Some people’s stories emerge organically — around a dinner table, on a long car trip or on a rainy afternoon. But most of us need a bit of a nudge before we will face down the Big Questions: Who are we? What do we believe? Who do we love? Why?
That is where StoryCorps, an independent oral history project, comes in. Since 2003, the project, the brainchild of Dave Isay, a radio journalist, has collected 50,000 interviews for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
The 45-minute sessions provide audio records of the national psyche, verbal snapshots of America, circa 2010: The big — and not so big — questions, asked and answered, all within the confines of a silver Airstream trailer.
That trailer, which contains the StoryCorps mobile recording unit, will be parked until June 26 next to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Whitney Henry-Lester, the tour site supervisor, has been traveling with the trailer for two years, stopping in cities and small towns to solicit and record people’s stories. Interviewees leave with a CD copy of their session, and a few narratives are chosen to be heard on National Public Radio.
The trailer has been to Chicago before, although not to Pilsen, the heart of the city’s Mexican-American population. This five-week stop is specific to the Historias initiative, which singles out Latinos. Like the Griot initiative, which recruits African-Americans, Historias is an effort to record the widest possible range of American experiences.
“It’s a way to celebrate and highlight stories that are often untold, or told by others in different words,” Ms. Henry-Lester said.
Participants are asked to enlist someone — a friend, neighbor or family member — whose story they want to hear. Sitting across from each other in the recording booth, they are told they can talk about anything. And they do. Over the years, topics have ranged from tragic losses to spectacularly ugly sweaters.
Not everything that people talk about is momentous, Ms. Henry-Lester said. “But I think people are telling the stories with much more purpose,” she said. “They tell them thoroughly and with intention. And people ask questions with intention. They might know their parents’ stories in vague terms, but this is a way to hear the stories in full.”
Late Monday afternoon, Luis Pelayo emerged from the trailer with more to say. “Forty-five minutes isn’t enough time,” he said ruefully. “I was just getting started. Life is a long journey.”
Mr. Pelayo, who arrived in Chicago from Mexico in 1981 planning to stay just a few weeks, said he talked mainly about the Hispanic Council, a nonprofit legal clinic that he runs with his wife.
“It’s a heavy burden sometimes, but it’s a small price to pay for what America has given us,” he said. “God bless America.”
As contributors leave the trailer, the last thing they see is a small portrait of the late Studs Terkel, the United States’ patron saint of active listening.
“Dedicated to Studs Terkel,” Beverly Finster, the artist, wrote in white paint across the bottom of the canvas. “The master on whose shoulders we stand. His spirit illuminates our path.”