Bye, Border Blog…

This semester just came and went, which of course is great but my goodness, it’s time to graduate!

This blog has been a great project, I’ve learned about the diverse group of people in the field and more about the field of border studies itself. Yes, in journalism we take border safety workshops and write about the region, and in my Mexican American studies classes I learn about the history of the border and the culture that exists in the unique region (a region I’m fortunate enough to live in). Since January I’ve learned so much more through keeping this blog.

My personal favorites were learning about the ties of women and gender studies and Chicana/Latina studies with Professor Guidotti-Hernandez. Also, I was able to meet one of my favorite authors and learn that we have similar familial histories, with Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and most recently I learned that border studies doesn’t have to be taught solely through text books, article and lectures- it can be interpreted through artistic experiences, according to Safos Dance Theatre.

So, I’ll leave with some helpful tips on how to safely report around the border, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/theborderbeat#p/u/26/UetyI1Ly3mg

http://www.youtube.com/theborderbeat#p/u/27/zoXWxajkre0

http://www.youtube.com/theborderbeat#p/u/28/m5itJYUZuIk

Safos Dance Theatre

I’ve spent the last few weeks, maybe even the last couple of months, filming and photographing a new dance company in Tucson called Safos Dance Theatre. For my advanced photojournalism class we had to do a “picture story” and put together a three to eight minute piece with photos, video and audio to tell a newsworthy story- using Final Cut.

No matter what I do or where I go, I am always drawn to stories that deal with the border and Latino culture. This picture story was no different. Safos Dance Theatre uses movement to music, spoken word and poetry, all to portray issues communities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands face. The small group comes from a diverse dancing background, including ballet, jazz, modern and folklorico. That, along with different experience levels, is combined to create their personal style.

The word Safos comes from José Antonio Burciaga’s definition of the chicanismo Con Safos in his book, Drink Cultura. Literally it means with safety, and the term is widely used to mean respect- you might not like an idea or a piece of art, or even a dance from Safos, just respect it as someone’s own.

Safos Dance Theatre was founded in February 2009, by Yvonne Montoya. I took a class from Montoya in the fall 2008. Her class (The Chicano Movement- MAS 351) was probably one of the most demanding that I’ve had at UA. It was also a class that I learned the most from- funny how that works. After some budget cuts, Montoya didn’t return to UA, she instead decided to start a dance company, something she always wanted to do.

The inaugural show, Deserted Scripts, is coming up on May 8. It features work inspired by news stories of immigrant deaths in the desert, conflict in the Tohono O’dham nation and more.

Also… if you’re wondering about my video, please give me $60 to upgrade to WordPress premium, or something to that effect, so I will be able to upload videos. OR, just check back to Safos Dance Theatre site, it should be up there when I give them the video.

Between the Lines: Border Research Ethics and Methods

Researchers, professors and students from the U.S. and Mexico will come together this Friday for a binational conference called Between the Lines: Border Research Ethics and Methods.

Courtesy of BREM

Speakers and panels will discuss issues in their border research, as well conflicts that arise in the border, like immigration enforcement. Different topics are presented in either Spanish or English. This event is hosted by (and sponsored by others, too) the the UA’s Center for Latin American Studies Border Research Ethics and Methodologies Project (BREM). BREM’s focus is methodological considerations. Part of their abstract about consideration says, “These are complicated when addressing the problems of ‘vulnerable’ populations constituted by poverty, immigration, clandestine activity, and border enforcement.”

I contacted one of the keynote speakers, Professor Kathleen Staudt from the University of Texas El Paso. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in political science. She calls this conference “pioneering” and will be speaking on the topic, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Border Research Collaboration”

Staudt will present a model she helped develop in her co-authored 2002 book, Fronteras no Más: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border, which will be “followed with some new dynamics since then, especially related to higher education bureaucracies, community-based organizations, and research,” she said in an e-mail. She will also, like the title of her talk says, look at the ugly, bad (or what she refers to good enough) and good- of border research.

