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THE CHAMBERSBURG PROJECT
Team Faculty Mentor: Dr. Rachel Adler
Student Researchers: Johanna Soto and Dan Suarez
The Chambersburg project started five years ago with Dr. Rachel Adler and several other students. Dr. Adler focuses on the ethnic transition of Chambersburg, a once very Italian neighborhood, which changed a little less than a decade ago into a Latino community. In her prior research she collected 150 interviews from both Italian and Latino Chambersburg residents. As this ethnic transition occurred, there was also an influx of Latino businesses. For the summer of 2007, the team focused on conducting interviews with several of the Italian and Latino business owners. The interviews lasted a little over an hour and focused on the life history of the owner as well as the business history. We used a list of businesses that was compiled last summer by a student research in Summer 2006. Because the list was a year old we took a trip into Chambersburg and made changes to the list.
The team was able to conduct eight interviews within the eight week period. Several more participants will be interviewed during the rest of the summer. Our research does not have definite results yet because it is an ongoing project with a great amount of data from previous research that needs to be analyzed. We did conclude that Dr. Adler’s study may need to expand and include African Americans because they seem to be a major focus when interviewing the Italian owners.
