>> Paloma Diaz has asked me
to mention to you right now
that if you want to keep
coming to our events like this
and the many things that
happen here, please be sure
to subscribe to our newsletter
if you haven't already.
Because that's where it happens,
that's where you see it all.
So our event today has to do with,
we have two scholars here
who will be speaking about
Digital scholarship
relating to anti-Mexican
and anti-Mexican American
violence on the border,
particularly in Texas
which is a topic that was
a lived reality of people
for many generations
but it isn't something that has received
the kind of scholarly attention
up until now that it should have.
That's changing through the
work of our two guests today.
They're not really guests
because Sima Azerbajan
is the director of, is a
generous cohost of this series.
They're not really guests.
But they're sort of
breaking through that wall
and really making strides and making this
a very important category of analysis.
The digital scholarship is
part of what lets that happen.
So I'm going to have to read part of it.
Our first presenter is John Moran Gonzalez
who's professor of English
and director of CMAS,
the Center for Mexican American
Studies here at UT Austin.
He earned his PhD in American Literature
from Stanford University
and is the author of
Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial
and the Emergence of
Mexican American Literature,
which he published in 2009.
And The Troubled Union:
Expansionist Imperatives
in Post-Reconstruction American Novels,
which was published in 2010.
And he's the editor of
the Cambridge Companion
to Latino Latina American Literature
published also by Cambridge in 2016.
His talk today is titled
State Violence in the Archive,
Remembering La Matanza of 1915.
In it he will discuss
the historical context
that anchored the collaborative foundation
of Refusing to Forget, a
non profit organization
and digital portal that
calls for a public reckoning
with racial violence in Texas.
And both of our speakers
are involved as founders of
Refusing to Forget.
I'm going to go ahead and
introduce our second speaker now
so we can just move seamlessly
from one to the next.
Our second presenter after John will be
Monica Munoz Martinez who
was a Carnegie Fellow,
I guess is a current
Carnegie Fellow, 2017-2019
and Stanley Burstein Assistant Professor
of American Studies and Ethnic
Studies at Brown University.
She received her PhD in American Studies
from Yale University and her research
which focuses on LatinX
studies, immigration,
histories of violence and
policing in US history
has been funded by
numerous granting entities
including the Mellon Foundation,
the Woodrow Wilson Foundation,
the Texas State Historical Association.
Her first manuscript, The
Injustice Never Leaves You:
Anti-Mexican Violence
in the Texas Borderlands
is under contract with
Harvard University Press.
And her talk today is entitled,
Mapping Segregated
Histories of Racial Violence
in which she will discuss her work
as the primary investigator
for mapping violence,
a digital project that documents histories
of racial violence in Texas.
So, we're not going to start
quite this very minute.
I want to invite you,
when this is over, to
go and visit our brand new,
this is the brand opening
of our brand new (indistinct)
digital scholarship lab
which is right on the
other side of this floor,
in the building, very exciting moment.
So now without further adieu
I turn it over to you John,
thank you.
(applauding)
>> Thank you Jenny and
thanks everybody for coming out today.
I'd also like to thank
all the wonderful folks
at LLILAS Benson
including Albert Palacios and
Paloma Diaz for being such
gracious and wonderful hosts.
Today I'd like to give
some context for what my colleague
will be spelling out
in terms of the digital
humanities aspect of our project,
of the Refusing to Forget project.
Refusing to Forget was
founded by five scholars
five years ago in order
to bring back to public consciousness
a series of events
that occurred in Texas
along the borderlands a century ago.
But these events, I think
resonate so strongly
with contemporary
concerns over the question
of state violence, police brutality and
the otherwise, the collective punishments
of communities of color that
it just was a timely kind of
motivation I think for this project.
So there are four scholars,
or four historians,
and me, one lit person
involved, I'm the oddball here.
But nonetheless, I think
we've all come together
and have been very successful in at least
starting the conversation
about these events and
helping to address, I
think narratives about
when they are remembered at all,
narratives about what
happened a century ago
in the Texas Mexico borderlands.
So,
let me go ahead and get into that aspect.
And I hope all of this will come together.
So first off, we're taking
a look at the period
between 1910 and 1920
in which the Texas Mexico borderlands
was really the site of
incredibly intense conflict.
And state and state sanctioned violence
against Texas Mexicans and
other people of Mexican descent.
And this violence had incredible
far-reaching consequences
for the subsequent
social, political and economic
and ecological life of South Texas.
Now the amazing thing about this is that
really these events are so dramatic,
and so violent, that
you would think this
would be common knowledge
not only for the folks of the borderlands,
but for Texas in general.
As we all know Texas is
obsessed with its history.
Its history, I mean,
Texas has by far the most
roadside historical markers of any state
in the United States, and
it constitutes a kind of
vernacular history textbook, right?
It's a pedagogical device
about how to think of
its own identity, how Texans or residents
are supposed to think of themselves,
and it's really in
relationship to that history.
So
Texans are obsessed with history.
And therefore, it's an
incredibly important site
to interrogate I think for the communities
who have either been written
or erased from those histories,
written out of those histories
and the specific events that
help constitute what Texas is today
yet have been thoroughly suppressed.
And I think there's no
other word to use than that.
So
all of this, and this is, I think a move
that's quite familiar,
suggests the need for reading
the archive, reading the
narratives against the grain.
Like I said, a very very common move.
But nonetheless, I think
one that has yet to be
fully played out in
terms of public history.
I think that is where we
seek to make our intervention
is in the public
narratives of these events.
So,
we need to take a quick look
at where some of these events
took place with one
major, major exception.
That is in the South
Texas borderlands here.
What's mostly known as the
lower Rio Grande Valley here
in this part of Texas,
just to give you a sense
of the geography.
And we also need to know a
bit about the social world
of the borderlands in this time
period to make sense of it.
So, one of the interesting things
is that of course we all
know that this part of Texas
became what was, in fact the occasion for,
or given as the occasion
for the US Mexican War
to begin with in 1846.
And,
was annexed as a result of
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
But one of the things that
perhaps is not as clear,
is in fact, the degree to
which this part of Texas
was not integrated into
the social political
and economic life of the
United States till much later.
Yes, there was a transfer
of national sovereignty
but on a very, very everyday level,
it was still Mexico.
It was still really Mexico.
People thought of themselves as Mexican.
They were oriented towards Mexico
in their kind of economic practices,
their cultural practices.
And their politics, right?
In other words, the fact of US annexation
did not alter their
sense that they had a say
in Mexican politics.
So this is of course, I
think borne out by the
fact that folks along the border
were very much part of
anti-Porfirio Díaz activism
like uprisings like
Catarino Garza in 1892,
and so on and so forth.
So they're very, very plugged
into Mexican politics.
