Hostile Terrain 94 is an international participatory exhibit commemorating the thousands of people who have died or disappeared attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border, due to the U.S Border Patrol policy of Prevention Through Deterrence. Organized by the Undocumented Migrant Project, the exhibit grew from the work of anthropologist Jason DeLeon, one of the Humanities Institute’s 2019 Distinguished Visiting Lecturers. Hostile Terrain exhibits will begin launching in late Fall 2020, and continue through Fall 2021. The Humanities Institute plans to participate, with a target date of Spring 2021 for the physical exhibit, and other activities leading up to and following the exhibit.
In advance of the exhibit, the Undocumented Migrant Project is hosting “A Moment of Global Remembrance.” The Project invites members of the public to record themselves reading aloud the name of a person who has died while crossing into the United States through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The recording also includes details of the person’s death. While it might be difficult to speak these details aloud, the project provides one way to remember those who have died and to bear witness to the results of U.S. policies.
The Humanities Institute extends an invitation to participate in “A Moment of Global Remembrance.” If you wish to record a video, the Undocumented Migrant Project offers these steps:
Email hostileterrain94@gmail.com with the subject line “HT94 Video Compilation” and include your name and location* in the body of the email. *If you would prefer to keep your identity anonymous this information is optional. We will also accept audio-only recordings.
We will reply to your email with the information that you will record yourself reading out loud along with further instructions.
Recording the video can be a difficult experience. If you choose to record a video and would like to participate in a discussion about your experience, the HI invites you to send a copy to Melissa Biggs, the guest curator for the Hostile Terrain 94 Austin site.
Dr. Paul Stekler, Professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film and the Wofford Denius Chair in Entertainment Studies, led the Faculty Fellows seminar on September 19th, beginning with a short overview of what brought him to politics, and more specifically, what brought him to making documentaries like Getting Back to Abnormal (2013). Dr. Stekler credited his family for his lifelong interest in politics, stemming back to conversations with his grandfather on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his first job working for a Republican congressman, among other things. Stekler has worked in a variety of political contexts since then, from the George McGovern campaign in 1972 to working with pollsters from The New York Times. His family spanned both sides of the aisle–his father, a Republican, helped him to get his first campaign work, while his mother is a lifelong Democrat. Stekler earned a doctorate degree in Government from Harvard University, and after working in academia as a political scientist for a number of years, he found his calling as a full-time filmmaker with a focus on politics.
Stekler showed the Fellows a series of clips from an NEH-funded film he made in 2000, titled George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire. The film allowed him, he explained, a new context in which to apply his political knowledge and background, but the challenge was presenting this information in a narrative appropriate to a broader audience. George Wallace, for Stekler, represented a transition point for American politics, and a documentary presented a unique opportunity to bring his conversations within academia into the mainstream.
Participants asked Stekler about his methods, from how he finds his subjects and characters to his methods for mapping the trajectory of a documentary film. Stekler emphasized narrative fundamentals, such as conflict, but he also noted the importance of finding an accessible subject–someone who would not only be open with the filmmaker, but who would be compelling to watch on the screen. Though crafting a story is of the utmost importance, Stekler explained that as a documentarian he seeks to balance storycraft, accuracy of representation, and visual interest. Several Fellows pondered what exactly could be told best in the context of documentaries and other projects for public audiences, and what academic and discipline-specific projects offers alongside more popular works. Participants agreed that although some work can be translated into popular projects, teaching also offers a venue for transmitting one’s research to the public.
Participants also raised questions about Stekler’s development as a documentarian. Much of his knowledge about filmmaking, and more generally, narrative, Stekler said, was learned through collaboration with other creatives. Stekler credited the producer of Eyes on the Prize, one of his first films, for teaching him some of the fundamental aspects of filmmaking–mainly, that the goal was to keep the audience watching. Overall, he admitted, he learned much of what he now knows about story from experience.
The conversation turned more specifically to Getting Back to Abnormal, and the variety of New Orleans documentaries that had been made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in New Orleans himself, Stekler explained he had found many documentaries of post-Katrina New Orleans lacking what he identified as the city’s true character. Stekler told the group that he and his collaborators wanted to tell the story of whether or not New Orleans had changed, capturing something of what he saw to be New Orleans’ contradictory nature. Stekler shared that at the Controversy & Conversation screening of the film the week before at the Austin Public Library, he had the chance to rewatch it with a number of engaged audience members. During the discussion he led, a member of the audience asked what the film would look like if he had made it in 2019. Although Stekler felt that his connections to the city have grown more distant, making him “not the right person” to make a present-day version of the film, he believes that the sway between the joys and sorrows of the city are unlikely to have changed.
