Community Voices: The Postville Oral History Project Recording with Sharon Drahn

Interviewee

Sharon Drahn

Files

Comments

Click image to play interview:

Interview Conducted by RaeAnn Swanson-Evans

Interview Transcribed by RaeAnn Swanson-Evans

Keywords

Drahn, Sharon--Interviews; Postville Immigration Raid, Postville, Iowa, 2008;

Genre

Oral History

Interview Description

Sharon Drahn is the newspaper editor of the Postville Herald, and has worked there for over 27 years. She is an active member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and volunteers at the Good Samaritan Center. Sharon moved to Monona a small town near Postville in 1969, leaving for a while in the 1980s for school and to teach in Iowa City, but shortly returned. As editor of the newspaper, Sharon has an insight into the events and happenings of the town. In the interview Sharon describes what it means to work for the newspaper in a small town from working on the planning committee of the Taste of Postville celebration for many years to handling Letters to the Editor and covering major events like the May 12th, 2008 ICE raid while national and local news sources also looked for the scoop. Sharon describes how much of the life of the town revolves around the school in Postville where athletics, cultural celebrations, and cooperation and change bridge the demographic and cultural differences of Postville’s residents.

Interview Number

03

Interview Date

7-13-2015

File Format

audio/mp3

Disciplines

Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | United States History

Project Title

Community Voices: The Postville Oral History Project

Project Description

The Community Voices: Postville Oral History Project sought to capture the remembered past of those who experienced the “Postville story,” that is, the social context leading up to, including, and following the ICE immigration raid that occurred on May 12^th, 2008. The Interviews available here showcase the unique memories of 16 interviewees living and working in or near Postville. The interviews will leave listeners with a sense of how a small town in rural Iowa has dealt with and continues to deal with vast demographic change and the aftermath of an ICE raid that threw Postville into the national conversation on immigration reform.

Publisher

Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Copyright

©2014 The Postville Project

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Language

en

Recommended Citation

Drahn, Sharon, "Community Voices: The Postville Oral History Project Recording with Sharon Drahn" (2015). Community Voices: Postville Project Oral Histories. 9.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/postville_oralhistory/9