Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? Meena Khandelwal, Associate Professor of Feminist Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Iowa, explores this paradox in her new book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India. Based on multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, development specialists, and others, Khandelwal discusses chulhas as women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work.
In The Jugaad Project: Material Religion in Context podcast, Khandelwal explains the questions that led to her research: “Why do these old technologies persist? Why does the chulha persist? I believe that re-imagining the chulha as a dynamic technology helps us understand the reasons that people and especially rural women may retain older technologies . . . despite the allure of modern energy infrastructures.”
The author also addressed the multidisciplinary aspect of the book: “We’re all trying to have a conversation. The language that we use is very different. The methods in each discipline are different. What counts as reliable data?” For example, the engineers wanted GIS data on forests and harvesting wood, with women’s stories as narratives about that data. But as an anthropologist, Kehandelwal believes women’s words and stories were the actual data. She said, “I pushed back at that moment and said stories are data too, not just embellishment of so-called ‘hard data.’”
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre in her new collection, House of Grace, House of Blood. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’sfrom Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations. Today we ask Low five questions about her book.
What inspired you to write this collection?
I have a double life as a scholar (should I digress about my Mercury in Gemini?), which leads me to write critical works about literature and Plains Indian ledger art. So I have spent many months of my life in Footnote Land, and those original versions, as close as possible to the historic events, have so much textured information—even when recorded by European settler descendants. The Gnadenhutten massacre, which I researched for my memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, resonated with many people of the time, from Tecumseh to Benjamin Franklin. To keep focus on one family in the memoir, I cut this incident. Every Lenape person I know remembers Gnadenhutten, and few others. I want to make this event part of the conversation about genocide in North America and genocide as a predicament of human experience, along with a conversation about actions toward reconciliation.
These poems weave historical voices and primary sources into the lyric, first-person perspective in a mode sometimes called “documentary poetics” or “archival poetry.” What are some of the challenges—or opportunities—that come with working in this mode?
The complicated history of East Coast Native peoples, especially Lenapes and related nations, leaves behind many archival artifacts, which include: texts about massacres, alliances, marriages, enslavements, destructions, ordinary farm life, military service, scouting, and trading. These moments all create a factual narrative of Delawares, who were the first Indigenous people to trade with the English on the island of Manhattan. This book pushes back at the image of primitive “Indians” selling New York City’s site for a few beads. By foregrounding the back stories—using oral and written histories—I want to uncover the apocryphal and vital presence of Native people. With Gnadenhutten archives, I found myself interacting in present time with the texts, so I created verse forms to engage in intertextual and inter-chronological dialogues. These were couplets woven from a document line alternated with my response. It was a ghost-like call-and-response. One text was a transcription of a massacre survivor’s granddaughter’s account. This was so moving to hear the story from the Delaware point of view. American lyrical poetry is so elastic. With researched information about Pennsylvania-sponsored scalp taking, I used a ledger format to make a point not possible in prose lines. The American poetic tradition can hold all this, plus lyrical words about faith and courage.
Where and how did you do the research for this book? Which sources were particularly important to this collection?
Research began with my uncle and brother—about the family’s occluded Native heritage. Delaware elders have shared information with me orally and some documents. The paper trail includes local Ohio histories, Moravian archives, military records, and maps. My husband Tom Weso, Menominee, used to say the land is the first place to start with Native narratives, and indeed the maps tell so much about this event and the history of Delawares in general. Maps confirm the diaspora. In text and visual maps, I trace the timeline of the Gnadenhutten massacre and then expand the horizontal line into one with depth—all the details that were happening in the same place and time moment by moment. The unfolding consequences, including intergenerational trauma, continue today.
Importantly, this work moves past the Gnadenhutten Massacre and into its aftermath, following the speaker’s childhood memories, visiting monuments, and ending with the wonderful poem “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County, Kansas,” which feels like both a celebration and a memorial. Why was it important for you to merge the historical with the contemporary moment?
This is a time when awareness of factual, not settler colonial fictions, are evolving. House of Grace, House of Blood contributes to this turn toward truth. I want better understanding of the Lenape and East Coast histories; I also want better understanding of how eradication of populations—human, animal, plants—is part of human experience and how to address it. The local newspaper reports that Governor Newsom of California recently signed a state bill that requires teaching of the Indigenous genocide during Gold Rush times and also Indigenous contributions. This is a great moment in California. My plan with my book is not to simply say, “J’accuse” / “I accuse you.” Telling the truth about the brutality of that massacre is embedded within themes of shared family ties, healings of the earth, spiritual ways, the arts, power of language, and hope. Through the years elders have taught these values as ways to survive as individuals and as communities. This healing is for all of us.
