Dulkin makes point 8; an anonymous reviewer helpfully raised point 9.

^36. Conversation with Gabriel Solis, June 18, 2021.

^37. Mellon Foundation, https://mellon.org/news-blog/articles/mellon-foundation-announces-transformation-its-strategic-direction-and-new-focus-social-justice/.

^38. Ford Foundation, https://www.fordfoundation.org/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fanny Julissa García

Fanny Julissa García is an independent oral historian contributing work to Central American studies with a focus on immigration narratives, identity, and solidarity in immigrant detention centers. She coined the term ”applied oral history” to define storytelling projects which seek, first and foremost, to serve the community contributing their life histories and experiences to story efforts and campaigns which seek to raise consciousness and contribute to policy change aimed at social justice and equity. She is the recipient of the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities and Oral History Association fellowship for her work on Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity. E-mail: [email protected]

Nara Milanich

Nara Milanich is a professor of Latin American history at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she researches and teaches on the history of family, kinship, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law. She is the author of Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 (Duke University Press, 2009) and Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019). She was recently the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she worked on a book about the son of an Italian woman and an African American soldier in occupied Italy. She directs the Center for Mexico and Central America at Columbia University. E-mail: [email protected]