Into the COLAverse – Episode 21: Annette Rodríguez

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the COLAverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me, your host, Frederick Luis Aldama, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It is my great honor to be here with Dr. Annette Rodriguez, Assistant Professor in the Department of History here with us at UT Austin. Welcome, Annette.

[00:00:33] Annette: Thank you so much for having me. It’s Such a pleasure to talk to you. I know you as Professor Latinex. So, um, it’s a joy to, to get to talk with you. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Right on the t shirt. Uh, such a joy to talk with you.

I’m, I’m such a fan of all of the work that you do.

[00:00:51] Frederick: Oh my goodness. So, and that also like the, you know, the mutual admiration here is, you know, it’s like a robust and abundant. Um, but tell me, you know, and that as we, gosh, you know, for, for lots of our listeners, for people in general, just in the. In the world, it’s kind of a mystery, I think, for some of them, how we like why we chose the paths we chose, why we’re passionate about the particular areas that we’re focused on studying and enriching understanding of maybe we can, I don’t know, go back as far as you share you care to go back or would like to go back in your journey.

Um, that led you two at a BA and an MA in American Studies at the University of New Mexico, and then on to a PhD at Brown and a postdoc. And now this, uh, incredible work you’re doing today. Um,

[00:01:49] Annette: you know, I, I’m so lucky. I was born in Silver City, New Mexico, so that’s about, you know, half an hour from the US Mexico border in Grant County.

And so our county borders, uh, Chihuahua and the state of Arizona. And so I was so lucky to have been born there because I have family on both sides of the U. S. Mexico border and I had a childhood of road trips, right? We, we drove from Silver City to Alamogordo to Deming where my older sister was born down to El Paso where we had family and then across to Juarez to get our dental work and to do, you know, our, our school shopping, our back to school shopping.

And so I, my, my family was always navigating these roads and also these very different, um, social organizations, right? Societies looked different from each other, even 10, 15 miles apart. And then, uh, I moved to the big city, Albuquerque. And that was, you know, it just felt extremely urban to me after growing up in these really rural spaces.

But even after we moved to Albuquerque, my family continued to do those, those road trips south. And, uh, and I still do them, you know, when I visit my family from Austin, I do that road trip that takes me West over to El Paso. I spent some time in El Paso and then, and then back up. And I try to navigate all those places of my childhood.

And I think that, you know, as a child, what I, what I realized was that there were these complex histories in each place we were. And so, you know, when we were in. Uh, for instance, Bayard, where we spent most, many of our summers, which is a little smaller town than, uh, than Deming and a smaller town than Silver City.

When we were in Bayard, uh, my, my uncle still worked at the copper mine that my grandfather had been recruited into working at, uh, at the turn of the 20th century. And this copper mine was still there and people still engaged heavily in the copper mine. And when we As kids took walks to, um, the Snappy Mart, which was our 7 Eleven, um, when we would take walks over there together, we were always walking past the Union Hall.

And this is the Union Hall that would later be, become legendary in, you know, films like Salt of the Earth. What I, what I realized, like, just picking up stories as a child, was that every place we were navigating, whether we were walking or driving, were these places of great consequence. And later in my, uh, high school years, when I was doing U.

S. history survey classes for the first time, I kept sort of noticing those places of consequences were completely absent. Even when we did New Mexico history, it was often the history of the Conquistadores, um, and, you know, Oñate, and Uh, you know, we have coloring books with the conquistadores and I just, I remember thinking, you know, like my grandparents were part of this, this labor struggle.

My, my grandfather stood on the strike lines, uh, not too many miles away from here and it doesn’t appear in anything we’re doing or seeing. And I think that was always. In my head, I was an avid reader as a kid. My mom, who, um, was a Mexican national and just, uh, became a citizen a couple years ago, um, you know, she had a great love, which I still find so endearing, uh, great love for America, right?

So my, my mom as a, as a, as a migrant, um, you know, she would be brought to tears. During 4th of July fireworks, There’s always this moment where um, Neil diamonds coming to america would sort of be like the big crescendo of of our fireworks In albuquerque, my mom would be brought to tears every time Um, and I was just so curious about that right her real love of of this place That I also knew You know was a place of injustice and inequity And so, you know, in middle school, I remember helping my grandmother study for her citizenship test.

And, you know, she was so proud to know the three branches of government. And so there was always this kind of, um, this, this thing happening, my family, this real pride, um, at coming to the U S and later becoming citizens and later having children who were citizens and spoke English. Um, but alongside that, you know, in a simultaneous track where, you know, do a wage systems and segregation.

and punishment for speaking Spanish, which my, uh, my mom and her siblings really, uh, suffered through. And so to me, there was always this puzzle, sort of, how do we, how do we understand the simultaneity of, of this place we call the United States, this project of America, uh, and our place in it. And I jet. I found so much more complexity in my family’s stories and my family’s experiences than I found in the textbooks we were reading.

