The future of fieldwork for a public preservation practice that is representative and meaningful will have to grapple with places such as the Berkeley and Richmond sites that opened this essay-places where the weight of cultural significance over material presentation and the legacy of the marginalization and erasure of certain histories come at us full force. A quick perusal of the end-notes will demonstrate that the professional and scholarly preservation community has been having discussions about community engagement, cultural significance, inequity, underrepresen-tation, and evaluation standards as barriers for more than thirty years. This may seem discouraging, but this continuity of discourse is also heartening. The work of equitable change and social justice does not happen quickly and can never be called "done." Pushing back on policies and standards of methodological habits that are no longer serving the larger purposes of preservation or changing professional paradigms is a challenge that will entail trying, failing, and trying again.
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