Category Archives: Music, Arts and Visual Culture

Two Essays on Our Work at Standing Rock

pregnant woman with earth in belly and water flowing around her

“Water is Life” drawing by Ruby Chacón. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Water Is Life: Why Chicana/o/xs Should Support NoDAPL

By Marisa Elena Duarte

On Thursday October 27 militarized police forces from multiple states joined the Morton County Sheriff’s Department in North Dakota to initiate a violent series of crowd control tactics against the peaceful water protectors and land defenders blocking the illegal construction of an Energy Transfer Company (ETC) oil pipeline across land adjacent to the current boundaries of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The pipeline, designed to transport oil from the Bakken Oil Fields in North Dakota down to the Gulf Coast, and from there to various domestic and international markets, also threatens clean water and soil through the entire Midwest region, all the way down to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In July, Continue reading

La Cholita de Guadalupe

Image of Virgin of Guadalupe as young contemporary woman in neighborhood.

La Cholita de Guadalupe. By Lizeth Gutierrez, Maria Saucedo, Silvia Garcia, Kayla Potts. Used with permission of the authors. Reuse of this image without the express permission of the authors is prohibited. All rights reserved (CC license does not apply to this image).

by Lizeth Gutierrez, Maria Saucedo, Silvia Garcia, Kayla Potts

When my colleagues and I were thinking about powerful images that represented today’s young Chicana we were very inspired by both Alma López [1] and Yolanda M. López’s [2] work with La Virgen de Guadalupe. Both artists redefined Chicana sexuality in powerful ways by reframing La Virgen; a significant cultural and religious iconography in the Chicana/o community, as a woman who is interpreted and experienced in various ways. Along with them we were also drawn to Sandra Cisneros’ essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” [3]  In her writing, Cisneros offers us a revolutionary understanding of our own sexual power as women. Through their work we were encouraged to think critically about our own unique relationship with La Virgen de Guadalupe.

Our individual relationships with La Virgen inspired this collective project because we realized we had a lot more similarities than differences in how we relate to her and each other. For instance, Lizeth is not very religious, but La Virgen holds symbolic value to how she has come to understand her femininity as a site of empowerment. She had to distance herself from her mother and grandmother’s conceptions of a “good” woman to make sense of her own sexuality. Similarly, Silvia and Maria grew up viewing La Virgen as a symbol of appropriate women behavior. Women are supposed to be docile and pure, especially in the eyes of Catholicism and Mexican culture. Both Maria and Silvia, however, have reclaimed La Virgen by challenging the typical portrayals of womanhood as submissive and passive. They embraced her as a strong figure that is not afraid to claim public space and speak her mind. Kayla sees La Virgen as a symbol of female empowerment because women’s bodies are sacred and sexual. We refuse to have vergüenza of our bodies, our sexualities, and our womanhood; we are beautiful women inside and out.

This project brings together two significant images of womanhood in our community; La Virgen de Guadalupe and the chola. Cholas are often perceived as a threat in our communities because of their political gender performances that re-signify sexuality. In bringing these two symbols of womanhood together we wanted to name ourselves within our communities. We wanted to contest the boundaries of femininity that are imposed on us each and every day. Women have been relegated to the domestic sphere in order to ensure that their role as mothers and wives in patriarchal culture function to affirm narratives of hyper-masculinity and heteronormative values of the heterosexual family. “The Cholita de Guadalupe” is our sitio that has allowed us to create a lengua that speaks about Chicana womanhood in empowering ways.[4] Her attitude of toughness is a fundamental mechanism of survival. Our survival. And it is through our toughness that we reclaim our femininity, our relationship with La Virgen, and our survival in academia.

While many may be curious as to why we have decided to use specific symbols in our work, we believe it is more powerful to leave our art open to interpretation. We do not feel it is necessary to unpack all the elements of the image because every symbol can mean different things for different people. The beauty of art is that it can speak to people in various ways, and it is precisely that ambiguity that we believe allows for a more inclusive conversation about religious identity, womanhood, and sexuality.

Some background information about this project: We worked on a beautiful painting together as part of our final group project for our Comparative Ethnic Studies course: “La Chicana in U.S. Society.” We wanted to draw attention to the ways family, religion (Marianismo), gender performances, and machismo (to name a few), shape and discipline constructions of womanhood in Chicana/o culture.[5] Our image reclaims the Virgin Mary as a chola; she is our “La Cholita de Guadalupe.” Inspired by a number of Chicana scholars and Chicana artists, we wanted to explore political identity from a Chicana feminist perspective in order to complicate the ways culture, religion, patriarchy, and the heteronormative Mexican family influence Chicana sexuality, as both a site of systematic oppression and a political space of discovery and resistance. Our work aims to incite a critical discussion on sexuality as both a political site and a politicized choice, especially for first generation Chicanas in higher education. The materials used were tempura paint, fabric paint, and bandana fabric. We, who worked really hard on this project, are all Chicanas, and are committed to our communities, especially on our campus.

References

[1] Alma Lopez, “Our Lady,” 1999 (Special thanks to Raquel Salinas & Raquel Gutierrez).
[2] Yolanda Lopez, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgen of Guadalupe, 1978.
[3] Sandra Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” 1996.
[4] Emma Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes From a Chicana Survivor,” 1991.
[5] Cherrie Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism,” 1983.

Lizeth Gutierrez is a Ph.D. student in the American Studies program at Washington State University. She researches representations in popular culture of gendered and raced Latinidades and is particularly interested in the commercialization of mainstream Latinidad in relation to U.S. discourses on second-class citizenship.

Silvia Garcia is a senior at Washington State University and is currently majoring in general studies, but hopes to finish her mechanical engineering degree.

Maria Saucedo is a spring 2014 graduate from Washington State University. She completed her Bachelors of Arts in Comparative Ethnic Studies and was the Chair/Coalition for Women Students at the Women’s Resource Center.

Kayla Potts is a junior at Washington State University and is majoring in Women Studies with a minor in Psychology. 

Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness

by Lizeth Gutierrez

“Because I, a mestiza

continually walk out of one culture

and into another

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa is my academic godmother. She has provided me the tools to create a sense of home. A space of survival. A space to call my own in the academy. This piece is inspired by Anzaldúa’s work, specifically her writing in Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa provided me the tools to name my restlessness. “Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness” is about my journey to self-discovery. In this poem I recite ‘culture’ and ‘race’ as homogenous markers of identity only to strategically address the multiple identities I wear on my body. I do not seek to homogenize identity or discipline racial categories of identification. Culture and identity, as Anzaldúa’s writing reveals, are complex, multifaceted and fluid.

I wrote this piece when I was an undergraduate student at Grinnell College. As a current PhD student at Washington State University this poem continues to speak to me in painful ways. I am a first generation Chicana college student from Los Angeles, California who decided to pursue her Bachelor’s degree in small town Grinnell, Iowa. I oftentimes felt dislocated there and swore to myself that I would never go back to rural towns. I did not belong in those spaces. Ironically, my distaste for small towns brought me back to a similar rural town: Pullman, Washington. Maybe I am a masochist. Perhaps it is in that masochism that lies my sense of home. Who knows, but it is with this knowledge that I offer you a piece of who I am.

 

!Ya no!

No quiero sentirme marginalizada por tu hipocresía

Me exotizas por ser Latina.

Me llamas “lazy” por ser Mexicana.

Y te burlas de mi acento porque no es como el tuyo.

Tú dices “pizza” cuando yo digo “piksa.”

 

You tell me I can achieve the American dream, and yet set boundaries that aim to intimidate me and make me question my own abilities.

Si, vivo en un lugar de contradicciones.

I am in a college where I am the “exotic Latina,” pero soy la “outsider” en mi familia.

La “pocha.”

La “ya te crees muy miss thing porque vas a coh-ledge”

No me encuentro ni aquí, ni allá.

 

Why do you make me feel like I have to choose only one culture?

Soy mestiza, una hybrid, una mixture.

Anzaldúa me lo grita al oído in my dreams.

 

I, like Anzaldúa, believe in the new Latina consciousness.

Una conciencia que reconoce y tolera las contradicciones de mis dos culturas.

I love frijoles y las tortillas hechas a mano, and let’s not forget the smell of el cilantro en la salsa roja.

Y adoro el crispy chicken sandwich with large fries de McDonalds.

 

Soy Mexicana como mi abuela, like my mother who must constantly fight against the machismo of our patriarchal culture.

Y soy Americana: conquering my dreams and goals a como de lugar is the mentality of my gobierno capitalista.

 

Tú  te sigues sintiendo perdida, abandoned, ahogada en un mar that restricts your identity

because it tells you constantly that you are not enough Mexican, ni suficientemente Americana.

Date cuenta that you are more than one culture, no te de vergüenza, no te escondas.

 

Do not let the waves of assimilation trap you.

No te dejes.

Nada. Nada más rápido. Defiendete, you can do it.

 

Our history has shown us that Chicanas are guerrilleras.

Tú como yo somos la negotiation of two distinct worlds.

Anzaldúa dice que vivas sin fronteras.

 

No dejes que la corriente del mar te lleve.

Do not let it make you choose one culture over the other.

¡Lucha!

Lucha por tu crossroads.

 

This internal fight no acaba hasta que hagas tu propia negociación de identidad.

Revolutionize your sense of self.

No eres prisionera.

 

You are not less than one culture or more than the other.

You are all cultures.

La güera. La negra. La india. La mestiza.

Eres la voz de la nueva Chicana and you have the inner-strength to create your third space of survival.

 

A space Anzaldúa so proudly calls “una conciencia de mujer.”

 

Lizeth Gutierrez is a graduate student in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She researches representations in popular culture of gendered and raced Latinidades and is particularly interested in the commercialization of mainstream Latinidad in relation to U.S. discourses on second-class citizenship.