And so I just, you know, I kept looking for, for spaces to find those stories. And so, you know, after high school, I was really drawn toward memoir. I was really drawn toward graphic novels. I was, you know, really hungry to, to read. Uh, I, I read a lot of Toni Morrison. I didn’t go straight from high school to university.

So I had this great, like 10 years off where I was working in a, a produce market and I was taking the bus to the produce market, uh, and just dreaming of going back to school, right? Just, you know, and I would take a, a classic community college. Um, at the time I was living in the Bay area. So I, I had classes from every community college in the area, uh, cause I would just, you know, save up money to take a Saturday morning class or a Friday afternoon class.

And I just remember being on the bus and, and, you know, just devouring books that commute and just dreaming about going back to college. And then that opportunity presented itself to me when I moved back to New Mexico and again Just started taking community college classes and i’ll never forget walking into you know say I want to take this english class and the um, The advisor saying tonight you have enough credits for an aa and you really should You have like 130 credits that you really need to like do something with these And thankfully they were the ones who said let’s transfer you to the university of new mexico um And so that was not something I had planned.

And it was just this beautiful, uh, intervention of someone doing the math for me, right? You’ve taken this many courses. You have this many credits. Let me write it down on a chart for you. And once I got to the university of New Mexico, what I found was that, um, the department of American studies. was going to allow me to dig into those interests.

There were folks who had done New Mexico history from that very, uh, I think, orthodox point of view that had, you know, some of that, that Spanish colonial focus. Uh, but there were professors who were really thinking through, uh, sort of a more, Modern approach, thinking through things like citizenship and migration, things like transnational and binational movement.

And so I, I was thrilled when I got there and I began, the very first research project I did, uh, as a bachelor’s student for my thesis was going back to researching the copper mining town. And, you know, again, there had been, kind of these films of the, of the zinc mine, uh, uh, agitations and uprisings and the strikers, but there was actually just sort of this long history of mutualistas before that.

And, you know, my grandfather had been part of those, you know, one of the, one of the things that continues to be a focus for me when I teach, uh, I’m currently teaching Mexican American women’s history. At UT, um, and when we get to the moment where we talked about the zinc mining strikes and we talked about the salt of the earth, um, you know, I always want to press upon students that there has been this focus on the IWW helping, um, the Mexican American strikers organize, but it’s actually a different story altogether.

The story is that these miners had been organized in mutualistas. And so when the IWW came in, they had this foundation to work with, right? There had already been so much organizing for decades. Um, so my very first research project for my bachelor’s thesis was, uh, going and doing oral histories with folks who were still alive, who’d been part of those strikes.

Um, and, uh, in particular thinking about women and their contributions. And that came from a story my mom told me of how, you know, when my grandfather would be striped on the strike lines, um, she, she had this memory of coming out to the strike lines with my grandmother and they would bring coffee to the strikers in the middle of the night and thermoses.

But they would warm up the thermoses with little propane pipes, which I, you know, those little propane, um, and they would make this happen just sort of night after night. And to me, that was like the role of the women in that moment.

[00:13:13] Frederick: Amazing. Yeah, I, what a journey and, um, so deeply rooted in your family histories and your own travels and, um, yeah, this really important insight into not only the kind of women and the significance of their, um, active, very active activist contribution, but also the, um.

Mutualistas and the kind of organizing. Um, yeah. So, Annette, how, um, this took you to Brown, it, you, um, you know, got your PhD there. I imagine, uh, someone like Ralph Rodriguez must have been in your orbit. Um, absolutely. Um, and. And then on to your postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill, were there, were there moments in the, in this part of your journey when, you know, there was a surprising turn or, um, or maybe like, oh, my goodness, what am I kind of doing here?

Maybe I should be out, you know, actually, um, you know. I don’t know, alongside, you know, activists, union activists, or maybe there isn’t a division between what we do and and that kind of work. Um, but anyway, I’m just, yeah, wherever you want to go

[00:14:29] Annette: with this. Yeah, you know, I, I, I went to Brown after University of New Mexico, and I had a wonderful mentor, Dr.

Christian by Buick, who’s an art historian. And one of the things that I gained from her, um, was one, she told me, okay, it’s time to do some study outside of the area, right? You’re here in, um, the, the U S Mexico border area. And I want you to really make your intellectual community more expansive. And so, you know, let’s, let’s think about graduate schools on one of the coast.

