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Like their forebears in the 1960s, today’s students blasted university leaders as slick mouthpieces who cared more about their reputations than about the people in their charge. But unlike their predecessors, these protesters demand more administrative control over university affairs, not less. That’s a childlike position. It’s time for them to take control of their future, instead of waiting for administrators to shape it.

The post How university students infantilise themselves appeared first on OUPblog.

People don’t exist as isolated entities, and social programs, movements, or data analytic methods that assume they do are not aligned with reality—and may be doomed to fail. We all know that providing therapy or tutoring to a child may be less effective than hoped if the child’s parents, peers, school, and neighborhood are not also operating in a way that’s conducive to the child’s growth and well-being.

The post Why the future of social change belongs to community research appeared first on OUPblog.

Say you wanted to take over the world—how would you do it? Let’s agree it looks much like the world we live in today, where some countries hold inordinate power over the lives of people in others; where global systematic racism, the shameful legacy of colonization and imperialism, has contrived to keep many humans poor and struggling.

The post The Hunger Games are playing on loop— And I am tired of watching appeared first on OUPblog.

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

There are many exciting things coming down the Oral History Review pipeline, including OHR volume 41, issue 2, the Oral History Association annual meeting, and a new staff member. But before we get to all of that, I want to take one last opportunity to celebrate OHR volume 41, issue 1 — specifically, Abigail Perkiss’ “Reclaiming the Past: Oral History and the Legacy of Integration in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia.” In this article, Abigail investigates an oral history project launched in her hometown in the 1990s, which sought to resolve contemporary tensions by collecting stories about the area’s experience with racial integration in the 1950s. Through this intriguing local history, Abigail digs into the connection between oral history, historical memory, and social change.

Abigail Perkiss. Photo credit: Laurel Harrish Photography

If that weren’t enough to whet your academic appetite, the article also went live the same week her first daughter, Zoe, was born.

How awesome is that?

But back to business. Earlier this month I chatted with Abigail about the article and the many other projects she has had in the works this year. So, please enjoy this quick interview and her article, which is currently available to all.

How did you become interested in oral history?

I’ve been gathering people’s stories in informal ways for as long as I can remember, and as an undergraduate sociology major at Bryn Mawr College, my interests began to coalesce around the intersection of storytelling and social change. I took classes in ethnography, worked as a PA on a few documentary projects, and interned at a documentary theater company. All throughout, I had the opportunity to develop and hone my skills as an interviewer.

I began taking history classes my junior year, and through that I started to think about the idea of oral history in a more intentional way. I focused my research around oral history, which culminated in my senior thesis, in which I interviewed several folksingers to examine the role of protest music in creating a collective memory of the Vietnam War, and how that memory was impacting the way Americans understood the war in Iraq. A flawed project, but pretty amazing to speak with people like Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, and Mary Travers!

After college, I studied at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and when I began my doctoral studies at Temple University, I knew that I wanted to pursue research that would allow me to use oral history as one of the primary methodological approaches.

What sparked your interest in the Mount Airy project?

When I started my graduate work at Temple, I was pursuing a joint JD/PhD in US history. I knew I wanted to do something in the fields of urban history and racial justice, and I kept coming back to the Mount Airy integration project. I actually grew up in West Mount Airy, and even as a kid, I was very much aware of the lore of the neighborhood integration project. There was a real sense that the community was unique, special.

I knew that there had to be more to the utopian vision that was so pervasive in public conversations about the neighborhood, and I realized that by contextualizing the community’s efforts within the broader history of racial justice and urban space in the mid-twentieth century, I would be able to look critically about the concept and process of interracial living. I could also use oral history as a key piece of my research.

Your article focuses on an 1990s oral history project led by a local organization, the West Mount Airy Neighbors. Why did you choose to augment the interviews they collected with your own?

The 1993 oral history project was a wonderful resource for my book project (from which this article comes); but for my purposes, it was also incomplete. Interviewers focused largely on the early years of integration, so I wasn’t able to get much of a sense of the historical evolution of the efforts. The questions were also framed according to a very particular set of goals that project coordinators sought to achieve — as I argue, they hoped to galvanize community cohesion in the 1990s and to situate the local community organization at the center of contemporary change.

So, while the interviews were quite telling about the West Mount Airy Neighbors’ efforts to maintain institutional control in the neighborhood, they weren’t always useful for me in getting at some of the other questions I was trying to answer: about the meaning of integration for various groups in the community, about the racial politics that emerged, about the perception of Mount Airy in the city at large. To get at those questions, it was important for me to conduct additional interviews.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

As I alluded to above, it is part of a larger book project on postwar residential integration, Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia (Cornell University Press, 2014). There, I look at the broader process of integrating and the challenges that emerged as the integration efforts coalesced and evolved over the decades. Much of the research for the book came from archival collections, but the oral histories from the 1990s, and the ones I collected, were instrumental in fleshing out the story and humanizing what could otherwise have been a rather institutional history of the West Mount Airy Neighbors organization.

Are you working on any projects the OHR community should know about?

I’ve spent the past 18 months directing an oral history project on Hurricane Sandy, Staring out to Sea, which came about through a collaboration with Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (remember them?) and a seminar I taught in Spring 2013. That semester, I worked intensively with six undergraduates, studying the practice of oral history and setting up the project’s parameters. The students developed the themes and questions, recruited participants, conducted and transcribed interviews. They then processed and analyzed their findings, looking specifically at issues of race, power and representation in the wake of the storm.