Along with Professor Staudt, the diverse, day-long conference, will bring together a range of people to collaborate on the often complicated subject of border studies- and conference goers will be able to catch the conversations!

Oscar Martinez

This week I met with another UA professor to learn more about his work in border studies. I know the majority of my posts relate to people at the UA, but so many insightful people work here! So today I went to my professor’s office, Oscar Martinez. I’m currently taking his U.S.-Mexico Border Region class.

Martinez first began teaching border studies courses in the late 1970’s in Texas, when border studies did not necessarily exist. There was little written on the subject, so readings for his classes were difficult to come by. In 1976, Martinez and others formed the Association for Borderland Studies (ABS)- when they began doing their own research for the courses on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. ABS however, is now an international scholarly organization that comprehensively studies borders throughout the world.

“There were articles and some books about the border, but they were part of something else. That’s how any field starts,” Martinez said about the lack of material in the beginning stages.

His most recent book, Troublesome Border, highlights many of his interests in the region. From historical perspectives in Border Indians, to Mexican border states becoming dependent on the U.S. in Foreign Dependence, he says his broad interests come from how the border works- the relationship between one side and the other, how it unites and divides.

Martinez’ classes are often based on books he has written, which he says all relate to his broad interests in the area. He currently has a book in progress about economic development in Mexico titled Why Mexico is Poorer than the U.S.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Last weekend, I went to the Tucson Festival of Books with my friend and fellow Border Beat reporter, Maty. Last semester we both took a UA Mexican American studies class, Chicana/o Psychology. That’s where we first discovered Stephanie Elizondo Griest– through her book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines

This book meant a lot to us both. Elizondo Griest writes about her Texan roots and half Mexican, half American heritage. She didn’t learn Spanish until she ventured to Mexico in her early 30s and the book is about subsequent experiences there. At the Festival of Books, she was there with a panel of Mexican American authors where Maty and I were able to meet with her.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest and Amanda Portillo at The University of Arizona.

During her portion of the panel, Elizondo Griest said, “I’ve always wanted to be one of those women that could start a story with, ‘this one time in Abu Dhabi…'” on how she’s always had what she refers to as wanderlust-and she shared how she got her degrees in journalism and Russian at UT Austin– after meeting a CNN correspondent who told her to “learn Russian” in order to be able to travel and report like him. She did just that. She traveled to Russia and then some, and even turned down a job at the Associated Press after one year to write her first book, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

After the panel, Maty and I interviewed her. That story should be up on Border Beat in a few days (there’s a great video of Elizondo Griest reading an excerpt from Mexican Enough). However, the best part was putting our reporter personas’ aside and being able to have a regular conversation with each other. How many times do you get to tell an author how much her book meant to you? Or find out just how similar you are- half brown, half white, third-generation, pocha. She told us about her unconventional life and how writing has taken her practically everywhere. The best things, she said, often happen when she asks herself “what’s next?”

Border studies, I keep discovering, do not necessarily adhere to some strict academic standard. It is intellectual, historical, political and journalistic. But, experiences that turned into a book for Elizondo Griest also make for a good study.

If you haven’t realized it yet, I highly recommend Mexican Enough.

Gustavo Reveles

This afternoon I spoke with a journalist I met last summer while at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in Puerto Rico.

Amanda Portillo and Gustavo Reveles in Puerto Rico

Gustavo Reveles is a reporter with the El Paso Times in El Paso, Texas. He’s also a member of NAHJ. Reveles and I discussed his studies at UTEP (he double majored in journalism and Chicana/o studies) and talked about how when you’re a reporter in a border town, everyone is a border reporter- no matter what the beat is.

“I was turned on about learning Chicano studies from a journalism class,” he said.

A journalism professor would incorporate the subject into her classes, and he said he was fascinated.

“Growing up here, you take it for granted. We’re all here and with the regular text books you’d think the Chicano Movement begins and ends with Cesar Chavez.”

