Oscar Chapa reflect 1

As a first generation Latino from the Detroit area I am always excited to learn more about leaders in my community. This class seemed like the perfect opportunity to venture out and learn more about the people who contributed greatly to social justice reform but are not specifically mentioned in our history books. Before this class I would search for the history of the "Mexican town area" I grew up in- to only find very little information. I really seek to learn more about what the word "Chicano/a" means, how I fit into this history, and to take what I learn and educate those around me. We tend to forget that our history as Latino people is not concentrated in certain areas of the country, as people we have bounded together for justice and the chicanas behind these movements deserve our attention. History deserves to be uncovered so that we do better. It's a scary thing to enter a class that talks about a topic like Chicana feminism, because truth is- this isn't talked about almost anywhere. It's a topic that I personally know very little about, but I am eager to open my mind and learn. I unfortunately am not familiar with any Chicana activists in politics. It's sad to say, but most of my life the Latino figures I have been taught to look up to have been male war heroes. I also don't know the time span that most Chicana feminism touches upon. Most feminism that I am familiar with revolves around pop culture, sexual rebellion, and the freeing of self through actions that many consider taboo (as extreme as an artist using her own period blood for a portrait to combat male to privilege). In many of the articles I read on this topic, feminism, is unfortunately divided by race and white feminism has received a lot of criticism for ignoring race as an issue in women's rights. This was most publically displayed at the video music awards when a black female artist confronted a white female artist to "check her privilege". It's especially interesting to dive into feminism in Latino culture, because classes I have taken in the past focus so much on machismo as a staple of Latino culture. I am hopeful that the word feminism will take on a new, even more powerful meaning. I am excited to make new friends and to be an active part of our class. Most importantly I am eager to challenge the history I had been presented in exchange for a more wholesome, inclusive, and true history.

Ramiro's Mini Oral History

Ramiro Alvarez was chosen by our group to participate in a trial run of an oral history recording. We interviewed Ramiro about his first encounters with racism and his early life. Along this process, as group we learned that the process of recording the interview is a sensitive one. Subtle changes in light, white balance, and angles really can improve the feeling of an interview. Another point of learning we encountered had to do with our audio: editing out background noise and enhancing voices digitally isn't as good as making sure that not even a single phone vibrates, any papers are shuffled in the background, or any walking really. The camera work itself was smooth for our group and good thing it was. Right before we started editing...we realized the record button wasn't on during our best take. Left with nothing but bloopers, the team quickly sprang into action and redid the whole thing.

Potential logo designs for ARISE, the first organization Ramiro co-founded

Ramiro's Diversity Peer Educator journal to the Hall Director they worked under.

Table of contents page to a Spanish language Trans Oral History report

Camera Settings & Example Production Schedule

Hi All,

Marie took some pictures of the camera settings during training, so I've added them for us all here:

We've also completed our production schedule and are excited to interview Ana Cardona tomorrow morning, I've copied it here:

Production Schedule: Ana Luisa Cardona

Date: Saturday, October 24, 2015 Time: 10:00 AM Production location: Home of Ana Cardona, 1243 Daisy Lane, East Lansing, MI 48823

Interviewee: Ana Cardona Interviewee Contact Information: (517) 575-8226 cardona.analuisa@gmail.com

Production Crew:

Maria Cotera—Professor/Project Coordinator/Interviewer Blake Ebright—Production Manager/Data Wrangler/Slate/Tape Log/Event Recorder Marie Dillivan—Data Wrangler/Cameraperson/Videographer

Contact Information: Maria Cotera: (734) 834-7306 Blake Ebright: (301) 272-5432 Marie Dillivan (231) 750-3245

Filming Schedule:

Production crew will arrive at 1243 Daisy Lane at 10:00 AM to set up the equipment. Blake and Marie will also look at any archival materials present. 11:00 AM, filming is set to begin, with Maria Cotera leading the interview. Filming should end at around 2:00 pm, at which point we will begin to pack up the camera equipment. Blake and Marie will continue choosing and scanning archival materials after the interview while tearing down the equipment. All equipment must be accounted for before departure.

