Week 4 at HistoryMiami- Lina Fernandez

My final week at HistoryMiami was undoubtedly the best week yet. The week began with a trip to the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, another local museum that focuses on the period from 1850-1950. We learned about the cultural influences that informed the Art Deco movement and how it spread into popular culture. I’ve always loved the Art Deco buildings that make the Beach so architecturally unique but I’d never had the chance to learn about the history behind them. As I prepare to move away for college, it feels really special to still be learning new things about a place I thought I knew so well. 

The Miami-Dade County high school interns Alexis, Khloe, and Emily and I at the Wolfsonian 

I also started touring this week! After weeks of researching and presenting my tour to the other interns, it was so fulfilling to finally have an audience to talk to. My first audience was a group of half a dozen kids, roughly between the ages of 5-8. Once I realized that my tour as I had developed it wasn’t really suited to kids, I abandoned my previous plan and tried to skip to sections I thought would be most interesting to them. Eventually, they wandered away to another section of the museum and at that point I just tried to be helpful in explaining what different objects were that they were interested in. It was a challenge to feel like I didn’t have control of the tour, but I think it ended up going really well because I was able to accept that it wasn’t really about doing my tour the way I wanted to do it, it was about trying to teach the kids what they wanted to learn about. 
Khloe and I setting up the touch cart before a tour

My favorite and probably most successful tour was to the staff on my last day. I had a few people on the tour from some of the communities I talked about which I think really added to the experience by providing multiple perspectives on the same place. When I got to the section where I talk about Kendall, a full-on debate broke out about the merits of the neighborhood and whether or not it was culturally relevant and had a community. I definitely was not expecting this response but it was amazing to see people really dig into what makes a place, and who gets to decide which places have their stories told in the museum. Watching people defend Kendall and share their own experiences of community in the neighborhood was really impactful and interesting. I was fortunate to have such an engaged and passionate audience and I think that I achieved my goal with the tour. I learned a lot about myself through this process, especially during a particularly difficult tour that my family attended, that I think will help me in the future. I feel better prepared to let go when things don’t go to plan, and to adapt when my audience wants to take things in another direction. 
Giving my tour!
Also on the last day of my internship, we visited the archaeology lab at the University of Miami. We learned about how bones can be used to extract information on the things people ate, which can teach us about the kinds of lives they lived. It was amazing to see how archaeologists are able to draw all these connections and stories from seemingly random shards of pottery or fragments of teeth.  

I am incredibly thankful for the experience and knowledge I have gained from my time at HistoryMiami. There was not a single day that I wasn’t excited to come in and the work I was able to do always felt important and interesting. My supervisor Cynthia was the best possible supervisor I could have asked for: she took the time to ask what I wanted to get out of the internship and created opportunities for me to learn from professionals in the fields I am interested in. She always made sure I felt supported, from giving me the time to really put together my tour to coming with me to the community outreach reading. She, along with the educators and the rest of the education staff, really defined my experience as the positive and enriching one that it was. 

And of course, I am thankful to YAP, who made my internship at HistoryMiami possible. This program has altered the trajectory of my life and put me on a path I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. I know that whatever I pursue, I will be able to trace back my success to this program for taking my passions seriously and showing me that I can pursue a career in the arts or social sciences and be successful. 
My last (and best) tour


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