Let’s think about how that might transform your work. And of course. As with everything else, she’s told me she was completely right. Um, and she also told me, taught me how to, um, study from the point of view of an object. So we did visual culture with her, um, her art history department. And, you know, she taught me how to really think through objects so that even when you take these turns to study something that are contextual and you think every moment and you’re crossing space and time that you can always return back to the object.

So I started looking at particular photographs of particular photographers to think through my work. And that was really helpful. And when I got to Brown University, she was right. Um, you know, I did work with, um, with Dr. Ralph Rodriguez as his teaching assistant for a couple of years. And every Every good piece of teaching I do is based on, on, on things that I have absolutely, you know, copied from him.

Uh, he, he’s such an incredible teacher. His, his pedagogical practice is incredible. And I remember once we were, um, he was teaching comic books and we were, um, we were reading Fun Home and the graphic novel Fun Home, which is one of my favorites in the class. And, you know, it was that part of the semester where students were, you know, tired and it was, it was a really long, thick, deep read.

And, um, and I remember it was a, it was a pretty big class. It was like maybe 60 students and he walked into class and he said, let’s, you know, try to put our, our, our, um, desks in sort of a semi circle. And he sort of did the semi circle. And then he said, you know why this has been so hard to read? I just realized it last night.

And he laid down in the middle of the semicircle, just laid down on that, you know, rental, rental carpet quality carpet that you have in old classrooms, right? And he laid down on the carpet, um, and he said, because this is how you read a comic. We’ve been reading it all wrong. We’ve been sitting in desks with highlighters.

This is not how you read a comic. And he laid down in front of the class and opened the comic book and started, you know, reading frames of it. And, um, and he said, okay, there’s not enough room for all of us to lay down here, but, but from now on, you read your work, please read it like a comic book. Uh, and it was so great because it pulled in the students in a way that was really beautiful.

It was, and um, and later as he was talking to us as TAs, you know, he said like that’s sort of a, a planned moment. Like, I try to have those moments with my students where, um, I sort of break the fourth wall and explain to them that, you know, this is not just an intellectual project, that I try to talk to them about the embodied experience and the sensory experience of reading and writing.

Uh, and so he changed my way to think about my own project because I then started thinking about, okay, the materials that I looked at, I’ve been looking at them. They’re very often everyday materials, but I’ve been looking at them as an academic studying them. And what if I tried to recreate for myself the way these were experienced in real time?

How did someone read a newspaper on the, on the porch? Um, how did someone read a postcard? What kinds of, uh, embody, embodiment can we bring to that experience? and how can that help us understand sort of the everyday life of objects. That was a huge turn for me. Another one was, um, which I bring to my work all the time.

Again, I’m sort of trained as, as an American studies scholar, which means, you know, I, I get to play with cultural forms a lot and literature and music. Uh, I think most historians do, but, but, you know, historical method can seem much more sort of chronological, uh, database. But, um, because I’m trained as an, as an American studies scholar, it means that I, I’m always thinking about how, you know, sort of how many things can we bring into the picture and the picture still makes some sense.

Um, and so I started studying at Brown University, um, Caribbean philosophy. And I happened into a class with Dr. Tony Bogues, who’s incredible. And, um, you know, some folks just said, okay, if you have time, just take his class. I know it has nothing to do with, with what you’re doing on the U S Mexico border and immigration, but, but just take his class if you have a chance.

And it was so changing of my perspective of again, how to do the work. Uh, he, he brought me to. reading more deeply the work of, um, Walter Benhamin. And, you know, it’s sort of work I’d read before. It was sort of like one of the boxes you check off, like Foucault or, you know, whatever, like you read these things in grad school.

Um, but what shifted the way I do my work was, was this moment in, um, the philosophy of history, um, where Benhamin talks about historical catastrophes. And we wrestled with that idea in, in Dr. Bogues’s class for quite a while, and what we came to, you know, so Ben Hameen is You know, he’s, he’s running unsuccessfully, like navigating and running unsuccessfully from this murderous fascism, uh, that he would not survive in the 1940s.

And this is sort of one of the last pieces that he, he brings to completion and he sends as a letter to Hannah Arendt. Um, and so it has, as a, as a material, it has its own sort of really interesting traveling history. Um, but one of the things he, he proposes is that there’s a historical catastrophe. And what we realized that, that what is the catastrophe he’s talking about?

It’s not just fascism. It’s not just the current moment he’s trying to survive, but the historical catastrophe is repeatability, is creating something that is repeatable, right? A script that can be repeatable. And that’s how he was understanding. fascism in that moment, that there’s this system that is now repeatable.