Looking towards the future, Stekler stated he was working to raise funds for a film on the McDonald Observatory and astronomy–moving from the politics of the city to the stars.
On Training Young Israeli and Palestinian Women to Be Peacemakers in their Communities
By Suzanne Seriff
Sometimes, various aspects of our lives intersect in unexpected and enriching ways. This was the case when I learned that the University of Texas at Austin’s Humanities Institute and Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, along with the Jewish and interfaith communities of Austin were hosting a week-long visit from four young women leaders—Palestinian and Jewish Israeli—who are part of a Santa Fe-based organization called Creativity for Peace. The events take place from Feb 12-16, 2017.
Creativity for Peace (CfP) is in its 18th year and “prepares young Israeli and Palestinian women to be peacemakers in their communities and across borders with compassion, friendship, and courage.” I am an active member of each of the Austin-based host communities, and I also have a collaborative relationship with Creativity for Peace in Santa Fe. Each has unique qualities but all share an openness to new experiences, and a desire for change toward social justice. Some exercise the mind; others the capacity for human connections. Dialogue is the active link that binds me to each of these organizations’ endeavors, and which catalyzes our conversations across borders.
I truly look forward to interacting with all of them on my home turf, a rare opportunity to bring so many resources to the task of promoting peace though dialogue, art, and action.
As a publicly engaged folklorist, I divide my time between Austin, where I teach in the Department of Anthropology and the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies here at UT (including Difficult Dialogues courses on immigration through the Humanities Institute), and Santa Fe, NM, where I direct an experimental lab at the Museum of International Folk Art called the Gallery of Conscience (GoC). The GoC is devoted to the exploration of social justice and human rights issues through the lens of folk and traditional arts.
Established in 2010, the mission of the GoC at the Museum of International Folk Art is to serve as an agent of positive social change by engaging and connecting individuals and communities around social justice and human rights issues, using the power of folk arts to address historical and current events; to catalyze dialogue; and to promote personal reflection, communication, and action. Since 2012 the GoC has operated through a “prototyping” process, in which exhibitions evolve organically over time in response to visitor input and community engagement, ever a work in progress.
Dialogue is at the heart of the GoC’s mission and it was the spark that generated our multi-year collaboration with CfP and two award-winning folk artists. During two successive summer workshops, CfP’s Israeli and Palestinian campers came together with local New Mexican young women at the Gallery to work with master-level folk artists. They explored mutually relevant themes of home, belonging, place and displacement which were mirrored in the GoC exhibition, Between Two Worlds: Folk Artists Reflect on the Immigrant Experience, which was on display at the Museum of International Folk Art between spring of 2014 and spring of 2016. Both workshops were held in conjunction with CfP’s annual three-week summer camp intensive for Palestinian and Jewish Israeli girls, age 15-17.
The issues affecting immigrants, refugees or displaced persons can be difficult to directly confront, either because of stigma, taboo, language barriers, stereotypes, or conflict. The GoC and CfP collaboration gave participants not only the opportunity to engage directly with the words and works of master-level traditional artists who speak out through their arts, but also the chance to share their own stories and personal experiences evoked by the art; to enrich their understanding of different points of view surrounding questions of home and belonging for people who share contested spaces; and to identify how they can respond directly to needs they see in their communities.
By the time the exhibition officially opened in the summer of 2014, the Gallery was perfectly—if inadvertently—positioned to respond to what national headlines—and President Obama—were billing as an “urgent humanitarian situation” in the United States (Washington Post June 2, 2014) involving thousands of unaccompanied children arriving in this country seeking asylum. Several of the artworks uncannily mirrored the reporting on these very current events, even though the artworks had been created years—sometimes decades—before. Two of the most evocative artworks include a painting by Cuban artist Cenia Guttiérez Alfonso, depicting an unaccompanied young girl crossing the Atlantic Ocean on her journey to a new land (Menina con Gallo/ Young Girl with Rooster), and a three-part sculpture by Peruvian-American retablo maker Nicario Jiménez (provocatively titled Immigration: The American Dream) which illustrates the differential receptions of three groups of undocumented Latino families–Cubans, Haitians, and Mexicans–arriving on our nation’s shores and greeted, respectively, either by refugee assistance agencies, detention centers, or border police.