Review of Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives

by Paloma Martinez-Cruz

Verónica Reyes. Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives. Pasadena, CA: Arktoi Books, 2013. 111 pages. ISBN 978-0-9890361-0-8. $18.95

chopperchopper coverI left my hometown of Los Angeles to attend college in the Bay Area, and then I left California altogether to attend graduate school in New York City. Many denizens of the San Francisco Bay and the five boroughs of New York City have no love for my birth town, so when people asked me where I was from, I felt shy about admitting I was from the place known as “72 suburbs in search of a city.”  One day a fellow student shared with me what he loved about it: “You can feel how it’s red and brown.” After he said this, I realized that he was right, and that so many of the quips about L.A. being anti-intellectual and superficial were, in truth, about the other L.A., the tinsel L.A. that eclipses our red and brown realities, until violence erupts in the streets, or Chicana feminist jota poets like Verónica Reyes sound the thunder of our lives in verse.

The poems in Chopper! Chopper!, Reyes’ first published collection, envision East L.A. as the continuity of Mexican experience, participating fully in an Americas-based spirituality that venerates the natural world.  As with physical sacred gatherings, the volume begins with a blessing.  The poem “Desert Rain: blessing the land” [sic] surveys the desert cityscape with devotion.

The agua took her back to her childhood in México

rain that blessed her alma como copal shrouding her skin

She inhaled the desert aroma over concrete, nopales,

and limones beneath splintered street telephone wires

Socorro breathed in once and inhaled México in East L.A.

While I am exhilarated by the red and brown affirmation of Mesoamerica in Los Angeles, some of the portraits of Chicana ethnicity in this volume echo others. From my perspective as a Latin American/Latina Studies scholar, I question what seems like a nostalgia that conflates spirit, nature, and nation. Although some of the poetic turns tended toward predictability, there is also much to recommend in this volume.  Reyes is at her best when she navigates the difficulty of voicing bicultural, transnational experience by moving in for the hyper close-up, telling us what she alone is capable of observing.  In “Theoretical Discourse over ‘Sopa’ (what does it really mean?),” she playfully employs academic jargon to try to make sense of a word that has multiple meanings.

All our lives we called it “sopa”

Differentiated “sopa” from fideo

            to estrellas or melones

labels for different pastas

titles to establish subjectivity

within the hegemonic world of pasta.

The poem concludes with the narrator and her sister agreeing to use the word sopa the same way that their mother had used it – to refer to Mexican rice – thereby legitimizing local, intimate knowledge over official language usage.

As in the postmodern approach to “sopa,” Reyes’ poetry consistently repositions authority so that cholos, jotas and bus patrons are key culture makers.  In “Super Queer,” the queer Chicana becomes a supernatural champion, managing to survive homophobia, bashing and “what you thought no human being can withstand.”  Where others are tempted to perceive marginalization or victimization, Reyes tells of pride and strength, urging the listener to “take off those silly straight lenses that skew your vision.”  In “El Bus,” the narrator is proud to announce, “I speak in bus routes,” which, as Angelenos and visitors to the city are aware, is a dialect spoken almost exclusively by the poorest of the poor.  In Reyes’ poem, the speaker claims “You got it, esa or ese, I know the system/It’s in my blood to travel the calles via el bus” as if to boast of royal lineage.  Reyes’ poems invert the parameters of social inclusion, so that queer and street folk decide who belongs, and misguided wearers of “silly straight lenses” and novice bus riders become the outlanders in need of charitable assistance.

Vehicles of surveillance and pesticide application populate Reyes’ poetic universe, producing a bellicose environment in which East L.A. residents are surrounded by drone-like aerial hostility.  “Green Helicopters” describes the apple-orchard helicopter that sprays toxins on the migrant workers, and “Chopper! Chopper!” depicts the play of young neighborhood children who turn the menacing sounds and lights of police helicopters into fantastic games.

The cops announced to the convict, “We know where you are.  We know…”

And Xochitl ran out of breath chasing the big white light piercing the darkness

She stopped and stared up at the helicopter slicing the chapopote sky for a moment

It was almost as if it were stuck like the mammoths, the saber-toothed tiger, the Chumash

woman whose bones remained deep underground until the archaeologist came

The people screamed and wailed to be set free from the tar that pulled them down

that swallowed them little by little as they struggled to get out from the bottom

Still the thick goo engulfed them hole suffocating their skin, filling their mouths

Xochitl’s brown eyes stared at the chopper swirling in East L.A.’s summer sky

But the helicopter broke free, pulled back its white light and flew away to the hill

Here, the child Xochitl plays under a tar firmament where the craft hovers like a relic from California’s Pleistocene epoch, witnessing centuries of ancestors struggle against asphyxiation across the sky: just another summer night in East L.A.

While most of Chopper! Chopper! must remain unexamined here, there can be no doubt that Reyes achieves what she sets out to do. In her poem “A Xicana Theorist,” her queer protagonist moves through a lesbian, Latina social space, and yet she poses the question, “Are we really safe?” The final verse reveals the highest potential that theoretical work can aspire to achieve.

She dances with the woman from the bar

She holds her gently around the waist

She leans her body closely into hers

She wants to cry and tell her she is hurt

…tell her she is tired of fighting

…tell her she feels alone and scared

She wants to heal her wounds

These last lines of “A Xicana Theorist” leave room for interpreting whether the wounds she wishes to heal belong to her or to her dance partner, and this blurring of bodily boundaries and subjects allows the reader to interpret a more expansive notion of selfhood that includes all the Latinas who are wearied by building their lives in spaces that are racially negative and sexually oppressive. The desire that is repeated in these last lines does not hone in on sexual appetite, which would make sense given the erotically charged environment of the bar, but rather emphasizes the act of telling. The telling is the medicine the poetic voice craves in order to heal wounds.

In the tar and asphalt prism of East L.A., Reyes’ poems unearth and celebrate centuries of red and brown truths. While some of the writing resorts to idealizing Mexico as a font of political and spiritual alignment, the collection convinces readers to rethink urban spaces and witness the cunning and courage that develop under a dome of both hyper vigilance and civil neglect.  In the midst of roaring engines, slicing blades and hostile surveillance lights, her courageous act of telling manages to cultivate a space of safety and healing: a place for pride to grow.

Paloma Martinez-Cruz, PhD, works in the areas of contemporary hemispheric cultural production, women of color feminism, performance and alternative epistemologies. She is the author of Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and the translator of Ponciá Vicencio, the debut novel by Afro-Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo, about a young Afro-Brazilian woman’s journey from the land of her enslaved ancestors to the multiple dislocations produced by urban life. Martinez-Cruz is also the editor of Rebeldes: A Proyecto Latina Anthology, a collection of stories and art from 26 Latina women from the Midwest and beyond. Currently Martinez-Cruz is at work on a book publication examining the resistance fronts found in Chicano/a popular culture. [5/1/14 post updated to correct an editorial error]

Bang Bang

by Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

[O]ne can never assume that anything one does, and especially the moral and political position one takes, is innocent and does not need to be interrogated for complicity.   —Barbara Applebaum

          I think love is an imperative. It obligates you. —Marisa de los Santos

Once, confessing to a colleague that I was going to attend a J.Lo. concert, she looked at me and without missing a beat simply said: “We all have our weaknesses. And that’s fine.” I can’t even begin to explain how grateful to her I was for saying that. Although I understand that it is practically impossible to lead a purely and unadulterated politically-sound existence, sometimes I struggle with the simple things. Like popular culture. I wish I were that person who could never be enticed by cool performers with a connection to Puerto Rico, or by overly processed and packaged images of gorgeous Latinas in the media, or by the incessant spectacle of reality television. Or scripted TV. Or B movies. Definitely B movies. I also wish I were too together to be seduced by songs with problematic lyrics and weird videos. But alas, those are only wishes, and I am not that person. The truth is that more frequently than I would care to admit, I find myself immersed in all of it, even as I dutifully try to resist its lure. I have had certain levels of success in my attempts at resistance, but at the end of the day, and to reiterate, I am not the person that I wish I were. I tend to get enthralled by all sorts of images, lyrics, and performers that taunt my politics and academic training, which is to say, I become enthralled by all sorts of things that shouldn’t appeal to me. And as a professor of ethnic studies and gender, this can lead to a distressing struggle, because I do know better. Of course, given what I do for a living, I have been able to work through some of my “weaknesses” by studying and analyzing them and by writing academic pieces about them: the ultimate means of intellectual penance we academics have at our disposal. But the fact remains, I still fall for problematic performers, shows, marketing campaigns, and songs.

Case in Point:

In 2005, Mexican American actor Michael Peña formed a rock band that he named Nico Vega (after his mom, Nicolasa). Last year, the band did a cover of the song “Bang Bang,” originally sung by Nancy Sinatra. The song should trouble anyone with a basic understanding of gender relations and violence against women. It should also alarm anyone with a pulse, as its literal meaning walks a very fine line between being politically objectionable and being downright wrong. Just to give you an idea, here are the first 8 lines of the song: “I was five and he was six/We rode on horses made of sticks/He wore black and I wore white/He would always win the fight/ Bang bang, he shot me down/Bang bang, I hit the ground/Bang bang, that awful sound/Bang bang, my baby shot me down.” The last four lines, the ones with the bangs become the chorus for the song, so before you begin to wonder whether the song gets any better after those lines, I will earnestly and promptly answer, no it does not. Not only that, but here I am about to tell you why I find the song metaphorically compelling. See, weakness through and through.