And this is what’s catastrophic. And really wrestling with, with, you know, Ben Hameen and, and feeling like in my heart, the loss of him, you know, just from, uh, both his biography and his work. Um, it made me think about my work differently, that what I am thinking through so often is Is the catastrophe of things that become repeatable and movable, right?

A script or a choreography. And, and so even though we think of, of history as, as the study of change over time, right? Like, you know, the idea of history is this change over time. Um, I do work that’s really fascinated by continuities over time. And, you know, tracing continuity over time is, is one of the things that one of the gifts that Ben Hameen gave me, um, through Dr.

Bogues. And so those were those moments where it’s just like completely unexpected. You know, you take a class outside of your, your area, outside of your field and, and can change the way you think and can change the way you do your work. Um, so that was an incredible. You know, turning point that I’m grateful for every day

[00:23:59] Frederick: and that I’m just, I’m really, uh, of course, you know, absolutely blown away by your work and you and, and everything that you’re doing.

Tell me, um, in the book, um, and in other areas, what are some of those continuities? Over time when it comes to, I don’t know, um, performance or popular culture or visuality, especially as it relates to your questions about the construction of race, personhood, belonging and unbelonging.

[00:24:33] Annette: Yeah, so, um, so I, I, I think the project, um, as it has evolved when I first started doing the project, it was a series of case studies. So I had this sense that I was going to recover. You know, uh, histories that had been silenced or marginalized. Um, and so I had this case study approach where, uh, I was looking at victims of racist violence, um, that we often call lynching, or we sometimes call riots or massacres, but I was looking at specific case studies and thinking about, um, the visual culture around them, right?

Was there a postcard? Was there a photograph? Was there a song or a story? And so it started that way. And then one of the shifts I, I really made after considering, you know, uh, the, the method proposed by, by, uh, the thesis of history was sort of, instead of thinking about these as discrete cases, to really think about what each case does, how the, the violence I’m thinking about functions.

And so, for instance, one of the early things when we look at Texas history is we can really think about the function of inversion and inversion is a really important continuity in US history. And so, you know, the, the idea of inversion, I get to thinking through the film martyrs of the Alamo, which I, you know, I, I don’t recommend to watch.

It’s really repetitive. You know, it’s like an hour of the same scene over and over and over again to like a drumbeat. But it is, you know, attempting to sort of dramatize the story of, um, of the defenders, as it says, of the Alamo. And so it’s called Martyrs of the Alamo, the Birth of Texas, modeled on the birth of a nation.

And so it’s similarly racist, and it similarly creates these tropes of, uh, of what Mexicans are. And that, to me, is such a You know, even though, like, narratively, it’s not a particularly interesting film. To me, it’s an interesting thing to look at because it, it teaches us how inversion works over time. So, for instance, throughout the film, um, the, you know, it’s a silent film, so it has Intertitles that tell you what’s happening.

You have the authority of the intertidal throughout the film, and so throughout it talks about Texas, right? It says like, this is happening in Texas. These folks enter Texas. These folks are living in Texas. And of course what we know is Texas doesn’t exist in that moment. Right? In that moment, we’re talking about a mission in Gua , which is a northern state of, of Mexico.

And so that’s the first inversion, right? Just kind of inverting even the location we’re looking at. And then the second inversion is to think about Mexicans as invaders, right? Rather than defenders of this part of Northern Mexico. And so even though you, you, you functionally have squatters in a, in a Mexican mission, the, the Mexican army is posed throughout this narrative as the invader, so.

This Texas, uh, Alamo, which is such a fiction, but, but it really turns on inversion. And so thinking about how narrative inversion becomes. a continuity, this idea of who’s the invader and who’s the lawman, who’s the combatant, who’s the patriot, um, who belongs and who doesn’t belong. All of that is constructed around just simply inverting the actual historical moment, right?

Um, and this came to me, you know, this is still so pressing, looking at a film, uh, that, that comes out at the turn of the 20th century, it’s so important. Because we still see some symbols that I argue are become repeatable and movable. And so you have the symbolism, for instance, of, of Santa Ana as a, as a drug fiend, uh, as the intertitles say, um, later as a potential rapist.

Right. And those continue over time. And then you have some really interesting visual symbols, some visual grammar that can then be. repeatable today in today’s news. You see hordes of Mexicans on ladders trying to go above the wall, right? And then those who can’t penetrate the wall create tunnels. They tunnel in through through the bottom of the Alamo.

