Sharing Untold Stories: Ph.D. student Amber Santoro highlights community impacts of freeway construction

Today, millions of Angelenos rely on an extensive network of freeways to get around our bustling city. Although many see freeways primarily as a dreaded part of their weekday rush-hour routine, the highways’ histories are rich with untold narratives of communities whose lives were inextricably linked – and changed – because of freeway construction in Los Angeles. Uncovering these stories is the focus of 2024 Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellow and history Ph.D student Amber Santoro’s research, who studies environmental racism, displacement, and transportation in Los Angeles.

Last summer, Santoro dove into USC’s archival collections to learn more about these topics through USC Libraries’ Summer Primary Source Research Fellowship on Sustainability, presented in partnership with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability and the USC Van Hunnick History Department. Working with library faculty and staff, Santoro examined the Libraries’ Century Freeway Collection, consisting of sources such as court documents, newspaper clippings, memorandums, and more, all related to the construction of the Century/105 Freeway, which Santoro describes as “one of the most litigated and controversial highways in U.S. history.”

This spring, Santoro presented her curated digital exhibit, “Driven Apart: Displacement Along the Century/105  Freeway,” at USC’s new Sustainability Hub. Her goal is to uplift the lesser-known stories of communities disproportionately impacted by regional freeway construction. Read more about Santoro’s experience as the USC Libraries’ Inaugural Sustainability Fellow and learn about her exhibit with the Q&A below. 

Can you paint a picture of what your day-to-day life as a sustainability fellow looked like?

I was very ecstatic when I found out I got the fellowship. I had done some digital humanities projects during my undergrad, but this was my first time doing really substantial archival research. I thought it was a great opportunity to learn more about topics in the context of Los Angeles history and environmental history.

Throughout the summer, I came to the USC Libraries a few times a week and stayed in the special collections reading room until closing. A lot of my time was spent poring over the archives. I would look at the finding aid [a document written by archivists to describe an archival collection] to learn about what was available in each box. Given that these descriptions weren’t too detailed, there was a lot of room left for surprises in every box and in every folder. You never quite knew what you were going to find that day! 

For me, the best part of this fellowship was getting digitized materials from the Century Freeway records out there and having as many eyes and hands on them as possible. I hand picked about 100 or so materials during my research over the summer. Those are what is available online, so it’s not exhaustive or completely representative of everything in the collection, but it’s what I found interesting and important.

What made you interested in diving into the Century Freeway Collection? 

I knew that I wanted to examine the history of community displacement in Los Angeles. I had grown up hearing stories about my great-grandparents who were displaced from their beloved home – my grandmother’s childhood home – in East Los Angeles during the 1960s to make way for the 710 Freeway. One memory [my grandmother] often shared was about revisiting the old neighborhood in East Los Angeles years after the displacement. The house was completely gone. It was essentially erased from the landscape as though it had never existed.

After hearing these kinds of stories from my grandmother, I began to wonder why I didn’t hear more about those who lost their homes to freeway construction. Exploring the Libraries’ Century Freeway Collection seemed like a perfect match to discovering more about this kind of Los Angeles-focused history. 

When exploring the collection, what discovery made the greatest impact on you? 

One of the sources that left an impact on me was a quarterly report from the Office of the Advocate in the early 1980s. This office was in charge of documenting and keeping track of displacement concerns from the community and making sure that these concerns were being followed up on. The source illuminated an instance of the office staff being ill-equipped to handle inquiries from Spanish speakers regarding eligibility for and availability of replacement housing due to freeway construction, because they did not have any Spanish-speaking interpreters at the time. The report concluded that this was the situation for almost a month, so it points to the fact that there there was a lot of confusion for people trying to access resources that were supposed to be available to them. This speaks to a lot of the issues that were prevalent in community displacement, especially in areas that were largely populated by marginalized communities.

Can you talk more about the major themes of your project?

The themes that I wanted to portray in the digital exhibit include evolving urban landscapes, community upheaval, and environmental destruction. I wanted to highlight the consequences of urban development that isn’t community-centered from the get-go. The construction of the Century Freeway is emblematic of just that. 

Many artists in the 1980s and the ’90s were kind of trying to tell this story as well, so you see sorts of traces of that all throughout the collection. You see photographers documenting abandoned homes. You see residents reporting the loss of public services and really awful dust pollution from construction. 

What message did you want to communicate to the public through your project? 

I want to share that the digital humanities are emerging as an interesting way of storytelling in the modern age, of engaging broader audiences beyond typical scholarly audiences that historians tend to communicate to.

This project was about shedding light on fascinating histories like the evolution of urban landscapes and transit issues and using interactive formats like digital storytelling techniques. I believe there is immense value in telling displacement narratives by inviting the viewer to directly engage with archival materials like photographs, newspaper articles, legal documents, and beyond. Placing the archival materials from USC Special Collections at the forefront allows these stories to be told in innovative and unprecedented ways, empowering viewers to explore the story firsthand with the materials that have been preserved in this collection. These materials were not widely accessible to a general audience prior to their digitization and are now hosted on the USC Digital Library website as a part of this fellowship.

That’s what is just so great about this fellowship. It’s open to graduate students and undergraduate students, and it’s a great way for people to hone their research skills. It’s also a great way to bring attention to some of the lesser-known materials in the USC Libraries’ special collections and then reach wider audiences who are interested in Los Angeles history and environmental history.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Visit Driven Apart: Community Displacement Along the Century/105 Freeway to view Santoro’s digital exhibit.