And so when you said the capitol,
they're thinking De Efe, not DC, right?
They pay their taxes in dollars,
but they're paying their
grocery bills in pesos, right?
Spanish spoken everywhere.
English is the official language
of the courts and the law,
but Spanish, everybody spoke it.
So
the few Anglos who ventured down there
became Mexicanized, right?
They married into the local families,
they became Catholic,
they learned Spanish.
And so really there was this,
as I'm suggesting, the overall orientation
of the region did not change
at some fundamental level.
That is,
not until July 4th, 1904.
What happens on that day
besides the 4th of July?
Well, the railroad.
The railroad is completed
into Brownsville.
So the St Louis
Brownsville and Mexico line
is completed to Brownsville,
and it essentially plugs in
the lower Rio Grande Valley
into the US national economy in a way
it had not been before.
And so here this way
goods could flow north.
But of course, you never
run transport lines empty.
So what was coming south
were Anglo settlers
from the Midwest who were
lured in to South Texas,
the land of California and
Florida rolled into one
as it was advertised.
And there were two things
attracting them, cheap land,
and cheap labor.
Right I'll take each of those in term.
Cheap land was of course about,
this part of South Texas at this time is
a semi-arid scrub brush,
and the only kind of
sustainable economic activity
that the Spanish and Mexican colonists
were engaged in was ranching.
But as we know, as we all know in Texas,
it's the water that's valuable right?
Land is cheap, water is valuable.
And the reason this land was cheap
was because you couldn't irrigate it.
It was too far from convenient sources.
However, just as technology
innovated, or did
time-space compression on
the transport of goods and
people, the other thing was that
irrigation technology could
transform this formerly,
this land useless for agriculture into
usable agricultural land.
And so
pumping stations and a whole
irrigation infrastructure
could be built in order to irrigate crops
20, 30 miles away from the Rio Grande.
But up until that happened,
the land was cheap.
The other thing was labor.
Well, you know these folks were,
the advertisements also said like well,
yeah there are lots of
cheap Mexican labor right?
In other words, about the kind of
racial differential in
wage labor structures
that were fundamental to making
commercial agricultural
ventures profitable
or hyperprofitable.
You needed this labor to clear the land,
and then to work it once it was cleared.
But as the advertisements said,
there was a plentiful
supply of docile cheap labor
in the racial ideologies of the day about
Mexican descent people.
So,
come they did, come they did.
And soon, very soon, the
newcomers came in such numbers
as to make the previous
integration of Anglos in the same way as
had occurred in the 50
years prior impossible.
They brought with them
their progressive-era
beliefs in white supremacy
and quickly moved
to impose these in social
political and economic life.
So some examples of these include,
well obviously, I've already suggested
there is a wholesale transfer of land from
Mexican descent folks
to the Anglo newcomers
for the purposes of
commercial agriculture.
But, there were other arenas as well.
In politics, this
included the establishment
of whites only Democratic primaries.
Texas at this time is of course
a Yellow Dog Democrat state.
So anybody who won
the primary in the Democratic
side won the whole thing.
There was the implementation of poll taxes
and literacy tests, but the
literacy tests were in English.
The lower Rio Grande Valley at this time
actually had pretty high
literacy levels, but in Spanish.
But these were implemented in English
to help further dilute what the
newcomers saw as the machine
politics of the region.
Of course segregation also came to,
in the forms that we are
familiar with from other context,
right segregation in
public accommodations,
so on and so forth.
Now the other thing to
remember is of course
that the Mexican Revolution is occurring
during this period of transformation.
So starting in 1910, particularly.
One as we remember, nearly
a million war refugees
come to the United States, and I think
it really has to be emphasized,
they are war refugees,
they're not economic migrants.
And they come up to the United States.
Of course this is in part,
there's this,
the contestation of national
sovereignty along the border
allows for the free passage
of all kinds of things,
goods, peoples, ideas,
smugglers, revolutionaries, exiles,
I mean it's all going on, it's
all going down on the border.
And of course, primary among this is
a revolutionary ideology of course
that is developed in
Mexico with the overthrow
of Porfirio Díaz, with the Revolution.
So in particular there is
this El Plan de San Diego
which emerges in early 1915 which
calls for the execution of any Anglo male
over the age of 15 or 16
and for a general establishment of,
it's a remarkable document
because it calls for
a kind of multi-racial community uprising
which included Asian
Americans and Native Americans
and African Americans to kind of rise up,
to overthrow the US government,
and to establish their
own independent states.
So
this is also the other context,
which I'll briefly mention is of course
the advent of the first
World War the Great War.
And I'll get back to that in a moment.
But essentially the combination
of all of these factors,
so a general kind of atmosphere
of revolutionary activity
in the face of oppressive conditions,
and the specifics of what is happening
in the Lower Rio Grande Valley,
the mass disenfranchisement
of the Mexican descent
population is a rebellion.
And we're talking about
open guerrilla warfare.
There's a guerrilla war
that breaks out here.
And in the summer of 1915
this, and you have to imagine,
this would consist of
raiding parties of perhaps
two dozen to three dozen
men on horseback with hunting rifles
or something like that who
do stage hit and run raids on
farms or on pumping stations,
or on railroad depots,
all the elements that
assisted in the displacement
of their social position.
So here I'm going to just mention or show
some of the major kind of
activities that occurred here.
Which often involved shootouts with
US military troops.
Now the events became so intense
that
in the English language
newspapers, there was this sense
that there's an all out race
war occurring in South Texas.
Of course, this is a
complete misunderstanding,
a purposeful misunderstanding
of the actual causes of the rebellion.
But nonetheless,
the state authorities
respond in a kind of,
well a disproportionate response to this.
And you're asking yourself
anyway, how can like
a couple hundred
irregulars on horseback
kind of hope to overthrow
the US government, or
even the state government?
Well you have to remember
that this is in the context
of how they are thinking
of the Mexican Revolution
and how peasant armies
overthrew the kind of
Rurales of the Diaz government.
This longtime dictator gets overthrown
by these irregular armies.
And so I think they're thinking very much
in that context of the
possibility at least
of that being replicated
in Texas or South Texas.
Well the response of the state
and local governments is
swift, and it is vicious
and disproportionate.
That is, yes, you know the
idea is from their thinking
is to restore order.
But it quickly turns into
something more than that,
it turns into an absolute
collective punishment
of the entire Mexican descent
population of the region.
So for instance, well
once again I won't go
to the particulars of these,
but there are numerous instances in which
Mexican descent people are
sometimes just shot, outright shot,
sometimes arrested and
seemingly placed into the
legal process.
But there's abridgments of the
process, of due process when
local law enforcement turns them over
to the Texas Rangers and somehow
they are always shot in the
back while attempting to escape
as the official reports would have it.
