Into the COLAverse – Episode 27: Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez

[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. Oh my goodness, it is my huge honor to be here with Dr.

Maggie Rivas Rodriguez, founder of Voces Oral History Center, professor in the School of Journalism and Media, and director of the Center for Mexican American Studies here at UT Austin. Welcome Maggie.

[00:00:39] Maggie: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:42] Frederick: Wow. So you like what a journey. I mean, just even looking at it on paper, you know, you’ve U.

T. Austin B. A. Journalism in the mid seventies and then a master’s degree went on to do a P. H. D. Um, at University of North Carolina. Um, and Then coming back to UT Austin as a professor, um, founding this incredible Voces Oral History Center, which is internationally renowned. Tell me, Maggie, what was, like, was there something in the water you were drinking as a kid that, I don’t know, sparked this interest in, well, first, kind of news media, um, Recording, uh, through kind of oral history, tell me what was going on for the young Maggie.

[00:01:41] Maggie: Um, I grew up in a small town 30 miles south of San Antonio called Devine, D E V I N E. And so, I don’t know that there was anything in the water. Uh, but there were some things that I noticed growing up. So, in our town, it was half Anglo and half, uh, Mexican American. And yet, the people in leadership positions were not Mexican Americans at all.

It was all Anglo. So, that, that kind of is an important, important part of my upbringing because I grew up noticing that and and no one had to say it, but I knew there was something wrong with that picture. So when I came here as an undergraduate to UT Austin and I found classes in Mexican American studies, it was very exciting to me.

And so that helped me Begin to formulate some of the questions and answers that I’m still formulating the questions and answers, you know, 50 odd years later, but that’s a that’s a big part. My my upbringing seeing that that, uh, the lack of political And other kinds of power. I mean, not that this is not a powerless community.

We had very powerful people, including my parents, who in their own way, stood up for the civil rights of the Mexican American community. So I saw all of that.

[00:03:09] Frederick: Yeah, that one of the really important links in all of the incredible work that you do is precisely between. oral history, voices, archiving, um, but in a way that links those voices and those, that presence, those important shaping, um, subjects, um, peoples in our communities, in our lives, in history, in things like the, Um, the different wars in, you know, really important civil rights struggles, this connecting between oral history and journalism.

Can you, you know, explore that a little with

[00:03:53] Maggie: me? Yes, that was my, my introduction to oral history was actually through journalism. I was a general assignment reporter at the Boston Globe in the 80s and, uh, early 80s. And we were working on a magazine piece with a, it was a small team of reporters working together and the editor for that magazine piece said, we’re looking at developing something like a Studs Terkel approach to this.

So I did not know who Studs Terkel was. So I went and I found, uh, A Studs Terkel book and loved his approach because for for people who don’t know who that is, he’s a an old Chicago radio man who started off doing jazz shows and he would play the music, then he would interview some of the musicians and little by little people were more interested.

It seemed like. in engaging with those interviews. He’s a great interviewer. Uh, then with the, with the actual part of the show, part of it, but at any rate, he ended up getting, um, getting involved in going out in the street and interviewing people in Chicago about life in Chicago. And that ended up becoming.

What became, um, what became books on, uh, Americans during the Great Depression, Americans during World War II, uh, their attitudes toward working. And you think, how can anybody make a book about working, interview excerpts about people’s attitudes toward working? How can you make that interesting? And it was fascinating.

And it’s the kind of book that I couldn’t put, I couldn’t put it down. I mean, part of it was just his skill as an interviewer, but the, the, the bigger part of it. I believe is people sharing their life experiences and their attitudes and people that they have, you have a philosophy and you have a strategy about working, whether you are sweeping floors or you’re the president of the United States.

So everybody has something to say about it. So that was my introduction. And, um, and I kind of, um, glommed onto that. And one thing that I always do, this is a, so every time I read a book about World War II or the Great Depression, whatever, I look to see how many Latinos were included in that book. And so Studs Terkel, one little blind spot was that he did not include a lot of Latinos.

And I love him in spite of that. I do love him, but I saw that there was, uh, there was, there’s a big, there was a big gap. So I felt like there was, uh, there was something that we could, that we could do about that.

[00:06:27] Frederick: Yeah, it’s, um, something that’s sadly continued, right? And in fact, many of us pushed back against Ken Burns, um, with that documentary, right?