That summer also coincided with the outbreak of renewed conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, rendering Between Two Worlds themes all the more compelling for CfP workshop participants. The works on display sparked dialogue about some of the exhibit’s core themes which resonated with all of the young women– the struggle to belong in a place where you may or may not feel welcome, and the experience of living between two worlds. These works included textiles, wood carvings, beadwork, paintings and poetry by Cuban, Mozambican, Hmong, Mexican, Hispanic New Mexican, Brazilian, Lakota, Polish, Navajo, Tibetan, Nigerian and Peruvian artists. Following this exercise, the young women were introduced to the exhibit’s featured immigrant artist—Nigerian Yoruba indigo dye artist Gasali Adeyemo; (Year One) and Mexican immigrant papel picado (cut paper) artist, Catalina Delgado Trunk (Year Two). These artists introduced the young women to the cultural background of their art and work.
For the remainder of the workshop, participants were encouraged to reflect on their experiences of home, belonging, and displacement, and to express their ideas through the artists’ medium. In the first year of the collaboration, the young women were encouraged to create a quilt block representing some artistic representation of “home” using the batik dying technique introduced by Gasali. These blocks were later sewn into a quilt for the Gallery, and represented some of the profound sentiments that were sparked by the exhibit’s themes. For example, a young Palestinian woman, far from home for the first time, depicted a house aglow with the lights of a traditional wedding. An Israeli portrayed the Jewish Friday-night Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner, when her family gathers for stories and prayer. In the second year of the collaboration, the participants created symbols of home, peace, or family using the cut paper technique of papel picado represented in Catalina’s award-winning work, which were bound into an illustrated book for the Gallery’s dialogue lounge. Both workshops resulted in original works of art, and stories from the CfP campers, that were subsequently featured in the exhibition itself.
Gasali Adeyemo with Creativty for Peace participants, Museum of International Folk Art, July 2014. Photo by Laura Marcus Green. Photo courtesy of Museum of International Folk Art
Many of these campers have gone on to become young leaders of the Arab-Israeli peace process. They have undertaken intensive leadership training in their home regions on how to facilitate groups, organize projects, serve as spokeswomen and take other actions to help achieve peace. The result has been a steady stream of speaking engagements at conferences both at home and abroad, attending global summits, meeting with government leaders, and even, in some cases, returning to Santa Fe to serve as junior counselors at the CfP summer camp. Their trip to Austin is part of a national tour in which four of these young leaders, along with CfP executive Director Dottie Indyke, will meet and hold workshops with high school and college students throughout the United States to talk about the process that brought them together and answer questions from the audience.
As I prepare to welcome the young leaders of CfP to Austin next week, I realize that one of them, Deema Yusuf, was a participant in our initial workshop with Gasali Adeyemo when she was a first-time CfP camper during the summer of 2014. Writing about the quilt block she created at the time, Deema reflects on the importance of language as both a tie that binds and a spark for dialoguing across difference:
Deema Yusuf, Gallery of Conscience workshop with Gasali Adeyemo and Creativity for Peace, July 2014. Photo by Laura Marcus Green. Courtesy of Museum of International Folk Art
. . . I wanted to write something. Especially in Arabic because I feel like Arabic writing is like an art. And it’s very beautiful—even for people who don’t know how to read it . . . So I decided to write ‘Palestine’ in Arabic because that’s where I’m from and . . . it’s very important for me.
I look forward to welcoming her—and the other representatives from CfP in Santa Fe, and Israel and Palestine—to my Austin home! We live lives in so many time zones, so many dimensions these days that it is rare for things we love to come together. Their visit is a great opportunity for dialogue, engagement, and action.
The Humanities Institute is hosting its Spring 2017 Difficult Dialogues Public Forum with Creativity for Peace on Monday, February 13 at 7pm at the University of Texas at Austin. To learn more about this event, visit us here.
Dr. Suzanne Seriff
Dr. Suzanne Seriff is a folklorist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also received her Ph.D. Her research focuses on Mexican culture, immigrant arts, and public culture. She is Director of the Gallery of Conscience (GoC) at the Museum of International Folk Art in Sante Fe, NM.
Southwest of Salem (2015) directed by Deborah Esquenazi
I am embarrassed to admit that, before the film Southwest of Salemwas released, I had never heard of the San Antonio Four. It’s never too late to catch up, I thought after I saw it was playing at my local cinema. So I texted my friend Andy and immediately set up our next movie date. After all, as a queer Latinx of adult age, keeping myself informed about the experiences of other members of my own community simply seemed like the responsible thing to do. Moreover, to show support for the women in the story and the women behind the film, it’s exactly what sorority calls for. Continue reading It’s Never Too Late→
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