There are hundreds of these incidents.
And the estimates that
we have by the scholars
on the team and also others is that
the estimate on the low, low end is 500.
Good evidence can be procured
for about 1000 people
killed in this and even
Walter Prescott Webb
who was the hagiographer of the Rangers
here at the University
of Texas back in the '30s
estimated as many as 5000.
So here you have the story
of this guerrilla war
that breaks out in
South Texas with massive
reprisals by the government.
Where thousands, at least 1000 people die
and how many of you knew about it?
(laughing) You know this
is the sort of thing
that I didn't know about it,
I grew up in Brownsville.
I had no idea.
But this is the kind of
historical, not simply amnesia
but the historical erasure
that Refusing to Forget
is hoping to counter with our activities.
To go on a bit with the story,
the situation gets increasingly
so violent and instead of
restoring order, of course,
what the Rangers and some
local law enforcement are doing
are racheting up the
unrest and the violence.
So the US military,
a large portion of its
pre World War I strength
is actually sent to the border
to literally occupy the border,
in a quite literal militarization of it.
So 110,000 National Guard troops
are sent to the lower Rio Grande Valley
of course not only to quell the rebellion,
but also to rein in the Rangers.
And they bring with them all the kind of
materials of war and practice with them,
that they would take to
Europe upon the entry
of the United States into the Great War.
So these events are,
they're astonishing, they're
really really astonishing
to think about, and they
should be known by not only
folks interested in Texas
history but in US history
and the history of the borderlands
and the history of US Mexican
relationships, but isn't.
Or not nearly to the
extent that it should be.
So when I'm talking about a war zone,
I'm not kidding, this is a World War I
recruitment poster that
says "No More Men Are Needed
"for the Watch on the Rhine,
but 26,000 Men Are Wanted
"to Relieve the Watch on the Rio Grande."
So the sense that this is a crisis.
This is an absolute crisis is prevalent.
Now the one important exception,
well there are many numerous
other incidents that occur
however,
for a number of reasons I
want to highlight this one
not least of all because this past weekend
was the hundredth anniversary,
or the centennial of its occurrence.
And there was a just remarkable
commemoration event featuring descendants
of the men killed in this incident
at the state capitol at which my colleague
Monica Munoz Martinez spoke, and she is
the person in Refusing to
Forget who absolutely knows
the most about this particular incident.
So it's the Porvenir Massacre
in which
15 Mexicans were rounded up
by US calvary and Texas Rangers,
supposedly for being bandits.
Now the bandit narrative is the dominant
kind of popular explanation of this era.
That all of these incidents
were caused by bandits
coming up from Mexico or
Mexican Tejano criminals, right
that this was just criminal activity
completely and utterly devoid
of any actual political content.
So in other words, it's
just criminal activity
not a rebellion.
But this narrative is one in which
the actions of the Rangers and the calvary
roust
the very small village of
Porvenir in Presidio County
just very remote and desolate area,
and they roust them and their families
in the middle of the
night, separate the men,
and we're talking about
including children 15 or 16
and march them off and
summarily execute them,
they're just shot with no
pretense of due process.
So this is an incredibly traumatic
event as you can imagine.
Their bodies are left out in the open,
their families flee to Mexico because
they're afraid for their
lives and only return later
to bury them in a mass
grave on the Mexican side.
This was only
perhaps the most egregious
and most recent of
nearly a decade long of Ranger atrocities
that occurred against
Mexican descent people.
Of course there were plenty beforehand
and there would be plenty after this.
Right so this is not to
say this is an aberration
in the kind of use of
the state police force
against communities of color.
It is particularly egregious perhaps,
but it's not unique, unfortunately.
But the Porvenir Massacre
was the latest straw that led
the one Texas Mexican representative
in the state legislature to
force an investigation of
Texas Rangers' atrocities
during the previous decade and
the results are this
incredible three tome,
1600 pages of testimony
against the Rangers.
But even with this overwhelming
mountain of evidence,
none are ever convicted
or even indicted.
So in other words, there is the blanket
of official immunity conveyed
upon the state police force
at the highest levels of its governance.
It's not like they didn't
know, in other words.
Even though of course the
Rangers did all they could
to cover up as much as possible.
But nonetheless,
these were actions that were absolutely
while condemned on the surface,
it was the green light for law enforcement
to just kind of be more discrete about it.
So immediate consequences of all this,
well a third of the
Valley's population fled
which of course, as you can imagine,
accelerated the turnover of land
from Mexican landholders to Anglo ones
as properties were lost to tax sales
and so on and so forth.
Distrust of state
authorities became rampant
as a result of this collective punishment.
The original, Austin,
at least in the '90s was
the home of the slacker,
from the Linklater film of the same name.
We all think we have this
image of what a slacker is.
But that term actually
has its roots and origins
referring to what
at least during the Vietnam era
were called draft dodgers.
Folks who refused to
fulfill the conditions of
enlistment in the US military when
ordered to do so by the government.
Well, as you can imagine,
the draft notices
for the Great War are being
sent out at this period
to many Mexican descent men in South Texas
who of course want nothing to do
with the government that is engaged
in such reprehensible behavior.
So they're termed the slackers.
There's a kind of
racialized kind of component
to that which has been,
I think subsequently lost
in that and I think was
worth rethinking through.
As part of the quote
unquote Story of Texas
which is of course the narrative of Texas
that is at the Bullock
State History Museum,
it's more complicated than
that because of course
the Bullock also put on the exhibit
Life and Death on the Border, 1910 to 1920
in collaboration with Refusing to Forget,
but nonetheless the kind
of version of history,
what I call the chamber of
commerce version of history
is still very much on display
in certain areas of that museum
as it kind of gets an overhaul.
But nonetheless
the history of Texas is very much one
in at least in public consciousness still
of kind of racial triumphalism,
in the curriculum,
in fourth and seventh grade,
Texas history courses,
perhaps not as much in academic history,
but I think in the other areas,
there are still elements of it that are
quite present.
However we do have to thank the
descendants and the
resilience of the descendants
of familial survivors who have passed down
not only oral histories
but also the archives
of the struggles to get indemnities
from the US government, court cases
and other legal proceedings,
the interventions
of the Mexican consuls,
or attempted interventions.
We all have these folks to thank for
remembering this story
and for making their
expertise available to
historians and other scholars.
I'll just spend a moment
on the question of
consequences, well, one,
it's not that what
happened here was unique,
it was just the compression
of time in which
any number of processes
which normally occur
over the span of more decades
occurred in 20 years, within a generation
in the establishment of a
settler colonial order and...
All too familiar.
And of course
to conclude, I just want
to say that this question
of remembering what occurred 100 years ago
is in fact in the service
of sparking conversations
about what's happening today, right?