What are you working on now?
Research is taking me to deeper sources for the slavery of Delaware and other related peoples, who were taken from their lands to the Caribbean cane fields. Something is known about the Pequot slaves traded to the West Indies in the 1630s. Little remains, however, about the history of up to 50,000 Indigenous people of mainland United States sent to this forced labor. Erasure of historic facts like Native plantation slavery distort understanding of the eastern tribal nations, especially. I’m also working toward another study of Northern Cheyenne ledger art texts regarding the Fort Robinson Breakout of 1879, connected to my book co-authored with Ramon Powers, Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors (University of Nebraska, 2021).
Denise Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her recent books include Shadow Light: Poems, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, and A Casino Bestiary. Her Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors won a Kansas Notable Book Award. She founded the creative writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University and is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage. www.deniselow.net.
Congratulations to author Rafael Martínez, who has received the “Líderes Under 40 Award” from the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los D-backs Hispanic Council. The award honors leadership in Arizona’s Hispanic community.
Martínez was recently interviewed by Scott Bordow of Arizona State University News about the honor, which recognizes Martinez’s 2023 oral history project Querencia: Voices from Chandler’s Latinx Barrios. They also discussed Martinez’s new book Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, and the Latinx Oral History Lab.
Martínez tells Bordow, “The questions are framed around the idea of querencia. It’s a common Spanish word that means love to place. It’s terminology that’s been developed by Latino and Hispanic Southwest authors. Mexican Americans and people of Spanish descent have been in this region for multiple generations. The idea of connection to place is embodied in this concept of querencia. So, the questions really revolve around talking about growing up in the city of Chandler. What did the city look like at that time? What did their neighborhood look like?”
In the photo above, Rafael Martínez and his daughter are on the left with other award winners at Diamondbacks’ stadium.
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Storiesis a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects.Today we ask McNamee five questions about his book.
What’s a favorite undergraduate moment?
Tucson is a friendly, laid-back town, and when I landed here in 1975 it was immediately apparent that someone forget to tell it that the 1960s were over. One of my favorite moments at the University came when I enrolled as an undergraduate on a hot August day. As I was walking down the olive-tree-lined path along Park Avenue, two bands were setting up on the back of a flatbed truck for a welcome-to-campus concert, Summerdog and the Bob Meighan Band, who were favorites of campus and community alike and who gave extraordinary performances for a body of bobbing, dancing students, many of them as disoriented as I was in the brand-new world of college. I later became friends with players in both bands. Anyway, that capped off my first day here, when, gathering punch cards to get into classes, I met several young men and women who remain dear friends to this very day. Many of them turn up in my book.
Not a moment so much as a series of moments was the delightful fact that on almost any evening on campus during my undergraduate years (1975–78) there was something going on: a lecture from a world-class visiting scholar in Social Sciences, a poetry reading in the Modern Languages Auditorium; a musical, dance, or theatrical performance in what became Centennial Hall; some great film in the Gallagher Theater. Within the space of a few months, if memory serves, I saw Spanish director Victor Erice’s life-changing film Spirit of the Beehive and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as well as repeated showings of the mind-blowing 2001, Allegro Non Troppo, and the collected works of the Marx Brothers; attended poetry readings by W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Lucille Clifton, and Seamus Heaney, among many others; heard fiery lectures by William Kunstler, Angela Davis, and Noam Chomsky, as well as a slurred one by Hunter S. Thompson; went to a Pink Floyd light-and-sound show at Flandrau and several great rock concerts at the Senior Ballroom; and talked about every possible topic there was to talk about late into the night, night after night, over coffee at the Student Union or beer at Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow down on Fourth Avenue.
University of Arizona vs. University of Wisconsin men’s basketball game atMcKale Center.
I don’t want to sound like too much of a cranky old guy, though I am certainly that, but back in those happy days before students glued themselves to cell phones and social media, it was possible to have a happy life with orders of magnitude more actual social interaction. In any event, I could fit an awful lot into my schedule: take a full course load, work a part-time job, keep my grades up, and even get a little sleep from time to time while enjoying all that the campus had to offer.