In addition to blogging about their experience, the students presented their work at the 2013 OHMAR and OHA meetings. You can read a bit more about that and the project in Perspectives on History. This fall, I’ll be working with Professor Dan Royles and his digital humanities students to index the interviews we’ve collected and develop an online digital library for the project. I’ll also be attending to the OHA annual meeting this year to discuss the project’s transformative impact on the students themselves.

Excellent! I look forward to seeing you (and the rest of our readers) in Madison this October.

Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities. Before coming to Madison, Caitlin worked for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow their latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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The post Oral history, historical memory, and social change in West Mount Airy appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Valentina Baú

My research has focused on the use of participatory media in conflict-affected communities. The aim has been to demonstrate that involving community members in a media production provides them with a platform to tell their story about the violence they have experienced and the causes they believe led to it. This facilitates the achievement of a shared understanding of the conflict between groups that were fighting and lays the foundations for the establishment of a new social fabric that encompasses peace.

This is, by no means, an easy process. It is also one that requires the co-implementation of different types of interventions that strive to rebuild peace in those areas. However, what is often lacking in post-conflict contexts is a communication channel that allows people to reconnect. In the aftermath of civil violence, communities are left divided and in need of information to make sense of the brutality they have undergone. Victims and perpetrators live side by side as neighbours, and dynamics based on resentment and hatred hinder the return to a peaceful environment. The mass media are often unable to address the tensions that have remained within communities as a legacy of the conflict; hence, it is crucial to provide a platform where formerly opposing groups can articulate their views.

By drawing on the experience of a participatory video project conducted in the Rift Valley of Kenya after the 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence, when the country underwent a period of intense ethnic violence, I was able to demonstrate the potential of Communication for Social Change in post-conflict settings through the use of participatory video.

Social change is a process that seeks to transform the unequal power relations that affect a community. The literature on conflict studies tells us that, in order to achieve social change, what firstly needs to be targeted in conflict interventions is change both at the individual and relational level. Changing individuals requires adjusting their feelings and behaviours towards other groups, while changing relationships is about creating a meaningful interaction between members opposing groups, which results in the improvement of inter-group relations. This can be represented as follows:

I argue that, from a communication perspective, these changes can be achieved when people participate in the production of a media story that allows them to both reflect upon and become aware of their situation, as well as to share their experience and create an understanding among groups.

In particular, collaborating towards the creation of media content, listening to one another and becoming producers of their own story, allows communities to transform conflict at all levels:

Individual change – participatory video activities contribute to instating participants’ confidence in re-establishing peace, helping them identify themselves as agents of change, and also guiding them in the discovery of new skills. The storytelling process people engage with encourages reflection on their actions during the violence and greater awareness of their present situation and the need to rebuild peace.

Relational change – the participatory video-making process can establish harmony among those who work together in the mixed-tribe workshops. These involve both those who are in front of the camera but also who cover other roles during the production process. Those who watch the final videos through public screenings can exchange views and develop an understanding of the situation for both victims and perpetrators.

Social change – Thanks to the power shifts resulting from newly-developed perceptions of the conflict and of their post-conflict environment, members of different groups begin to engage in dialogue. The existence of different realities of the violence and of the need to move forward are acknowledged, laying the foundations that are needed to begin to build a new social fabric.

A Communication for Social Change approach to peacebuilding recognises how changes at the individual and relational level can be addressed both through the media content production process and the screening of the final media outputs in the community. Within this context, participatory video is seen as a catalyst that can initiate processes of conflict transformation that lead to a wider social change.

Valentina Baú is completing a PhD at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). Both as a practitioner and as a researcher, her work has focused on the use of communication in international development. Valentina has collaborated with different international NGOs, the United Nations and the Italian Development Cooperation, in various African countries. Her doctoral research has looked at the use of Communication for Development in Peacebuilding, particularly through the use of participatory media. Valentina Baú is the author of ‘Building peace through social change communication: participatory video in conflict-affected communities‘, in the Community Development Journal.

Community Development Journal is the leading international journal in its field, covering a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the life of communities.

The post Transforming conflict into peace appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Erina Duganne

Many hope, even count on, photography to function as an agent of social change. In his 1998 book, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises, communications scholar David Perlmutter argues, however, that while photographs “may stir controversy, accolades, and emotion,” they “achieve absolutely nothing.”

Camera Lens, by Jkimxpolygons. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In my current research project, I examine the difficult question of what contribution photography has made to social change through an examination of images documenting events from the Central American civil wars — El Salvador and Nicaragua, more specifically — that circulated in the United States in the 1980s. Rather than measure the influence of these photographs in terms of narrowly conceived causal relationships concerning issues of policy, I argue that to understand what these images did and did not achieve, they need to be situated in terms of their broader social, political, and cultural effects — effects that varied according to the ever shifting relations of their ongoing reproduction and reception. Below are three platforms across which photographs from the wars in Central America circulated and recirculated in the United States in the 1980s.

(1)   In the early 1980s, the US government adopted a dual policy of military support in Central America. In El Salvador, they provided aid against the guerilla forces or FMLN while in Nicaragua they backed the contra war against the Sandinistas. Many Americans learned and formulated opinions about these policies through photographs that circulated in the news media. The cover of the 22 March 1982 issue of Time, for instance, featured a photograph of a gunship flying over El Salvador. Taken by US photojournalist Harry Mattison, the editors at Time used the photograph as part of their cover story questioning the use by the US government of aerial reconnaissance photographs of military installations in Nicaragua to establish a causal link between the leftist insurgents in El Salvador and Communist governments worldwide.

