Fall 2021 Showcase Aberle
Katherine Aberle
La Barbería
Beyond the visible increase in the number of Mexican restaurants across Oxford, few people in Oxford are aware of the growing population of Latino immigrants in this changing college community. The exponential increase in the Latino immigrant population both in Lafayette County and the South as a whole is clear, but often misunderstood. In Oxford, the neighborhood with the heaviest concentration of new Latino immigrants is S. 18th Street Ext., a mobile home park. Within the modest circumstances of a trailer park, Mexicans and Central Americans residents have built a rich cultural community, established roots, and maintained homes.
A Honduran immigrant, Henry Likin, offers an example of how cultural and social institutions can arise in unexpected ways. Likin built a tiny barbershop next to his house there. The barbershop has become not only a place to get a haircut, but also where those in his community can share stories, socialize, drink beers after work, and form a community that functions to help each other negotiate living in Southern town in which they are often looked at as invisible at best and worse as unwanted.
As the daughter of a Nicaraguan mother, I have been particularly interested in the lives of Central American immigrants living in Oxford. This small community serves as a sharp contrast to the various communities of Ole Miss students who have filled up new luxury condominiums and apartments that have sprouted up across Oxford. My project looks at the lives and the physical environment of different communities within Oxford, as well as the intersections between entrepreneurship and community building among the Latin American population living here.
“Agitate, Agitate, Agitate”
The Mississippi State Penitentiary, more commonly referred to as Parchment Farm, is sprawled out across over seventy acres in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Since its inception in the early twentieth century, Parchman Farm has functioned as a plantation, where those in bondage are forced to labor and dissenters against the system are punished.
In the summer of 2019, I worked alongside Dr. Garrett Felber and four other students as a member of the Parchman Oral History Project, collecting stories from a handful of former black students at the University of Mississippi and Mississippi Valley State who were arrested in 1970 for their student activism and sent to the infamous prison.
“Agitate, Agitate, Agitate” tells the story of the largest mass arrest of students in United States history. In February 1970, just weeks before the deadly massacres at Jackson State and Kent State, nearly 900 students at Mississippi Valley State College, located in the Delta outside the small town of Itta Bena, were arrested and then bussed to Parchman. Six former student activists at Mississippi Valley State were interviewed for the film and offer their experiences of the arrest and its aftermath.
Katherine Aberle is an M.F.A. student in Documentary Expression. As an undergraduate student at the University of Mississippi in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, Aberle graduated with a BA in Classics and Southern Studies, and then received an M.A. in Southern Studies. Her graduate research focuses on student activism in Mississippi, the prison-industrial complex, racial capitalism, and the Latino South. She produced a film “Black Power at Ole Miss” (2020) and currently holds a graduate assistantship with the Southern Documentary Project.