Where it seemed like a deliberate erasure of Latinos in the war.

[00:06:46] Maggie: Well, you know, that was the big thing that we were involved in. I don’t know if you knew that, but we were, we were the, the ones who spearheaded that defend the honor was the big national umbrella group that, uh, we, we wanted him to include Latinos, but he was adamant about it’s done.

It’s, and, and. He ended up including interviews with two Mexican Americans and one Native American at the end of it. But the book, the companion book, does not have any Latino voices. And, uh, and really the, the, the documentary that most people will see will not include those interviews. So, um, I ran into, to someone recently who said that he feels that Ken Burns has gotten the lesson and he now makes it a point to include Latinos.

Um, I think, I, I suppose that’s right, but I’m, I’m not, I’m not the best

[00:07:38] Frederick: Yeah, well, I came at aim at this through, um, one of the professors that I worked with at UC Berkeley when I was an undergraduate, Mario, uh, Barretta. And, um, so yeah, that’s how I, um, was introduced to this. I didn’t know what was going on to be honest.

[00:07:57] Maggie: Yeah. Well, you know, Mario Barrera did interviews, I believe three of our interviews with World War II vets and did them with high quality professional equipment.

And so because of him, we have some of our, some of our best interviews are with that Mario did.

[00:08:12] Frederick: Yeah, we, so I brought him to the Ohio State University, um, and so those videos were screened and we had, um, a really productive, fruitful conversation, um, also a kind of awakening of people, at least in the audience to the fact that there was, there has been a deliberate erasure of, of our voices.

Um, in spite of the significant presence right in something like the, the, you know, these wars, let me ask you, Maggie, um, there’s this really interesting connection and even possibly tension between serving patriotism and activism that runs throughout your work. And could you explore that for us and, you know, for the listeners here?

[00:09:04] Maggie: Yeah. So throughout from the very, very first interviews that we did, um, one one thread that really ran through all of them was civil rights. And so that generation largely, but not exclusively or solely was, uh, interested in just working through the system. There were a lot of people who wanted to work outside of the system and protest and become more, and active in, in trying to, uh, to create the tension so that those changes would be made.

So that has, that was always there. And in fact, the, the person, if I could, if I could kind of like make a drawstring from the very first person that I said, we need to get that interview. It was a, um, It was a lawyer in San Antonio named Pete Tijerina. Pete Tijerina had been the, one of the founders, really the person who founded the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

And, um, he had He had been in World War II, came from Laredo, went to, you know, ended up getting a law degree and found that every one of his, he would, he became the civil rights person in charge of the, of LULACs. So anybody who suffered some discrimination in Texas would write a letter to him. Then he would write a very stern letter to some restaurant or store or something or a newspaper.

And then, but there was no, there was no way that he could get them to do anything. The only way to get any, any enforcement of that was to file a lawsuit and lawsuits were incredibly expensive. So PT heading out would, uh, he, and he knew that the one thing that he said that helped him out was that newspapers were his friends.

And so a lot of journalists ran stories about this action that took place that somebody was, was fired or demoted or wasn’t given a promotion because they were Mexican. And it was, it was pretty blatant. So, so. When I interviewed him in 2000, I suppose, 1999 or 2000, I can’t remember what year it was, but it was toward the very beginning of the project.

And, um, I interviewed him and he said he admired the people that were activists that marched in the streets, but he was To he was scared to do that. And I think that that’s true for a lot of people, not, not just World War II generation. I think today people are afraid of exercising that first amendment right to protest.

And I do think it’s so important that when, when it’s, it’s a visible protest and it’s very, um, it’s, it’s. In your face that people say, this is it, ya basta, it’s, it’s an important way to, to the world know that this is something that we’re not going to allow. So, so that was the, the activist or lack of activism back in the, back in the, um, in the forties and fifties.

But then that generation was a generation that were the parents for my generation and a little bit older than me too, because I, you know, my parents were a little bit older when they had me. Um, and those were the people that started to really question, and a lot of them were able to enjoy, uh, college educations, and, and once you start understanding, reading more, and expanding your worldview, then there’s certain truths that you can’t unsee, and I think that that’s one of the reasons that we had, uh, that Chicano generation that was, Out in front protesting and, and, uh, very visibly letting the world know about their displeasure.