(2)   In addition to these reconnaissance photographs, the Reagan administration also turned to photography in an eight-page State Department white paper entitled Communist Interference in El Salvador, which was released to the American public on 23 February 1981. In this white paper, the US government included two sets of military intelligence photographs of captured weapons, which they believed would help them to further provide the American public with “irrefutable proof” of Communist involvement via Russia and Cuba in Central America, and thereby justify the escalation of US military and economic aid to the supposedly moderate Salvadoran government. The aforementioned article in Time also questioned the validity of the sources used in this document.

(3)   While photography played a prominent role in debates over the existence of a communist threat in Central America, beginning in 1983, a number of artists and photographers — Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, Group Material, Marta Bautis, Mel Rosenthal, among others — put photographs from the Central American conflicts, some of which had circulated directly in the aforementioned contexts and others which had not, to a different use. Rather than employ photographs to perpetuate or even question the accuracy of communist aggression in the region, these artists and photographers instead used the medium to examine the imperialist underpinning of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Central America as well as the longstanding geopolitical and historical implications of US involvement there. To this end, they produced the following: the 1983 photography book and exhibition El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which was edited by Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, and Fae Rubenstein and toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985; Group Material’s 1984 multi-media installation Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, on view at the P.S. Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York, as part of the ad hoc protest organization Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America; and the exhibition The Nicaragua Media Project that toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985. Together these three photography books and art exhibitions provided, what I call, a “living” history for photographs from the Central American civil wars.

In his 1978 essay “Uses of Photography” that was anthologized in his 1980 book About Looking, cultural critic John Berger argues that for photographs to “exist in time,” they need to be placed in the “context of experience, social experience, social memory.” Using Berger’s definition of a “living” history as a model, my research project offers a novel way to think about how, within the contexts of these exhibitions and books, photographs from the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua functioned as dynamic, even affective objects, whose mobility and mutability could empower contemporary viewers to look beyond the so-called communist threat in the region that was perpetuated through the Reagan administration as well as the news media and begin to think more carefully about past histories of US imperialism and global human oppression in Central America.

Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University where she teaches courses in American art, photography, and visual culture. She is the author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010) as well as a co-editor and an essayist for Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007). She has also written about her current research project for the blog In the Darkroom.

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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The post Photography and social change in the Central American civil wars appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Alisa Del Tufo

Stories are powerful ways to bring the voice and ideas of marginalized people into endeavors to restore justice and enact change. Beginning in the early 1990s, I started using oral history to bring the stories and experiences of abused women into efforts to make policy changes in New York City. Trained and supported by colleagues at Columbia Center for Oral History and Hunter College’s Puerto Rican Studies Department, I was able to pioneer the use of oral history to leverage social change.

In 2007, I became an Ashoka Fellow and had the space to organize my ideas and experiences about oral history, story gathering, and participatory practices into a set of teachable methods and strategies. This resulted in the creation of Threshold Collaborative, an organization that uses stories as a catalyst for change. Our methods aim to deepen empathy and ignite action in order to build more just, caring, and healthy communities. Working with justice organizations around the country, we help design and implement ways to do that through engaged story work.

This is why when a colleague who runs a youth leadership organization in Pennsylvania wanted to share the ideas and voices of the area’s marginalized youth, we helped to create a school-based story-sharing initiative called A Picture is Worth…. This project came to fruition after the New York Times gave Reading, PA the “unwelcome distinction” of having the highest poverty rate of any American city. Reading also suffered from elevated high school dropout numbers and extraordinarily low college degree rates.

Threshold went to the I-LEAD Charter High School in Reading, which offers poor and immigrant youth another chance to succeed. After spending time at the school — meeting and talking with teachers, parents and learners — we brainstormed a project that would incorporate the personal stories of 22 learners into an initiative to help them learn about themselves, their peers, and their larger community. Audio story gathering and sharing were at the core of this work. The idea was to support them in identifying their vision and values, link them with their peers, and thereby align them with positive change going on in Reading.

With the support of I-LEAD, assistance from the administrators and teachers, the talent of a fabulous photographer Janice Levy, and of course, the participation of the students, Threshold was able to launch an in-school curricular literacy class, which revolved around story gathering and sharing. The project uses writing, audio stories and photography to create powerful interactive narratives of students, highlighting their unique yet unifying experiences. A Picture is Worth… also provides an associated curriculum in literacy for high school students. The project fosters acquisition of real-world knowledge and skills, and encourages young learners to become more engaged in personal and scholastic growth, by combining personal stories with academic standards.

We also gathered and edited the stories of all 22 learners and have linked them with the wonderful photos done by Levy. You can find these powerful voices and images on our Soundcloud page. Here is one of the photos and stories:

Now, we are growing this project to be able to share it with schools and other youth leadership programs around the country. Through our book, curriculum and training program, we hope to inspire youth justice programs to see how young people can contribute to positive change through the power of their stories.

More information about the project can be found at apictureisworth.org, as well as on Facebook.