Reveles has spent most of the last 10 years as a reporter in El Paso. The added history he learned gives him more knowledge and sensitivity to be able to relate to readers in the area. Some of the specific classes he took, like a Youth at Risk class helped him when he covered education- he said history is relevant, especially when understanding why an urban brown student might already be two steps behind others when entering the school system.

He currently is covering an enterprise beat on transportation and growth, which he says just like other beats covered at the newspaper, deals with the border.

“When you live right here, right on it, you have no other choice but to be a border reporter.”

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, PhD.

For my entry this week I spoke with a UA professor whose class I took last spring. As I have previously mentioned, I like to combine my journalism projects with my other academic love, Mexican American studies and research.

So, I went to assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez‘ office to talk to her about women and the border region. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses like U.S. Third World Feminisms and Latina Feminisms in the Americas. The class I took with her was Chicana Feminisms: History, Theory and Practice.

Guidotti-Hernandez has taught at the UA for seven years and in that time took a sabbatical for two fellowships; a postdoctoral in Chicago for nine months and another nine months as a Fulbright at UNAM in Mexico City.

During our discussion, she told me about her article on Dora the Explorer, a book she has coming out and how history has shaped the nationalism of this region; as well as a uniqueness of the Gender and Women’s Studies department.

Her article, Dora the Explorer, Constructing “Latinidades” and the Politics of Global Citizenship looks at the children’s television show and how it has commodified Latino identities- that they’re all the same, Guidotti-Hernandez told me. Dora represents a universal Latino identity and Guidotti-Hernandez argues that’s just not true- Latinos are not universally the same. The show then impacts how people see all Latinos and doesn’t show any national histories.

I’d have to agree with her, and I think that even our main Border Beat site shows a small piece of the uniqueness among Latinos.

We moved on to her new book, her first book actually. Unspeakable Violence: Narratives of Mourning, Citizenship and Loss in Chicana/o and U.S. Mexico National Imaginaries. Her time in Mexico City was dedicated to research for the book, in which she states and argues that border violence in the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped U.S., Mexican and Chicano nationalism.

“I write about the past to connect the present. There’s a lot of ignorance about history,” she says about her book. “A lot of the violence is motivated by economics.”

Part of the economics she touches on have to do with the Yaqui’s of Sonora being displaced and relocated to Arizona, in collaboration with U.S venture capitalists and Mexicanos who had financial interest in Sonora, the book’s description reads.

“Violence is always there, it’s the technology that advances,” she says about the evolving ways to monitor the border. “This place has always been a contested region.”

The “unspeakable” violence she writes about show the ignorance of history she speaks about- and she “challenges methodologies” in the Chicana/o studies field by discussing misrepresented history.

So… we haven’t touched 100% on women and the border, but that’s okay. I think it’s also important to look at the history of the border, to have some sort of idea of why things are they way they are… and why it’s interesting and relevant to even have these areas of study. Before I left, we also talked about the Gender and Women’s Studies department, which offers the only undergraduate concentration in Chicana/Latina studies in the U.S. Also, in the PhD program, it is required to take a Chicana/Latina studies course.

This is to “not only get into mainstream, white feminism,” says Guidotti-Hernandez. “But to get more inclusion in general. It’s good to be doing stuff differently.”

Antonio Rios Bustamante Part 1

So, this blog is proving to be a little more complicated than I thought it would be. How difficult can it be to find a correlation between the journalistic and academic ties to U.S.-Mexico border studies?

Kinda difficult.

However, all of the information and ties are out there, I just have to keep my eyes and ears open- and research some more!… So this week I came across a former University of Arizona professor of Mexican American history. Antonio Rios Bustamante recently returned to Tucson. He taught at UA from 1989- 2000. From 2000- 2004, he spearheaded the new Chicano studies program at The University of Wyoming

Bustmante and his wife Yolanda invited me to their home where we were able to discuss his extensive work and research in Mexican American studies.

“I worked on historical geography, Chicano museums, I made two documentary films…” explains Bustamante.