Mm-Hmm. .

[00:12:53] Frederick: Yeah. Um, amazing. Yeah. Your Texas, me, Mexican, Mexican Americans and post world civil rights, um, book that came out in 2015 where you, you talk about him and of course others in the edited volume that you do with, um, that you publish with Ben Olguin. There’s also. Um, you know, this kind of, Hey, look, we need to also pay attention to Afro Latinos and the experience there.

Um, along with, of course, and this is in all of your work, but the Tijana is on the home front, um, you know, youth activism and so on. Can we, can you. Um, maybe share a little bit about why it’s important for us to, when we need to ask questions that haven’t been asked constantly, but we also need to kind of put center stage, um, things that even within our own communities aren’t being sometimes asked.

You know, like Afro Latinidad, um, our families and our mixed, our mestiza, mixed, um, ancestral pasts that tend to lean in, you know, because of the media and the mainstream more toward the, the European and less, um, into our indigeneities, um, African included.

[00:14:21] Maggie: Yeah. Uh, it’s a big question. Um, so in the Late seventies, I had a fellowship to Peru, so I lived in Peru for, for nine months and traveled around the southern cone of South America.

And in a

Peña, and in Peru, what it means is there’s, there’s a kind of a house, kind of a party in a restaurant, but there’s all night entertainment and dancing and all night. So it goes on from like 10 o’clock at night until 6 o’clock in the morning. And they had, uh, Black Peruvians do some of the, some of the dancing.

That was the first time in my life that I understood that they were Black Peruvians. Now, that could be attributed to a lack of, of, of imagination. If I had understood more about the history of Latin America, I could have understood that there’s, yes, of course, there’s, there’s Black people throughout the Americas.

And, and in Mexico, but that’s not something that I had ever been exposed to. If you watch, uh, at that point, and maybe it’s different now because I don’t watch a lot of Mexican television anymore, but if you watch the, the Mexican news or telenovelas or movies. You would see a very European and that did strike me that that that part about the European, um, Mexican always struck me because they all had blonde, blue eyed, green eyed people and I’d say, well, I go to Mexico and I don’t see those people there.

Uh, so that that part of it I, I had understood, but what I had not understood was, was the Afro Latino experience. And I think that that’s, it’s so. It’s interrelated with everything. It’s, it’s interrelated. If you read a history of Latin America now, probably it’s different, but at the time there was not that inclusion of the different people that make it up, you know, it really was more, um, you know, and then, and then this government took over that, so you weren’t, you weren’t reading that, so, you know, it’s, it’s part of.

Really the, the, the historicizing of Latin America and what it means to be Latino has really improved so much in the last 20 years. It’s, it’s pretty breathtaking and it’s welcoming because you think, uh, we have as a people, we’re, we’re made up of so many different races and, and Asian too. You know, there’s, there’s also in Peru, the best restaurants were the chifas and they were by, you know, run by Chinese immigrants.

So they’re Peruvian. They’re also Chinese. There’s also Latino. So putting that all together is, is, uh, I think it’s, it’s something that it’s going to be an ongoing, um, effort for all of us to understand a little bit about what it means to be Latino.

[00:17:12] Frederick: Mm. Yeah. Really important. You mentioned with, um, Pete, yeah, his, yeah, his, um, he mentioned that newspapers, um, being his friends.

And I get that. Um, but of course we also know. Um, your work included here, um, but also auto Santa Ana, you know, his bright brown tide rising, his one in a hundred and so on that there are metaphors that the media uses that have, um, negative, you know, consequences produce negative public perceptions about our communities.

Um, so what are we, what do we do with that?

[00:18:00] Maggie: I think, um, The number one thing to do with that is, um, is Calling, calling news organizations out when they do that, I’m, um, you know, I’m a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and it’s ongoing when they see evidence that there is a, um, an instance of this, there’s, you know, there’s an awareness that we can all bring to it, but it is ongoing, and I do think that it’s important that when, when we do see this, that we, we let them know that this is not acceptable.

Thank The same time, I also think it’s, it’s important for us to let, let folks know when they’ve done something right. I was just talking about this today with someone. We do, uh, Voces does this thing for Hispanic Heritage Month. We do, uh, daily stories, 90 second stories every day, and then we do long stories, four minutes long, uh, once a week.