Alisa Del Tufo has worked to support justice and to strengthen empathy throughout her life. Raising over 80 million dollars, she founded three game changing organizations: Sanctuary for Families, CONNECT, and Threshold Collaborative. In the early 1990s, Del Tufo pioneered the use of oral history and community engagement to build grassroots change around the issues of family, and intimate violence. Her innovations have been recognized through a Revson, Rockefeller, and Ashoka Fellowship.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest Oral History Review posts on the OUPblog via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Threshold Collaborative: a lesson in engaged story work appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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1. Give what you want to receive. The flow of Abundance is already all around you. To step into this flow is easy. Give to someone else the very thing you would like to receive. And give it freely without expectations of receiving, as if you already had more than enough. If you want more kindness in your life, be kind to someone, if you want more happiness in your life, make someone else happy, if you want more money in your life, share a little of what you have. Give it away easily, like you already had all that you need and there is plenty more from where that came from. 


2. Trust and know. The next step is to trust and know you have just stepped into the flow of abundance and are now aligned with what you want. Know there is more than enough to go around. 
 


3. Take Action. Participation is an important part of Abundance. While you are knowing you are now aligned with the flow of the abundance you want, it is also important to participate and help make things happen. Follow your inner knowing and your intuition and do your part to help create the abundance you would like to have. Continue to participate until you are receiving what you want.
 


4. Be Grateful. Gratitude is a vital step in the flow of abundance. It is a powerful magnet which keeps us in the flow and aligned with receiving all the wonderful things we desire. Fill yourself with gratitude all the time, even about the small and seemingly simple things in your life. There is always something to be grateful about. When you notice a little of what you want flowing to you, take a moment and be grateful for what you have received, regardless of how big or small it may be. Be grateful and say thank you. 



5. Pass it on. When you receive a little abundance take a moment and pass some of it on and assist someone else in feeling a little more abundant. When you pass on some of what you receive, do it easily as if you already have more than you need, expecting nothing in return. When you pass it on in this way you are now starting the process all over again and have once again taken the first step to "give what you want to receive." In this way the flow of abundance continues and becomes more and more each time.

Martin Espada

TEATRO VISTA, THEATRE WITH A VIEW is firmly committed to sharing and celebrating the riches of Latino culture with all Chicago theatre audiences. This commitment stems from the belief that there are as may similarities as there are differences, and that perhaps the answer to breaking down the walls of prejudice and stereotypes lies in understanding these differences. Ultimately, it is through this "view" that Teatro Vista intends to bridge the gap between Latino and non-Latino cultures in Chicago.

A Message from the Founders Henry Godinez, Director-Founder Edward F. Torres, Artistic Director-Founder WE MET IN 1989, while working on a play together here in Chicago. We both felt that it was a shame that Latinos weren't getting roles outside of stereotypical casting. So we founded Teatro Vista. We hoped that all of Chicagoland could enjoy the sort of theatre that we had envisioned. Our Mission Statement is from our hearts and we hope that our "view" is one you share. We hope you like our "Theatre with a View" and will visit us in person, as well as our website, as often as you can.

Our Lady of the Underpass by Tanya Saracho 

The same week that Rome announced a new Pope, a woman driving home from work spotted an image of the Virgin Mary on a discolored wall of the Fullerton Avenue underpass.


Playwright Tanya Saracho renders the voices of those who were drawn to that wall, exploring issues of faith and desire in present day Chicago. Tanya Saracho (Playwright) Tanya Saracho was born in Sinaloa, México and moved to Texas in the late 80's. As the proud Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Luna: Chicago's All-Latina Theater Ensemble, Tanya's writing has been featured in most of Teatro Luna's ensemble-built works including Generic Latina, Dejame Contarte, The Maria Chronicles, SOLO Latinas, S-E-X-Oh! and Lunatic(a)s.

Tanya's play Kita y Fernanda has received productions at Teatro Luna (2003) and 16th Street Theatre (2008) along with a reading at Repertorio Español while a finalist for the 2003 Nuestras Voces playwrighting competition. Other Awards include: The Ofner Prize given by the Goodman Theatre, Finalist for the Christopher B. Wolk Award at Abingdon Theatre in NYC, nominee for the Wasserstein Prize and winner of the Khan Award.

Her solo play Quita Mitos received a world premier with Teatro Luna, in November of 2006 and has toured colleges and festivals, including the International Hispanic Theatre Festival and the Goodman's Latino Theatre Festival. Other productions include: Jarred (A Hoodoo Comedy) and Lunatic(a)s. Tanya is working on a fellowship in collaboration between The Goodman Theatre and the Institute for Women and Gender Studies at Columbia College on an interview-based piece titled 27 where she will interview one woman from each of the 27 countries that make up the Latin Diaspora.

She is also under commission from Steppenwolf Theatre to adapt Sandra Cisnero's "The House on Mango Street" slated to open in the fall of 2009. Directing/co-directing credits include: Solo Tu, Lunatic(a)s, the remount of Generic Latina, Piece of Ass for Estrogen Fest, The Maria Chronicles for both the Goodman's Latino Theater Festival and the critically acclaimed full-length run at Teatro Luna, and S-e-x-Oh!, Que Bonita Bandera and Three Days for SÓLO Latinas. Also an accomplished actor, Tanya's performing credits include Neil Labutte's Fat Pig with Renaissance Theatreworks in Milwaukee, Migdalia Cruz' Another Part of the House with Teatro Vista, Living Out with American Theatre Co./Teatro Vista, Electricidad at Goodman Theatre, and Angels in America and La Casa De Bernarda Alba with Aguijon Theater. Tanya is a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists and her voice can be heard around the country in radio and television commercials.

