Saturday, November 23, 2013

The saga of the p2 card: Elena Herrada, Round 2

Frustrated is not nearly a strong enough word to describe my experience as Production Manager on Elena Herrada’s second interview. Originally, Jasmine and I were set to interview Mary Luevanos at C.L.A.V.E., the arts organization in Detroit. However, she was relatively unresponsive and wishy washy when Maria kept trying to contact her and set a date and time, so as a backup, Elena agreed to do a second interview to expand on what she had already said. This meant that we didn’t know what we were doing or when until Wednesday, meaning I could not reserve the equipment until then. Naturally, ISS was out of the camera we needed, so I asked them for a similar one. They ended up giving me one that, while relatively similar in operation, used a different kind of memory card. On-site, we figured out how to set up and operate the camera, and I didn’t think the difference in equipment would be a huge deal. However, though I had asked for enough memory to hold 3 hours of footage, our cards ran out of space after about an hour and a half, in the middle of Elena telling us a really crazy and important story. Because the cards were different and ISS wouldn’t let us take the card readers out of the building, we couldn’t upload the files and then reuse the cards, so we had to cut the interview short. Elena was very understanding and everyone handled it well, but we were all disappointed that we couldn’t do the best job possible because of the equipment problems. But the tech issues didn’t stop there.
Because of the whole memory card situation, I couldn’t just upload the footage directly, I had to go in to ISS and use the card reader. I found out in the process that the type of files that card collected are incompatible with iMovie. Luckily, I have a friend who has Final Cut Pro, which I also have experience with, so I thought it would all be fine, if a little inconvenient. But when I tried importing the files to edit in final cut, they only appeared as picture files. I tried several methods of importing and the same thing happened each time. I had checked on the camera that the footage was there, so I don’t know what happened. I suspect it might have something to do with transferring the files to the hard drive. But as of now, I have no idea how to access the footage. We have the sound files, so at least we have audio of the interview, but that’s nowhere near enough. It was literally just an avalanche of technical nightmares that mostly just stemmed from not having enough notice because of Mary’s unresponsiveness, but it escalated way beyond what I thought it would. Maria had talked to us about going back for a follow-up so Elena could finish the story and we could complete the interview, and now, because of all of the technical nonsense, it looks like we may have to revisit what Elena told us on Friday so we can get it on tape, and I will make sure we have the right equipment. I’m just really frustrated because I was looking forward to the interview and the experience was muddled by the stress involved with dealing with the equipment. I feel that I did a good job of working on the fly and figuring things out in less than ideal circumstances, but these editing difficulties render all of our work pretty much useless. Knowing what I know now, I’m sure that when we go back after Thanksgiving to finish up and maybe try to recapture some of what she told us, it’ll be a breeze compared to this unfortunate saga. The worst part of all this is that Elena gave us a really great, interesting interview and talked about some really important parts of Midwestern Latino history.
It was really interesting to hear about Elena’s experience in Detroit, especially regarding her work on reclaiming the history of the repatriation. She’s been working for decades on collecting oral histories from people who were repatriated or had experience with it. Elena told us how difficult it was initially for her to find subjects because people did not want to talk about their experiences or admit that they had been sent away. She recalled showing her father the advertisement she had put in newspapers and magazines looking for interview subjects, and him laughing at her blunt request for repatriation stories. According to him, Mexicans were much too proud to admit that they had been essentially kicked out of the country. Even after she started getting a lot of interviews, people would contact her and ask her not to use what they had said in any of her research or materials. She said that people had recalled a lot of really traumatic and upsetting memories and after the fact, couldn’t bring themselves to make those public. All of that came back to Elena, and the information and accounts she did make public were only a fraction of what she had heard. She said she knows things she never wanted to know about this country’s attack on Mexicans and the effects it had on people in her community. It is amazing to me how much she has heard and how much she knows that she can never tell people, and it must be an incredible burden. It was really moving to watch her recount those interviews.

She began to work with organizations in Detroit to make these stories public and create a project around them. She told us about meeting with a white filmmaker at the Reuther Library who was interested in her research and about how he had achieved success with a film about Latinos in Detroit. She and her team had consulted with him and helped him, and when they began to try and get funding for her project, she discovered that he had taken the materials she had shared with him and applied for his own grant with her research. He essentially stole her work and intended to profit off of it despite not having been a part of the project or even the community. In response, she did the only thing she thought she could do: she went to everyone he had mentioned in his proposal and told them not to give him any information. She systematically rendered him informationless because she felt he couldn’t possibly tell this story; one that she had spent so much time collecting and one that felt very close to her heart. I couldn’t believe that someone had stolen her work, especially someone who didn’t understand it’s implications in the community. If I had invested so much of myself and my life in trying to understand something that affected me and my family so directly, I would be absolutely livid at an outsider looking to profit off of that. She seemed sort of calm as she recounted it but you could see the hurt and anger she still felt about it. Luckily, her precautions paid off and she shut his efforts down, so we could all laugh about it. She had a way of involving all of us in her storytelling which made everything seem personal to us as well. I felt drawn in and that experience is something that people wouldn’t have access to without direct interviews. I just wish we could have actually captured it. Hopefully, we can get the same story on our next try, because I think it’s important for people to hear, not only with regards to learning more about the repatriation, but to seeing the struggles that people have undergone in trying to tell their stories.

1 comment:

  1. I am sorry you had to deal with the fallout of the P2 card debacle Tina, that must have been so alarming and frustrating! Rest assured, Linda (our videographer) has had similar "disasters" and been able to restore files and use them for the project. We will figure it out!

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