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Public and Digital: Doing History Now

Three years ago I broke a promise to you.

In the spring of 2013, I wrote two articles on the digital technologies that were changing the way we do history: one on blogging (Digital History: A Primer Part 1) and one on digitizing documents and images (Digital History: A Primer Part 2). I promised to write a third article on what I called “Digital History For Real.” I never wrote that third one.

At the time I was scouring the internet for digital history projects that were using computer technology to produce new kinds of historical documents that I hoped would generate new historical questions or new historical methods, and eventually yield new ways of thinking historically and new insights into the past. To share what we were finding, we started The New Archive, a series of reviews of digital history projects. The first two entries covered an online archive about the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916 and an interactive map called Visualizing Emancipation about the surprisingly long-term and often violent process of resisting and ending slavery in the U.S. Along the way, we found marvelous maps, archives of sounds, even a database of feelings. We found data visualizations of stunning creativity and graphic appeal. Our most recent front-page feature, by UT art historian John Clarke, displayed the ways gaming technology can be used to reconstruct ancient buildings and make them accessible to everyone. And about a year ago, in November 2014, we offered a list of resources on digital history, in case you wanted to start exploring on your own.

These projects were each presented in increasingly sophisticated and eye-appealing ways, which is important, but, for the most part, they were using digital technology to do the same kinds of history we have always done. I never wrote that third article because a new digital history hadn’t yet materialized.

Now I think that we are on the cusp of seeing some very impressive new uses of computational thinking and digital presentation of databases, mapping, and text mining – all of which have had more impact in digital humanities fields other than history until now. And I promise (!) that I will write something about those developments later this month.

10426760_10206009617059332_927044538242862274_n — Source: Digital Public History

First though, today I want to talk about the ways that historians have been using digital methods to make history more appealing and accessible to the public. This is the realm where Digital History and Public History overlap. So far, public history has benefited from the digital more than any other kind of work historians do.

I’m defining public history as any activity that makes high quality, professional historical research and writing available and accessible to the public. This differentiates it from popular history, which, at times, can be as good as public history but also includes all kinds of dubious junk.

historyonline — Source: Smithsonian, The National Museum of American History

Not Even Past is public history, like other kinds of online history writing and blogging. Public history, which appeared well before its digital enhancements, also includes the work of museums and archives, the preservation and display of historical sites, the collection of oral histories, and the production of documentary photography and filmmaking. Public historians work for private and public institutions, government and business. In 1979, the National Council on Public History was formed; its website is a great resource for information about doing and enjoying public history. And in 2013, The Digital Public Library of America was launched online as a national digital library.

The internet, computational technology, and digital film and photography have made much more professional history available to the public than ever before. Much of that newly available history is visually exciting and effectively interactive and it is changing the ways public and academic historians go about their work. In many cases Digital History and Public History overlap. The most obvious case is the vast number of online archives: digitized documents, books and other texts, films, photographs, and other images that are available to the public, while at the same time providing fundamental research materials for academic historians.

Carolyn.Alexa-1354830727 — MediaNOLA: New Orleans Will Forever Have a Piece of My Heart

Another area of overlap is in the practices of openness and collaboration. Digital projects often require the work of people with diverse skills in programming, archiving, and data analysis, but collaboration goes beyond the specialists who produce projects. As Ben Schmidt put it, “collaboration in the digital humanities manifests itself not just among those involved in creating digital scholarship but also with the audience. Through comments and feedback sections, social networks, and other mediums, historians are able to engage with their audience on an unprecedented level.” This kind of openness to multiple voices is beginning to have an impact on academic history, but it has already been shaping many public history projects. For example, Vicki Mayer and Mike Griffiths describe their project MediaNOLA as a website for showing “the invisible contributions of ordinary people, places, and practices in the creation of New Orleans culture and its representations.” They quickly realized that in order to show the role of ordinary people in creating a city’s culture, they would need to engage those people in producing the website and that included training students to work with local librarians, archivists, and institutions.

pinterest history — History on Pinterest

Public interest in history is also served by collaborative, self-generated digital platforms. Television and movies, with all their romantic and entertainment oriented distortions, remain incredibly popular, but they are joined by outlets that satisfy the public’s desire to know “what really happened.” This is a question that can now often be answered easily and relatively authoritatively online. AskHistorians, for example, one of the many specialized and moderated pages of Reddit, the huge (sometimes scandalous and often misogynous) information sharing website, “aims to provide serious, academic-level answers to questions about history.” With 450,000 registered readers, AskHistorians is a lively open forum for discussing history. Crowdsourcing has its well-known problems, but it is worth noting that studies comparing Wikipedia and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica carried out by Nature in 2005 and Oxford University in 2011 found them to be equivalently reliable.