Sandra Marquez (Director) has been a proud ensemble member of Teatro Vista, the mid-west's only Equity Latino theater company, since 1997 and served as the company's Associate Artistic Director from 1998-2006. In 2005 she made her main stage directorial debut with Teatro Vista's production of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner by Luis Alfaro. Previously she had conceived and directed an ensemble studio piece for Teatro Vista called Vampiros y Bebes. Other directing credits include student productions at various venues as well as her work with Yollocalli, the Theater Summer Outreach Program under the auspices of The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and The Goodman Theater which served the young people of Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Teatro Vista acting credits include Icarus, Another Part of the House, Santos and Santos, Living Out (for which she was Jeff nominated). Other credits include The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner), Victory Gardens (Anna in the Tropics); The Goodman Theater (Mariela in the Desert, Electricidad, Massacre, Zoot Suit & A Christmas Carol); Steppenwolf Theater (Sonia Flew, One Arm, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Boiler Room); Madison Repertory Theater (Our Town).

Ms. Marquez is a member of AEA, AFTRA, and SAG and has worked in many industrial films and national commercials. Film and TV credits include Timer, Stranger than Fiction, Early Edition, Prison Break, Women's Murder Club and Big Bang Theory. Ms. Marquez has been on faculty at Loyola University, Eastern Michigan University and Columbia College of Chicago. Currently she is an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University where she has been teaching since 1995. Teatro Vista...Theatre with a View is at the forefront of the Latino theatre movement in the U.S. Chicago and ensemble based Teatro Vista is universally redefining the American landscape through the use of new, provocative and unique voices that reflect the Latino experience in the U.S.

After 18 years of existence it has empowered and encouraged "first voice" among the community and its artists. 

Our Lady of The Underpass opens to Rave Reviews:

"Absolutely don't miss this really special piece! Saracho's ear is terrific." – Kelly Kleiman, WBEZ Dueling Critics

"It is quite the artistic achievement." Randy Hardwick, chicagocritic.com

"Our Lady veers — just like real life — from laugh-out-loud hilarious, to gut-wrenching to enraging to contemplative." – Catey Sullivan, examiner.com

"This is brilliant work that is worth the trip to see. Director Sandra Marquez has assembled the perfect cast to bring these characters to life." – Alan Bresloff, steadstylechicago.com

"The details of the monologues are perfect..." – Laura Molzahn, The Reader Newspaper

NOW Through MARCH 29

GREENHOUSE THEATER

2257 N. LINCOLN AVE.

CHICAGO, IL

(To read our reviews visit this link:www.theatreinchicago.com)

Tickets are available now! To purchase please click www.teatrovista.tix.com or call 773-404-7336

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THE EVENT:

Support Chicago HOPES, an educational program for the city's homeless children, at:
Casa Aztlán
1831 S. Racine Ave
Chicago, IL 60608
(312) 666-5508
THURSDAY, MARCH 19TH 7PM



Acknowledging the strengths of Mexican families, Casa Aztlán seeks to sustain the strong cultural identity of the Pilsen community by organizing and educating residents and providing supportive services in order to combat social violence, discrimination and poverty.

what i'm on

With a performance by Luis Humberto Valadez

THE BOOK: what i'm on

Camino del Sol: A Latina/Latino Literary Series, 64 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8165-2740-3, $15.95 paper

Luis Humberto Valadez is a poet/performer/musician from the south side of the Chicago area whose work owes as much to hip-hop as it does to the canon and has been described by esteemed activist writer Amiri Baraka as "strong-real light flashes."

His debut poetry collection what i'm on is frankly autobiographical, recounting the experiences of a Mexican American boy growing up in a tough town near Chicago. Just as in life, the feelings in these poems are often jumbled, sometimes spilling out in a tumble, sometimes coolly recollected. Valadez's poems shout to be read aloud. It's then that their language dazzles most brightly. It's then that the emotions bottled up on the page explode beyond words. And there is plenty of emotion in these poems. Sometimes the words jump and twitch as if they‚d been threatened or attacked. Sometimes they just sit there knowingly on the page, weighted down by the stark reality of it all.

José García put a thirty-five to me
my mother was in the other room
He would have done us both
if not for the lust of my fear

THE BUZZ:

This new Mexican American/Chicano voice is all at once arresting, bracing, shocking, and refreshing. This is not the poetry you learned in school. But Valadez, who received his MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa University, has paid his academic dues, and he certainly knows how to craft a poem. It's just that he does it his way. Luis Humberto Valadez works as a coordinator and consultant for the Chicago Public Schools Homeless Education Program.

Recordings of Valadez performing his poems can be found at MySpace.com, Reverb Nation, and other Internet sites. 

“Brave, raw, and exposing of a young mans consciousness. Luis’s work is not confessional in the limited, put-it-in-a-box way that big publishers like to market their material to liberal guilt.” -Andrew Schelling, author of Tea Shack Interior

“In voices colloquial and church, reverent and riotous, serious and sly; in rap and fragment, sound and sin; from gangs and minimum-wage jobs to astrology and Christ, Luis Valadez makes his fearless debut. This poetry is a painfully honest disclosure of identity and anger, and it is as mindful of falsity and as hard on itself as it is playful, loose, and loving. Sometimes the language is clear and cutting, while other times it disintegrates into sonic units and primal utterances: Luis calls upon the whole history of oral and verbal expression to tell his story—going so far as to write his own (wildly funny and disturbing) obituary.” —Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century

“On the trail blazed by innovators like Harryette Mullen and John Yau, Luis Valadez sends wild, canny, charged, and vulnerable prayers from the hard camp of contested identities. Each line, each word, is a blow against “impossibility” and the heavy pressure to be silent as expected. Interrogations of tradition(s) as well as celebrations, the irresistible poems in Valadez’s first collection exist at the exact fresh moment of deciding to live and to love.” —Laura Mullen, author of After I Was Dead