And they’re about people, Tejanos, people who are Latinos from Texas who have made a contribution in some way. This is our third year. We just finished our third year of doing this. We hardly ever get any responses from people, unless they have something negative to say. And so this last time we got something, and it’s, you know, I don’t mind because I can deal with it.

But the students who work on this and really put their hearts and souls into it, they get so discouraged that they don’t get any. Positive feedback, and then the one, the one person said has something nasty to say about what they did, not that they, and the criticism was not that they did a bad job. The criticism was you.

You showcased one person when it was actually his mother who had laid the groundwork for this. Well, the problem is that the mother didn’t have her contributions documented. So his contributions are the ones that you can find on Wikipedia, but not the mother’s. And it gets back to another larger issue with, with, uh, with our Latino population is that we need to, we need to have more books.

We need to have more memoirs. People need to write their memoirs. We need to have more really, really good oral histories. Uh, the scholars that, that you know, and that I know all over the country work really hard to be able to produce as much as they produce. But it’s, Kind of a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done.

Um, so to the extent that we can facilitate it for each other and lift each other up and encourage each other, I think it’s vitally important that we do that.

[00:20:42] Frederick: In 2007, you wrote a piece, News Coverage of Latinos, We’re Not There Yet. Are we getting closer in 2023?

[00:20:50] Maggie: We’re a heck of a lot closer in 2023 in 2007. And way closer than we were when I graduated from UT in 1976. Um, I think the big difference has been that we now have more Latinos and Latinas reporters and editors.

Thank you. We’re still at that place where we need more people in, uh, in gatekeeper positions, managing editors and editors. Uh, but we are so much better off. If you look at any given day, the New York Times or the LA Times or, The Dallas News, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, you’ll see a lot more Latino, uh, surnames.

And that’s just the surnames. And then there’s people that don’t have Latino surnames that are still Latino. Um, so, so we’re doing so much better. And, and I think the other part of it is that even within newsrooms, uh, the Latino journalists, By and large are pretty sensitized and so when they see something wrong, they do speak up and so it’s got to be an effort from from within so that we Latino journalists who work within a news organization cannot just be there, um, enjoying the paycheck and writing nice stories.

We also have to shape that institution to something that’s going to be more, um. More representative of their population, not and not just our population is if you see something that they’ve done wrong with any population. I mean, it really is. It has. You have to be an active participant. You cannot just be keeping your seat warm.

And then from the outside, the community really has to step in. And I’ll tell you something when I was a newspaper reporter, if that newspaper got one letter. to the editor about a story. They’d say, oh my goodness, we got this, we have a lot of interest out there with one letter to the editor. So that’s why, and in that particular piece, um, I remember there was a man named Danny.

What is Danny’s last name in that piece? Anyway, he was someone who has since passed away. But, um, he would write, Letters to the editor all the time, and he would call them to task all the time, and he was such a needed voice. He was such a wonderful needed voice, but we don’t always have a Danny. What is Danny’s last name?

That’s gonna drive me nuts now. He passed away a few years ago, but he was just, he was super smart, very, very thoughtful in his approaches, and And always was constructive. It wasn’t just like, you know, you screwed up. It’s like, okay, you could have done this better. This, these are ways that you can do better.

[00:23:36] Frederick: Calling the media, um, and its representation of our communities to task. really important, you know, speaking of early publications and you have quite the long list. Um, I have to say, but let’s go back to 2003. You were already thinking about the internet and Unique perspectives of an alternative Latino online publication two thousand and three.

And today we have, oh my gosh, this proliferation of ways that our voices are being documented, that are being archived, um, news, our news. And what is it? Latino USA is what, 30 years now? Um, uh, you know, Maria Hinojosa, her, you know, Futuro media group, the Latino, um, ampersand stories that our colleague dr phallus and at texas a and m san antonio are so much.

Oh my gosh, my head is spinning. Um In 2003, could you have predicted something like this?

[00:24:55] Maggie: No, no, no. And you think about it, I mean, the, you’re doing a podcast. How many podcasts do we have? Latino podcasts. It’s, it’s super exciting. It’s super exciting. I’m, it gives me a lot of hope for the next, uh, you know, for the next generation of, of young people coming.

coming up because I, I see some of the work that they’re doing. And I’m like, they’re thinking about things way, way beyond what I would have thought of when I was their age. And even today it’s opening my eyes. So, so yeah, no, I don’t, I don’t think any one of us, and I do think publication means something different now.

