Oral History Teaches Starting Over is a Process Not a Plan

By Tony Hernández- Documentary Filmmaker & Oral Historian Preserving family, founder, and cultural legacy

What Oral History Teaches Us About Starting Over

The New Year has a way of convincing us that starting over requires a clean slate. A new plan. A bold declaration. A dramatic reinvention.

Oral history tells a different story.

After recording thousands of interviews—many with immigrants who were forced to begin again not by choice, but by circumstance—I’ve learned that starting over is rarely a single moment. It’s a process. Quiet. Uncelebrated. Often uncomfortable.

I see this not only through oral histories, but through the legacy films I’ve been privileged to create—intimate records of lives in motion, not lives neatly resolved. Time and again, people sit down believing they’ll tell a story of arrival or success, only to realize that what shaped them most were the moments in between: the setbacks, the recalibrations, the decisions to keep going without certainty.

Most of the people I’ve interviewed didn’t arrive with clarity or confidence. They arrived with uncertainty. With loss. With the awareness that whatever they had built before might not translate to where they were going next.

And yet, again and again, they moved forward.

Not because they had a perfect plan—but because they understood something fundamental: starting over doesn’t mean erasing the past. It means carrying it wisely.

In oral histories and legacy films alike, “starting over” is rarely framed as reinvention. It’s framed as responsibility—to family, to children, to parents left behind, to a future that demanded effort even when the outcome was unclear.
There are no shortcuts in these stories. Progress is incremental. Identity is negotiated slowly. Confidence follows action, not the other way around.

What’s striking is how often success, when it finally arrives, isn’t described as triumph—but as stability. The ability to provide. The dignity of work. The freedom to make choices that once felt impossible.

Oral history also teaches us that starting over isn’t a failure of the original plan. It’s often the most honest response to reality. That truth becomes unmistakable when people watch their own lives unfold on screen—when they recognize that the chapters they once considered detours were, in fact, the story.

At the Immigrant Archive Project, and through the legacy films we create, we don’t frame these lives as heroic arcs or cinematic comebacks. We document them as they are: complex, unfinished, deeply human. Because starting over doesn’t resolve itself neatly—and neither do most lives worth recording.

As we enter a new year, I’m reminded that beginnings don’t need to be loud to be meaningful. They need to be intentional. Patient. Grounded in truth.
Starting over isn’t about abandoning who you were.

It’s about deciding—once again—how you’ll move forward with what you’ve learned.

So here’s the question I’ll carry into the new year:

When you think about starting over, are you trying to erase the past—or build more honestly on what it taught you?