“Valadez’s work is not simply fierce language poetics… here is a writer—the genuine article—whose style is that of a truth-speaking curandero, offering sacred cantos to anyone interested in illuminating that inner revolution called corazón. To read his work is to discover the future of American poética! “ —Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Skin Tax

“Valadez’s impressions abruptly transport the reader from swaggering elucidation to raw pain. In a sometimes-resigned glance around for divinity, what I’m on triggers equally sudden heart-rippings, laughter, and cinematic naturescapes.” —Claire Nixon, editor Twisted Tongue Magazine

Holly Schaffer, Publicity Manager
University of Arizona Press
355 S. Euclid Ave., Ste. 103 Tucson, AZ 85719
Ph: 520-621-3920, Fx: 520-621-8899
[email protected]
www.uapress.arizona.edu

Lisa Alvarado

Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass
Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York
November 7, 2008

This is the longitude and latitude of the impossible;
this is the epicenter of the unthinkable;
this is the crossroads of the unimaginable:
the tomb of Frederick Douglass, three days after the election.

This is a world spinning away from the gravity of centuries,
where the grave of a fugitive slave has become an altar.
This is the tomb of a man born as chattel, who taught himself to read in secret,
scraping the letters in his name with chalk on wood; now on the anvil-flat stone
a campaign button fills the O in Douglass. The button says: Obama.
This is the tomb of a man in chains, who left his fingerprints
on the slavebreaker’s throat so the whip would never carve his back again;
now a labor union T-shirt drapes itself across the stone, offered up
by a nurse, a janitor, a bus driver. A sticker on the sleeve says: I Voted Today.
This is the tomb of a man who rolled his call to arms off the press,
peering through spectacles at the abolitionist headline; now a newspaper
spreads above his dates of birth and death. The headline says: Obama Wins.