Publication used to be having a newspaper, you know, and I, and I, I was, I did newspapers. When I was in, at UT, we worked on a, a Mayo newspaper called El Despertador and I’ve run into, to chicanas of my generation, a little bit older who, who produced their own newspapers and the hard copy of newspapers.

These days you, you don’t have the expense of doing all that. These days you can publish in so many different ways. And I do think podcasts are a form of. publication. It’s a different platform, but it’s, it’s a way of, of communication. So I think that it’s a really important, valid way of, of, of producing content that, that is important.

[00:26:14] Frederick: Speaking of the younger generations, Gen Z, um, and it, it always surprised, you know, it’s so funny. It’s, this shouldn’t surprise me, but, um, these real, like, incredibly politically aware. Young activists that if you, if I saw them walking down the street in, I think that they just walked off, uh, you know, some kind of designer fashion runway, you know, it’s not like When I was, you know, at Berkeley as an undergrad and, you know, we kind of dressed a certain way if we were like politically active and stuff, now it’s this weird, like, Gen Z that, you know, don’t judge that book by its cover.

That’s for sure, right? Um, but let me ask in your teaching, you have a course, Oral History as Journalism, and you’ve just so beautifully shared with us why oral history is journalism. Um, but, and then you have another one covering the U. S. Latino community, reporting Texas, reporting words. Where, where do you want your students to, what do you want them to take away from some of your classes like this?

[00:27:38] Maggie: So in my oral history, uh, classes, what we do is they learn about oral history methodology and they learn about the subject, whatever the subject is. And every semester that we study this, it’s a different subject. So in the first years, it was World War II and then it became the Vietnam War and then it became different slices of the, of, uh, political engagement.

And in every single one of my classes, my students by and large would say, I never knew this before. I never had this in my history books. I didn’t learn this in high school or in any of my other classes. Of course, it’s impossible for you to learn all of history and even U. S. history and anything. But honestly, I do know in my generation, I don’t think in my history books, we had anything about Latinos at all.

Anything about the contributions of Latinos. at all or activities or, you know, nothing. Um, I don’t know what the history books look like today. I would love to see that now that I think of it. I’d love to see that. Um, but I do know that some of these other topics like the 1975 Voting Rights Act, which extended voting rights to, um, language minorities, Such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, um, uh, Japanese Americans, and some people, uh, indigenous people in Alaska, mainly.

That had a real huge impact on Latinos, and, and students don’t know that. They don’t know about that there was any Latino involvement at all in the voting rights act. Of course, now it’s kind of moot point for the most part, but they don’t know about that. They don’t know about, uh, how did we end up with Texas A& M?

Kingsville. How did we end up with Texas A& M Corpus Christi? Um, how did we end up with UTRGV? Um, and so that’s a little bit, UTRGV is a little bit out of the equation, but there was the US, um, you, uh, there was a Texas, um, Legislative bill that created that provided funding for these new universities, and it came, it came from a lawsuit that MALDEF had filed on behalf of all these border universities and communities, saying that, why does UT Austin and Texas A& M, why do those two universities get all of the resources, and we’re here with Lousy labs, they don’t have PhD programs because of the way the system was built was to, uh, to not allow them to, to even have a PhD program.

You had to have so many professors who had PhDs in order to have a PhD program and they couldn’t get those professors because there was no PhD program. So who wants to go someplace where there’s no graduate students? So that was what happened. The South, South Texas border initiative. So, so we learned about that in a few semesters, and it’s just fascinating because you can go almost anywhere, and there can be, um, kind of a nice way of looking at this.

What we, what I try to do for my classes is, we’re looking at a specific research topic, and that research topic can be either written about that semester by someone, Or you can do a compilation where, you know, for the World War II thing, there were several semesters that we were able to use. But for the, for the South, South Texas Border Initiative, we had about three semesters that we can easily, not easily, but we can package it into, um, a really compelling story about those people that were at the forefront of that, of that, the lawsuit, and then at the forefront of the legislation, how it all came together, and what were the effects of that.