Additional Tasks/Notes: To our knowledge, no one has a set time they need to leave, so once the interview is over, we will begin scanning some of Ana’s documents.

Equipment List
From ISS-Medial Lab: Panasonic AGAC-160 Miller Tripod Sennheiser Shotgun Microphone Wired Lavalier Microphone Two XLR cables (one 1’ for the shotgun, one 10’ for the lav) Zoom H4n (used as backup) Soft Box light kit Memory card reader	Other: Iguana (Group hard drive) Still camera/phone Extension cord and power strip Laptops with scanner software Clear plastic sheet for photographing large sized documents 550 Scanner Coin (to use for camera set up) Notepads for tape log Cardboard box and acid free folders Craft services: fruit, veggies, water, etc. Tissues
Documents Production schedule Tape Log

           

Shirley's Oral History

For our Oral History Test Run, our group chose to interview Shirley Rivas about her journey to the University of Michigan. Setting up our test run went remarkably well. We did run into some issues getting authorized to rent out the camera for our test run and the actual interview, but luckily, we were able to get the authorization overridden. For our test run, Katelynn rented out the equipment and walked Shirley through how to set up the equipment because she missed our media training center at the ISS Media Lab. Taylor filmed the interview, while Katelynn was the interviewer. Shirley was able to download a film slate app on her phone to help with the organization of the different clips. Our test run was completed in just three takes. We had to pause after the first take because Shirley wanted to have a better scope of the questions, while the second time we stopped due to equipment issues with the camera. The timestamp feature on the camera screen was not working. Fortunately, we had someone from the ISS Media Center help us out.

As a result of our test run, our group realized several key issues relevant to the success of our actual interview with Ms. Juana Gonzalez. Taylor realized how careful we need to be in saving our interviews in 2 or 3 different places to make sure we do not lose anything. Our group made sure to upload our test run interview to our external hard drive, Katelynn’s personal computer, and it was shared via Google Drive to Taylor and Shirley. Taylor also realized how long it actually takes to set up all the equipment necessary for our interview. Another concern that we encountered during our test run was just realizing how much care goes into the filming of an interview. We realized we had to silence our phones, make sure the camera was working properly, make sure the framing was okay, while still remembering everything we learned during our workshop at the ISS Media Center. We realized that even though a lot of care does go into filming, you can plan ahead to reduce your anxiety over some of these concerns.

Taylor Davidson, Katelynn Dreeze, Shirley Rivas

Blake's Mini Oral History

Here's our mini oral history of Blake and filmed by Marie! We also have some objects from Blake's archive, and we think everything went pretty well overall. Although we did have a data scare with our clip, and the scanner takes some getting used to. Below is the link to our video on youtube.

Ramiro Alvarez, reflection #1

“brown boys” by florentino diaz

For much, if not all of my life, I have felt sensitive. I have felt and “acted” sensitive: tearing up through any emotion, even happy ones, howling after any scrape, cut, or bruise, and spending too much time alone with my mother. Of course, “sensitive” was not the word the other boys were flinging at me. Sensitive was a word reserved for my mother. Sensible, tierno, delicado. And while she definitely worried about her sensitive son, especially when she wondered about what kind of man I would grow up to be, it seldom bothered her and she never hesitated to listen to me cry, even now at twenty-three. 

Sensitive is not a fun place to life your life out of at times. Sensitive, in a world that seems to spin on aggression and competition, keeps you lonely, it keeps you anxious, and it keeps you vigilant—of your behaviors, your words, your reactions, and your thoughts. Layering onto that natural inclination to surveil myself harder came homophobia, racism, and machismo. Growing up brown, effeminate, and queer brought the harsh magnifying glass right above my most tender parts and eventually, I trained my own mind to second-guess itself, to belittle itself, and to never be content with where I am, but instead to draw happiness from the possibilities of what I could become. To no surprise I became clinically depressed.