One hundred stories is a lot of history. Will you share a bonus 101st story, perhaps one that didn’t make it into the book?
Well, it’s telling tales out of school, as the old saying goes, but back in the day I hung out from time to time with several friends who lived at the old grad-student apartments in the Babcock Building, which I believe became office space for a couple of decades and then became a dorm again. One of the residents was a friend of a friend, Barbara Kingsolver, whom I got to know. While the rest of us were hanging out down by the pool, jawboning about politics or literature or whatever until midnight, I could hear Barbara typing away in her room up on the second floor. Just a few years later her first novel, The Bean Trees, appeared, and the race was on. Every now and then I reflect on what might have happened if I’d gone home and hit the typewriter myself on a Saturday night, but things have worked out pretty well.
Thinking about what you call the four foundational pillars at the U of A—agriculture, mining & geology, astronomy, and anthropology—what is a great example of a modern research achievement from one of these areas of study?
Ten-odd years ago, my friend Neal Armstrong, now a retired Regents Professor of Chemistry, invited me to come up to the UA experimental farm in Maricopa, 85 or so miles northwest of Tucson, to see what appeared to be the world’s largest scanner. Some fifty feet high, it weighs thirty tons and moves along steel rails over crop rows the length of four football fields. Those fields contain thousands of sensors, reading data from forty-two thousand plants below, about five terabytes a day. The numbers are then crunched to determine which plants are thriving under experimental conditions that are expected to resemble the future climate. Those plants that produce good yields are then selected for breeding, while those that fail are pulled. Darwinism in action, that.
TERRA (Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture), as it’s called, represents the confluence of three important areas of research, conducted by scientists from many disciplines: energy, water, and food. We’re likely to be scrambling for energy, unless we go fully renewable, in the next quarter century; we’re likely to find that water is ever scarcer; and in the year 2100, by most estimates, the human population of the world will stand at nearly 11 billion people, about a third more people than are alive today. All of them need to eat, so TERRA, helping select crops that will do best under arduous conditions, is a potential life-saver and world-changer. As I say in the book, it’s a matter of life and death.
Agricultural analysis machine that is part of the TERRA program.
The other pillars have done more than their share to keep up with the modern world. But growing food is perhaps the most important thing humans can do, and it pleases me that our school’s very first pillar, agriculture, is such an important part of the planet’s future.
What is the most surprising thing you learned about the University of Arizona while writing this book?
I wouldn’t say I learned it so much as appreciated it more while writing the book, but one of the underlying themes of my book is the power of interdisciplinarity in research and study. Years before it became standard, UA scholars were going from building to building, anthropologists talking with economists, space scientists cooking up projects with hydrologists, physicians teaming up with physicists, writers collaborating with dancers and photographers and musicians, and professors and administrators such as John Schaefer, a chemist, making room in his schedule as UA president to teach a humanities course. Much of the intellectual richness of our school—and it’s always yielded an embarrassment of intellectual riches—comes from that kind of interdisciplinary work, leaving the rigid confines of supposed fields for the freedom of the highway, if you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor.
What is your current writing project?
I have a superstition against talking about work in progress, since it’s altogether too easy to talk all the energy out of the writing, to go out to lunch one time too often on a good anecdote and eventually get so sick of your stories that you want nothing less than to repeat them on the page. I’ve seen it happen many times, not least with my old friend Dick Tuck, scourge of Richard Nixon, who would have had a ten-thousand-page memoir in him if he’d only stopped talking and started writing.
I will let on, though, that I’m hoping to focus my next book on a certain animal that’s a distant cousin of the wildcat rather than on the capital-W Wildcats of the current book.
Apart from that, each month I pull together a Substack newsletter called World Bookcase, four or five thousand words of musing about whatever topics in history, culture, language, food, travel, and suchlike matters happen to be catching my interest at the moment. New subscribers are always welcome!
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About the Author Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of more than forty books and author of more than ten thousand periodical pieces. He is a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a contributing writer to Kirkus Reviews, and his writing and photographs have appeared in dozens of magazines and online publications. McNamee is a former lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Arizona and is a longtime traveling speaker for AZHumanities.
This week author Brian Haley discussed his new bookHopis and the Counterculture with reporter Sam Dingman, host of the radio program “The Show,” which is broadcast by Phoenix-based NPR station KJZZ.