This is the stillness at the heart of the storm that began in the body
of the first slave, dragged aboard the first ship to America. Yellow leaves
descend in waves, and the newspaper flutters on the tomb, like the sails
Douglass saw in the bay, like the eyes of a slave closing to watch himself
escape with the tide. Believers in spirits would see the pages trembling
on the stone and say: look how the slave boy teaches himself to read.
I say a prayer, the first in years: that here we bury what we call
the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever. Amen.

~~~ Martín Espada

I've been thinking a lot about art-making, about ownership of art and the internet. One of the things I love about the 'net, and here I mean NON-PROFIT blogging, non-profit journals, etc., is the way in which it snatches the creation and analysis of culture from corporate control. It unchains criticism from the side of the elite, snatches it from the dominant culture and puts it in the hands of everyday people. It is incredibly democratic, populist, and as such, subversive.

I remember in graduate school catching high holy hell for my love of sampling, of the ways that hip hop artists take from the past and fuse it into something else. (And yes, Virginia, where there's a buck to be made, I wholeheartedly support recording artists, visual artists and writers getting their due.) But there is something about participatory culture, communal creation that keeps grabbing people by the throat, blurring the boundaries, something irresistible.

A while back I read a book that made me think about art as commodity, art as communal property and here are my thoughts about the book and its ideas.

"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." --- Henry Jenkins

Palabra Pura Series: Lorna Dee Cervantes and Rigoberto González
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 7:00pm

Note correction to starting time of event

Time: Doors open at 6:00 PM, Reading begins at 7:00 PM
Cost: Free admission.
Location: Center on Halsted, Chicago's LGBT Community Center, 3656 N. Halsted, Chicago, IL


Lorna Dee Cervantes is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet from San José, California. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, including The Norton Anthologies of Modern, American, English, Contemporary & Women's Poetry. She is a recipient of many honors, awards & literary fellowships including the NEA, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for DRIVE: The First Quartet. A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. In 1976, she founded the influencial small press & Chicano literary journal, MANGO Publications, which was the first to publish well-known writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ray Gonzalez and many others. Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness and was an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently resides in San Francisco and teaches at SFSU and offers intensive poetry workshops from her home, the Mission Poetry Center. She is readying several new books of poetry for publication and completing her novel and a full-length screenplay. Visit her on her blog at http:lornadice.blogspot.com

Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes twice a month a Latino book column, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, on the Board of Directors of Fishouse Poems: A Poetry Archive, and on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.

And reasons why I love them both:

Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In The War Between Races
--- Lorna Dee Cervantes

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)

I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country
there is war.


Cactus Flower --- Rigoberto González

It's a sweaty forty-minute walk through the desert from the main road to the wooden shack. Though the desert is flat and Rolando thinks he can see for miles into the faded blue horizon, the shack remains invisible until it suddenly shoots up from the ground, becoming distinguishable from the clumps of golden tumbleweeds and the sand hill leading up the ravine, everything blanketed by the brightness of the sun. The leaves of the fresh head of lettuce he brings from the fields wilt inside his oily fingers. He thinks about his toes shrinking back from the steel-tipped boots, his scrotum pulling away from his sticky underwear. The smell of dirt rises pure off the ground. His hand trembles at the thought of an empty shack, of nobody inside to open the door for him and take the lettuce from his hands, of no one to gasp in gratitude to assure him that despite the journey through the sweltering heat the leaves at the center are cool and crisp. His fears dissipate with the presence of his wife standing at the doorway, still as a cactus flower in her diaphanous white blouse, which she wears not so he can peek at her small white bra or at the pudgy abdomen he likes to grab while she's washing her hair bent over a bucket of water. She wears it, she tells him, to let the faintest breeze blow on her blouse, so she can spread her arms and cool her sweaty undersides. She's posing that way now, arms outstretched, but this far back it's hard to tell if it's the desert breeze come her way or if she's greeting him. He looks forward to tonight when they will feed each other lettuce leaves and chew them slowly as caterpillars devouring the moisture. Suddenly his eyes go blank, victims to the beads of sweat mixed into the dust he picked up from the fields, giving the sweat a more powerful sting. He rubs his eyes with the sleeve of the blue flannel shirt, taking in the sharp contrast of the smooth cloth to the coarse skin of his brown hand. Out of focus, he tries to reclaim the image of his wife in her white blouse, and then saddens, thinking Mirinda may not have seen him coming at all because she no longer stands at the entrance to the shack and the door is shut, the padlock hanging heavy like a heart gone solid and cold.

The candle flame twitches violently, threatening to leave him blind. The weather changed during his nap, and he woke up surprised in the dark. The wind hurls small stones against the wooden walls and bumps the window shutters repeatedly. Only when the wind blows is Rolando painfully aware of the imperfections in the small one-room home he built for himself in the middle of the desert, what the residents of the nearby town call "el dompe" because they drop off their useless vinyl couches and urine-stained mattresses into the nearby ravine though this area is no longer a county landfill and no longer uninhabited. The whistling and hissing of the dust storm outside disrupt his concentration so he sits without a word in his throat, slurping the Campbell's soup as loud as possible to convince himself that the silence the wind has forced on him has not upset his late-evening meal. Mirinda remains expressionless, staring across the table at the way his large hand holds the tin spoon too delicately, as if she knows he's scooping properly to please her. Even with the dim light she's beautiful, her features sharply defined and smooth as mariposa lily petals. The shadows make her face grow thin, distant as a portrait; but the flickering flame dancing gracefully in the deep ebony of her eyes keeps her within reach. She is tangible and touchable like before. She is here again to disregard the shadows as they flutter wildly like moths above her head. If they flee they will take her with them. But until then they soothe him, giving him this gift, this light, this woman, who said she was going to leave him and who didn't leave him completely. Forgotten are the elbow cramp, the stiff neck and aching shoulder blades. He has the urge to find the pretty marigolds he promised her when she agreed to follow him here to this desolate place, far from the run-down trailer camps and low-income housing projects where beauty like hers withers and dies. No, instead they are closer to the ground they left behind in the deserts of Chihuahua, a space so large it is like living inside breath itself. The peaceful evenings are long and familiar. The peaceful evenings bloom with stars. Stars love Mirinda so much they confuse her for the moon and crown her head. Suddenly the wind breaks in and snuffs the candle out. Mirinda disappears. He wants to stand and ask her to forgive him for those pretty marigolds. The wind roars. He keeps quiet, knowing that with such a wind his plea is weak and will remain unheard.