So that is the kind of
questions of police brutality
against African Americans obviously,
Black Lives Matter, and of
course the response to it.
So Ferguson, many many
incidents in recent years
as well as the Black Lives Matter movement
and of course the increased
use of state policing
and detention in the current
context of the borderlands.
So I think I'm out of time
so I'll leave it there.
And turn over what is specifically the
digital humanities aspect of this project
to my colleague Professor
Monica Munoz Martinez.
(applauding)
Good afternoon everybody.
Let me see if I get the mic on.
Now is it on? Press the button.
Mic check.
It's so good to be here with all of you.
This is sort of like coming back, whoops.
This is really like coming back to where
many of the ideas of the questions
for this project started.
Actually I knew John
Moran Gonzalez before.
Maybe I could actually, before
I start the presentation
show Refusing to Forget.
This is the Refusing to Forget website.
And I was saying that I knew
John Moran Gonzalez through
his work and his scholarship.
When I came to UT Austin
as a post doc here at CMAS.
But we became collaborators,
co-conspirators
through our work here together at UT.
So the time that I had at
CMAS was really important
not only for the development
of my research project
but also for giving me
the opportunity to develop
a public project and a public facing part
of the research that I was doing.
So for any of you who are interested,
the Refusing to Forget
website is available.
You can get to it from
refusingtoforget.org or dot com,
it has information about our work,
the history of the group
and ongoing projects.
One of the things that,
(laughing) as scholars with full-time jobs
who are also trying to
do public humanities work
and intervene in these
public conversations,
our website is a bit behind on some of the
accomplishments that we've had.
So in just five years, we
were able to collaborate,
to have an exhibit at the
Texas State History Museum,
The Story of Texas at
the Bob Bullock Museum.
It was only up for 10 weeks
in January 2016 it opened, and it closed
in April 2016, and over
those course of 10 weeks
can anybody guess how many people came?
Just a quick guess?
Over 40,000 people, right? Wow.
That should just convey quickly
the demand for this kind of public work.
The demand for an
institution like the Bullock
to revise not only its
permanent collections
but then to have temporary exhibits
that really showcase how far the field
of Texas history has come.
Because it was old by several
decades, let's just say.
We also collaborated with the
Texas Historical Commission
and have successfully had approved
four historical markers, Texas
State Historical Markers.
But John and I and our other collaborators
actually came to this public work because
although books had been published,
many of them had already
had their books out,
or we had published articles,
there was a big gap between
the academic advances
in the understanding of this history
and public understandings of this history.
And so frankly we were
just angry and frustrated
with how slow it is for academic advances
in the history to actually
shift public understandings.
And so we put on multiple hats.
Not just the scholars
conducting the research but also
the public humanists
helping to curate exhibits
and working with the Texas
Historical Commission.
One thing that was also frustrating
is that public humanities
work is just as slow
as academic publishing.
So it took us three years
once we secured the partnership
with the Bullock Museum,
it took us about three
years before the exhibit
was actually unveiled.
And it's been a year
since we've been working
to try to raise funds so that it can be
a traveling exhibit.
We also had our first Texas
Historical Marker approved
in 2015 and it was just
unveiled in October 2017.
And the other three
are still in the works.
And so that gives you a sense of,
doing this public work
takes not only the research
and the scholarship and
the authority but then
being seen as an authority
by the local historical commissions
and also the state historical commission
and then building bridges between
somebody who's at Brown University
or somebody who's at UT Austin,
somebody who works here in Austin
at the Texas Historical
Commission, but then also
the Presidio County Historical Commission
or the Hidalgo County
Historical Commission.
And if they're in their 80s,
try convincing them or explain to them
how to email you a PDF of the application
with their signature approving the marker.
There's just logistics
that you don't anticipate
in doing this kind of work.
But I'll say for my, here we go,
for this project that I've been working on
called Mapping Violence it grew up out of
an interest that I had,
a frustration really so
my book coming out in fall is called
The Injustice Never Leaves
You: Anti-Mexican Violence
in Texas and it's a book that examines
not only signal cases
of anti-Mexican violence
that help to shift the older narrative
that this history was just
relegated only till 1915
and that actually the Canales
hearing helped to bring
a transformation of the Texas Rangers
that then led to this
glorious state police force.
But my work has also been founded on
the collaboration with
descendants who had preserved
these alternative
histories of these events,
who had archival documents,
who had oral histories,
photographs of some of
those that were killed.
And so the work in the public realm
has been in collaboration
with those descendants.
But I've also been
trying to figure out how
from the beginning we can
situate these lost lives
in a much broader national
conversation about
racial violence in US history.
The work for the Mapping
Project was also inspired by
some of those early conversations
with the Texas Historical Commission,
namely very candid
conversations with allies there
who said you know, (laughing)
the history of racial violence
in Texas is so rampant
we can't possibly have historical markers
to designate every lynching
or every massacre or every
case of extralegal violence
at the hands of police.
And so (laughing) you
know that's very pragmatic
because the history is deep.
But at the same time, I
was really questioning
how can you fully reckon with
a history of racial violence
if you haven't even documented
as many of the cases that we can?
And so I've been working on a project
called Mapping Violence that
was also really inspired by
the chapter that I developed
while I was a post-doc
here at CMAS and it was a chapter
that thinks critically about,
oh here's, is that up?
Yeah there's some pictures
of the historical marker
unveiling in Cameron County.
It was a four day public
history extravaganza
it was fantastic.
But when I was here researching,
my time at CMAS, I was trying to link
these critical moments in
civil rights efforts in 1919
to the efforts not just
protesting anti-Mexican violence
but also anti-Black violence.
And that was really inspired
by this moment in the archives
when I was reading through
the Canales investigation
and there was a reference to the Negro
that was lynched in Hillsboro, right?
So there's this moment
as John was explaining
that so many people who lived in Texas
had no understanding of
how daily life functioned
in the border regions.
Many of them didn't have the experience
actually interacting
with Mexican populations.
And so there was a moment
in the investigation
where a lawyer representing
the Texas Rangers
is actually trying to
translate anti-Mexican violence
by referencing mob violence
against Black residents.
So on January 20th,
just a few days before
the investigation starts
there's the lynching of
a man named Brad Williams
in Hillsboro Texas.
He's accused of murdering a white woman.
The Texas Rangers are
supposed to be providing
security for him, and
they leave him vulnerable
with no protection.
He's taken from police custody
and he's burned at the stake in Hillsboro.
And so that sort of
moment is a realization
that in 1919, the Texas
government is being
confronted with anti-Mexican
violence activists
who are trying to change the
policing practices in Texas
but they're also being confronted
by anti-lynching activists
the NAACP who were trying to get the state
to pass anti-lynching legislation.