And so these really early visual symbols that are in Martyrs of the Alamo become repeatable over time. And so those are the ones we still see on the news, right? That became, uh, you know, an entire broadcast of in the kind of in the early 2000s of Lou Dobbs, right? His entire broadcast was just, you know, having these images of people going over ladders and through tunnels.

And so I argue that there’s this moment of, of invention. that happens in popular culture that then can become repeatable and it becomes this, um, this shorthand for understanding what’s happening, right? This, this inversion of the invader becomes this, this shorthand. So, so the way the book works is to take moments like Martyrs of the Alamo and Break them down to what they contribute to a visual grammar of how to understand the Mexican.

Um, and one of the things I, I have found in doing the work is that, you know, these, these racist tropes continue over time, you know, over a century now. Um, and, and racism is laborious, right? It’s. It’s a labor. It’s a, it’s a social hierarchy that has to be remade and that has to be held in place daily through our social interaction.

The racism is laborious and racism is lazy. It’s always drawing on these antecedents. And so it’s that, um, It’s that interplay that I’m so interested in the racism as a labor and racism as lazy and really thinking about how the visual culture becomes functional and sometimes that visual culture is again a film or a postcard and sometimes the visual culture is the actual, um, public performance of violence that we see still today.

[00:32:15] Frederick: Amazing. Yeah, I have a net so much going on right now. Um, you know, my brain’s going crazy, but I wanted to ask you in this inversion defender invader, um, how you might kind of look back to those moments that you mentioned. So, beautifully about your own mother as a Mexican national and a kind of pride in.

You know, the being here in the United States and at the same time being, you know, the definitely like, facing the consequences of dual wage structure, segregation, Spanish, um, phenotype and so on. Is there, would you, um, I’m. More generally, I’m thinking about, there’s this weird assimilationist, say, like, apparatus, if you will.

That sounds really academic, but, you know, these policies that kind of, that function in this inventing of the Mexican that you so beautifully articulated. How would we kind of read assimilation, Americanization, in and through inversion, I guess?

[00:33:33] Annette: Yeah, that’s a great, um… That’s a great thing to think about what thinking about continuity and ubiquity and inversion, what kind of new tools they give us to understand the discourse we’re always often having, right?

And so this, this sensibility of, you know, my mom, my grandma, my aunties being very proud of becoming Americans. My state, my home state, New Mexico. very proud of having the only bilingual, uh, state constitution, right? But a lot of that is built on, you know, fantasy Spanish heritage, right? That’s the way we get our, our bilingual constitution.

And that’s how we get statehood after the longest territorial period of, of any, uh, territory other than, uh, Puerto Rico. Um, but. You know, one of the ways that New Mexico gets that is by arguing they’re European, right? We are a European place and, and so we, we still very much draw on our, our Spanish heritage as, in a strange way, a claim to being American, right?

That we are closer, uh, to the European, uh, colonizer than we are to, for instance, Mexican migrants. And so it’s a very interesting moment for me right now to think about all of these inversions. We’ve had these new, uh, projects that are so complex of folks trying to understand their, their common path in the borderlands.

And so you have, um, these, these project folks really thinking through, uh, how they draw on their indigenous heritage, which has been lost in the The anti Indian genocidal wars of both Mexico and the U. S. And we have people thinking about, um, uh, native enslavement and how, um, folks have been on both sides of that Mexican enslavement.

And so I think, you know, folks are coming to this sense of there’s not a binary way to understand our own histories, and there’s not a binary way to experience our present. And, you know, one of the things that inversion does is it creates binaries where there aren’t any, right, this sense of, of, um, unmasking those binaries and just sort of pulling the thread of them, right, sort of saying, like, where did this binary originate, where did, where did, you know, speaking Spanish or not speaking Spanish become, uh, an understanding of nationhood?

You know, there was a point. In New Mexico, we’re speaking Spanish marked you as European. That’s not the case anymore. Right. But we can sort of historicize that. And I think one of the things, you know, that our students think about. As many of them are thinking about going to law school or, uh, into journalism.

I have a lot of journalism and, and advertising, uh, and communication students in my classes, and they’re really working through these ideas of, of what does it mean to, um, to, to serve our communities, to reflect our communities, um, to maybe feel exceptional from other members of our communities because we’re going to a place like UT.

Um, because we’re getting degrees at UT, and you know, my students really struggle with thinking through that, and I think the, the sense is that, um, there’s not that binary that exists. One of the, the key things is, you know, my mom was my first intellectual. You know, absolutely. You know, my mom who was doing crossword puzzles and memorizing everything there was to know about every us president, she’s the first intellectual.