First Bang:

I have been haunted by this song since I first heard Nico Vega’s lead singer Aja Volkman sing it a few months back. It was as if I could actually hear the sound of each bang as she sang it.  Almost as if I could feel each bang against my skin and my heart even though I have never been shot in my life. The song affected me, there is no other way to explain it. So in trying to answer Applebaum’s call to interrogate complicity, I asked myself why. After pondering that for a while, this is my answer.

I am a Latina lesbian. Hardly much of an answer, right?  But as I thought about it, being shot down (metaphorically, of course) by men who should have loved me and had my back is a fairly familiar feeling. Friends and family members alike. Of course, women have done their part too, especially women protecting those men, and I suppose I will eventually find a song for them as well. But for now, there is this: each bang in the song feels real because it symbolizes rejection, abandonment, and contempt. That is to say, each bang represents the violence of neglect (bang bang, he shot me down), of the spoken word (bang bang, I hit the ground), and of silence (bang bang, that awful sound). Each bang is a reminder of a person who has chosen not to acknowledge me and my life, leaving me on the ground to pick up the pieces (bang bang, my baby shot me down).

Final Bang:

I am not trying to justify being affected by the song. I am, however, trying to exact my penance and work through why I am affected by it. I know I am taking a risk by writing this piece, for I may be seen as romanticizing a decidedly violent narrative. But I am only trying to explain (perhaps to myself) why I have developed a soft spot for a song so distastefully against my politics. I am writing this because as Isabel Allende tells us, writing is a “journey into memory and the soul.” And also, because as Audre Lorde warned, “only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.”  I am writing this because I loved those men, friends and family, who have, for all intents and purposes, disowned me. I still love them, and to paraphrase Marisa de los Santos, as an imperative, love obligates me. It obligates me to think and to write. But it also obligates me to maintain my integrity and remain true to my compass, even if as Applebaum suggests, my compass may be complicit in my weakness for popular culture. I will finish this short writing by sharing the song’s last two verses, the least violent ones, yet, the ones that hurt the most: “He didn’t even say goodbye. He didn’t take the time to lie.” And suddenly, my weakness for popular culture doesn’t seem so daunting, because as problematic as it may be, it can also help me articulate my pain.

Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She engages in research involving Latinos in the US, “the War on Terror,” US/Puerto Rico relations, and popular culture. She is a co-editor of A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality, and a co-author of Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality and Post 9/11 Constructions of Citizenship, both published by Rodopi Press in 2009 and 2010 respectively. With C. Richard King and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, she  is co-author of Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children, published in 2010 by Rowman and Littlefield.

Remembering Nelson Mandela

11206285456_6b5da7bb8f_z(1)
Photo by Flickr User HelenSTB
CC BY-SA 2.O

by Inés Hernandez-Avila

I wrote this poem for Nelson Mandela in 1988 because he truly moved me, all along the path of his life as I began to know about him, and his spirit will continue to move me, always.  The poem speaks for me of what I think of him.  He was a great Spirit who came to this earth to be Nelson Mandela, and he kept the radiance he brought with him from the spirit lands of the ancestors.  With the example of his life, he “lifted us up,” as my own Nez Perce elder, Albert Andrews would say.  I have read the poem at literary events, but it has never been published.  On the occasion of Mandela’s death, my dear colleague, Jualynne Dodson asked, on the Ford Foundation Fellows listserv, what the impact of Mandela had been on the Chicana/o community.  I sent her my poem, from my own Native (Nez Perce) and Tejana perspective.  As I re-read what I had written in 1988, I saw that everything that I wrote for him all these years ago, still holds true.  And I did write the poem while listening to Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano composition, “Mandela.”  Ibrahim, moved by Mandela, composed his piece, and I was moved by the beautiful music for this great human being, this Maestro, who brought his light to the world.  It is a poem from my heart.

For Nelson–Leader, Tribal Person, Elder*

Summer 1988, on the occasion of Mandela’s 70th birthday, when the South African government offered him a six hour visit with his family

Oh Mandela, Mandela

I sing your name

in the name of all peoples locked in and up

in their very cells

weighed down by all the forces

that do not want their hearts light

and spirits lifted

Nelson, Nelson

Triumph is a sweet song

the one you know

saxaphones jubilant for your spirit

concentrating

in your space

to will your conscious waking

sleeping dreams

for all of us to see

And it is hard, Mandela, Mandela

Six hours offered you with family

with Winnie and your daughters

six hours to hold each other

gulp in every detailed facet

talk with hands eyes ears mouth

nose smiles tears

as if the heart of the very mother earth

would burst with joy at such a moment

but this joy cannot be

it is, as you say, not possible

for you are not alone

but one of oh so many whose pain like yours

meted out minutely daily

seeks to engulf you in despair

This visit offered is not to them

but to you

And what is six hours in the face of terror centuries old

horror with the face of most intentional genocide?

Six hours more or less of time

when in those same six hours

Children, little children

sit, like you, in other prison cells for their “subversion”

When heads are cracked and bodies wracked

across the landscape of a continent that is yours theirs

A motherland keeps count of each heart battered to a bloody pulp

to stop its count of life

And you know, too, that count

So you stop the maddened offer of a visit

What would you have said, Mandela, Mandela?

“Shall we have tea, Winnie?

Daughters, rub my back, I am so sore.

What shall we talk about?”

And in the next cells casually inflicting itself

in studied vehemence on seemingly countless others

the obscenity of racial/cultural boundless hatred

Nelson, Nelson

A visit?

We are visiting for you all over the world

for you and with you in our homes your face shines

from  the walls of our hearts

Poets gather to sing for you

Peoples gather to struggle with you

Workers pass the light of your name from mouth to mouth

Races, classes and sexes unite for you and for the people

Children learn of you and of the brave children

through whose eyes and spirits we find courage

Agelessness is where principled commitment is born and lives

Even in the splattered, broken bones of death

that wants so badly to detain the march of liberation

in all its splendor

Mandela, Mandela

you are real

The people you stand firm for are real and true

The visionary will outlast the cynic, the impotent and depraved

It is a matter of time

Only a small matter of time

The freedom spirit is soaring from heart to heart

around the world

To stop for six hours for convenience?

No, Nelson, Nelson

How you knew how time is precious

How you knew to keep on soaring

Oh, Mandela, Mandela

Keep on soaring

*With thanks to Abdullah Ibrahim, because this poem was written to his composition “Mandela.”

©Inés Hernández-Avila 1988

Inés Hernández-Avila is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC-Davis, where she is also Co-Director of the UC-Davis Social Justice Initiative. She has been involved in creating both the MA and PhD program in Native American Studies at UC-Davis. Her research and teaching focuses on indigenous literatures of the Americas and Chicana literature and feminism.

 

Dictionary for a New Century

By Kimberly Blaeser

What would housework mean

to women who haul water from springs,

use lye soap and scrub boards,

who hang flypaper on ceilings

and sew cloth cupboard curtains

on the family treadle machine?

What does kitchen appliance mean

to those toasting bread in ovens

of old wood stoves,

or bathroom appliance

to those donning snow boots

to walk to the outhouse?

Somewhere between microwave pancakes

and the state-of-the-art mixmaster

I trip over the kitchen slop pail

retch at the smell of lard rendering.

Just as my fingers settle on the dvd remote

I remember to empty the ash can.

At three my daughter kisses and releases her fish

at four she asks if chicken is a dead bird.

At forty like Billy Pilgrim I come unstuck in time

still wait to take my turn in a three-foot washtub,

then light candles and soak in a warm whirlpool

now camped uneasily between progress and nostalgia.

With a heavy duty vacuum and a lightweight canister

I cruise the air-conditioned floors of my house

sweep away unearned guilt or hire a cleaning lady.

With electric everything and my computer whirring

I work my way through memories and philosophies

Try to recollect that proverb about idle hands.

What does convenience mean in a country of prosperity?

Should we use or release our histories?

Can education repay old debts?

If science and technology are the answers

who have we hired to ask the questions?

And what was it you said about women’s work?

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing. She has published three books of poems, including Apprenticed to Justice (Great Wilbraham, Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing Ltd., 2007), where this poem appears; a scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition; and numerous articles and book chapters. Blaeser is of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation.

 

Chapina 2.0: Reflections of A Central American Solidarity Baby

May 13, 2013

Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú visits Los Angeles, CA, and tells her story at an event organized by the Guatemalan Information Center. Norma Chinchilla, the author’s mother, translates. Circa 1982. (Photo courtesy of Maya Chinchilla.)

Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú visits Los Angeles, CA, and tells her story at an event organized by the Guatemalan Information Center. Norma Chinchilla, the author’s mother, translates. Circa 1982. (Photo courtesy of Maya Chinchilla.)

By Maya Chinchilla

“Knowing the truth may be painful, but it is without any doubt, highly healthy and liberating” –Slain Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, 1998

In the 1980s, my parents and a group of Guatemalan exiles founded the Guatemalan Information Center, a human rights and solidarity organization focused on international solidarity with Central America. They showed documentaries like When the Mountains Tremble and slide shows to raise awareness about the extreme human rights violations in Guatemala, which were enacted with the complicity of the U.S. government under the Regan administration. They spent nights and weekends organizing events and staffing literature tables all over Los Angeles, often accompanied by guest speakers, music, art and food.  I vividly remember the leaflets and flyers, permeated with the smell of mimeograph ink, and small newsletters that they learned to typeset themselves. Like other dedicated organizers, my parents didn’t have a regular bedtime.  I remember my sister and I found places to sleep in corners of the room when meetings would go on late into the night. I have written about this experience in my poem, “Solidarity Baby,” in which I call my home a “Central American underground railroad,” or a place where refugees and exiles rested after running for their lives.