Not only is there more historical information more widely available, but the technology has made all kinds of information available in exciting new visual forms that are relatively easy to produce. Data visualization is so popular now that there are dozens of free software programs that are openly available and easy to navigate and many other sites like Rice historian Caleb McDaniel’s, to instruct anyone on using them. We have already reported on excellent data visualization projects from big digital history labs like those at Stanford and Harvard as well as individual projects hosted at other universities and institutions elsewhere.

These visualizations raise important and unanswered questions about the differences between seeing and reading. To take just one example, a 14-minute video made in 2012 by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, illustrates each detonation of a nuclear weapon between 1945 and 1998, with a flash and a sound. One historian claimed that “almost anyone watching the animation will come away with a deep understanding of the key features of the nuclear age.” Now, while the video powerfully conveys the high number of explosions, it is impossible to derive a “deep understanding” of anything from watching it, because it violates almost every fundamental rule of historical presentation: it offers no way to think about or contextualize the data, and no way to verify its accuracy. Other commentators come closer to the mark in pointing out its emotional impact. For example, on Open Culture, Kate Rix called it “beautiful” and “eerie,” and said its laconic style makes it “work better” than excessive films like Oliver Stone’s historical psychodramas. Hashimoto’s video “works” as an art object because it generates feelings, conveys some generalized knowledge, and might stimulate the viewer to learn more. But it fails, in my opinion, to become anything more complex than a simple timeline, however beautifully rendered, because it lacks all analytical credibility and depth.

I’m not arguing against such visualization of historical data, just the opposite. We know that the visual has a visceral impact on us, an effect that often skirts around words and goes straight through our senses to our feelings. A famous (or internet-famous) marketing info-graphic claims (correctly) that we process visual information much more quickly than text. But what are we processing? What kind of history are we “learning”; can visuals that exclude the precision of words manipulate our feelings more stealthily?

I’m asking how we can harness that visceral and emotional power used by public and popular historians to academic data analysis. I’m also asking how we academic historians can do a better job writing for the public. One place to start is by asking how museums, historical sites, and films, for example, use that emotional power and our ability to identify with what we see to convey historical information and encourage thoughtful responses in their public audiences? How can we, as academic historians, work with professional public historians to learn what works in a documentary film or museum exhibit or Reddit, to understand how better to convey our own work to public audiences? And how can we apply this galaxy of ideas to our research and teaching?

This year at Not Even Past, we plan to dig much deeper into the ways that digitization and public accessibility are changing historical research, teaching history, disseminating history online, and training graduate students to become historians. I know I speak for many of my colleagues and readers, when I say that we are learning as much from our students about digital tools as we are teaching them.

We will also introduce a new page, Thinking in Public, devoted to public scholarship in all fields. One of the problems we face in entering these new fields is the lack of adequate archiving and indexing projects in digital and public history. Thinking in Public will seek to create a database of public scholarship projects conducted at UT Austin as well as to review and promote them. We will also be seeking to review the most interesting public scholarship taking place at other universities.

We have a new staff member to coordinate our Public and Digital History initiatives. He is Edward Shore, a UT History graduate student specializing in Brazilian history. You’ll recognize him as the author of some of our favorite NEP articles on Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s famous album and Hugo Chavez. Eddie will work with our current Senior Assistant Editor, Mark Sheaves, to commission and contribute to a series of articles about becoming historians in the digital age, and about their own forays into public history.

We will continue to offer the best historical writing in our reviews and articles, but we will also be thinking about how we can use new digital and public history practices to make us all better and more interesting historians who can speak to larger and more diverse audiences.

Featured image adapted from Steven Lubar, “Teaching Digital Public History,” January 2, 2014.