I knew my father, who was a, um, who was a preacher, um, who didn’t complete high school, but just did incredible close reads and I mean, that’s where I learned close reading was with my father doing readings of scripture, that these are the first intellectuals. I knew. Um, and these are the first intellectuals who taught me the process of kind of wrestling with a text and understanding a text and asking questions about a text.

So all to say that, that when we realize that, that the binary categories are invented, right? The, the idea of, of who’s assimilated and who isn’t, the idea of. Um, you know, who speaks Spanish and who doesn’t the idea of what side of the border were raised on if you’re a first gen or fifth gen when we realize that these are sort of invented categories and we’re actually free to understand ourselves as this very complex world, um, then we can reworld it, you know, that, that there’s so many things that history disguises, right?

We sort of, we have, um, We have these disguised categories of who are victims, and then we realized that these folks had a lot of agency, and were fighting on their own behalf, um, and, and no one is ultimately, um, no one is ultimately evaporated from history if we insist on telling the story, um, so, so I kind of feel like, you know, one of the, one of the battles of the work is really a battle against systems that produce death, Um, both, you know, real actual death and systems that produce a sort of narrative death and, and we can work through that we can make things that are always visible, more visible, and, and we can work against these ideas of.

[00:40:19] Frederick: Annette, you’re doing this fascinating, huge data mapping project, social history project on what you’re calling intimate acquisitions, a digital history of U. S. bounty lands. Tell us about that. And as we kind of talk about that, maybe we can kind of segue into some of your, um, let’s say, more Public facing scholarship, you’re curating, you’re interviewing of directors, Barbara Singer, John Leanos, um, as a creative and scholar, um, Alex Rivera, among others.

[00:40:56] Annette: Yeah, um, so, so the Bounty Lands project is really born of my frustration with, uh, Chicano Studies understanding of land grants. Again, this idea of complexity and, you know, there’s this moment of activism in the, in the 60s, in particular, that peak where, um, Chicano community are using long, uh, long existing data and long existing deeds to make arguments for land grants that were given by, uh, the Spanish crown and later, uh, the nation of Mexico.

And this becomes a moment of really sort of incredible part of the long civil rights movement, the moment of activism, you know, and land grant studies, borderland studies, Chicano studies, really see this as just this moment of uprising and a moment of pride. And as I looked at that more, I continue, I saw it as a continuity of.

U. S. settler colonialism. And I was really struck by how we as activists, uh, fighting for more just systems, social justice, uh, environmental justice, how we kind of square that with the idea that the land grants came from colonial powers and they came at the expense of Indigenous communities that still exist.

Um, and so I sort of was like, how, how would I really, you know, like, this is sort of an instinctual critique I have. Does it have any, does it have any actual chops, right? And so one of the things I did was I started looking at how folks were granted land, and I found this phenomena that I’m just generally calling bounty land because it has many different names.

But, um, what I’ve found is there’s about 60 to 70 million acres of, uh, of land given in what we now call the United States. And it’s land issued, uh, to veterans of conflict. And it’s land that is given in exchange for voluntary military service. So we have an early nation and sometimes early territories or states who do who are land Who are cash poor but land rich?

And so what they say to folks is if you join our militia if you join our albury We can’t give you wages. In fact, you may have to bring your own horse and your own gun, right? But what we can promise you is at the end of your service 160 acres and of course those acres um had been You know, uh, settled, um, since time immemorial by indigenous peoples.

But, again, we have this cool little, uh, moment of, of inversion, of, of relabeling something in the historical record. And the historical record names all of this, uh, public land or public domain land. And so just those two words. Allow us to erase the whole process of how they become public domain. And so I thought, okay, let me look at this process of public domain.

What is this process? What is this thing? And it turns out a large part of it is this, these bounty land brands. And so, um, folks would, uh, just volunteer, um, and then be given 160 acres and settle, uh, what we now call the U S west. So what’s so fascinating to me is that these kinds of bounty land grant records have really been used a lot by genealogists.

So people, historians might think of as laymen, you know, trying to figure out, you know, their grandfather, their great grandfather doing genealogical research by looking at these military records and property records. But it turns out these were the experts in the field, right? In the, in the field we weren’t paying a whole lot of attention to.

Right. These were the experts. They knew how to look at military history and land grant studies in this, in this sort of new way. So one of the things I wanted to do was, if we have this incredibly diffuse set of records, sometimes they’re state, you know, uh, general land office records, sometimes they’re, uh, military pension records, sometimes they’re folks.

Genealogical histories and memoirs. If we have these diffuse records that start at the Piqua war in the 16 hundreds and move forward into the last claims that are all the way into the 1960s, um, because you could claim this land as a descendant of a combatant, how do we make these, uh, understandable? How do we make them studyable?