The wind grows stronger when he rises at four in the morning to pack his lunch and set off on his forty-minute trek back to the road where the bus picks him up to deliver him to the lettuce fields. When he opens the door the moonlight bursts in, lighting up the wooden table, the tiny unmade bed with the yellow faded sheets, the gas-tank stove, and Mirinda's white dresser. The looking glass Rolando gave her stares out the door, confronting the moon with its own light. He squints at the glare, grabs his denim jacket and tries to find the stone silhouette of his wife standing near the darkest corner. He shuffles out swiftly and doesn't catch a glimpse of her. At dawn the desert is cold. He shivers at the thought of the weary march getting back after work. Red flashlight in hand, he walks behind the shack, bends over the broken-down Pinto to check for damage on the windshield. The green paint looks clean, smooth as skin, so he rubs his hand across it then draws back quickly when a nettle on the surface stings his thumb. Suddenly he's alarmed to be outside. The landscape of desert rocks and manzanita patches appears shrunken, pulled in toward the shack, which becomes its dead center. He feels trapped, like the snowman in the glass bubble Mirinda enjoys shaking up at the swap meet to watch the tiny white particles drop. For him the particles strike sideways, strike hard. He moves quickly back around inside, exchanges the jacket for a thicker coat and grabs the brown paper sack, tightening the grip to remind himself how many of yesterday's burritos he will have for lunch. He steps out and shuts the door. The padlock snaps. He wishes to retreat, crawl beneath the yellow faded sheets, which will always smell of Mirinda's nape, of a strong sunlight filtered in through the dampness of her long black hair. He walks a few paces forward, hesitating because there's something he forgot. He's afraid to turn around, afraid that when he looks the shack will have vanished and he will find himself alone and vulnerable as the snowman or the palo verde that looks twice as solitary at night. He keeps on walking, sensing his distance from his home, a length that doubles when he thinks Mirinda's not inside stirring like the delicate perfume she rubs into her earlobes so that any sound she hears is savory and sweet. Mirinda, savory and sweet, desires no earring over this, the lip clamp of his mouth that nibbles nibbles nibbles on the flower-scented skin above her jaw. He dares to grin; he's compelled to whistle. He remembers he didn't eat the lettuce.

Rolando doesn't wait long for the bus. It's an old school bus painted over in white with the agricultural company's name on both sides. He doesn't have to see it to know it's coming because it's backfiring all the way down the road. In the early mornings the sloppy paint job looks clean until it stops in front of him and the old yellow coat shows through the wild strokes of white. The doors squeak open and the fat driver in a red plaid shirt greets him with a nod of the head, shifting into gear before Rolando finds a seat. Rolando paces reluctantly toward the space next to Sarita Mendoza, who wears a sweatshirt with words in English neither of them can read. She likes to save a place for him near the front. Before he takes a seat, Rolando nods at the other lettuce pickers. Don Carlos calls him by the wrong name. He wants to relax for the next twenty minutes until he arrives at the fields. He wants to tilt his head back and listen to the small transistor radio don Carlos behind him is holding. But Sarita Mendoza wants to talk.

She likes asking questions. She asks about his wife because she suspects Mirinda doesn't exist. She accuses him of lying to keep her from making a match of him with one of her daughters. Today she invites Rolando and his wife to a family bautismo. He politely refuses. She asks why. The glassy look of her eye makes him nervous. The bus hits a bump on the road and he hears the blades of the short-handle hoes rattle in the back. He wants to look down at the oval blister beginning to callus on his right palm. He wants to pick at it but doesn't, imagining a more intense pain against his hand as he thrusts the hoe into the ground. Instead he traces Sarita Mendoza's chapped lips, smiles and tells her he'll be celebrating his third-year anniversary this weekend. She jokingly says he's a liar. Rolando laughs with her, trying to think up an answer in case she asks where he's taking his wife to celebrate. She asks. He still hasn't thought of anything, so he simply says it's up to Mirinda. Can Mirinda travel to México? Sarita Mendoza leaves her mouth open, the dry lips are cracked at the corners; one corner is clotted with blood. He answers no, though he should have said yes because now Sarita Mendoza says he should have married a woman with papers. All of her daughters have their documents in order and they can all work in the fields, cook in the kitchen and perform both chores in bed. Rolando shakes his head. He should try to stop by the bautismo anyway, she suggests, since she's never met this mysterious woman he keeps hidden away in "el dompe." She's heard so much about Mirinda she's willing to wear out her old huaraches on a trip to the middle of the desert just to meet her. And if there isn't anyone there it won't matter because she will bring one of her daughters along just in case. Rolando looks away, embarrassed. He watches his cut lip grin on the dirty window. He didn't comb his hair. He forgot his baseball cap. The red bandanna in his back pocket has been used on his nose all week.

He wants to correct Sarita Mendoza and tell her she's heard very little about Mirinda, that woman, that goddess, that light. Mirinda, passion and appetite, can eat a whole coconut by herself, using up an entire afternoon with a dozen limes and a bowl of rock salt by her side while his heartbeat races to compete with that fervor she has for breaking the shell with her hands—a fever that finally peaks with him taking her fingers in his mouth and pressing his tongue beneath her nails to suck the salty juice. Mirinda, fury and fire, becomes as silky as her sleeping gown when he braids his limbs into hers, sweating off the humidity from their skins, surrendering themselves like cactus owls on that tiny bed that prompts them toward one another no matter what direction they stretch. Mirinda can touch every place on him at once and make each place jump twice. Mirinda is more than a woman, more than a wife—she took his body in her fleshy arms exactly three years ago and she still holds him there. And when she said she was going to leave him, she said she was going to dissolve his soul, so he didn't let her leave, not entirely, taking her neck in his hands and widening her mouth and forcing his power on her love until it burst into the air like a puff of dandelion seeds, an explosion of stars in the sky, an outbreak of marigolds. Such beautiful flowers. He's dizzy. Sarita Mendoza gazes at him and he blushes.

When the bus finally stops she leaps up and hurries to the back, her gray sweatshirt coming up on her stomach. She wants to get a good hoe, one with a clean sharp blade that won't give her trouble when she's digging into the ground. The rest of the workers scurry right behind her. Everyone hops off through the emergency exit door. Rolando looks past the window and at the lettuce fields, the heads looking cool and bright. Beyond the lettuce fields grow the grape fields and next to them sit the onion fields and rise the orchards, all of them blossoming so majesticly in the desert. He works this land year after year, intimate with its furrows and soils, yet he despises it for breaking his body down, for keeping him alive and sucking back all that strength. He imagines returning the following season, the fields lush and ripe again, displaying no evidence that he ever touched them. He imagines Mirinda, buried beneath the broken-down Pinto, unable to comb her long black hair or unable to darken her plucked eyebrows slim as marigold stems or unable to redden those fleshy points in the middle of her upper lip. She left her reflection behind in the looking glass. She returns to the desert to reclaim it and be whole again, then she thins out into air to become that void he sees when he holds up her mirror. When the white-haired foreman taps on the window, Rolando slowly rises from the seat, unashamed to be the last off the bus. The air is chilly and smells of soil freshly watered, the scent of cool lettuce lifts off the ground. On the other side of the road lies the barren desert. At the other end of the desert Mirinda's ghost waits patiently inside the tiny shack for him to step inside and breathe her scent of dusty wood. When he arrives each afternoon, the shack listens carefully, detects his slightest movements, excites its joints and rusty hinges and entreats Mirinda to respond.

Lisa Alvarado

Here's some things to ponder....

Politico, Prisoner, street poet...aside from these obvious roles,
what is the lasting impact of raulsalinas?

What are both the specific and universal messages in his work?

What were his spheres of influence as a writer and poet?

How has he personally affected your writing, your ethos, your sensibilities?

How would you summarize his example as to what it means to be a man,
a Chicano (a), a creative person, a spiritual person?

Share your thoughts and your stories here with us next week....