And so that's a real
awakening for historians
for a realization that these
histories are not segregated.
We write African American history
in one subfield of US history
and it's remained in one
subfield in public memory.
And the history of anti-Mexican violence
has been segregated for
people who study the border
and people who study
Mexican American history.
But if you actually map
these together archivally
and physically on a map,
you see that they are integrated,
geographically, temporally,
and also in the way
that they are being opposed
by the State of Texas.
So it's no surprise
that after the Canales
hearings, Texas governor Hobby
who the Houston Airport is named after,
right not the International
one but the smaller one,
that he actually instructs
the Texas Rangers
to dismantle NAACP chapters.
And so he's actually
actively then trying to end
anti-lynching legislation
and activism in Texas.
So mapping violence is an effort
to help us grapple with
how these histories
are actually intertwined.
There are three primary goals.
The first is to create a record
of interconnected histories
of violence in Texas
between 1900 and 1930.
And to map not only those
interconnected histories
but the diverse strategies
that were used to seek justice.
There were other
opportunities that were open
to Mexican nationals that
could get the support
of the Mexican consul for example
that weren't available
to American citizens.
Also another goal is
to make these histories
publicly available as one form
of redress for descendants.
If we can't put up a
historical marker for everyone,
well they can certainly
be documented and mapped
on a digital platform, and
to inspire further efforts
to commemorate this violence.
If people look in the research
and they see something close to home,
hopefully with some
curating, you can spark
good public conversations.
Also interested in making these histories
publicly available to shift
understandings of the past,
to inform current debates.
And this gets back to
John's important point
that it's no surprise to us,
but it is still unsettling
that in the counties in
South Texas where we are
unveiling Texas State Historical Markers,
there are detention centers where people
are being housed for deportation.
So part of the work of creating a record
is the beginning of this
kind of a digital project.
This is a digital project,
but we don't have the luxury
of just taking a library
of congress collection
that has all the names of
people who were killed,
we actually have to create this record.
So for this project,
creating a record that is,
that includes multiple
racial and ethnic groups,
African Americans, ethnic Mexicans,
and Mexican Americans but
also in the second phase
of research to include Asian
Americans and Native Americans
and European immigrant minorities.
The record, we also want to include
multiple forms of violence.
So in the history of
documenting anti-Black violence,
because of the early work of the NAACP
and the Tuskegee Institute,
we primarily have an archive
of anti-Black violence
in the form of lynchings,
of mob violence, but we don't,
if you look at the history
of anti-Mexican violence,
what has primarily been documented
has been extralegal violence
at the hands of police,
the Texas Rangers, local
law enforcement agents.
And so even just in bringing
these archives together
you start to ask new questions
about anti-Black violence,
trying to collect the
numbers of acts of violence
and intimidation by the
Ku Klux Klan for example
and acts of extralegal
violence at the hands of police
targeting Black Texans.
And then of course also
mapping the various strategies
for seeking redress.
And so this gets us to the question of how
you also map the aftermath of violence.
Not just cataloging dead
bodies, but showing the efforts
to actually change the course of history.
And so this is also just
from my practice of teaching
undergraduate students who get
overwhelmed by the violence.
If you only teach the violent act,
then there's no way to inspire hope.
And so actually bringing our attention
to the efforts to change
the course of history.
How are we doing on time? What time is it?
Oh it's almost one, OK so I'm
going to move really quickly.
Really quickly, just to give you
a sense of anti-Black violence,
primarily what we know are
the numbers of lynchings
that have happened but also the efforts
to curtail those by the NAACP,
and also by civil rights
activists like Ida B Wells
who was working actively
to create a record.
Also for anti-Mexican violence,
that span of numbers, that
range from 500 to 5000,
you know there hasn't been an effort
to actually try to come up
with a comprehensive list
recently so my colleague Trinidad Gonzalez
started to do that and returned
to some earlier efforts
by people like Jovita Idar
and an early ally trying to stop violence
his name was Frank Pierce
and he put together
a collection in 1917.
So we do have studies by scholars
that show that between 1848 and 1928
232 ethnic Mexicans were
lynched by mobs in Texas alone.
And so trying to actually
expand what we know
about anti-Mexican mob violence to include
anti-Mexican extralegal violence
is a part of that process.
So here is you know, the
sort of patron saint of this
Jovita Idar, here's a
list that was put together
by Frank Pierce, and then of course
the Canales investigation
that is digitized
and online and available for everybody.
So I'm going to skip
through this to get to
some of the complications
of actually doing
this kind of digital work.
As somebody who works in the humanities
and as somebody who's
a historian who spends
14,000 words writing about one event,
then how do you translate
that event and that tragedy
into a dot on a map?
One of those tensions in moving beyond
the humanities and into the
digital world is actually
trying to do that kind of translation.
And one of the takeaways here
is that lives are not metadata.
So one of the ways of
trying to move from this
anonymous representations of lives is that
I have a team of students
at Brown who are helping
to research each documented
case that we have so far
and actually continue
to add to the database.
This is an example of
the database entry form
that they're using.
And so you see here,
this is an example case.
And the students are
drafting for each event
150 word narrative of what
happened, what took place,
so they're doing the archival research,
but then they're also doing
the historical analysis.
And in this, thinking
about this as a memorial,
right a digital memorial,
the tone is very important.
Especially if you're introducing documents
like a newspaper article
that was celebrating
a mob lynching, this is an opportunity
to develop some critical
thinking amongst your public.
We also are collecting sources.
You see secondary sources here, citations
for primary sources
but also research notes
with the thought that
if somebody's interested
in a particular case, the
students will have notes
on the dead ends or the
sort of intellectual
thoughts of where they
might take the project
if they were going to
continue the research.
But this also, you can see here
some of the sort of
coding that has to happen
to make room for the ambiguities of
mapping histories of racial violence.
As John mentioned,
we start much of our research
with actually oral memory.
And so somebody's describing
a lynching that happened
around the bend of the river,
or at the edge of someone's map.
How do you find the
geo coordinate for that
to actually plug in?
And so the students are not only including
information about the
location but where they think
that specifically you should map that.
If somebody was taken from
the Brownsville County Jail,
that might be a location for example.
And they have to build in
that kind of flexibility
also with dates.
So if somebody was killed in
early October for example,
1915, the coder who's
developing this platform
has to know to build in the
space for those ambiguities.
Another component of the database,
and the research is that it
was built with a Wiki function.
Meaning that anybody who plugs information
into the database entry form,
anybody on the team can see it,
anybody on the team can collaborate,
and give notes and share thoughts.
It's helpful for editing the content.
And we also keep records of
everybody who's contributed
to a particular case.
And so that's important in thinking about
how we keep track of all of
the work that's going into
the research so that we
can give people credit.