Lessons from London: what happens when universities place PhD students in museums?

By Kevin Guyan

Stress: Approaches to the First World War is currently running at University College London and explores the effects of the First World War on the mind, the body and the environment. The exhibition is part of the Student Engager project, which began at UCL in February 2012 to explore the question, ‘What happens when PhD students from different disciplines explore links between their research and museum collections then share their discoveries with non-university audiences?’

Opening Night of Stress: Approaches to the First World War Exhibition

I am one of nine PhD students who works for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department on ‘as and when’ contracts and wish to share what we can learn when PhD researchers are placed in museums and left to engage with the public. I am in the final year of my PhD in History at UCL and got involved in the project as I was aware that historians often find themselves presenting research only to those working in the same field. Through the Student Engager project, I have experienced first-hand how PhD students can use museums as locations to fine-tune their thesis through two-way discussions with visitors, as well as other curators, and avoid the dangers of intellectually narrow research.

Members of the Student Engagement Team.

The meat and bones of the Student Engager project is the presence of PhD researchers in UCL’s museums (the Petrie Museum of Egyptology, the Grant Museum of Zoology, and the Art Museum), working three hour shifts every one or two weeks. Similarly, during the run of Stress, an engager is always present in the exhibition space ready for conversation – making all visits a unique experience that presents a personal interpretation of the materials on display from whoever is working that afternoon.

Approaches to engaging vary but researchers generally follow the pattern of approaching interested visitors, introducing themselves, explaining the project and asking about their museum experience. This either provokes a confused look, a polite acknowledgement of the project or sparks the start of a conversation, which can last anything from five minutes to three hours. The project discourages engagers from reciting prepared monologues and instead encourages people to draw connections between their theses and the collections, and enjoy the thrill of seeing where visitor conversations lead. After every engagement, researchers input details into an online platform that enables us to gather quantitative and qualitative information on the types of people encountered in the museums and the conversations taking place.

Members of the Student Engagement Team discuss the exhibition with visitors.

Project responses are overwhelmingly positive. Between October 2012 and January 2015, engagers had 1,516 conversations and described 93 per cent of interactions favourably. Online responses also noted that UCL Museums and Collections was the most common talking point (38 per cent of engagements), followed by the researcher’s own work (33 per cent of engagements).

The Student Engager project has helped encourage curators to reimagine museum sites as interactive locations for conversation. It has also given me a space to test innovative and experimental ways to share my research. For example, I brought images from my research into the museums then observed the responses they provoked from visitors. I shared photographs of ideal English homes in the 1940s and 1950s, this presented an entry-point for visitors to start conversations as they drew links between the images and their own lives. Visual cues helped visitors think about their own homes, both past and present, in a new way, while also educating me on their experiences and opinions towards my research.

The project is not without its problems. It risks looking for intellectual connections between themes and across disciplines where none may in fact exist. Projects like this also come at a cost, requiring the funding for a full roster of museum staff alongside researchers who are paid for their time. Universities cannot expect PhD students to undertake public engagement work without recompense.

Above all, placing PhD students in university museums does not require a ‘dumbing-down’ of the intellectual rigour of research. It instead opens up new skills, crucial for historians entering competitive job markets. The benefits also reach far further than dissemination alone – they allow researchers to enter into dialogues with people from different backgrounds and identify new and unexpected connections. The process of sharing ideas with people unfamiliar with our own field forces us to change the way we present information, which ultimately results in a deeper understanding for everyone involved.

For further information on the UCL Student Engager Project and Stress: Approaches to the First World War visit http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums

Kevin Guyan is in the final year of a PhD in History at University College London and is a Visiting Research Associate with the University of Texas at Austin during Fall 2015. His research explores how planning experts, including architects and sociologists, used the design of domestic space to produce new performances of masculinity in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. He is from the North East of Scotland and works as the Student Engagement Coordinator for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department, a project that provides a platform for PhD students to share their research with non-academic audiences.

All images courtesy of the author.

