A group of elders from one of Seattle's most linguistically diverse neighbourhoods has created something remarkable: a digital archive of oral histories recorded in 14 languages, preserving the stories of Beacon Hill's immigrant communities before they're lost to time.
The Beacon Hill Stories Project, housed at El Centro de la Raza and supported by the Wing Luke Museum, has collected 180 recorded stories from residents aged 60 to 97, speaking in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Tagalog, Somali, Spanish, Amharic, Korean, Japanese, Tigrinya, Khmer, Lao, Oromo, Mandarin, and English. Each story is transcribed and translated, with contextual notes written by University of Washington ethnography students.
"When an elder dies, a library burns," says project coordinator Linh Pham, quoting an Malian proverb. "Beacon Hill has lost so many elders in recent years — and with them, stories that exist nowhere else. This archive is our fire department."
The stories range from the epic to the intimate: a Vietnamese grandmother describes her family's escape by boat in 1979; a Filipino grandfather recalls building the Alaska Cannery Workers' union; a Somali elder shares the recipe for the tea her mother served every afternoon in Mogadishu. Together, they form a mosaic of the migrations, struggles, and triumphs that built modern Beacon Hill.
The project was inspired by 89-year-old Fumiko Hayashida, a Japanese-American resident who was interned at Minidoka during World War II. Hayashida shared her story at a community gathering in 2024, and the response was overwhelming. "Everyone wanted to tell their story after that," Pham recalls. "It was like a dam breaking."
Technical support comes from the University of Washington's Digital Humanities Lab, which helped build a searchable online platform where anyone can listen to stories, filtered by language, decade, or theme. The archive went live in January and has already received 15,000 visits from 40 countries.
The project plans to expand to younger generations next, training Beacon Hill teenagers to interview their own grandparents. "These stories are bridges," Pham says. "Between generations, between languages, between the old country and this one. We're just making sure the bridges hold."