I grew up hearing about dictators such as Jose Efraín Ríos Montt, a cruel army general who, after leading an internal coup became the de-facto president in 1982. He is only one of many U.S. supported military regimes that took leadership after the years following a U.S.-backed military coup in 1954. This same general and former president was recently on trial for crimes against humanity and for helping to design and execute the scorched earth policy that resulted in the Maya genocide during the 1980s, the most brutal period of Guatemala’s 36-year war. This historic trial marks the first time a former head of state has been convicted of genocide in his own country and is the result of years of struggle from many, like my parents, who never thought they would see this day.

I was five or six years old the first time I saw When the Mountains Tremble, a powerful documentary about the repression of indigenous Guatemalans by the military dictatorship and the ways in which Mayan and Ladino Guatemalans organized themselves to resist repression and to work for much-needed fundamental social and economic reforms. We watched it in my living room, where organizers and friends sat on couches, folding chairs, and even on the floor and leaning up against each other in anticipation of the story of the film. As a dreamy yet observant kid, tiny for my age, I would casually slip in and out of the room without much notice. Curled up in my mother or my father’s lap, I would listen to the rise and fall of their breathing, their hearts pounding as their words echoed through their chest discussing the issues at hand.

Then there he was, Ríos Montt, his face huge on the screen, smiling, overly confident, invoking the name of God and talking as though Jesus himself had blessed his crusade to protect the US and Guatemalan elite interests from the poverty-stricken masses. What I remember most vividly from the film was the sound of the military helicopters: chocka chocka chocka chocka. They were the same grayish green ones I saw in the TV show M.A.S.H. and in movies about the U.S. military in Korea or Vietnam.  I still jump at the sound of thunderous helicopter blades, not because of their use by police in Long Beach, where I grew up, or in the Bay Area, where I now live; it is because of images and sounds of helicopters used by repressive armies against Mayan villagers that are so deeply engraved in my memory.

These memories come in bits and pieces, but what is always present is the feeling of anxiety, the intensity of the silences, the power of the personal testimonies, and the sense of the life and death urgency of the times. While I may not have understood the complexities of dictatorship, repression, organized resistance, and the U.S.’s assistance to authoritarian governments at a young age, I did understand that there were things that should not or could not be said at school or with other family members because they might not understand or, worse, might think of us as “commie sympathizers” and potentially disclose things that might endanger others’ lives.  These included horrific stories of torture, mutilation, death squads, disappearances, and images of bodies left in public places—that is what happened to people who spoke out, and this filled me with fear.  Of course, there were stories of heroism and bravery and stories about the importance of individual sacrifice for a better life for future generations. Yet the images of repression were so powerful they accompanied me as I went back and forth from the refuge of my home into the world.

At times I feel I absorbed my parents’ anxieties and none of their political training or coping skills. This is the trauma that I believe has been inherited by many of us who are second-generation Central Americans, who were either born over there and left very young or born in the U.S. like me, who did not experience the violence first hand. The impact of the war lives on in our silences and is only healed by knowing the truth, telling our stories in all their complexities and cultivating our creative imagining of a more just and boundless future.

It was not until I had the opportunity to research and write about my family history in college that I was finally able to articulate the weight I had felt all my life and the urgency to put the pieces of my memory together. I found other Central American students—or rather they found me—the majority 1.5-ers who came very young from Guate or El Salvador, who shared their stories and asked me about mine. It was the first time people asked me questions about what I thought about my identity and history and the first time I felt they wanted to listen. I read Central American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican and other Latin American poets. I found myself in the margins between Spanish and English. It was then that I first wrote a poem called “Central American-American,” yearning for my own cultural movement to find names for this 2nd generation experience.

As Guatemalans are apt to do with their corny and dark multilayered humor-coping mechanism, I often joke about our collective skittish Central American paranoia or the worry, the caution, the mistrust: the way I was taught to always know where my shoes were at night in case we had to just get up and go; the lectures from my parents on how to answer the phone and who was allowed to pick me up at school; my training to remember specific numbers for emergencies, to avoid saying too much; that everyone was shady until proven otherwise and the way every time we went to Guate, I was told that being too “Gringa” could get me in trouble, but how the act of forgetting and not asking too many questions could also keep me safe. Some of this was the usual conversation for cautious parents to have with their elementary-school-aged, latch-key kids, but I knew for us it was more than that.

Today, just hearing any little thing about Guatemala in the news as a 2.0 Chapina causes my body to tense in places. Some of that tension is actually excitement that we will finally be able to hear more of the truth, that others will understand our collective intensity around the need to know more, the hunger to find justice and move beyond only speaking of the violence to never forget, so as to never let it happen again. And now, more recently, I continue to put the pieces together when I share my writing with others and show my own students’ documentaries like When the Mountains Tremble.  Showing films like this one still cause me anxiety and sadness; but, more than anything now, I choke up with emotion when I think about the incredible strength and resiliencies of those that have survived to tell these stories.

I still remember the sound of the Quiché-Maya accented Spanish of Rigoberta Menchú, the young narrator of the documentary, with her bright, focused eyes and hands folded calmly in her lap. Her words were interspersed with the sounds of the boots of the fresh–faced, idealistic guerilla fighters, mostly indigenous men and women, hiking through the mountains, sharing their dreams about the more peaceful and humane world they hoped to create for future generations. I remember the deep baritones of the cocky generals explaining the importance of resisting the supposedly Cuban-influenced “subversives” and the face of the often Mayan-descended young military soldiers with their M-15 rifles, looking like they could be the children or brothers of the dead villagers and the wailing mothers.

It is with the same combination of pride and deep sorrow that I watched the trial against Rios Montt, an unprecedented historic event, in which survivors of the violence and genocide, along with hundreds of expert witnesses, have been documenting their stories and presenting evidence for crimes against humanity in a court of law and as a matter of public record, in hopes of finally bringing the perpetrators of the violence to justice.
There have been many moments of frustration and dramatic attempts at disrupting the proceedings of this trial. But the trial and what it symbolizes for so many people in Guatemala and outside the country who have remained persistent—from those who experienced the violence first hand–to the documentarians, the forensic investigators, the writers, the scholars, the organizations such as the ones my parents were involved in—this day feels like a small yet definite triumph. One of the most powerful moments of the trial came when more than 30 Mayan-Ixil women, with their heads half covered in traditional weavings to protect their identity, testified in court to the systematic rape they experienced and witnessed, the dismemberment, murder of children, family and wiping out entire villages. They had survived to tell the truth and were willing to continue risking their lives to do so.

This trial is not about revenge. Nothing can bring back the dead or heal the trauma inflicted upon a generation of people.  Instead, this is an opportunity to record the truth as public record in a Latin American country that has never witnessed anyone brought to justice within its own borders, where perpetrators continue to act with impunity. This is an opportunity to break the silence, however long it takes, to declare, as has been repeated over and over: Sí hubo genocidio. Yes. There was a genocide in Guatemala.

As physically and emotionally hard as it has been to write this, I feel that by telling my story, I access a ounce of the strength of the many people I saw give their personal testimony over the years. This is an act of bearing witness, telling you, “I experienced this with my own eyes.” It disrupts the silences and the official stories that seek to erase the personal toll, each of the individual human beings and their suffering. It also testifies to the generations of colonial violence and racism that continues today.  Finally, it accounts for the feelings of madness that come along when you are obsessed with telling the truth and hoping someone will hear you; hoping that more people will act, yet realizing that you can’t wait for anyone to tell your story for future generations.  So many overwhelming feelings after the announcement that Rios Montt has indeed been sentenced and found guilty. After so much time and so much struggle I feel a sense of a momentary relief, a moment of justice after so much sorrow and loss at such a high human cost. All this fighting for truth, reconciliation and justice has not been in vain.

BEFORE THE SCALES, TOMORROW

By Otto Rene Castillo
(Guatemalan Poet of the Committed Generation)

And when the enthusiastic
story of our time
is told,
for those
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
—those who have suffered most from it.
And that
being ahead of your time
means suffering much from it.
But it’s beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.
And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it’s all still so cold,
so dark.

Maya Chinchilla is a poet, filmmaker, and educator, who has taught English at the Peralta Colleges and Latina/o Studies at San Francisco State University. Currently, she is working on her first poetry manuscript for Kórima Press. www.mayachapina.com

Comment(s):

  1. Miriam    May 21, 2013 at 1:01 PM

    thank you for writing this, maya. putting together the puzzle of who you are. where you come from. the mountain trembling weight your name hefts. linked to the blood chilling images from the dictator’s trial. all power to the women & men of fire and heart who would not be silenced or shamed. wishing them & their babies & their dreams bulletproof protection. wishing you love & delight in your newfound voice. xoxo, miriam

  2. Sara Ramirez    May 13, 2013 at 6:42 PM
    Maya, thank you for your beautiful words of wisdom and for the corazón you put into this piece.
  3. Rio Yañez    May 13, 2013 at 7:23 PM
    Maya, thank you for showing your reflections on this profound moment in history. International solidarity means that our personal experiences with politics, movements, and trauma have equal weight across borders. Keep telling your story!

  4. Anonymous    May 14, 2013 at 1:55 AM
    Yes indeed! No matter what happens after this conviction was delivered in the case of Genocide in Guatemala, or whether more political recourse will be waged as a tool for perpetual impunity in Guatemala, many facts will remain true no matter what. One of them, the VOICE of Guatemalan Mayan women were spoken and heard across the world. A testament to the courage of Ixil women, proof that not even genocide was able to silent them.