So in addition to be interested in continuities, I’m really interested in ubiquity. So sometimes history can be like the study of the of the sudden event that erupts. Right? Like the riot that erupted or, uh, the conflict that erupted. I’m really interested in ubiquity. And it seemed to me that this process of exchange for violent military service was ubiquitous, you know, as I studied it, I kept finding more and more and more.

And so to me, the, the question of how we understand the violent settlement of a nation. by individuals who would sometimes be fighting on the land they would take, right? So you have folks, uh, volunteering to join, uh, battles against the Dakota, and then settling on that very land that they had that violent encounter on.

To me, that seemed a bigger story that we haven’t been telling. You know, the, the story we’ve been telling. Has generally been like you have the, the military violence, and then a little bit later the covered wagons come and settle, but this actually this project is hoping to, to collapse that invented gap in time, it’s actually many of the settlers were themselves the, the, the folks who are engaging in the violence to take the very land they would settle on.

Um, and so the reason it’s become a, a data project is because I want to make it usable to others. And this is, um, this is modeled on the work of, um, Dr. Matthew Garcia, who did a project on braceros. And I, I interned on that when I was a graduate student at the, uh, Smithsonian Museum. And one of the things that happened out of his project, Was he just said there’s so much here, right?

We’re going to collect as much as we can and then leave it open to scholars to do the interpretive work and the analysis. And so I have colleagues who were interns on that project who wrote their dissertations and their books based on. Kind of this new archive that they were helping to collect. Um, and so to me, there was such a generosity of spirit in that project model.

And there was also a certain humility, right? Like, there’s more than one scholar can do here. And that’s very much how I feel about the Intimate Acquisitions Project, which is when you’re looking at this scope and this scale, that there’s certainly more than I could interpret and analyze. So let’s find a way to make, uh, all of the records available so that we can all do this work together.

[00:49:21] Frederick: Speaking of which, making available your insights, knowledge, your data gathering, and so on. Um, you are very active as a public facing, you know, scholar. Maybe you can share some highlights from, from that work as well, like Steinbeck Remixed. Yeah. Um, you know, the Cyber Braceros, uh, uh, stuff that you did with, um, Alex and, and

[00:49:48] Annette: others.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, Steinbeck Remixed is just one of like. Those proud moments where you’re just like, this is why I do what I do. You know, you just wake up real. Um, that was one of the moments we were, um, me and my collaborator who had, who had previously done a film series together called borderless cultures.

When I was at the university of North Carolina, um, we were invited to join the Mexicali biennial, which had one of its locations. at the Cheech, which was so exciting. I, you know, I did lots of road trips to Riverside as a kid. We had family who worked in Pomona. Uh, so it was really wonderful. Um, uh, you know, I was like, oh yeah, I will be thrilled to return to this part of the country I have so much love for.

Um, but I teamed up with a collaborator, uh, Emmanuel Ramos Farajas, who’s Over in Chicago has done an incredible amount of work, uh, with me and with others trying to visualize a lot of our academic, uh, lectures and, uh, and what we decided to do was to take the theme of land of milk and honey and my love of, uh, Steinbeck and my love of, of thinking through, through labor and unequal labor.

Uh, in narrative form and sort of think about how we might, as we said, remix it for a current and popular audience. And so that really creative work was done by Manuel, who created a remix of Steinbeck film trailers. Uh, and then we invited our friends, uh, from Chulita Vinyl Club, who have, uh, who have a club here in Austin.

And then they have, you know, sort of chapters in other places of the nation. And so we invited, um, the Santa Ana chapter. And what they did was a live soundscape to the film that Emmanuel created. And then we projected it outside of the museum to invite, on a free day that the museum gave us, to invite more interaction from, from, uh, the audience.

But what it was hoping to do was to, again, think about how the Mexican is invented in these Steinbeck films, right? You know, fairly progressive, um, labor rights author, but, you know, they’re, they were part of these like, um, you know, social problems films. And so we wanted to think about how it actually invents this character of the Mexican, even as it’s trying to be socially progressive.

And how could we turn, how could we, uh, show those images without recreating those caricatures? And so we thought about ways to remix it, and so one way to remix it was to do it, uh, visually, but then also to have our DJs, who were incredible, who like studied the remix we created, Um, and give us a live, uh, action, uh, soundscape to go with it that was often very resistant to the image you’re seeing on the film.

It was just, it was one of the, one of the joys of, of my career thus far to see that happen. Um, and to see so many of our collaborators come together. So that was just this March. Um, and I hope we’ll have a chance to do something like it. Um, I’ve been thinking about a way to use projection mapping at UT, um, and I have all these really, I love the idea of projection mapping because sometimes we can’t think about, it’s hard to think about the palimpsest of the past and the present together.

