Oregon Humanities magazine | Oregon Humanities

Away

Oregon Humanities: Fall/Winter 2009

Letter from the Editor

Seeking and Finding

Kathleen Holt

I’ve never been much of a traveler. Growing up in Hawaii, I was prone to motion sickness, and even short drives around the island made me nauseous. And as an adult, I’ve never felt the wanderlust that strikes so many other people I know. I’ve always preferred, instead, to find a small patch of the world to settle on and call my own.

Perhaps—motion sickness and homebodiness aside—this is because I’ve always been uncomfortable with how travel makes economic inequities painfully clear: several of my family members rely on Hawaii’s tourism industry for their livelihoods, though they can’t afford the plane fare that would take them off the islands to explore the world themselves. Hawaiian sovereign rights activist Haunani-Kay Trask took a hard line on tourism when she spoke at the University of Oregon’s environmental law conference many years ago, eloquently and passionately describing the problems that befall local economies dependent on visitors. When an earnest young man in the audience asked how he could better know and understand other cultures without traveling, Trask brusquely replied, “Read a book.”

But I understand the allure of a journey and see the life-changing effect globetrotting has had on some of my closest friends. Pico Iyer describes travel as a means of guiding us toward “a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly,” adding that “travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places and saving them from abstraction and ideology.” Given these lofty outcomes: a firsthand experience versus a chapter in even a well-written book? No contest.

Writing

The Guilty Traveler

The complexities of being an American tourist in an inequitable world

Lucy Burningham

I know where I was sitting the moment I wrote the line.

I was in an Internet café off a dirty street in Cusco, Peru. The city was built by the Incas and conquered by the Spanish, who supposedly covered much of it in gold, but today European twentysomethings with dreadlocks walk down the streets without shoes and crippled beggars whine for change in the town square.

“Poor people are happier,” I’d written on my blog, a new tool for me at the time and my primary means of updating friends and family on my three-month travels through South America.
Even then, I felt embarrassed by my hasty generalization, which I knew smacked of ignorance. But I was feeling bold, in touch with a new reality. Here, people lived simply, seemingly content with bootleg CDs, nonorganic vegetables, and a lack of order. Seat-belt laws and emissions standards? Peru seemed just fine without them.

Like a college freshman who, upon reading Nietzsche for the first time, buys her parents a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra for Christmas, I wanted to tell everyone about my discovery. Even though I’d spent a summer studying abroad in Europe and had briefly visited Turkey and Nepal, on this trip I’d found an even bigger world outside the United States—one that included vast amounts of poverty and, yet, joyful people.

Seeing this new world also meant acknowledging a deep, nagging guilt. After all, I was a white, educated, middle-class American who’d been born into unquestionable opportunity. And I’d needed this trip to really begin to contemplate the realities of the developing world and my relationship to it. No book, movie, or essay had ever pushed me to evaluate my identity in the same way. The daily sights, from men urinating in bushes along the side of the road to schoolchildren skipping to class in neatly pressed uniforms, prompted me to form many theories and make quick declarations. My emotions ran high.

I knew the danger of my position. Travel tends to bend truths, obscuring an otherwise clear gaze with a mysterious gauze. Was I making valuable insights or simply seeing what I wanted to see? Did these insights make traveling more than 4,500 miles from home worth the time, money, and resources? Did they justify my cultural voyeurism and contribution to a tourism infrastructure?

Neverland

The striking difference between travel and escape

Apricot Irving

I never know what to bring Madina. The gifts I come up with—a bag of apples, a homemade peach and blueberry tart, a box of sweaters—all seem superfluous when I place them in her hands. She greets me the same way every time I visit, whether or not I have a gift. She pulls me close, the gauzy layers of her head scarf brushing against my cheek, then holds me at arm’s length to study my face. We grin at each other a little foolishly, neither of us sure what to say next, with no common language to bridge the distance.

The Crossing

A two-week journey toward hope and home

Vicente Martinez

This essay, adapted from a longer unpublished work, chronicles the fifth border crossing to the United States by Vicente Martinez (a pseudonym). Oregon Humanities magazine editorial advisory board member Camela Raymond worked with Martinez on editing this essay for publication. Some names and details have been changed.

On Wednesday, February 4, 2009, I said goodbye to my family. I didn’t want to leave, but the thought of getting sick was often on my mind.