This project, in terms
of thinking about design,
it's important also to
note that we're thinking
about multiple audiences, and that's for
the public history work,
but especially for the Mapping Project.
Scholars and researchers are of course
going to be able to use
the content that's mapped
to further their own studies
or to inspire new questions.
Maybe I should just start here, yeah.
Scholars and researchers
want access to the research.
Educators, both K through 12
and at the university level
want access to lesson
plans to primary sources
that they can use for their teaching.
We're also going to be
creating curated content,
thinking about the everyday user.
So clicking on a bunch of
dots on the map for example
isn't helpful for somebody who,
if we want somebody to take
a nuanced understanding
about the dynamics of racial violence
in the early 20th Century,
you actually have to give them
access to digital tours for
example, historical essays
that can help them walk
away with an understanding
of the consequences of this period.
And of course we're also thinking about
the descendants of violence
who may be looking for
a place that recognizes the atrocity
that impacted their family.
But they might also be looking for a place
where they can digitize their sources
and make them publicly available.
And so that's something
that we're imagining
in the development of the project.
So a map is the platform that we've chosen
that allows these multiple audiences
to interact with the content.
On the one hand, maps have
been used for over a century
for actually displaying
these histories of violence
and helping to
share content about the widespread nature
of lynchings for example.
This is a map that was
put together by the NAACP
this was the hundred year anniversary
of this map being created.
And so you can see without
high tech digital tools,
that this is a very effective
way of sharing information.
But again, a map will
allow for multiple users
to engage the content differently.
We're also thinking about how
you curate the website itself
so that people receive an introduction
before they enter the map.
And so they're not just
clicking necessarily
on random dots and seeing lynchings listed
but they get an
introduction to the project
before they move on.
Also having instructional tools
on what each dot represents.
In some cases it might be a massacre,
it's not just one person that was killed.
But it may be representing multiple deaths
or an attempted lynching.
Also there's a filtering
function hopefully for,
the plan is everything will be searchable
so that people can search
not just for the victims
but also for information
about the assailants and so
when we're entering the metadata,
we're collecting information
about the nationality
of the person, their
gender, their occupation,
their citizenship, their age but also
we're collecting that same information
about the aggressors, the assailants.
So that especially if
it's one Texas Ranger
that's literally causing terror,
inspiring terror in South Texas
and then he moves to West
Texas, you can map for that.
And a timeline function allows you also
to display different patterns of history.
Let's see, so that's an example
of what it could look like.
If you go onto
mappingviolence.com right now,
you can see a live map where we're testing
some of the features of the map.
Right now people are only able to click on
the title of the event.
But I did want to
move on really quickly to talk about
student researchers and collaborations.
And one of the ways that you can bring
this kind of a project to fruition,
you need a range of skills,
not only the digital
developmental skills, but
really the humanistic skills.
And so I had a summer
research team that was funded
by a grant that I received
at Brown and it was called
an interdisciplinary team UTRA.
And here you see a group of students.
Two of them are computer scientists.
And the other students
are in ethnic studies,
in history, in education.
And so I brought them all
together for the summer to help
build this database entry form but also
to start researching the cases.
And what was really
fundamental about allowing that
to come to fruition was
that all of the students
started reading histories
of racial violence theory.
So they were exposed to
people like Kidada Williams,
Saidiya Hartman, John Moran Gonzalez,
they learned the history but
they also learned theories
about how to research
and present this history.
And that was really crucially
important for the coders
to then be able to help build
the database entry form.
They couldn't have done
it if they didn't have
an understanding of the
theories and the methods
and the approaches,
but they also conducted
historical research themselves.
And so they became what
Tara McPherson calls
hybrid practitioners.
And at the same time we
also gave the students,
the humanists training in digital methods,
how to wire frame a
digital tool for example,
how to use markup.
So it was this dual experience for them.
And this has been a long
project in the making.
So since 2004 I started working
with one graduate student
at Brown to put it together.
But this is an experimentation
in how you actually
visualize labor which is really
hard for digital projects.
Because this is something
that has been in the works
since 2014 and the website
went live last week.
And you don't get a sense of how people
have contributed to this
project and so it gives you,
one of the names on
here is Jonathan Cortez,
he's a CMAS graduate doing
big fantastic things at Brown.
But it gives you a sense
of how you could also,
we have to participate in the politics of
giving students, you know
the first research team,
all the students were
underrepresented minorities.
The one that wasn't was
economically disadvantaged
and so one of the answers to the questions
of why are the digital
humanities so white is that
there aren't enough paid
research opportunities
for students to get involved and work.
And so that's an
important part of the work
that all of the students who
are listed here were paid
research assistants with
the exception of Jim McGrath
who's a digital humanist,
he's a post doc at Brown
who's helped to be my navigator
through the digital humanities.
So I'm going to stop there
for time so we can answer
questions, and I know some of
you may be running to class
or onto other things but from
the history of the project,
the history itself to also
the public humanities efforts,
this digital project is
trying to take this work
to the next step and
participate in the recovery,
what one of my colleagues
at Northeastern calls
the digital Red Record.
Right, the Red Record is
what Ida B Wells described
her lynching collection,
her collections of lynchings
in the late 19th, early 20th Century.
And so this is wandering
into the new world
of the digital Red
Record where we not only
collect and recover these histories,
but we work to effectively
make them public
and accessible to the public.
So I'll stop there.
And pull up the map maybe or the website.
And we can answer any questions.
John you want to come join me?
(distant speaking)
(applauding)
Oh I got my lipstick everywhere.
Is it everywhere? Hmm.
Why didn't you tell me during
the presentation Alberto?
I had some lipstick on
my teeth, I apologize.
It's the Selena Dreaming of You.
(laughing)
OK.
>> I have one.
Can you talk a little bit
more about the ethical issues
that you faced in creating
the individual platform
of Refusal to Forget and Mapping Violence?
Can you talk a little bit
more about what you faced
and how you dealt with them?
>> Mm hmm.
Well the lives are not metadata.
Metadata is one of
those, it's figuring out
the strategies for actually
translating these atrocities.
How do you visually represent
a history of loss for example?
So giving those historical narratives
is one of the strategies for doing that.
But we're having a lot of
debates and discussions.
The research team now is PhD
students and master's students.
They're important in the
process of developing
what the visual interface will look like
especially in thinking about
what kinds of primary sources
we may make available.
So that's not only to think
about newspaper archives,
that are essentially hate speech.
You know newspaper articles
that are celebrating lynchings,
is that something that
we want to put on the web
for just wide circulation?
And one example actually from the
exhibit that we hosted,
there's a postcard of
anti-Mexican violence
that we had on display.
It was from a photograph that
was taken by a photographer
of four men who he identified
only as Mexican bandits,
dead Mexican bandits.