In the new book, Haley, who is a cultural anthropologist, addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the appropriation of Indigenous identities that exploded in the 1960s.
In the interview, Haley and Dingman discuss the role Los Angeles radio stations played in amplifying appropriated ideas. Says Haley, “The Radio Free Oz broadcast started doing a number of radio documentaries that gave the Hopi traditionalist faction’s view of things without any real significant critique of what was actually going on there.”
About the Author Brian D. Haley is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Oneonta and a leading scholar of the appropriation of Indigenous identities by people with non-Native histories.
Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park.
During the interview, Dr. Rachel Phillips, a GSA Science Communication Fellow, asked Pyne to explain more about the evolution of fire. He replied: “Fire is a shape shifter, I mean, fire is a reaction. It’s not a substance like earth, air, or water. It can assume many forms but it’s fundamentally a substance. Fire takes its character from its context so it synthesizes, it integrates its surroundings and as those surroundings change, fire changes. So, as oxygen levels on Earth change, fire changes. As plants and animals evolve and rearrange and organize terrestrial landscapes, fire assumes forms appropriate to those landscapes and those conditions.”
About Five Suns:
Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country. Creatively deploying the Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the “five suns” that it birthed, Pyne addresses the question, “Why does fire appear in Mexico the way it does?” Five Suns tells the saga through a pyric prism.
Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world today through its fire suppression capabilities, fire research, and industrial combustion, but also by those continuing customary practices that have become increasingly significant to a world that suffers too much combustion and too little fire.
This month author Melani Martinez publishes The Molino, a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors. Today, Melani answers five questions:
What sparked your interest in publishing the story of your family and your family’s business?
I wanted my family, and families like mine, to be represented in published stories of American experiences. The Mexican-American community and communities from Tucson and the Borderlands have incredible stories, but they are not shared or platformed as much as they could be for many readers and listeners who care about these stories. I knew El Rapido, our family business, mattered to this community. I believed El Rapido’s stories should be published for Tucson. My personal stories that also make up the memoir may be new for this audience, but I hope they resonate.
How has your relationship with the molino changed over time?
I think about the molino in three different ways: the grinding machine itself, the name my family gave to our place of work, and my reflective writing on the memories of this work with my family. In all three ways, the molino is all about process. It is sometimes a representative of the past, but for me it is more often a symbol of how things are constantly changing. I’ve written about the tension I felt with the molino and how I experienced a fear of it, a desire to get away from it. Putting these ideas in writing has helped me see that it is not something I can just walk away from—it never was. But I am not afraid of the machine anymore. I’m able to mourn the loss of the place where we lived and worked. I feel like I can more authentically celebrate the molino now.
What was the connection between El Rapido and México?
It seems like a tamalería / tortillería would have a pretty clear connection to México, but I’m not sure if it was always clear for me and my brother growing up as workers at El Rapido. This disconnect was often tied to language—even though we used some Spanish vocabulary regularly and listened to Mexican music everyday at El Rapido, we didn’t learn to speak the language fluently and struggled to communicate with our co-workers as well as customers and familiar people in our own community. As third generation, we were very isolated from México. Even though we were part of Tucson and Sonoran culture, we didn’t know quite how to connect to the land, the people, and the culture of a place just 70 miles south of us. In terms of our sense of place, El Rapido was one of the only ways we would experience a microcosm of this big idea that was “México.” El Rapido let us taste something, hear something, and through iconic images that were all around us to also see something that told the story of México for us. It wasn’t the same story that we learned in school. It wasn’t the same story on television or in the movies. It might have been a little fuzzy and vague sometimes, but it was our most compelling artifact. If we needed any proof of our ancestry and ties to México, El Rapido was a definite “X” on the map we could point to.
Why did you decide to use the sometimes controversial figure of “El Pensamiento” to tell your story?
I had been writing the memoir for over a decade before El Pensamiento was named in the manuscript. I knew the storefront mural was very important to my family, especially my father, but I had only written this idea with plenty of space between me and the image of “The Sleep Mexican.” I knew it was a complex and powerful image but I didn’t know how to address it confidently. Once I started to imagine the house itself as a character in the story, I realized that I had been missing the voice of an incredibly important El Rapido figure (the mural image) and I wanted to know where he really came from. Searching for “Sleepy’s” origin story made his character come alive for me. I realized his name (El Pensamiento) and then I could hear his voice. He is a narrator in the story because he reveals truth, especially as mijita (me as the primary narrator) struggles to articulate truth to herself. He is also a vessel for compassionately sharing the faith traditions and christian doctrines that have been rejected, resisted, or misunderstood. In this way, he serves as a typology of Christ for mijita. He speaks multiple languages, including the love languages recorded in scripture. His message and his likeness will always be controversial, but full of wisdom for those who listen to his words.