I was lucky enough to enter college around such an exploratory age—my late teens and early twenties, something many people take for granted. It is at this university where I began to reconcile my need to express my sensitivity with my desires to provide myself a career path. Naturally, I was drawn to social movements. Finally, I was living in a reality that was supposed to validate my struggles as struggles beyond things I needed to “fix” about myself. Finally, the issue existed outside of me. Finally, there was space for me to be disappointed by life, shocked by violence, and left in tears by the atrocities I could not seem to stop focusing on. Finally, my set of skills: communicating hurt, holding people accountable to their passive/micro aggressions, and doing the emotional labor of others seemed like it was going to pay off big time; I was going to be a social worker! Or something…

"untitled" by patricia bordallo dibildox and florentino diaz

One of those early and very formative places was within the ideological terrains of Chicanismo. While it seemed a generational thing I could not fully sync with, I noticed emerging subgroups within the movement calling themselves Xican@s, Chicanxs, and even Xicanxs that spoke to a more present-day experience of Mexican American-ness that took time to look at gender, gender expression, diversity of sexualities, and bodies. But the “new” Xicanx identity was not very accessible. There simply was not enough writing or art being shared around that dealt with these “denser” topics as they intersected with race and nation. The works of these young Xicanxs was kept archived not across paper, but across slam poetry performances, blogs, art across our bodies in the forms of tattoos and piercings, within relationships, in dance steps, and in dreams.

Fortunately, while in school I was able to learn from the more classic identity: Chicano, as it stood in the sixties and seventies. Now research savvy, I dove deep into the movement’s history and found an eerie parallel to my own internal conflict. But before that, I felt “wrong” again. For such a long time after initially connecting myself to the political alignment of the Chicano, I was hyper-surveilling myself again. I was host to thoughts that felt less rooted to me and more connected to an external understanding I absolutely had to internalize and had no role in creating, much like masculinity.

All my life older men had made me feel ashamed for trying to balance and reconcile my emotions and my logic. Older men had chastised me for not dwelling on values like tirelessness, toughness, sacrifice, order, and individualism (ego) exclusively. My hopes to be all those things and also be fragile, whole, chaotic, communal, and compassionate were not allowed in masculinity. This did not change among the writings, histories, and narratives of the popularized Chicano movement. Again, I found myself in a space full of men, this time with my peers and some elders that romanticized militancy, legal rights, and logic to pursue their idea of liberation.

It was not until I stumbled across intersectionalism that I began to see that eerie parallel I mentioned early. Intersectionality, and by extension the works of legendary and contemporary radical poets and feminists of color, often queer Black women, gave me a new insight into myself that I am eternally grateful for. I began to believe in an authentic self. I began to understand the bigger picture of what it means to be Ramiro and in that overwhelming experience, I noticed the complexity of the self, but also how the self is a mirror or microcosm of social movements. It became apparent that mining my past for insight and making peace with said past would help me return to a life that takes place in the moment. After all, for me, anxiety has never been anything but an obsessive fixation on the future with shame and guilt shooting up from the past, barring me from sacredness of the moment.

Just like that, “Chicano” became “Ramiro”. I saw the movement much how I saw myself: an amazing force thirsty for freedom, but with skills unbalanced and emotional creativity undeveloped. That lack of balance came from self-sabotage. It came from refusing to listen to the ways my logic and emotions naturally reconciled themselves within me, from refusing to be patient, from refusing to be my complete self in everything that I do, and from refusing to be intuitive. But it did not always feel like self-sabotage because it was rewarded so often. I experience a much easier life, filled with far more opportunities for me to be remembered as "important", all because I man. In other words, because the Chicano movement’s foundation was created almost exclusively by men as a result of their fear for all things feminine within themselves (and by projection, women), the movement fell into fragility so quickly after its prime as a result of sabotage, a lot like myself in later college years. 