And projection mapping or, or mapping or, um, projecting images on, on architecture is one way to do that. Activists have done this a lot. Um, But I love the idea. For instance, I work in, um, Harrison hall. And so when I walk into my office, each time I walk into my office, the edifice has, um, the, the cattle brands on the kind of on the top of the building, and then it has the names of what we now call the founders of Texas, right, Austin and Jones Lamar.

Um, and I have this idea of what it would be to project. The folks who were on the 40 acres before it were on the 40 acres right before we were calling it this, um, to project, you know, who had been here right to make those, those absences present using projection mapping. And so that’s what we tried to do.

On the on the front of the Riverside Art Museum of the Cheech, and it’s something I’d love to bring to, um, UT. I think it’d be really, we have so much amazing architecture, and we have so many historical moments that we don’t realize we’re walking through, you know, in our rush to and from our classes. So to me, it’s, it’s always sort of how to make, um, you know, how to make history as embodied an experience as the present because it is right because it continues.

Um, so that was the, the, the Steinbeck, um, piece. We loved working together on that. And I think one of the, um, the things we realized from that is that as attentive as we had been, um, to film and to photography, I hadn’t been as attentive to sound. Um, and so our Our DJs who were, you know, music scholars, um, really brought that to the fore for me.

Um, how sound is also engaged in all

[00:56:02] Frederick: of this. Yeah, it’s so important, um. I mean, it’s the same for me, you know, um, and a constant reminder to myself, not just in, in print and say comics, how sound is reproduced, but, um, you know, the significance of sound and shaping meaning and the experience and the emotions, um, in areas where we might not be attending to it.

Right. So, yeah, really important. I love that. This thing you mentioned about really kind of asking us to take pause in our everyday kind of rush to get to from 1 place to the next. And that what are you reading or watching now? What’s kind of on that proverbial bed stand? That’s asking you to take pause.

Yeah, you know,

[00:56:57] Annette: I’m, I’m a lover of poetry. So, um, there’s a collection of poetry, um, called Horsepower, uh, by Joy Priest that I have spent a lot of time with. It came out in 2019 and it stays on my bedside. One of my favorites. Um, and then I’ve been reading, um, Gwendolyn Brooks’s, uh, collection called In Montgomery, which is also a collection of poetry.

So I find that poetry really resets me. Um, you know, I’m always, there’s an economy of language in poetry, right? Finding the most apt word, uh, for half a, you know, what is a line or a stanza. Um, to me, I hope will inform my writing, um, in terms of, of sort of fun things I’m reading, I’ve returned to, and it’s probably because of, um, you know, our continuing pandemic and, uh, and environmental crises that are sort of layering on top of one another.

Um, I’ve returned to the work of Douglas Copeland. Um, so, so I remember loving, like, in the 90s, again, on the bus in the 90s, uh, this, this small little novel, Microsurf, uh, which is about, like, coders who live in a, uh, uh, computer coders who live in a house together in California, and sort of their experience of a, Of, of kind of trying to figure out how technology can help them recover, um, one of the parents of, of the folks.

And it’s really just, it sort of sneaks up on you. It’s a silly, silly, um, novel with like a Lego man on the cover and it sneaks up on you with its poignancy, like you’re crying by the end of it. And then his other work, um, that I liked so much, Girlfriend in a Coma. Which is similar. It’s it’s about a group of friends, um, waking up to a sort of apocalyptic event and you know how they do or don’t cope with the reality of the situation, but again, similar that, um, it’s a lot of, you know, action of the apocalypse.

And then in the in the final chapter, the way that folks tend to each other and hold on to each other, um, just become so incredibly poignant. So I, so I, so I’ve been surprised that I was like, oh yeah, I really, I really like, really like Doug Copeland. Let me, let me reread some of those. So I’ve been enjoying that

[00:59:44] Frederick: reread.

Amazing, Annette. Well, gosh, you’ve taken us on quite an incredible journey, U. S. Southwest in your own, um, micro journeys and road trips, um, your own very sort of mature understanding, you know, of kind of the comedy. Plexities of belonging in the U. S. Um, and then through your family and then later in your scholarship.

Oh, my goodness. Constructions of race is both laborious and lazy. This collaborative knowledge making that you embark on, um, in your public facing work. Oh, my goodness. What an incredible journey. Thank you so much. Annette for sharing with

[01:00:29] Annette: me today. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you.

Into the Coliverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. Sound engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Coliverse podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.