I’d been looking for work since arriving in Las Calandrias in October. But the economy was in terrible shape, and I wasn’t an ideal job candidate. I couldn’t do hard labor with my health condition, and I was too old to be considered for most jobs; the cut-off was typically forty, and I was forty-one. I hoped my English language skills might help me find a job with a company that needed bilingual people in Guadalajara—the capital of Jalisco state, where my family lives—but my application was turned down. Ironically, it was far easier for me to find work as an undocumented worker in Portland than as a legal citizen in Mexico.

To control my HIV, I needed a regular supply of medicine and periodic blood tests. I could get these for free at a clinic in Portland, but here in Mexico, although I could get my medicine free of charge at a local hospital, I had to pay for my own lab work—500 pesos every three months. Even if I found a full-time job, which seemed increasingly unlikely, this would be difficult to afford. Minimum wage was 700 pesos a week, barely enough to get by.

Far from Home

The history and future of Slavic refugees in Oregon

Susan W. Hardwick

A few years ago a pro-immigration rally in Salem crowded the front steps of the Capitol and spilled across the street onto the Capitol Mall. Almost everyone in the crowd of about three thousand mostly Latin American immigrants and other supporters were wearing red, white, and blue shirts and waving Mexican and American flags. Scenes like this, along with daily news stories, political debates, and dinner table conversations are reminders that issues surrounding immigration have become one of the hot button topics of our times.

Latino immigration issues have dominated recent news headlines, but about a week before that rally, a smaller but equally engaged group of Slavic Christian fundamentalists and other supporters gathered on those same steps with a protest of their own against proposed legislation in support of gay rights. This less-publicized event not only provides evidence of the increasing numbers of Russian-speaking residents here, but also signals their increasing involvement in American politics and culture. Much like immigrant groups who arrived in the early twentieth century, newcomers from the former Soviet Union are not only finding ways to adjust to their new lives in the United States, they are also becoming active players in reshaping the landscape of the place they now call home. Because of their relatively large numbers and well-organized networks, and the availability of instant communication systems and high-tech media exposure, Slavic refugees and their families have the potential to make their mark on local landscapes more rapidly than did earlier groups.

Here, Not There

A wife looks to the Greeks when her husband is called away to war.

Sarah Gilbert

At first, I found my solace in Penelope. It was May, and I was in my garden planting radishes when I learned that my husband would be leaving our home in two months and ten days, headed to Iraq to serve as a truck driver in an Army infantry unit. He would be almost seven thousand miles away. In my state of astonishment, I imagined it as a trip through time, too: he would be “over there,” engaged in a medieval battle in camouflage and chain mail. I would be sitting on a cliff somewhere north of Dublin, my brown wool skirt billowing in the wind, listening for the echo of my husband’s voice in the spray off the ocean’s cold waves, knitting socks for our three sons.

Conflicted, in denial, mixed up, I turned to the Greeks.

Distance as an Illusion

John Yeon and the landscape arts of China and Japan

Kevin Nute

The self-trained Portland architect John Yeon is probably best known as a designer of houses that seem made for the landscape of the Northwest. Less well known is his passion for an art that was anything but local: Far Eastern landscape painting. In John Yeon’s mind, however, these seemingly remote landscapes were very closely related. “People sometimes ask me why I got interested in Oriental art,” he explained in a 1983 interview. “It’s because I knew the Columbia Gorge very well, and when I first saw a Chinese painting, which had crags and twisted trees and tall, vertical waterfalls, it was not at all strange. I just walked right into the painting. I was completely at home.”

Irreconcilable Dissonance

The threat of divorce as the glue of marriage

Brian Doyle

I have been married once to the woman to whom I am still married, so far, and one thing I have noticed about being married is that it makes you a lot more attentive to divorce, which used to seem like something that happened to other people, but doesn’t anymore, because of course every marriage is pregnant with divorce, and also now I know a lot of people who are divorced, or are about to be, or are somewhere in between those poles, for which shadowy status there should be words like mivorced or darried or sleeperated or schleperated, but there aren’t, so far.

Field work

From the Director

Cara Ungar-Gutierrez

By now, many of you know about changes that we’ve undergone here at Oregon Humanities, formerly Oregon Council for the Humanities. (See full story on page 5.) How we embarked on making our work and our programs more accessible and relevant in response to a board-directed vision. How we worked with advertising superstar Jelly Helm this year on creating a new image that mirrored these changes, which in large part hinges on three letters: O. Hm., which is not only an acronym for the organization but what we like to say is the sound of hearing a new idea.