  5. ¡Exactamente! No importa que pase después de esta convicción en el caso de Genocidio en Guatemala, o qué otros recursos técnico legales son usados como herramienta para perpetuar la impunidad en Guatemala, ya que los hechos son auto evidentes sin importar que hagan. Uno de estos hechos es que las VOCES de la mujeres Mayas guatemaltecas hablaron y fueron escuchadas en todo el mundo. Como testamento de la valentía de la mujer Ixil, prueba que ni siquiera el genocidio pudo apagar sus voces.

  6. Sonia    May 14, 2013 at 12:48 PM

    beautiful, honest, sad, joyful, history, beautiful

  7. Unknown    May 14, 2013 at 1:19 PM

    Maya, thank you. Thank you for existing as you are, and for openign to the sharing of your story. Please, keep story-ing.

    This piece left me speechless, and streaming sweet tears of sorrow amongst the genocide that ravages the Americas. I am grateful for the soul-heart-psychic-work you do daily, breath by breath, cuz it seems necessary to nourish the courage and genius required to weave together words as story as reprieve and inspiration to keep struggling, such as you have here.

    Also – I’m in a PhD program in Urban Planning, a place where I am exploring genocide in the Americas. That institutional program has been a seed for something else, a parallel universe Planning as Poetry PhD program, that is being birthed with coaching by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and in collaboration with other folks. Right now, our workshops are exploring forced movement in relation to settler colonialism and being 1.5ers living in the U.S. I’d love to share this piece for us workshoppers to read together. THANK YOU!

  8. Anonymous    May 14, 2013 at 11:28 PM

    On Friday, May 10, when Efrain Rios Montt’s verdict was read, Judge Jazmin Barrios stated: “The crime of genocide affects all Guatemalans, because it damaged the social fabric of the country.” The genocide, Barrios added, caused multi-generational pain, trauma and damages. And it is this multi-generational impact of the genocide that my colleague and friend Maya Chinchilla eloquently expresses in her essay “Chapina 2.0: Reflections of A Central American Solidarity Baby”. Gracias!

  9. Pamela Yates    May 15, 2013 at 8:57 AM

    Maya, it is so gratifying to know that our film WHEN THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE had this effect on you and helped make you the wonderful woman, the writer you are today. I wanted to let you know that WHEN THE MTS. TREMBLE and GRANITO DE ARENA (the sequel) are now streaming online free on PBS in both English and Spanish right here.
    http://www.pbs.org/pov/granito/watch-when-the-mountains-tremble-online.php#.UZOvviv72K8
    We’re doing this to commemorate the guilty verdict for Ríos Montt. We also have put up filmed moments from inside the genocide trial DICTATOR IN THE DOCK right here
    http://www.granitomem.com Please get in touch with me. I want to know you. Pamela Yates, Director, “When the Mts. Tremble” pamela@skylightpictures.com

  10. Clarissa Rojas    May 17, 2013 at 1:51 PM

    you brought us into the living words of witness.
    Ixil woman says during the trial: “even assuming that the General Rios Montt stays in jail, he will be fed every night, what about us? We still have to worry about whether we will die of hunger.”  this is a historic moment on which the work to address the legacies and continuities of colonial and neo-colonial violence in Guatemala builds. the mic is turned way up on the everyday enactments of genocide and feminicide. solidarity starts with gesturing toward listening. gracias maya. may all the words that beckon to be spoken arise and guide the tasks before us all.

  11. Luz Vazquez-Ramos    May 29, 2013 at 8:01 PM

    Well done Mayita! Keep telling your story.

  12. MARLENE LEGASPI    June 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM

    I always feel blessed when I have an opportunity to read another person’s words and how they depict such an immovable, intricate and complex aspect of their experience and identity. I really appreciate you pointing to trauma children retain into adulthood when much of their residual emotions may be based on memories and the stories they were told. My mother once told me during WWII that a special siren would go off when she was a little girl in grade school informing everyone that the Japanese military were coming to abduct children to force them into sexually slavery, and how routine it was for them to hide and when I remember her story the exact emotion I had from such a visceral account comes right back to me, as if it ever really left. But thank you for sharing this! Thank you.

  13. Cyber Chapina    June 27, 2013 at 6:29 PM

    I want to thank you all for your own powerful comments, for reading and sharing this essay, for the encouragement and incredible response, and to MALCS Mujeres Talk blog for the editorial support in the writing of this piece. Although the trial has been partially annulled and is for the time being on hold, I still believe all this work and sacrifice has not been in vain. I originally wrote this not knowing what the out come would be but still with the urgency to write and put these pieces together.I was hesitant in my own celebration but found it necessary to celebrate each victory no matter how big or small, no matter how many steps forward or back we may feel this process has taken all of us. The resilience of those who continue to fight for justice remind me that there are those of us who can not give up. Failure is a luxury. Survival is a victory in and of itself and our cultures and people deserve to heal, thrive in order to change the status quo. Please keep an eye on this important international in internal work being done in Guatemala as well as supporting the diaspora in telling their stories too. Un abrazo. http://www.riosmontt-trial.org/

  14. Roberto Lovato    July 4, 2013 at 2:49 PM

    A few months after you shared this piece,I finally took it out of bookmarks and read it. Well done, Maya. Helped me better understand the tragi-heroic drip of our very violent, very inspired political legacy on the 1.5-2.0 generations. Difficult but necessary to write. I hope it inspires other young people to write because Gerardi was and is write about painful truth. Was glad to see the pic of yer Mom w/ Rigoberta. Thanks for writing and sharing. Un abrazo, R

The Deconstruction/Reconstruction of the Community and Institution Collaborative Model

February 18, 2013

'Archives' by Marino Gonzalez. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

‘Archives’ by Marino Gonzalez. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

By Linda Garcia Merchant

(Crossposted from Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory with permission of author)

These Digital History projects define how existing collecting methods have been tested, challenged and reconstructed to achieve their successful outcomes. Each project takes the basic idea of creating an online resource on knowledge that historically hasn’t been available to interested audiences.

 The community collaborative projects are based on these general ideas.

• A model based on acquisition, preservation and distribution of an existing cultural history parallel to, but not included in the American narrative.

• An anecdotal history through interviews and a history based on material acquisitions in danger of being lost without this effort to acquire and preserve it.

• A history presented in visualizations that organize large amounts of data into a manageable visitor experience. Content that has a goal of informing a range of visitors, engaging a community eager for this history and encouraging future scholarship.

Featured Practitioners:

1. Thuy Vo DangVietnamese American Oral History Project
 (Email:  thuy.vodang@uci.edu)

2. Janet WeaverIowa Women’s Archives, Mujeres Latinas Project
 (Email:  janet-weaver@uiowa.edu

)

3.  Samip MalickSouth Asian American Digital Archive (
Email:  samip@saadigitalarchive.org



)

1. Origins: How did you come up with the original idea for the project? Did the idea come as a response to a community request? Did you approach the community as a result of your research? Did personal experience play a role in your project choice?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
The Vietnamese American Oral History Project assembles, preserves, and disseminates the life stories of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. The idea for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project (VAOHP) came after many years of conversation between academics and community leaders who wanted to see some efforts made to assemble and preserve the stories of Vietnamese Americans. Since the Vietnam-American War ended in 1975, the population of Vietnamese Americans has dramatically increased and the majority of Vietnamese Americans are concentrated in Southern California. With a population of about half a million here, we’ve seen scattered efforts to conduct oral histories, but without institutional backing. I wasn’t until UC Irvine’s School of Humanities received a generous grant from a donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) that we were able to begin this project in the Fall of 2011. I was hired to be the project director and in my first few months on the job that looked at existing models of oral history projects from the Jewish, Japanese, and Chinese American communities (to name a few). Besides connecting with other projects, we also outreached to the Vietnamese language media. In the first year of the project, VAOHP was covered by all 3 Vietnamese-language daily newspapers in Orange County and a handful of radio and television outlets.

I have experience with interview methodology, from my ethnographic field work in San Diego. I am also fully fluent in speaking, reading, and writing Vietnamese, which was a preferred qualification for this position.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)


The original idea of the Mujeres Latinas Project grew out of the priority of the Louise Noun – Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA), an archival repository located in the Main Library of the University of Iowa Libraries. The Archives was created to preserve the papers of Iowa women from all walks of life.

IWA staff started the Mujeres Latinas Project in 2005. Its impetus lay in our realization that at that time no archival repositories within Iowa were actively seeking to preserve the history of Iowa Latinas, whose contributions remained hidden in Iowa history. We originally conceived the project simply as an oral history collection. Between 2005 and 2007 three part-time oral history interviewers Georgina Buendía-Cruz, Teresa García, and Iskar Nuñez were hired to conduct interviews in different parts of the state.  During the same period, additional interviews recorded by IWA staff members Janet Weaver, Kären Mason, and UI reference librarian Rachel Garza Carreón.  During this period over 100 interviews were recorded, the majority of them in four areas of the state along the Mississippi River, and in Mason City in northern Iowa. Since the start, participants in the project have donated a variety of documents to the Archives and the collection has expanded beyond individuals’ papers to include records from organizations important to Latina/o history.  The individual and family papers are preserved under the individual or family name in about twenty collections. Among the organizational records now preserved in IWA are the records of the Davenport League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC Council 10, the records of the Muscatine Migrant Committee and the records of Iowa state LULAC.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We started SAADA because of a critical need not being addressed by other existing archival repositories. Very few materials relating to South Asian Americans are currently included in any other physical repositories. For the vast majority of archives, materials relating to this community fall outside the scope of their collection development policies. The archival materials that do exist are spread widely across collections around the country, making it difficult even for individual researchers to access the materials they need for their work and especially difficult for members of the community to consult them.

SAADA’s digital-only approach to archives presents a major re-conceptualization of traditional archival functions. This innovative, dispersed approach to archives reinterprets the post-custodial model for the digital era. Original archival documents remain with the communities, institutions or individuals from which they originate, while digital access copies are made available for use online.