What project are you working on now?
At the University of Arizona, I teach Borderlands writing courses for first-year students and I’ve been working on a Department of Education grant initiative called Project ADELANTE. The Borderlands classroom is some rich territory for dreaming up new and creative ideas! This year, I hope to participate, alongside my students, in various Borderlands genres including corridos, testimonios, fotonovelas, and more.
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About the Author Melani “Mele” Martinez is a senior lecturer at the University of Arizona, where she teaches writing courses. She earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Arizona and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Bacopa Literary Review, BorderLore, Bearings Online Journal,Telling Tongues: A Latin Anthology on Language Experiences, and Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology. Her family has lived in the Sonoran Desert for at least nine generations
We started taking our families in 2014 when our kids were quite young. And from year to year we started to notice the parade route itself was still the same, but the participants had changed. There seemed to be an overwhelming presence of policing units, of the military, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol and several junior exploration programs where we saw young young kids—the adolescent age and even younger—who were kind of marching in unison as they were wearing whatever uniform they were representing. And so that kind of it caught our attention.
Morales expanded on her life in the borderlands:
I grew up in El Paso, she grew up in Anthony, New Mexico. So we have experienced what it’s like being in the margins—not only the geographical margins, but the margins in terms of social class immigration status. I am a second generation Mexican, so my parents came from Juárez and then my upbringing was really on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I was born in the El Paso side, but I very much had relatives and social events and activities on the Mexican side of the border. And so I grew up with this very rich, bicultural experience, and it’s something that really shaped the way that I look at the world.
The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.
This month author Tim Z. Hernandez published They Call You Back, a memoir about the investigations that have shaped the greater part of the author’s life. He takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. Today, Tim answers five (plus bonus) questions:
In some ways, this memoir is a continuation of All They Will Call You, which documents your work to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon. In this new book, you describe your ongoing work tracking down the plane crash victims. Can you give us a peek at what you’ve uncovered since ATWCY was published in 2017?
Since the publication of ATWCY in 2017, I’ve located seven more families and was able to highlight some of them in this new book. But other exciting things have happened since then too. For instance, in 2018 the California State Senate formally recognized the accident and the families on the Senate floor. That was an exciting closure for the families who were there with me that day. This work is about so much more than ATWCY. How have your searches for the victims intersected with your own life?
I wouldn’t necessarily say they “intersected” with my life, but in my pursuit to find these families I found myself having to grapple with some of my own family’s past, our history, the ups and downs. It was as if looking for their families I came to discover my own, and that’s what I tried to capture in this book.
You have several events this Fall, including one later this month at the Los Gatos Plane Crash Memorial. Why is it so important to present this story in public spaces with the community?
I feel like it’s important for the families so that they can finally receive some long overdue closure for what happened to their relative seven decades ago. But also, it’s a story that contains a lot of power—compassion, empathy, and a message of interconnection—so it’s only beneficial to the larger community if we share it far and wide.
We are probably biased, but we love the cover! How did it come together?
Haha! Yes, I love it too, VERY much! That’s the genius of University of Arizona Press cover designer Leigh McDonald! I knew I wanted the cover to reflect my own personal journey in some way while at the same time conveying it was still very much based on the historic Los Gatos plane crash. So I sent her a few photos of me looking “contemplative” and suggested there be an airplane in the sky somewhere distant. Leigh found a Douglas DC-3 photo and placed it in the sky, but it’s also slightly offset from my eye line, which is intentional because I didn’t want it to appear like it’s in the same space with me, but rather that it just also happens to exist in some parallel world. But then Leigh added the texture and just some really special nuances that brought the whole thing together. I’ve worked with her on past covers before too, and she’s always a pleasure to work with, but I have to say, this time she really hit it out of the park!
In addition to community collaborations, you are also collaborating with musicians. What has that been like?