But “O. Hm.” suggests more than just a moment of clarity; it represents a moment of insight that changes the way you think about something. For example, when one of our Conversation Project scholars, Elliott Young (see profile on page 10), led a group in Lincoln City on an exploration of thorny topics—immigration, ethnicity, and culture—they began by listening to each other’s stories and slowly realized that, in some ways, they were all immigrants. When seventy high school students from Ashland to Pendleton to Astoria gathered in Portland this summer at Happy Camp, they asked questions, listened closely, and began to consider how they would move forward with their lives. After a Humanity in Perspective student read about and talked with his fellow students about questions of power, justice, and language, he went on to become a vocal advocate for HIV awareness. And when twenty-five high school teachers (who collectively reach 9,000 students each year) gathered at our Teacher Institute to consider class, mobility, and the American dream, they reimagined how they might inspire their students to become better citizens.

Oregon Humanities is doing good, important work. My hope is that the refocusing we’ve done these past few years will be meaningful to Oregonians and will provide us all with a sense of deeper understanding, insight, and connectedness.

The Road to Oregon Humanities

Behind the scenes of our recent adventure in branding

Kathleen Holt

Maybe you’ve noticed: we’ve changed. Maybe you’ve seen and read about our new look in the September Oregonian article, or on our new website, or at one of our recent events. Maybe you’ve watched our short films on YouTube or our website. Maybe you picked up our new business cards or pins at Wordstock or a Conversation Project program. Maybe you’ve received correspondence from us on our new stationery.

You may wonder how this all happened. It wasn’t a quick, sudden process, but more of an evolution, a gradual response to changing times, values, and experiences. Here’s the short version of the long story of how the Oregon Council for the Humanities became Oregon Humanities.

June 2008: Based on discussions at winter retreats, board and staff prepare a three-year vision and planning document that focuses on program responsiveness and improved access to all Oregonians, and the value of inquiry and conversation as tools for transformation and growth. This vision, these plans, were a long time coming: For years, staff had been thinking about how the humanities could be seen as tools of change and how our programs and publications could better engage more Oregonians. How can Oregon Chautauqua be redesigned to encourage dialogue among participants? Could we start a discussion series held in a bar? How should the magazine model and inform humanities inquiry? As part of these plans, staff and board prioritize organizational branding and website redesign to better communicate the new direction.

A Borderless World

A Lewis & Clark College professor wants Oregonians to talk about immigration, globalization, and changing communities.

Eric Gold

On September 15, 1891, the Mexican journalist Catarino Garza put down his pen and picked up a Winchester rifle. It was the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. Garza led a band of peasants, merchants, and former soldiers from both sides of the border across the Rio Grande from Texas into Mexico with the aim of overthrowing the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Their hatbands bore the words libres fronterizos—“free border-people.” The Garzistas, as the group was known, battled the armies of both nations, as well as the Texas Rangers and local police, for two years before their revolution was put down. In 1895, Garza was killed while in exile in Panama.

Though Garza’s story lived on in border community song and legend, his failed revolution was largely forgotten by history until, in 2004, Lewis & Clark College professor Elliott Young published the first lengthy study of the man and his mission: Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border. The book isn’t just about rescuing this fascinating, if short-lived, movement from obscurity. Young sees parallels between that time, more than a hundred years ago, and today. “It was a moment when the border [between the U.S. and Mexico] didn’t really exist, or was just coming into being,” Young says. “It existed on the map, but the cultural and economic connections across the border meant that people living on the border lived on both sides. And today, despite the militarization of the border, because we live in such a globalized world, borders are becoming less meaningful, or meaningful in a different way.” By studying the genesis of the border, Young hopes to better understand how the boundary was and is used as an instrument of nationalism, and how, in spite of that, many people continue to live transnational lives.

Telling the Story

Board member works to ensure a healthy economy for Oregon’s future.

Raina Hassan

Gillian Floren admits she is a little uncomfortable about being interviewed. As a communications professional with a lengthy background in journalism, she hasn’t been on the other end of the microphone very often. Her life’s work has centered around telling other people’s stories.

“What I’ve always appreciated about journalism,” she says, “is the opportunity to find ways to tell stories that are compelling, share important ideas, and try to make those stories and ideas accessible to your audience.”

But Floren, who has been an Oregon Humanities board member since 2008, has an interesting story of her own. A meandering path through early adulthood began with her first job as an auto mechanic. She later worked in a medical lab examining cancer cells and then for the Arizona state Senate on the research staff of the education committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at the age of thirty, Floren immediately entered graduate school and earned a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina. “I saw journalism as a career choice that would open up worlds, rather than narrow them, and that suited me well,” she says.

Get together, share ideas, listen, think, grow.