There's a photograph with
three white men on horseback,
two of them are Texas
Rangers and one of them
is a local civilian or
perhaps a deputy sheriff,
but they have rope tied to the dead bodies
and they're posing on their horses.
And so that was a photograph
that we had lots of debates about,
how much violence do we
want to show in the exhibit?
And so we decided as a group to put
in a shadowbox, a shadow framed box,
so that the postcard was on display
but it wasn't blown up in huge size.
It was a sensational
representation of violence,
but we didn't want to further
the sensationalization of it.
So we were wonderful I
thought in how we had
these debates and discussions.
But we didn't talk to the
press team at the Bullock.
And so when they sent out press packets
to newspapers across the country,
they included a digital
file of that photograph.
And so every newspaper
article, magazine article
that published about the
exhibit included that
as their main highlight photograph
which meant that it was
the thumbnail on Twitter,
in Latina Magazine, The
Statesman, the Houston Chronicle,
it was all over Facebook,
all over Twitter.
And so,
we played a part in the casual
recirculation of that image
without the names of the dead men,
without contextualization and then also
without the names of the
Texas Rangers who we know
were in that photograph, Henry
Ransom and James Monroe Fox.
And so that question of what it means
to display these histories and then to
send them out to the ether
curation and control is something that
digital scholars and humanists
can find tension with.
>> Yeah no, I think those
questions are exactly
the ones that we were,
as Monica suggested,
very careful in thinking
about for the exhibit.
But of course,
precisely because one had to
recognize these productions,
these photographs as precisely about
replicating the conditions
of racial terror
and normalizing them, right?
So one of the things we wanted folks
who were looking at this postcard
at the materiality of how this image
actually circulated at that time
was to consider something
like well one had to go to
the local store and look over
through the selection
of postcards and kind of
settle on this one and
then write a note to
friends and family, buy it at the counter,
take it home, write that note and mail it,
have it circulate and finally arrive.
And then have the recipient look at it,
read the message...
All with accepting the kind of
level of racial violence
that was necessary
to reproduce and maintain
the white supremacist
kind of moment of the time.
So
we wanted to provoke
that kind of reaction.
But on the other hand
as Monica pointed out,
really the facility with
the ease with which digital
images can fly in all sorts
of directions these days
really kind of made us
I think rethink about
where that discussion had to happen,
and in what context.
And so I think we're going to be much more
circumspect about that.
(muffled speaking)
>> I mean in some cases there were people
who were thinking transnationally
and who were thinking
intersectionally before we
called it intersectional
and transnational.
So somebody like Jovita Idar for example
was writing about anti-Mexican violence
and describing the lynchings
and she was placing it
in this much broader conversation about
discrimination in the long
racism in the United States.
She critiqued colonialism,
and she critiqued slavery.
And so she would also
describe the kinds of
violence at the hands of
the Texas Rangers and say
this is like what is happening to
these Black populations and so--
but if you look at the way
the histories were archived,
especially at the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People,
they had to make decisions
about what kinds of
histories and events to
collect and to index.
There were moments in
the archives for example,
there was a man named George Cabines,
and he was arrested for being a slacker,
for evading the draft.
And there's an exchange and a conflict
with the local police and
he's shot and he dies.
And then the rumors are
in the white community
that he lives in in East
Texas that the family
is going to seek revenge.
And so a mob forms around the family,
around the family's home, they
start shooting into the home
and the house catches on fire.
And so George's mother, Mrs Cabines,
brings out the bodies of,
she has four children.
And so her four children die,
and she's shot and killed.
And so the NAACP initially
includes all of them
as lynching victims.
And then after they have
discussions and debates,
they take George's name out
of the index and they say
well he was actually killed
because he resisted arrest
allegedly, but that's a
police act of violence.
And that's by a state authority.
And so we are trying
to raise consciousness
about the evils of mob violence.
And so even if you look at the history of
the records of anti-Black
violence, those are segregated.
It's mob violence and so
they're not accounting
for police killings or
they are recording episodes
of violence at the hands
of the Ku Klux Klan
but they are specifically
trying to document mob violence
and to pass anti lynching legislation.
And so they need that data.
On the other hand, you
don't have an organization
like the NAACP who is
working to collect the names
of people who are dying at
the hands of the Texas Rangers
or the police.
And in most cases because
they are criminalized
at the moment of their death,
that person was abandoned.
And so that isn't being registered
as an act of racial violence,
as the refusal of somebody's
rights to due process, the
denial of their judicial rights
but it's being recorded as
this is the pacification of the border.
And so they write dead
Mexican bandit on a postcard.
And so part of this work is not only,
is actually going back to the
records that do document that
and doing the interpretation
to recover that loss of life
and to recover the denial of rights
and then to put that
into a conversation with
what we primarily understand
as racial violence
which is the lynching.
And so that takes
a reflecting on this
history but also to recover
and to not be tricked by
the authority of a badge.
And for over 100 years that
has been the hard part.
I actually presented at a
workshop at Northeastern
with colleagues from a project called
Civil Right and
Restorative Justice Project
and they are doing the
kind of work to recover
murders, during the Civil Rights Era
and to uncover those
histories particularly
when the police were involved and so
within African American
history now there is an effort
to see how do we include
police violence in this?
>> Yeah and I would just
add that this is in no way
to disparage those kind of collection,
early community collection efforts at all.
I mean they were doing this
under difficult circumstances
and even today, I mean in effect,
they were doing the job
that the state itself
refused to do so even now,
there is no, as it were
comprehensive database
of deaths at police,
as a result of police shootings right?
So even today.
This was incredibly
important work but I think
as Monica suggested, that the task of
scholars and historians
and researchers is to,
among others, is to kind of bring these
into conversation and to
perhaps rethink some of the
circumstances under which,
what they can tell us.
>> What's also a central question
that I think we can't miss
is if we're actually trying
to look back to the past
and understand, what was it like to live
in a reign of terror?
To live through a world
created by violence?
You can't only reference
the mob act of violence.
That doesn't give you a
glimpse into the intimidation
into the fear.
What it felt like for
communities to stumble upon
12 bodies that were lynched.
And so it really asks us
to rethink these histories
but also to think about
the histories that are also
not often documented in
oral memory, right rape.
And that's something, sexual violence is,
another part of this history,
it's a gendered act of violence.
There were cases that are
documented in photographs,
photographic evidence of sexual violence
against male victims,
right, that doesn't give us
a glimpse into the
kinds of sexual violence
and intimidation that women
experienced in this period.
And so this is just the
start of these kinds of
efforts to collect these histories.
But it's only giving us a
glimpse into some of these cases.
Into what it must've been
like to navigate a world
in the early 20th Century.