The Seldoms Bring LBJ and the 1960s Into the Present in Their Investigation of How Power Goes

By Michael J. Kramer

History & American Studies, Northwestern University

Dramaturg, The Seldoms

“I can see them now, Clio and Terpsichore…I can feel them spinning, lurching, sidling and smashing up against one another, laughing knowingly as they wipe the sweat of foreheads and from the skin between lips and nose; in a standoff, carefully calculating each other’s weight and flexibility, careening toward one another, rolling as one body and then falling apart, only to circle around for a fast-paced repartee, trading impersonations…. This duet rejuvenates itself endlessly. It has an insatiable appetite for motion.” Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History”

“It is all here: the story of our time with the bark off…” Lyndon Johnson at the dedication of the LBJ Presidential Library, 1971

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon at the White House in 1968. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the contemporary dance theater work Power Goes, which arrives at McCullough Theatre on the campus of the University of Texas on September 16th and 18th, courtesy of Texas Performing Arts, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the LBJ Presidential Library, the Chicago-based dance ensemble, The Seldoms, propose that we can dance our way deeply into the historical past. So too, they stake out the claim that the past, arriving through dance performance, has important work to do in the present. Presiding over Power Goes is the figure of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who serves as a guiding spirit for an exploration of physicality, power, and social change. Using videography, spoken text, distinctive lighting, sound design, and, most of all, dynamic, innovative movement, The Seldoms ask audiences to join them in drawing upon LBJ’s legacy and his times to consider what power is exactly and how, as the work’s title suggests, it goes.

Power Goes relies significantly upon archival sources to pursue this investigation. In this sense, it is a work of public history, except that it adds the body, movement, and performance to text, image, and sound as means for discovering and communicating its findings. History is all over this piece. Even the title of Power Goes comes from an oft-cited saying coined by Johnson, “Power is where power goes,” meaning that he could exercise political influence and control in any office he occupied. The Seldoms take this line and run—or better said (of course) dance—with it. Power Goes refers to everything from Johnson’s childhood in Texas Hill Country to his political prowess as an intensely physical leader to the broader civil rights and social movements for equality in the 1960s to Johnson’s tragic political demise after his decision to escalate US military involvement in the Vietnam War. But this is no biography of Johnson, and it is certainly not hagiographical. Power Goes is certainly not history in the conventional sense. By presenting history in dance, it asks us to reconsider what public history is and what it can be.

At a time when scholarly historians are working to make academic history more accessible to broader audiences, looking to other fields that confront similar issues might be stimulating. Contemporary dance faces oddly parallel issues to academic history. Both have typically been made for smaller, specialized audiences even though both history and dance are important activities for a far broader swath of the population. To witness how The Seldoms use innovative choreographic tactics, cross-disciplinary collaboration, sustained studio practice, ongoing self-scrutiny, continued public dialogue, and, most importantly, the body itself, as avenues to deeper interpretive understanding of both the past and the present (and perhaps as a way to imagine the future) is to consider new areas of possibility for public history as well.

The choice of Lyndon Johnson as subject matter brings history and dance together quite directly. Johnson, as a character, is no stranger to the stage. Bryan Cranston, of television series Breaking Bad fame, took on the role of LBJ in the recent Broadway play All the Way (soon to be an HBO biopic), which tells the story of Johnson’s efforts to push through civil rights legislation in the aftermath of his landslide Presidential victory in 1964. Johnson also turns up as an opponent of civil rights legislation on screen in the recent film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay. In the 1960s themselves, LBJ was even placed in the villainous position of Macbeth in Barbara Garson’s satirical and angry radical theater work MacBird!

In Power Goes, however, he is more like Banquo’s ghost. He haunts the piece, looms over it, even gives it the infamous “Johnson treatment” that he was renowned for when he leaned his six foot four frame over allies and adversaries alike to get them in line for his legislation. The Seldoms are less interested in retelling Johnson’s story than allowing it to work its way into the present moment. This is not historical reenactment or naturalistic dramatic realism. Instead, The Seldoms demand that audiences enter into a version of history that is lively, weird, uneven, palpable. No one member of The Seldoms alone plays the role of LBJ, for instance, or remains in the position of any other specific historical person consistently. Stable identities give way to the porous flow of power as it courses through the bodies of the dancers.

