ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author looks at where people’s lives diverged from the typical life course and explores those differences, her initial aim was to compile a collective account of ordinary lives based on shared memories of everyday life earlier in the century. The collective approach sat very uneasily alongside the telling of people’s own stories – in their own way and at their own pace. In an educational programme with a group of Puerto Rican women, Rina Benmayor reported how the reading of autobiographical essays moved the discourse from an individual to a collective level. The coming-together of individual accounts, in order to produce a collective account, happened in two ways. Firstly, the cyclical process of readings within the group served to confirm existing stories, and generate new ones. Secondly, the overall balance of accounts which make up Past Times means that the publication itself is the highly visible product of the group’s work.