Yes, I’ve always collaborated with musicians over the last 25 years of my writing career. Music is my second love after writing. For this book I actually co-wrote a song with one of my favorite indie folk-musicians, Ted Nunes, and he recorded it. It’s titled “They Call You Back” and as suspected it’s based on the book and my journey. I think music is always a good vehicle for stories and poems, and I try and bring that aspect to my performances as well. I want the work to always be engaging and entertaining, as much as educational. And music just helps with that.
We can’t help it. We have one more question. What’s next?
Haha! I’d like to keep some of the mystery, but I’ll just say that I’m working on a fictional novel for this next one. And it’s about an issue that is a concern to us all, but because of the approach I’m taking I’m really having to use my “dark tools” to write it. It’s unlike anything I’ve written before. It requires me to enter a very cynical state of mind to write it, which is not at all how I operate. Whereas the subjects of my books and poems are usually about interconnections and compassion, this one is very much about division and what happens when one goes down a twisted path that one can’t return from. Fiction feels like a nice break for the time being.
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About the Author Tim Z. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You. Hernandez is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program.
Focusing on service-learning and Latina/o/e communities within a variety of institutional contexts, Working en comunidad: Service-Learning and Community Engagement with U.S. Latinas/os/es provides a practical framework grounded in theoretical approaches that center Latina/o/e experiences as foundational to understanding how to prepare students to work in the community and en comunidad.
We recently had a chance to interview editor and author Elena Foulis about the book, asking about the origin of the project, the concept of comunidad, and the benefits of service-learning.
Your work, and the work of the contributors in this book, provides a guide to service-learning that is both ethical and reciprocal. How did you come to see that there was a need for this kind of guide?
As a growing population, there is an increased interest to interact and learn about Latina/o/e communities, yet it typically tends to be brief, during a semester, or rather extractive, whether this is intentional or not. In the past two decades, more and more academic programs across the U.S. want to work with Latina/o/e communities, and as someone that identifies as part of this community and who has engaged with these communities with my students for over a decade, I wanted to offer a set of best practices to understand how to work with and in community with such a complex and diverse group.
Comunidad is a central, unifying concept for this book. How did you and the other editors formulate this idea?
When we (all of us editors and authors in this book) think of service-learning, we think of comunidad— there is no other ethical way to do this. Service-learning is reciprocal, mutually beneficial, and should lead to sustainable practices. Seeing communities as integral, long-term collaborators requires that we spend time with each other to develop a respectful and trusting relationship. This is what comunidad is all about! A coming together to build unity and work together to build a better future for us and the generations that come after us.
In Chapter 1, you lay out the importance of cultural humility and empathy as part of the pedagogical preparation for service-learning. You employ the wonderful phrase “listening to understand.” Can you talk about what that means, or what it looks like?
As scholars and students, we can think that our textbook or academic knowledge about a community makes us experts of their issues, but we are not. We have an educated understanding that is true and necessary, but we must be humble in our approach to working with communities outside of our institutions. Communities understand their needs and the structural systems that have prevented them from accessing resources, so our job is to listen. As a Latina, I don’t have all the answers about my own community, because we have different experiences, so we must teach ourselves and our students to listen to their concerns and to the solutions that work best for them. In this interaction, our book knowledge takes a back seat, and we become “vulnerable observers,” as anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it.
What are some of the benefits or changes you’ve seen among students, educators, and community members who participate in the kind of service-learning this book advocates for?
Well, students never forget these classes. It is often the only service-learning class they’ve ever taken, so I regularly hear back from them to tell me what they are doing or how the class led them into non-profit work, law, education, and medical school because they want to continue to work—within their chosen professions—in the community. There really is much care among community organizations, students and educators, and those who are served by the organizations. I get to see real changes, joy, and empathy for all involved in this work. Just this year, I heard about how much my students are having a positive impact working with an organization that serves adult learners. They often asked when students would be back, because they’d had such a great rapport with them.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a monograph on oral history with Latina/o/e communities. I developed my passion for service-learning and oral history almost at the same time. The tentative title is Embodied Encounters: Bilingual Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences. I also have several articles coming out on Latina/o/e digital humanities, translanguaging and trauma-informed oral history.
Elena Foulis is an assistant professor and program director of Spanish Language Studies at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She has directed the oral history project Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio since 2014. Foulis’s research explores Latina/o/e voices through oral history and performance, identity and place, ethnography, and family. She has more than ten years of experience in service-learning pedagogy.
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