Similarly, The Seldoms do not stick to one historical time period or level of historical action. Past and present blur. Official and informal intermix. Access to haircut stylists and self-help audio tapes become issues of power relations right alongside pressing issues of national import. The micropolitics of everyday life interweave with public spectacles of political theater. History jumps around, we cut between and across time periods, and between fantastical interactions (a conversation between LBJ and Obama) and realpolitik (Johnson intimidating a segregationist business owner into hiring African-Americans).

History pulsates here. Sometimes it pummels bodies with trauma. At other times, we witness the power of bodies that are massed in stillness and endurance. Sometimes these bodies are vulgar. At other times, they are quite tender and vulnerable. History disappears into the bodies onstage, but the dancers also become historical vessels, bringing the past into the present moment. Power Goes does not offer a “history of the body,” as historians have done in the past decades; rather, it presents history through the body. LBJ’s physicality is the beginning of a much larger inquiry into how history surfaces through skin and bones, exertion of muscle and tangle of nerve.

But what a perfect starting point LBJ is. Whether it be something as crass as taking aides into his bathroom while he urinated or something more kindly such as wrapping his arms around friends to show his fondness for them, LBJ’s physicality was crucial to his politics. He was often awful on television, but a master of face-to-face glad-handing. Johnson’s body was, in some sense, his politics. Presidential bodies are significant anyway, beyond LBJ alone. As Ernst Kantorowicz wrote of Medieval political theology in his classic study The King’s Two Bodies, and as Michael Rogin translated into the American context, leader’s bodies have always borne a close relationship to the body politic. We think about the larger nation-state, sometimes, through linking the literal body of a leader to the metaphorical social body. The President is not called the head of state for nothing.

A leader’s body, however, is not the only one that matters, particularly in a democracy. When The Seldoms pivot from LBJ to other people from the 1960s—civil rights protesters, antiwar demonstrators, everyday citizens, fearful political adversaries, potential political allies—the range of the dance piece’s exploration of physicality and power grows dramatically as well. Scales and sizes, individual bodies and masses of bodies, stillness and motion, duration and action, all contrast with each other. Varying tones and intensities of assertion, rejection, conflict, and concordance register. The Seldoms loosen history from its moorings, embodying its implications and giving them a physical presence. Power Goes enlarges historical awareness through embodiment. The company even hold a workshop, “Bodies on the Gears,” in which participants explore the historical gestures with their own physical being; these workshop attendees then join in the performance itself.

The oscillations in Power Goes between bodies then and now—the way that The Seldoms move from the 1960s and the present, the archives to the stage, a straightforward retelling of the past to something far more adventurous, even delirious—also raise questions about history and memory. Aligning physical exploration with evidence, argument, and interpretation, The Seldoms create a deeply intellectual investigation that is also a sensorial séance. Ghosts from the past shoot through the bodies of The Seldoms into the present moment, but they never settle into place. Instead they mutate and change as their stances and positions get reworked, abstracted, reconfigured, re-physicalized, redistributed, redirected, and recontextualized by the dancers. Memory itself becomes alive, suddenly happening now, a tailwind that must be negotiated in the moment, a highly charged experience in which structures of power grow fluid and unruly.

The Seldoms have created a piece that allows audiences to experience history, with a thrilling combination of visceral immediacy and meditative contemplation. LBJ oversees this affair, and protesters and others from the 1960s show up to play their parts, but it is the relationship between history and power, between what things persist and how things change, between what gets remembered and how we remember it, that ultimately takes center stage in Power Goes. As a kind of epic duet choreographed between dance and history, Terpsichore and Clio, this is a version of public history that has got serious moves.

Watch a one minute trailer or the entire piece (80 minutes).

All photographs by William Frederking

Cited Sources:

Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (1995).

Lyndon Johnson, Dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, May 22, 1971, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/page/library-museum.

Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957).

Michael Paul Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, and Presidential Self-Sacrifice,” in “Ronald Reagan,” The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987).

History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico

By Robert Wilks

Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico. Via Wikipedia.

My favorite history museum, and one of my favorite museums of any type, is the Museo Nacionál de Antropología in Mexico City. It is housed in an enormous structure filled with the pre-Columbian culture of Mexico. It covers every civilization, period and style in its artifacts. They are beautifully displayed, perfectly lit and present a dazzling array of forms and colors. There is so much to see, multiple visits are required. I was totally amazed at the richness and variety of cultures. I highly recommend it.

Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone.

Latinas and Latinos: A Growing Presence in the Texas State Historical Association

By Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco

Historians, both veterans and newcomers, recently gathered at the 2015 Texas State Historical Association conference in Corpus Christi. UT Austin, past and present, was well represented. Veteran Tejano historians Roberto Villarreal, Andres Tijerina, and Emilio Zamora attended, all of whom were part of the 1973 UT Austin MA Program in History, the first significant cadre of Tejano graduate students, following Carlos Castaneda and Jovita Gonzalez from decades before.

Dr. Benjamin Johnson; Dr. Monica Munoz Martinez; Dr. John Moran Gonzales; Dr. Trinidad Gonzales; and Dr. Sonia Hernandez

Historical presentations

At breakfast, Villarreal spoke of obstacles various historians placed before him to prevent his success. Today, Dr. Tijerina and Dr. Zamora are co-editing the forthcoming Tejano Handbook of Texas. Dr. Arnoldo De Leon, previous advisor to the Tejano entries of the Handbook’s 1996 edition, was also present as was Jesus F. de la Teja (UT PhD, 1988) who talked about his past role as a Texas State Historian. Dr. Carlos Blanton celebrated the recent publication of his book on UT’s Dr. George I. Sanchez, and Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez celebrated the publication of her essay on Jovita Idar in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

Most encouraging was that for the first time a significant number of Latinas employed in history departments in Texas and elsewhere presented or attended. Present was Dr. Maritza de la Trinidad (UT Pan American); Dr. Laura Munoz (Texas A & M Corpus Christi); Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez (UTSA); Dr. Monica Munoz Martinez (Brown University); Dr. Sonia Hernandez (Texas A & M College Station); Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco (ENMU Ruidoso); and Dr. Caroline Castillo Crimm (retired, Sam Houston State University, UT PhD, 1994). English professor, Dr. Patricia Portales and doctoral candidate, Cecilia Venerable (UTEP) also presented.

Dr. Patricia Portales; PhD candidate Cecilia Venerable; Attorney Sharyll Teneyuca; Dr. Laura Munoz; Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez; Dr. Maritza de la Trinidad; Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco; Dr. Sonia Hernandez; and Dr. Carmen Tafolla

Other Tejanas conducting historical research also attended. Writer Dr. Carmen Tafolla and lawyer Sharyll Teneyuca spoke about labor activist and intellectual Emma Tenayuca. Archaeologist Dr. Mary Jo Galindo spoke about her grandmother, Mexicanist activist of San Antonio and Lytle, Texas, Maria L. Hernandez.

Several sessions were outstanding, including Grassroots Tejano History in Austin, San Antonio, and Laredo; Border Violence, 1915-1919; Tejana leaders; Dr. Hector P. Garcia; and Corpus Christi archives.

Grassroots Public and Community History

Latinas involved in Public History — historical preservation, public programming, and archival collections — were there too. These included Dr. Nancy Vera (Corpus Christi); Graciela Sanchez (San Antonio); Gloria Espitia (Austin); and Margarita Araiza (Laredo). All are key to grassroots Latino historical preservation, public programming, research, and archival preservation in their respective cities.

Tejano Grassroots History: Margarita Azaia; Gloria Espitia; and Graciela Sanchez

The Hispanic Heritage Center of Texas, a grass-roots institution, organized a session on South Texas’ role in Tejano-Mexicano culture. Founded in 2008, it focuses on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Efforts by Laredo, Austin, and San Antonio community activists to preserve and promote Tejano and Tejana history were addressed. Margarita Araiza of the Webb County Heritage Foundation noted that historical fallacies are still being promulgated: Texas Monthly reported that Stephen F. Austin was the father of Texas and that the US cattle ranching industry was born in the 19th century, facts negating Spanish and Mexican presence.