His films include Latino Hollywood and Mexican Los Angeles. What caught my attention was his interest in cartography of the borderlands. He told me that his work included researching the Southwestern United States from the indigenous to the Hispanic period. He wanted to publish an atlas but it never came to fruition. Here is an excellent example of some his work about maps and the borderlands.

Although his atlas never came to be, he developed even more work on an overall description of Mexican American history. Bustamante says that somewhere at the UA there must be some 50 to 100 maps he was working on and researching. That will have to be a scavenger hunt for another blog. Until then, these are some of the books he has written and edited.

Arelis Hernandez

Arelis Hernandez is a modern-day Latina activist, but she might be a little more modest about that title.

Hernandez, a multimedia journalist for Diverse: Issues in High Education, struggled and campaigned to solidify a U.S. Latina/o studies minor at the University of Maryland at College Park in the spring of 2008.

An article she wrote on her student experience (she graduated last year) was published last month in the Harvard Educational Review. I spoke to Hernandez on the phone a couple of days ago so she could tell me more about her involvement and leadership with the effort against the university administration. Along with other students, faculty and community members, Hernandez peacefully and intelligently stood up to the administration and demanded what she and other students deserved: a right to learn U.S. Latina/o history and a right to have it recognized as a genuine field of study.

Days at the newspaper. Tom Burton, Hilda Perez, Arelis Hernandez and Roberto Gonzalez. Thursday, June 26, 2008. (Marie D. De Jesus/Orlando Sentinel)

In the spring of 2006, Hernandez, whose parents are from Puerto Rico, was reporting for the school’s newspaper The Diamondback, covering the diversity beat. For one story, she headed out to a symposium, where the university was allocating funds to “try out” Latina/o studies.

“It was the first time I’d been in a room with Latino professionals and students. I had no idea they had been fighting for 10 years to get these programs. It was a eureka moment for me,” she said.

Hernandez registered for the first class in the fall 2007 semester, to see what would happen, she said. The class was held in an old field house that was drafty, where the basketball team used to practice and where Elvis Presley once played.

“When I first learned about Latino history, well that class did it for me. I hadn’t had a chance to explore any of these classes…I’m inquisitive and I love history, I thought I had a good sense of American history and there I was, I was completely wrong. I had no idea.”

She said that so much of what she was learning, hundreds of years of history, all the way to the Chicano movement in the 1960s, resonated with her. Questions she had been yearning to know more about, ranging from her Latina identity, to different Latin American countries to Latinos’ place in U.S. history, were now being openly discussed.

When the course was to continue into the spring 2008 semester, professors said the outlook on keeping the classes and turning them into a minor, were grim. Hernandez and some fellow students came together to let administrators know they needed the classes, they had a right to learn more.

She helped in writing press releases, making posters and going out to share, face-to-face, what was going on. People responded and action became greater. A professor encouraged her to write a final paper for her Latino studies class, which ended up being 30 pages – and which ended up published in the Harvard Educational Review, a paper on why the courses matter and the movement at UCMP.

“I learned a lot about the politics of higher education. It works like Congress… slowly, and I found you have to maneuver.”

Students drafted a manifesto, like what they learned in class from El Plan de Santa Barbara, declaring their expectations for higher learning at UMCP. In the end, the administration did allow a U.S. Latina/o minor.

She said the work she did and being published, hasn’t quite hit her yet.

“In retrospect, maybe we didn’t do that much, we were just serious about it.”

Intro…

Hi!

My name is Amanda and this is my Border Beat Blog!

I’m a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in journalism and minoring in Mexican American studies. I like to combine my two subjects, so for my blog this semester I’ll be looking at various universities across the U.S. (especially border states) that have departments and schools teaching border studies. For example, here at the UA we have the Department of Mexican American & Raza Studies. They are “committed to contemporary applied public policy research on Mexican Americans,” according to their Web site. Two professors in the department, Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzalez have journalism roots. They also have a Web site, Column of the Americas, which regularly produces articles on various topics (including immigrations, human/civil rights, indigenous issues, etc.)

I’ll update here about interesting research, classes, student projects, etc., that are going on around universities.