Mnemonic labor and the construction of civil service at the National Mall and Memorial Parks

Abstract Despite long‐standing recognition in collective memory scholarship that commemorative sites are places of deep cultural meaning, fieldwork evidence collected at the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC, suggests that visitors primarily engaged with mnemonic resources in a superficial fashion. This paper explores how interpretive park rangers, who are tasked with engaging the public to discuss the nation's history, nevertheless strived to deliver informational, interpretive services to the visiting public. Findings show that rangers, conceptualized in this paper as street‐level bureaucrats, developed roles and routine lines of action that hinged on how they imagined and constructed their audiences. This paper demonstrates how street‐level bureaucrats variably conceive of their clients at the pre‐interactional stage, thus identifying an underexplored dimension of discretion in frontline service work. Additionally, this paper contributes to collective memory research by contextualizing mnemonic deliberation within contexts of mnemonic agents' workplace dynamics, showing how organizational expectations shape discourses of difficult, contentious histories.