The Webb County Heritage Foundation in Laredo works to preserve historic architecture and maintains the Villa Antigua Border Heritage Museum and the Republic of the Rio Grande Museum. It also sponsors a young archivist program along with a Cine de la Epoca de Oro (Mexican Golden Age movies), tours, and has succeeded in getting Laredo local history into the common core at public schools. Its publications include a Laredo Legacies booklet, a Haunted Heritage book, and pamphlets on Leonor Magnon de Villegas and Jovita Idar. The foundation presented its ten minute professional video on Magnon de Villegas.

Gloria Espitia, previously of the Austin History Center, reported that ordinary folks do not consider their materials “historical.” She spoke about exhibits she coordinated: Diez y seis; an Elderly Oral History Project (assisted by Professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez of UT); Quinceneras; Mexican American Firsts Trailblazers; Austin Brown Berets; and Latina Musicians. She also spearheaded an oral history project with Martin Middle school to document the thirty year effort to create the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin.

Graciela Sanchez, of San Antonio’s Westside Preservation Alliance, spoke on efforts to save the La Gloria building and the KCOR Spanish-language radio station building, both unsuccessful efforts. The organization has published pamphlets about Mexican-descent women singers and has reproduced historic photos for outdoor public display.

Dr. Nancy Vera reported on her singular efforts to produce a Corpus Christi Mexican American virtual museum online. Interviews she conducted with local historical figures can be found there too.

Mexican Border Violence, 1910-1919

One of the most important sessions focused on a public history project by historians in collaboration with the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. In commemoration of the 1915-2015 anniversary of racial violence in South Texas by the Texas Rangers and others, a group of historians are working on a project to give attention to murders suffered by Mexican descent people. Dr. Monica Martinez informed the audience of their website “Refusing to Forget” which includes a map of Texas’ racial violence against Mexicans.

Dr. Trinidad Gonzales said his great grandfather was killed in the matanza. He discovered a report of his death in a 1929 edition of El Defensor, a Spanish language Edinburg newspaper published by Santiago Guzman.

The panel reported on attempts to obtain historical markers commemorating the conflict. County control has censored some Tejano markers. Edwards County denied a marker about Antonio Rodriguez’ lynching in Rocksprings in 1910. Likewise, the Presidio Historical Commission denied one about the Porvenir Massacre of 1918. County historical societies have had decision-making power and conservative European Americans would like to prevent historical discussion. In contrast, Cameron county approved the “Matanza, 1915” marker but changed it title to “Victims of an Undeclared War, 1915.” And markers approving Jovita Idar and the Primer Congresso of Laredo, the first major Mexicanist civil rights congress, were approved by Webb county.

They also informed the audience of the Texas Historical Commission’s Untold marker program which the state pays for and is not vetted by local county commissions

Twentieth Century Tejana Leaders

Another historical session focused on twentieth-century Tejana leaders. Carmen Tafolla and Sharyll Teneyuca reported on labor activist Emma Tenayuca. Intrigued by politics by age 15, she became active early. While her work with the pecan sheller strike of 1938 is well known, fewer know of her work as a teacher. She obtained her teaching certificate in 1952 and taught at Catholic schools and Harlendale in San Antonio. In 1974 she obtained a masters at Our Lady of the Lake but retired in 1982.

Mary Jo Galindo noted that her grandmother Maria L. Hernandez worked in conjunction with her husband all her life. In the mid-1920s she had a midwifery certificate and in 1936 helped form the Asociacion Protectora de Madres and the Clinica de la Beneficiencia Mexicana. In 1939 she was a goodwill ambassador to Mexico and, as a result, the Mexican government gave the clinic an x-ray machine. In the 70s she attended Raza Unida Mujeres events with her husband though men were not permitted.

Cynthia Orozco talked about Adela Sloss Vento, a LULAC ally (League of United Latin American Citizens) and one of the most significant Mexican American civil rights leaders and public intellectuals in the 20^th century. Based on Sloss Vento’s archives, Orozco and Dr. Arnoldo Carlos Vento are completing a book manuscript on her work from the 1920s through the 1980s. Sloss Vento wrote to US and Mexican presidents, Congressmen, and state legislators to seek racial desegregation and improved lives for immigrant workers.

Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco (UT BA, 1980) chairs the History, Humanities, and Social Sciences Department at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (University of Texas Press, 2009) and a TSHA Fellow.

All photos courtesy of the author.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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