Like many first and second generation South Asian Americans, I grew up completely unaware of the long and diverse history of South Asians in the United States. I was surprised to learn that Dalip Singh Saund, the first person of South Asian American heritage (and also Asian American heritage), was elected to serve in Congress in 1956. Or that in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that South Asians should not be allowed to become American citizens, a policy that lasted for the next twenty-five years. Or how in 1913 South Asian immigrants on the Pacific Coast founded the Ghadar Party to fight for India’s independence from the British. These are the very kinds of stories that SAADA helps to preserve and make better known.

Since 2010, we have collected and provided access to over 1,000 discrete archival objects, each of which helps to uncover overlooked narratives from South Asian American history. Through outreach, public events, community forums, presentations in classrooms, reference interactions, and the use of blogs, traditional and social media, SAADA also works to create greater awareness about these histories. Materials from the archive have been included in documentary films, books and journal articles. In 2012, the SAADA website received over 73,000 visits.

2.  Structure: Describe the support structure for this project. How was the support developed? Support from your institution (financial, staffing, network space), did this have challenges, if so, what kind, if not, why not? (If you would rather not speak to the challenges, that’s fine, but please do speak to the process).

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)


The VAOHP is housed in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine, thus the department has provided support in terms of an advisory committee, a faculty mentor, and administrative staff that help with tracking the donor budget, equipment, and hiring work study interns to help with transcribing and other related work. I teach a course for the department called “Vietnamese American Experience” once per academic year where I teach students historical-social context and train them in oral history methodology. From this class, we generate one fully-processed oral history per student. I recruit from this class for an independent study/research program for VAOHP where students can continue to conduct oral history interviews or work on community outreach, social media, and website maintenance. Additionally, Professor Linda Vo, gives her Research Methods class the option to work with me on an oral history project and receive course credit through her course. These are all ways we generate interviews and train students in the process. I conduct interviews as well–between 5 to 10 oral histories per month.

We also partner with the Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine, which provides us with network/server space through the libraries’ UCI-Space. The libraries staff worked on the design and general maintenance of the digital repository. We will house the entire VAOHP Collection (hard copy and digital records) in the Southeast Asian Archive.

Finally, I have reached out to community organizations that have conducted oral histories, such as the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation’s 500 Oral Histories Project to acquire their Southern California interviews so we can process these–transcribe, translate, and digitize them for online dissemination. The VAHF owns the copyright to their interviews and out of their 500, they have given us approximately 100 interviews.

Some challenges that have arisen are mainly budget-related. We are working with a very small budget and thus have to utilize volunteers and students to get the interviews processed. The UCI Libraries has kicked in tremendous support in terms of network space, but we anticipate needing to provide them with some support to sustain the website and make the interviews available to the public. The restrictions have affected us in our choice of media, as we only audio-recorded at this point. The cost of video is prohibitive for the libraries.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
We were able to begin the project with small grants from the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Resource Enhancement and Protection-Historical Resource Development Program and the State Historical Society, Inc. As the project grew we secured additional funding from the University of Iowa Libraries and from the University of Iowa’s Year of Public Engagement and Year of the Arts and Humanities.

The IWA’s Mujeres Latinas Project is able to call on resources from the UI Libraries, including access to technology support, state-of-the-art conservation and preservation facilities, and the Iowa Digital Library.  The permanent two-person, full-time staff of the Iowa Women’s Archives continues to maintain the Mujeres Latinas Project as part of its ongoing commitment to preserve the papers of Iowa women and their families.  The IWA website is an essential component of making its collections visible and the UI Libraries supports the maintenance of our website and provides server space for digitized materials.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
SAADA is an independent non-profit organization. In 2008, the founding board members each chipped in a couple hundred dollars to purchase server space for our first website and submit the necessary paperwork to register the organization. From its inception until mid-2012, SAADA existed as an entirely volunteer run effort. However, in an effort to ensure that the organization is well situated to care for and curate the archive, we have begun to work towards building the organization and ensuring its financial sustainability.

In 2011, we applied for and received our organization’s first grant funding and also conducted our first annual fundraising campaign. In 2012, we expanded our fundraising efforts and began working towards hiring our first staff member. In July 2012, I left my position as the Director of the Ranganathan Center for Digital Information at the University of Chicago Library to begin volunteering with SAADA full time. Our fundraising efforts in 2012 went well and I am now SAADA’s first full time paid staff member.

SAADA is a start-up non-profit organization, and we face the same challenges as many other non-profit organizations. One of the primary challenges, of course, is that of fundraising. However, we are fortunate to have a Board of Directors that fully supports the organization’s growth and a volunteer Development Director with expertise in fund development who has helped us approach our fundraising efforts more strategically. I believe that we have the right elements in place to build a financially sustainable organization.

3. Sustainability:  How long has the project been online? What has the feedback been from the community on usability?  From the institution? Has any of the feedback been incorporated into adjustments or additions to the site, the collection or the process of acquisition? How has the collection/acquisition/curation process changed from the beginning to now? When did the development of site infrastructure enter into the process? If you would like to share, what are plans for the future? How have you addressed issues like ‘scope creep’?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
We had a “soft launch” of the website in April 2012, just 5 months after getting UCI’s IRB approval for research. Then in October 2012 we had a formal website launch when we hosted a community reception in Little Saigon (Orange County, California) to demo the website. The event attracted over 250 people, from the community mainly. We had a great amount of media coverage, including an Associate Press story in the days after the reception.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from the community so far. We have yet to receive any constructive criticism about the actual website, only requests for expand the project beyond Southern California and to incorporate video interviews.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)


The Mujeres Latinas collections in the IWA have been included in its website since the project’s inception in 2005.  Collection guides for papers of Iowa Latinas, their families and organizations are added to our website as they become available.  A search for Latinas and their Families currently yields a list of collections with links to their finding aids. Additional collections of varying sizes wait in the wings to be processed and added to the website.

All IWA collection guides are described through the UI Libraries Archon database that allows for detailed description of collections and enhanced searching.  In addition to collection guides, a sampling of documents and photographs are scanned with consent of donors and made available to the public through the Iowa Digital Library.

We are in the process of updating the Mujeres Latinas page of the IWA site to enhance visibility of the Latina collections and provide detailed information about the interviews and related documents.

Our plans for the future include creating a digital version of the 2012 Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives and an expansion of the project to offer offsite digitization in the homes of donors and to expand the scope of the project to encompass central Iowa. Through the UI Libraries digital department we are able to guarantee that the digital materials preserved in our repository will continue to be accessible in a future that brings new technologies that cannot be anticipated by today’s archivists and technology specialists. In this way IWA can promise those who entrust their family papers to us that no matter what the digital world of tomorrow holds, their papers will continue to be accessible.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We put a website online in 2008 with some basic information about the organization. But it was not until 2010, when we began collecting materials in earnest, that we built the website with its current structure and using our current content management system (Drupal 6). The website has undergone some aesthetic changes and added new features over time (such as the visual browsing, map browsing), but the interface and structure of the site have remained relatively consistent. We are just now beginning a process of refreshing our visual identity, branding and updating our website to Drupal 7.

The feedback from the community about our website has been overwhelmingly positive. We have not done any systematic usability testing or user surveys, though this is something that we hope to do in the coming months. However, based on anecdotal feedback, users have found the website easy to use and navigate. We have added some features to the website based on user feedback, such as the visual browsing and map browsing. Other feature requests are on the back burner, but will be implemented at a later date, such as a request to be able to download PDF versions of public domain materials.

SAADA is guided by a collection policy that was approved by the Board of Directors at the organization’s inception. However, given the breadth of the materials included in the collection policy, this year the Board of Directors has outlined three collecting priorities for 2013, which fall within the scope of the collection policy, but specify areas that we would like the archive to grow in the coming year. These priorities will be assessed again in 2014.

Feedback from the community through both informal and formal channels has been important in helping determining the priorities for collecting. For example, many community members have indicated the importance of documenting the South Asian American community post-9/11 and consequently, that is one of the collection priorities for 2013.

4. Building community: Projects like this can create generational and transformational experiences with students, staff and community that create related points of cultural, social, and historical awareness. These types of projects build new communities both virtual and real. What has been the multi-generational experience for your research group? For the community?  What has the larger global community’s response been?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
This project has been a tremendously successful vehicle for forging stronger relationships between the university (mainly the Southeast Asian Archive) and the community and between the different generations in the community. One vehicle that was truly effective was a weekly radio show on Vietnam California Radio (FM 106.3) that I co-hosted bilingually. The show was called “Oral History: Stories between the generations” and the goal was to make the stories we collected even more accessible to the community. The show also served as a recruitment tool to get a wider sampling of narrators to share their life stories with the project. I had students come on air to talk about what they learned in interviewing their parents or those of the first generation. I had narrator clips air thematically to showcase different types of experiences such as family life, migration, and education. This show has reached a really diverse audience in the Vietnamese American community and it proved to be a great media tool, since we were able to publicize our community reception through that show.

Aside from the radio show, the website where all the oral histories are presented has been used by a high school class as part of its curriculum. I invited that high school class to come for a tour of the Southeast Asian Archive and when they were able to get funding for a bus, they came to UCI for the tour. In addition to the Archive tour, I worked with an organization on campus called Southeast Asian Student Association to put together a college panel for the high school class. All these “extramural” activities are really crucial in helping to strengthen the relationships between the VAOHP, Southeast Asian Archive, and the local communities we serve which is multi-generational and quite diverse.