(muffled speaking)
>> Well I think it is
for a couple of reasons I mean one of the
incidents,
I'll just kind of point
to the specifics of
incidents that are related but
perhaps we need to do more thinking about
those kind of ties.
So in 1906, there's
the stationing of African
American troops in Brownsville
of which
there is an incident
where it is cast as being
a kind of quasi race riot where these
African American soldiers run up,
supposedly run amok and shoot up the town.
Now obviously that's (laughing)
that's not the whole story.
But the kind of linkage of like
what occurred in that particular incident
and how it relates to the
complex triangulation of race,
of racial relationships at a period where
they're beginning to
shift drastically right?
There's an established order that is just
at the beginning of being
transformed, and so
the question of how all the various
actors in this kind of
reacted to this differential
kind of pressures of
racialization and their
changing place within the racial hierarchy
is something that I
think we're just really
beginning to kind of look at,
in this deep relational
manner that you're suggesting.
>> I mean Texas is a place where you have,
it's the convergence of histories
of colonization and genocide
and histories of slavery.
And so Texas in the early 20th Century
has the legacies of both of
those kinds of history occurring
and so even if you took it
as an institutional history
the Texas Rangers in the late 19th Century
are policing and
participating in the genocide
of Native nations in
Texas, but they are also
hunting for, I mean they
are literally hunting down
people who are enslaved
who are seeking freedom
by crossing into Mexico.
So you can think about
it in different ways.
You can think about it in terms of
how are these populations comingling?
What does it mean to bring a
Black troop to South Texas?
What does the kind of anti-Black violence
that happens at the hands of Mexicans
and also anti-Native
violence and discrimination
against indigenous groups
and that particularly
plays out in different
class relations amongst
ethnic Mexicans.
But there is the question of how the state
polices different
marginalized racial groups.
And that changes over the
course of the late 19th Century
but you see it manifesting
in interesting ways
in different parts of the state.
So racial violence in East
Texas versus in South Texas
are different in terms of the populations.
But you also, not until the
1920s do you actually have
more movement of people back and forth
across these different regions.
You know it takes people
two weeks by wagon
to get from San Antonio
to the border. (laughing)
So you're really getting
a sense of why is it these
attorneys in 1919 have to explain
what the border is like?
And they describe it as a place full of
inherently violent Mexicans.
This is also a period where
you have the rise of eugenics,
back to this question you have
the rise of eugenic science
the passage of the
Immigration Act in 1924.
Right there are questions
about Canales's Mexican blood
and how that is inspiring
his investigation
to the Texas Rangers.
And so eugenic science
is developing as a field
in the 19 teens and 20s.
>> We have time for one more question.
>> So you mentioned that
this research that you
have some PhD students
and master's students that
are doing the research
say on the people that were
the victims of violence
and that this isn't so easy as just
going to the library of
congress list of names
and that a lot of it is in oral histories
and documents that families have kept.
And so how do you find those?
Is there a way, say on the
website that they come to you?
How are you
making contacts with these people?
And then once they do
share the oral histories or
these documents, are you putting them in
an institutional archive
or digitizing them?
>> Well those are
questions for the future.
The hope is that once the
map is publicly available
with all the functions of
being able to search and sort
and learn histories,
that people will be able
to engage with it, access the content
and then suggest, the
Racial Violence Archive
is another project that
people could look at
and it has a form where
people can contact the users
and suggest an event,
ask for more information
about something that is mapped,
but also suggest sources.
So for the historical work that I've done
for my book project that
was contacting descendants.
A lot of descendants who I've worked with
actually were trying to
make their histories public.
They're not waiting around for historians
to get it together, they're
doing this work on their own.
And so they have blogs,
they have family websites.
And so in some cases you can find people
who are trying to find access for redress
by making their histories public online.
They also find you.
So we have through Refusing To Forget
built relationship with descendants
who have reached out to us.
The publicity of the Bullock exhibit was
fundamental in
raising the awareness
not only of the history
but of our efforts and
so that really helped
for people to see us as a resource
to either get more information
or to share information.
And so as a full time
professor though, (laughing)
the question is how do you build support
so that once it's live,
that you can actually
be ethically be taking that information
and try to work with people?
And I think that's where collaborations
with archives and libraries
is going to be fundamental.
Because if you are putting something up
as a resource for people and saying
we want to collect your histories,
you've got to be able to do that quickly
and effectively and efficiently.
And that's of course,
every archive's challenge.
(laughing) How do you
maintain your collections?
But that's down the road.
This is a multi year project.
We have 250 events in
our database right now
that the students are researching.
80 of them have been
researched and have some form
of the narrative and the metadata entered.
So we're going to start playing with
the digital methods and
digital storytelling.
And so we'll see what,
we'll do a lot of testing
that's different for
the digital humanities
scholars in the room, and the humanists,
something that digital scholars do.
So I applied for an NEH
Digital Projects for the Public grant
and I learned a lot
about the digital world
in that application, I didn't get it.
It was 45 pages single spaced. (laughing)
It's a lot of work.
I didn't get it but it was the first year
that we had envisioned the
project, developed the project.
But there's a component of
that grant that asks you
to describe your user testing.
You have got to talk to the NEH about
how you're going to test
your platform to see
if you get the results
that you're looking for.
So you have your goals.
Scholars are going to be able to use it,
teachers are going to be able to use it,
and members of the public who don't have
any understanding of the history
are going to be able to
walk away with something.
Well you've got to test for that.
And also in our development
of lesson plans,
right teachers think your
lesson plan isn't done
until you've taken it into the classroom,
you've tested it and you've seen
what students learn from it.
So I think that scholars
have a lot to learn
from these public projects.
What would would we live in
if everybody who's working
on critical race study,
everybody who's working on immigration
empire, worked thinking
about user testing?
Not just our peers making
important intellectual
interventions, but actually
making our research
useful for publics.
We would live in a vastly
different world I believe.
I don't know how you convince TPACK
or tenure and promotion
committees about that.
But I think that we're in a moment where
this public work has really
taught us that we have
responsibilities, moral and
ethical responsibilities
to participate in public conversations.
>> Yes I'll just add, just
to echo what Monica has said
that it really (laughing) has
been a steep learning curve
and also just really incredibly
eye opening in the ways
of learning to more effectively engage
this world of discourse and history
that circulates more publicly.
I'll just add that
we were,
Refusing to forget
folks, we were successful
in securing an NEH Public
Humanities Conference grant
and so in about a year,
in a little less than
a year from now, we will
be holding a centennial
conference about the Canales
hearings and the aftermath
and its contemporary resonances as well.
Put it on your calendar,
January 2019 at the Bullock
State History Museum, this conference.
>> I want to thank you (muffled speaking)
(applauding)