And it’s a fascinating story that That, uh, still hasn’t been, still hasn’t been fully told that, um, I’m hoping it, you know, it gets told in, in, um, law journals. I have a, a good friend in, uh, in San Antonio at St. Mary’s named Al Kaufman, who was one of the MALDEF lawyers at the time. So he’s written a couple of, of law journals, but to get it out into a wider audience is going to require, uh, another kind of book, another kind of approach.

[00:31:48] Frederick: Wow. I just learned a bunch. Thank you, Maggie.

[00:31:54] Maggie: I just learned a bunch from this conference I went to, Fritz, because I’m like, I came back and was like, oh, man, there’s so many other things I’d like to be

[00:32:00] Frederick: doing. Oh, gosh. So, yes. So, on that note, and kind of the bedside table, proverbial bedside table, you know, what’s, What’s exciting to you?

Um, right now you’re fresh back from this oral history conference in Baltimore. Um, I imagine your brand, you were just blown away at some of the kind of new scholarship going on there. Um, maybe you can share a little bit about that. And then, yeah, what’s exciting for you sort of generally, um, You know, in your reading, you’re viewing, um, you’re very active engagement with the world.

[00:32:37] Maggie: Yeah. So what’s exciting to me, you know, at this conference, one of the topics that has come up is how AI can be used in oral history, uh, not to do interviews because I don’t know that we’ll ever be there. Uh, but we were playing with the idea of using AI to develop summaries from interviews and then.

Someone is calling the alarm and saying, well, you’re feeding AI. The, uh, a way for them to, uh, replicate this and use it in their databanks. So I don’t know. I don’t know about that anymore. I thought I was, I thought I was, uh, we were, we hadn’t, we have done one interview that way. So I don’t know if that’s going to be something that we’re going to pursue, but it’s something that we’re going to, the oral history community is, is, is looking at what are the pros and cons because we don’t want to enter into anything in a, um, Just blithely and just assume that there’s no downside to it.

Uh, that’s a pretty big thing. The other, the other big thing, and I’m trying really hard not to say that I’m going to do this, but, um, the issues of the day, the, the issues that we are facing worldwide, the biggest one is climate change. And I would love to, uh, to delve into that and look at what, how different communities are responding to climate change, are being affected by climate change, are studying climate change.

What could we now do? What are we doing right now? To be able to have an impact on the future. Um, and I, I talked to just one, you know, I went to one panel discussion and they were talking about it and I’m like, Oh man, I don’t want to think about this because if I think about it, if I say it, I have to do it.

So I’m not saying I have to do it. However, I do think it’s something I am thinking about because, uh, it’s something that it’s an existential threat to us all and having, having us. converse about it, and not just for UT, but, you know, if there’s a way that we can get other universities and institutions involved in, in looking at this, uh, we might be able to have some, some pretty good, um, you know, some good data, but beyond that, kind of just talking it out.

So that’s kind of a, a, um, a big issue. Um, and the other big issue is just, I, I listen to all these other people who teach oral history in the classroom, and come away with. New ways of of engaging students. I’ve never had a problem with students engaged after they get into it, but sometimes it’s not always been easy to get the enrollment because people see oral history and they like, you know, it doesn’t sound sexy.

I think it’s super sick. I think oral history is super sexy, just the words, but I think a lot of undergraduates might, might not see the, the, uh, the appeal.

[00:35:32] Frederick: Yeah, there’s so much. In fact, that, um, the voices, oral history, I, my goodness, you know, the, the voices, animation, the art, the multimedia kind of work, you know, my.

Goodness. Um, so much happening. Um, I, this, the barrio dog, um, and you know, the, the, and how it’s kind of linked to this Latino, Latino Pia, which I think is out of Germany, if I’m kind of reading that right. Anyway, bottom line is, um, Dr. Maggie Rivas Rodriguez. Thank you. This has been amazing. Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing, um, to, you know, along with others, um, to make heard, to make seen those traditionally erased and unheard, uh, these significant transformative shapers of history walking us through, um, Um, All of the kind of nooks and crannies of your own journey, um, within the short period that you could, um, and reminding us of well.

Yeah, we need to keep our eyes wide open, but with a critical optimism. Thank you, Maggie.

[00:36:49] Maggie: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 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.