Shamed by Parisian society and denied access to her children, Micaela sailed to New Orleans to reclaim her father's property and to build within the old part of the city a development in the grand European style. Her legacy, the Pontalba Buildings and the transformation of Jackson Square, define the city's French Quarter style today. We began with personal accounts and local histories in order to examine the discourses and practices of everyday life and the intersections of the private sphere with public life. The disintegration of public-private boundaries in our project is an attempt to reestablish women within the cultural landscapes of their time and commemorate them in current historical memory. 3 Memory is a continual layering, an accretion of places, stories, and events tying us to the past.
Memory accommodates the facts that suit it.
In outsider history, memory becomes a foil against the hegemonic tide of official interpretations. It may be softly focused or skewed. Instead, the reader can begin at any point in the exhibit and thread a remarkable tale of both agency and social situatedness in the construction and memory of women's spaces in the Mississippi Delta as told through the textual, material, and oral traces found today. Documents, archives and photographs, current and historic, were used in our methodology as well as interviews with distant relatives and current community members. Louisiana has many traditions of conjure women, psychics, and seers, some of whom we interviewed as informants helping us to further interpret and utilize the textual traces that we found.