Author bell hooks refers to this self-sabotage psychic self-mutilation. “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

Like all people working against the system, movements also fall into states of fragility and depression. But when faced with fragility, the best thing one can do is to feel it through and through. To learn from it. To embrace this cyclical flow between abundance and scarcity of energy, as is the flow of the seasons, as is the flow of self-care. But without any voice to lead that healing, without anyone to validate that importance of breaking before rebuilding again (to winter and then spring), the movements became a massive vehicle of community harm, notably at the expense of women. However, it was not that those experts on healing, wholeness, and transgression were not there, it is that they were not welcome. Queer men, women in general, non-binary people, Black Chicanos, or anyone that wanted to focus on the present issues (sexism included) were preferably unheard and excluded from the movement that was too deep into its long-term goals. So, the Chicano body could not hear itself because it artificially segmented itself instead of doing the hard work it takes to deal with everything the body needs. In the case of Chicanismo, sexism and sexual pleasure were ignored despite being vital to the true collective, among other issues.

Professor Cotera’s project then becomes a metaphor for therapy in my eyes. I see the work of digital archives as something like giving one’s self therapy through honesty. But, instead of individual experiences, the pieces we must reassemble for this act of macro self care are whole stories of people, as people, not events, represent and carry the collective memory of the Chicano movement. In collecting these incredibly necessary oral histories we are beginning to make peace with our past as Chicanos. We are learning that time is in fact not linear, and that the past has as much to be planned for as the future, for there is no chance at living a liberated tomorrow without coming back to the present and being content—being happy, well nourished, and critical Chicanos before objects of activism.

I enrolled in professor Cotera’s class to learn more about my process and myself, as much of it is still extremely confusing. I enrolled because Cotera is providing a safe and effective model for us to practice history reunification, reconciliation between the emotional and logical, a balance that does not live in camps of masculine and feminine, but inside each of us, all the time. I enrolled to thrive as sensitive, to embrace my uniqueness and reorient myself into the true Chicano movement, which I believe is more accurately the Chicana movement. 

In healing the Chicano movement, in healing myself, I hope to discover the true nature of the Chicano movement and its sensitive side. Which, with each passing day of this class, seems that it was clearly carried on the backs of gender and sexual minorities. We are essentially redefining Chicano by bringing the movement closer to its roots through memory recollection. We are not comparing, “bettering”, or perfecting anything. We are simply trying to be authentic in how we heal from the trauma we inflected on ourselves, which is a trauma often learned outside ourselves and through the toxic systems of sexism, racism, and imperialism. And that is a lesson that will extend far beyond the classroom. This is the lesson of recovery.

“these great divisions hurt me but i’ll find home again” by florentino diaz

Lizette Esquivel Reflection #1

What the H is Chicana Feminism?

 I was immediately drawn to this course because I realized that I know close to nothing about Chicana Feminism. I believe that as a Mexican American Woman, I seek to understand and learn about my people's history within this country. Unfortunately its always obvious, that the history that is deeply imbedded with in our society is one that tells the story of the White mans journey through time. We rarely ever hear about what the Mexicans journey was like, what our experiences were and further we almost never hear what the Mexican Women's experiences were like. I have always been bothered by my lack of knowledge on the topic. 
I  know that this class will grant me the opportunity to not only learn about our history as Chicanas and the activism we participated in, but it will also grant me the opportunity to learn about the steps that the woman before me have taken to empower our community and combat the social injustices that still remain today so that I may be able to follow within their footsteps.
It is a goal of mine to learn as much as possible through  this amazing opportunity that hits extremely close to home. I am beyond ecstatic to begin on our journey of discovering our uncovered history, in a sense. I feel that it will be a very impactful and empowering experience for me to be able to hear first hand the amazing things the Chicanas before me were able to achieve. 
I currently, however, have zero exposure to archiving and cataloging so I am a bit skepitical about what the process is going to look like, but I am also very excited to learn new skills that undoubtedly will assist me in future endeavors. Overall I am mostly excited to learn the history of the women whose lives have impacted my own in various ways, but most  importantly, I am excited to learn about the legacies that the great women before me have laid in my path.