Another example of an inter-generational collaborative initiative through the VAOHP is a student-lead summer research project at a senior apartment in Orange County. My students came into the senior apartments and presented on the VAOHP at an opening social mixer and then recruited narrators to interview from that facility. After 2 quarters, they collected 8 interviews and shared their “findings” at a closing social mixer. The product of this initiative will be a bounded copy of life stories for the senior apartments’ library, individual CDs for the narrators, and a presentation on campus in Spring 2013. This initiative pushed students outside the university and allowed for an engagement between seniors and students.

Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
The digital world represents a critical point of access for younger generations through which ties with older generations and community can be strengthened.  By providing ready access to information in undergraduate and graduate classes, students develop an understanding of the contributions of Latino families to Iowa history and recognize familiar sites and stories from their own family histories.  They encounter primary source materials in their own time and through technologies with which they are familiar. We encourage them to visit the Archives and look at the physical collections in our reading room. IWA is also able to take reference questions by phone and email through our online reference account.  Visitors to the IWA – whether in its physical or virtual space –  develop an appreciation for the interconnectedness of family and community networks and the place of Iowa Latinas within a larger context of regional, national, and transnational history.

The connectedness of our IWA staff to communities with which they engage is strengthened by the process of reaching out, conducting interviews, collecting documents and building trust.  In the community of Davenport, Iowa, the League of United Latin American Citizens – LULAC Council 10 – after reconnecting with its significant history of civil rights activism, now boasts the largest membership of any council in LULAC’s Midwest region.  And the Council continues to work for educational opportunity, preserving traditions such as fiestas, its scholarship program, and reunions of residents of the community’s early-day Mexican barrios. These events provide an opportunity to connect younger members with a Latino past that stretches back over a hundred years. This year the Council has asked the IWA to charter a bus to bring community members, families, and individuals who have donated materials to the Mujeres Latinas Project for a day-trip to visit their papers, see how they have been preserved, and remember Iowa’s Latina/o past.  Iowa LULAC’s recent leadership in the struggle for voter rights in Iowa has garnered Iowa state LULAC this year’s Louise Noun Award from the ACLU of Iowa.  A former president of the ACLU of Iowa, Louise Noun was also the co-founder of the Iowa Women’s Archives.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We have used social media and other online forums extensively to create an online community around SAADA’s archive. We have more than 1,300 followers on Facebook, 250 on Twitter, and nearly 600 subscribers to our email list. We post items from the archive, news about the organization, relevant articles and links to other archives that will interest our online community. In response, the SAADA’s social media community has remained active and engaged with our posts. Our most popular post on Facebook last year (a photo of students at the Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia PA from the 1920s) received 58 likes and 42 shares.

Additionally, we have tried to find ways to make the materials from the archive relevant to our users by connecting historical items with current news and events. For example, after the tragic shooting at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin, we posted materials from SAADA with more information about Sikhism and that demonstrate the long history of Sikhism in the United States. We also put out a call requesting submissions of photographs and other materials documenting the community’s response to the shooting. We received photographs of vigils, official proclamations of mourning and flyers for community events. These materials were added to the archive.

As another example, before the 2012 presidential election, we posted an article from 1923 describing the U.S. Supreme Court decision to ban South Asians from becoming American citizens. This article was shared by many of our subscribers with added comments encouraging others in the community to vote. This item was liked 340 times on Facebook and shared 21 on Twitter.

In addition to our online presence, we have organized ‘community forums’ as a venue for community members to learn more about archives, see materials from SAADA’s archive and offer feedback and suggestions for our organization. We organized 2 forums in 2012 that were open to the general public (one in Chicago, one in Cleveland) and 1 forum specifically targeted to contemporary South Asian American artists in Chicago. We plan to have more such events this year. We have also presented in classrooms and at workshops and conferences. Altogether, we did over 20 public presentations in 2012 all over the country.

5. All things analog: Each of your projects engages in related creative products (art installations, performance events, print culture). How has this ancillary production influenced the project? What has been the most interesting or inspiring moment, material discovery, or interview experience in the work so far?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
For the website launch/community reception in October 2012, we partnered with a local artist who was also a narrator for the VAOHP. Her artwork layers family and community history into visual pieces, so we wanted to have her art exhibited on one wall. On another wall we presented the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation’s 500 Oral Histories Project and on the third wall we had the UC Irvine libraries laptop stations with volunteers to help community members navigate the website. This multi-pronged approach to presenting oral history shows the aesthetic/creative possibilities that life stories can initiate, features the collaboration between grassroots efforts to preserve community history, and brings technology directly to the community.  

This community reception really cemented the notion that oral history can be exhibited, discussed, and used in a variety of ways that make it accessible to all.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
One of the best moments of discovery occurred when our staff along with staff from the conservation department of the UI Library visited the LULAC center in Davenport to assist with refurbishing an exhibit in the LULAC center. One of the elders from the council suggested exploring the attic space above the old portion of the building where he believed a box of records of the council’s activities during the 1960s had been stored.  When the younger members of the council brought down the box – it did indeed contain precious documents that told of the council’s leadership in the grape boycott campaign, flyers supporting the passage of Iowa’s first migrant child labor legislation, and handwritten meeting minutes of the Quad City Grape Boycott Campaign. This was a signal and exciting moment and highlighted the active role that historical archives can play in enriching community life for people too often overlooked in the historical narrative.

The Mujeres Latinas collections in the IWA provide primary source material for scholars and researchers from all backgrounds – junior high school students participating in National History Day competitions, undergraduate students from across the state conducting course research assignments, independent scholars and interested members of the public and institutions.  We conceptualized our recent exhibition Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives to showcase our Mujeres collections and celebrate IWA’s twentieth anniversary.  We are currently reconceiving this exhibition as an interactive digital exhibit for the IWA website.

IWA’s Mujeres Latinas collections helped provide an impetus to the decision of three UI faculty members to organize and host a symposium in 2012 on The Latino Midwest, which was held at the University of Iowa. The symposium in turn provided inspiration for a February 2013 Iowa Alumni Magazine article, “The Invisible Iowans,” which drew on many of the collections featured in the Pathways to Iowa exhibition. Among the photographs it included was an especially moving and significant one of Florence Terronez with her daughter and granddaughter visiting the IWA exhibit, which featured her mother’s migration story.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)


For me, the most rewarding moments have been in working with community members who have materials saved in their basements or attics and who, for the first time, are given an opportunity to share these materials with the world.

One such example is our work with S.P. Singh, whose grandfather, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, arrived in the United States in 1914. Gyanee was born in India in 1884 and from an early age became involved in the anti-colonial freedom struggle. In 1909, as the British began strongly suppressing the freedom movement, Gyanee began to feel that his and his family’s lives were in danger. He decided to flee India, leaving his wife and three young children behind and for nearly the next 50 years he lived in exile, traveling to Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Burma, Panama, Canada and finally arriving in the United States in 1914. Here, he became a leader of the Ghadar Party, an organization based in San Francisco agitating for India’s independence from Britain. In 1917, Gyanee and his compatriots were arrested and imprisoned for amassing weapons, which they hoped to use to fight the British in armed combat. After his release from prison, Gyanee became a philosophical and spiritual leader and delivered lectures across the United States. Finally, in 1958, after nearly 50 years away from India, he was allowed to return. He spent his last years living in a small town near where he was born.

After his passing, his grandson, S.P. Singh inherited all of his grandfather’s materials. When Mr. Singh moved to the United States in the early 1970s and settled in Atlanta, he brought these materials along with him. His grandfather’s materials were important to him, and he thought they would be important to others as well.

I came across this story in a short article Mr. Singh had written about his grandfather that was published online. At the end of the article, Mr. Singh had included his email address.  I emailed him to ask if he might consider working with SAADA and allowing us to digitize any materials he had in his possession. Mr. Singh was visiting India when he received my email, but he called me right away. He was so thrilled that an opportunity had finally presented itself to have his grandfather’s story heard by the world.

In April 2012 I flew to Atlanta, and along with a volunteer, sat in Mr. Singh’s house for three straight days as we digitized all of his grandfather’s materials. Mr. Singh would regale us with stories he had been told by his grandfather as we looked through page after page of correspondence, community publications, photographs and diaries. This incredible collection is now digital preserved and available online through the SAADA website. It has been featured in the New York Times and I have shared this incredible story at many of our community events.

For me, this experience embodies the possibilities of SAADA’s approach to building a community-based digital archive.

Linda Garcia Merchant is an independent documentary filmmaker and the Technical Director of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Humanities Project. linda@vocesprimeras.com

Comment(s):

Anonymous    March 23, 2013 at 5:51 PM

I applaud you for your efforts!
I believe it is very important to preserve a community’s history so that future generations can study the changes that communities undergo. The interviews that were conducted are and will be extremely rewarding. They will provide researchers with a better understanding of the personal circumstances that members of that community faced. I am glad to see that you have received support from different organizations and your communities. I agree that projects like this create cultural, social, and historical awareness and I hope in the future to have the opportunity to perform research in my community. Thank you.

Alejandra Cervantes
Latina/o Studies 2322; The Ohio State University

A Visit From Artist Ana Teresa Fernandez

November 26, 2012

by Ella Diaz

Photo by Rio Yañez

Photo by Rio Yañez

            Ana Teresa Fernandez is a visual artist, sculptor, and performance artist based in San Francisco, CA. Originally from Tampico, Mexico, Ana moved in 1991 with her family to San Diego, California. In the early 2000s, Ana earned her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute [SFAI], and began teaching drawing and painting around the time I began teaching in the humanities at the SFAI. But before I actually met her, I first encountered Ana Teresa Fernandez through her 2008 exhibition, “Ecdisis: Juarez, Mexico” at the Galería de la raza in San Francisco, California. See http://www.galeriadelaraza.org/eng/events/index.php?op=view&id=1244 

            This exhibit featured Ana’s oversized ex-votos, better known as milagros, which are the diminutive metal fetishes of hands, hearts, arms, and other sacred body parts often used in syncretic and hybrid spiritual rituals in Mexico and Central America. Ana’s replicas of Milagros were “life-size” and hung on a red velvet wall. By isolating these representations of body parts and contextualizing them within a well-known spiritual practice for many Mexicanas and Latinas, Ana reframed the recovery of the mutilated and desecrated bodies of women murdered in Juarez. This show stayed with me for many years as I tried to find ways to talk and teach about Ciudad Juarez and representations of female sexuality and gender in the neoliberal state. See http://anateresafernandez.com/ecdisis/af_111708_prs_001/  

            Another component of the exhibit featured Ana’s creation of glass sculptures of several children, orphaned by the femicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, as well as children left parentless through sexual and labor exploitation in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Ana began the process of creating the sculptures first by taking molds of the children in various poses. She then took the molds and covered them with broken glass from beer bottles. Her choice of material was based on her travels through Haiti and Ciudad Juarez where she noticed that broken glass was often as a type of home security system, placed at the tops of walls as a defense against robbery and other crimes. The broken glass sculptures were illuminated during the 2008 exhibit and positioned against walls of the Galería; one of the sculpture-children was placed on a bench. The figures were at once beautiful, haunting, and lonely. Ana wanted viewers to think about the multi-generational repercussions of the ongoing femicide in Ciudad Juarez, as well as the fallout of other epicenters of violence against women. Ultimately, the broken glass sculptures visually conveyed Ana’s and our inability to protect these children from the crimes against their mothers and the traumas imposed upon them as a consequence and in the future without the protective presence and defense of their mothers.           

Photo by Rio Yañez

Photo by Rio Yañez

            Returning to her recent lecture at my campus on November 8, Ana centered her presentation around her 2010 work, “Borranda la barda/Erasing the border.” (http://anateresafernandez.com/borrando-la-barda-tijuana-mexico/) In 2010, Ana “set an enormous ladder against the border wall separating Playas de Tijuana from San Diego’s Border Field State park, and using a generator and a spray gun, she started painting the bars a pale powdery blue. While wearing a little black cocktail dress. And black pumps” (Jill Holslin, 2010). Writer Jill Holslin concludes that “Erasing the border, then, reminds us of the power of utopian visions, of dreams and the imagination.” Utopian visions are not uncommon in narrative, and Ana works across many mediums, from visual art, to performance and social sculpture, to tell the stories that shape our cultural experiences. For those of you who may not be familiar with social sculpture, it’s an idea put forth by Joseph Beuys in the 1960s and 1970s that proposes sculpture as a potential for and an act of societal transformation. 

            One aspect of “Borranda la barda” that I had difficulty reconciling is Ana’s selected wardrobe for painting the border fence: a little black dress and black high heels. As a Chicana who has witnessed many offensive perceptions of overtly sexual apparel, I didn’t know how to read this component of her performance and intervention on the border. During her lecture, however, Ana explained that the “little black dress” is a loaded symbol—even a kind of capital—in the western imagination. By placing it out of its expected context—the nightclub, the lounge, etc.—Ana is able to channel its co-opted power, or objectifying gaze and turn it back on her viewer. 

            Also, while in the midst of painting the border that perfect shade of sky blue, she was detained by to policemen on the Mexican side, while helicopters hovered above her on the U.S. side. Her negotiation with the police went on for 45 minutes. Ana contends that her little black dress had everything to do with her ability to finish painting the piece. 

            Earlier this year, Ana learned that “Borranda la barda” had been destroyed—repainted the black color of the fence. Prior to arriving at Cornell to give her lecture, Ana returned to the fence and repainted “Borranda la barda” that perfect shade of sky blue that, at a certain distance, restores the horizon to an unbroken, unblocked natural divide, where the ocean meets the land.

Ella Diaz is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University. Her research is on the interdependence of Chican@ and Latin@ literary and visual cultures.

8 comments:

  1. Anonymous November 29, 2012 at 7:53 AM

    I had the pleasure of seeing Ana Teresa Fernandez’s work when she came to Cornell University and presented “Blurring Borders: Redefining Truths, Fables, and Folklores”. I was familiar with a few of her works before the presentation, but the highlight of the presentation for me was hearing about how Ana utilized local materials (garbage in Haiti, glass in Mexico) within her art and performance. The lack of accessible “traditional” art materials (paint, paper, brushes, etc.) was incredibly striking when we see the incredible work Ana has done in engaging local materials within a community consciousness in Haiti. Her representation of the children of Mexico orphaned by the Femicides in Ciudad Juarez was a striking portrayal of the multi-generational impact of violence and the inability to protect children from this trauma.

    In her performance of “Borranda la barda”, Ana addressed the binaries of female identity (perceived and performed) along a heavy politicalized border state. Her performance of both female identity and nationalism was particularly striking in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, specifically when looking at the Femicides of Ciudad Juarez.
    I look forward to researching Ana’s work in the future and am extremely thankful I was given the opportunity to hear her present her work at Cornell University.
    -Sarah Anderson

  2. Ester December 3, 2012 at 8:17 AM

    What a courageous artistic intervention into difficult subjects. Thank you Ella, for providing the context of these creations. It makes me appreciate her sensibility to address literal dismemberment, carnage if you will, without producing more injury.

  3. Theresa Delgadillo December 3, 2012 at 8:18 AM

    Dear Ella, Thanks for sharing the pictures and discussion of Ana Teresa Fernandez’s work. The casts of children covered in broken glass are quite moving, and ask us to reflect on violence against children on many levels in new global economies. How wonderful for your students as well that they heard her and had the opportunity to learn about violence at the U.S.-Mexico border through an artist’s engagement with the topic that foregrounds critical discussion. Theresa Delgadillo, Co-Moderator of Mujeres Talk

  4. Ella Diaz December 3, 2012 at 2:22 PM

    “without producing more injury.” What a beautiful response, Ester, to Ana’s work in the Ecdysis show on the murdered women of Juarez.

  5. GGuerra91 December 4, 2012 at 11:34 AM

    I also had the opportunity to attend her lecture and the lunch with her.
    The choice to bring ATF to Cornell, especially given the timing with our class was great. It allowed us to be exposed to a new kind of artist, one that is raising awareness about most of the issues discussed in class.

    She is resourceful and works with her environment, this is very important because it teaches people, specially the natives of the area, that they can use anything to beautify and create art. This was evident in her work in Haiti and in South Africa. In the latter country, she was able to show that artists have the duty to report the beauties of everyday life instead of reporting/focusing on the negative like the news do.
    Overall, it was a great experience being able to meet her and understand the thought process and goals of her art.
    -Gloria Guerra

  6. GGuerra91 December 4, 2012 at 11:34 AM

    I also had the opportunity to attend her lecture and the lunch with her.
    The choice to bring ATF to Cornell, especially given the timing with our class was great. It allowed us to be exposed to a new kind of artist, one that is raising awareness about most of the issues discussed in class.

    She is resourceful and works with her environment, this is very important because it teaches people, specially the natives of the area, that they can use anything to beautify and create art. This was evident in her work in Haiti and in South Africa. In the latter country, she was able to show that artists have the duty to report the beauties of everyday life instead of reporting/focusing on the negative like the news do.
    Overall, it was a great experience being able to meet her and understand the thought process and goals of her art.
    -Gloria Guerra

  7. Sophie Loren December 10, 2012 at 6:03 PM

    Though I know this blog talks about Ana Teresa Fernadez’s work, I really enjoyed the altar of photographs that Maria Teresa Fernandez, who happens to be Ana Teresa’s mother, created and left on display for at the Latino Studies Program here at Cornell University until late November. It was a way of humanizing the border when so many times it is militarized especially by the responses the United States has taken in the past years (because the U.S. must “secure” the border). I was able to actually take an instructor and another peer of mine who would have never stumbled upon this type of work and show them the exhibit. This was a way for me to raise consciousness in others (esp. since that one peer came from a privileged background).

    Moving back to the work that Ana Teresa Fernandez did on the border really struck me. She stated in her lecture that her work was about “transcending the given, by changing the context” and she gave them example of the broom and how it wasn’t dirty on the floor but was dirty when left on a pillow. She does the same with her little black dress and she places it out of context and calls attention to what she is doing but more importantly to the border and how she is erasing it as she paints it blue.

    I could continue to go on but all I can say is that I was taken aback by both Ana Teresa and Maria Teresa’s ingenuity and how they use art to speak and give voice to those who are voiceless in our world.

  8. Vanesa L. December 13, 2012 at 8:43 PM

    Attending Ana Teresa Fernandez’s lecture at Cornell University was a great experience . There were two exhibits that struck me the most. The first one was NanMitaNan: Haiti. I thought it was amazing that Ana Teresa was able to make sculptures out of plastic bottles she found. More importantly, the clear plastic material against the backdrop of oil lamps not only showed Ana’s ability to use the resources around her, it reflected the ghost of the beautiful architectural structures in Haiti, the lack of resources and the invisibility of Haitian people to the rest of the world. I believe that Haiti is stuck “nan mitana” or in the middle between their historic accomplishments of gaining independence in 1804 and the potential of what nation could be. Her Ecdisis:Juarez, Mexico exhibit was also very memorable . The glass figures of the children were beautiful but it made me realize the generational effects that femicides have on these children. The children are fragile but defensive just like the jagged pieces of glass that make up the sculptures. To have their mothers taken way from them without justice being served is devastating. Thus, the femicides in Juarez has serious implications for the future of Juarez.

    I thought Ana Teresa’s work was fantastic. I hope she continues to do more work involving different human rights issues around the world.