Join us for 2024 Western Relation Readings December 3rd and 4th from 4-6pm by Semester in the West Students in Maxey Auditorium or via Zoom

Texas

Meet our Guests: Antonia Morales

Antonia Morales

Grassroots Activist

El Paso, Texas

11/3/21

 

Under an eminent domain claim, the city of El Paso has plans to raze a neighborhood and build a sports stadium. The neighborhood, Durangito, is the oldest in the city. The apartment of Antonia Morales, affectionately known as Toñita, is one such building.

      When 92-year-old Toñita moved into her Durangito apartment in 1967, the neighborhood was in a state of economic collapse. Prostitution, robbery, and drugs were the avenues of survival for many of its denizens, until Toñita stepped in as what historian David Romo calls “the real leader of the struggle to save Durangito.” Toñita worked tirelessly to help bring economic security to the neighborhood. Now stadium development is undoing the efforts of her struggle.

While the developers claim the stadium will bring in revenue, Toñita knows better. The same was said of the baseball stadium across town, yet hardly any of its revenue returned to serve the surrounding community.

When in 2016 developers began buying out residents of Durangito en masse, Toñita refused. They threatened to cut her water and power if she didn’t accept their offer of $14,000, she told them to go ahead, she wasn’t leaving.

Recently, Toñita’s act of resistance was documented and circulated on media outlets. With widespread support and visibility, the city cannot make her go quietly. And go she won’t. “I’ve never stopped fighting,” Toñita says. “My life has always been about struggle and fight. And that’s why I’m struggling to save this community.”

  

By Nicki Caddell

Meet our Guests: Elizabeth Parra

Elizabeth Parra

Interpretive Ranger, Texas State Parks

Hueco Tanks State Park, TX

11/5/21

 

Elizabeth Parra works as a State Park Ranger at Hueco Tanks State Park, near her hometown of El Paso, Texas. Elizabeth grew up camping and hiking with her family in a nearby forest, Ruidosa, which inspired her love of science and natural world. As an adult, Elizabeth works to help people emotionally connect with the natural resources around them. “It’s super special when you see someone out here, young or old, and they go ‘Wow, I never knew.’”

The Hueco Tanks area is ancestral land to many different communities, including the Jornada Mogollan, Mescalero Apache, the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples. Hundreds of Jornada Mogollan petroglyphs are tucked away in corners of the mountains at Hueco Tanks. “What makes this place special is the geology and the amount of human history we have here,” Elizabeth says.

Part of Elizabeth’s job is to protect cultural resources like the petroglyphs from damage. However, visitors have carved into walls containing petroglyphs in numerous areas around the park, resulting in a separation of Hueco Tanks into self-guided and ranger-guided tours. Over the past two years, new graffiti has increased, as the pandemic has brought greater crowds into the park. Elizabeth says that the desire to protect the pictographs from other writing is based on their historical importance and the effort that went into creating them. “A lot of these images are grounded in ceremony, tradition, their own historic record as well — compared to me buying a Sharpie at Walmart for five dollars and just writing my name.”

 

By Emma Fletcher-Frazer

Meet our Guests: Adriana Lopez

Adriana Lopez

Musician and Educator

El Paso, TX

11/3/21

 

     Adri Lopez’s powerful voice resounds throughout the city of El Paso. A musician and educator, Adri uses her vocal talent to fight for what she believes in: protecting culture and history in El Paso while spreading el cariño—a word with no direct English translation that refers to a special kind of love with tenderness, something that Adri feels is unique to El Paso and Juárez, its sister city directly across the Mexico border.

     Adri was born and raised in El Paso and has made her way back home after a decade away. In her time away from her home city she heard many narratives about El Paso that weren’t true to her experience. Wanting to correct these false conceptions, she gained an understanding and appreciation for the rich stories and history of El Paso. This experience brought her home—to the place where she feels el cariño.

     Led by her passion for writing, poetry, and especially music, Adri uses her talents to fight. Duranguito, El Paso’s oldest neighborhood is under threat by developers and the city council to be demolished to make space for a new stadium. Adri sees the importance of this place, for its historical value as the oldest part of the city, but also for the diversity of culture that it holds as a place of border and a first stop for many different groups entering the U.S. In the fight to protect Duranguito, Adri, along with historian David Romo, produces music with messages of revolution. Adri and David’s pieces vary in style, but all fall into the musical traditions of past residents of Duranguito, a nod to the diversity of culture that this place holds and that Adri hopes to preserve.

 

By Katie Wallace

Video credit: Haley Post

Meet our Guests: David Romo

David Romo

Historian, musician, and author

El Paso, Texas

11/3/21

 

The streets of El Paso, Texas come alive through the songs and stories of David Romo. Donning black leather and an acoustic-electric guitar, David leads Semester in the West students along grided sidewalks, past colorful murals and beside brick buildings. He tells tales of El Paso’s historic inhabitants—indigenous Mansos and Mexican revolutionaries, Pachuco anarchists and Spanish spies—through the form of narrative melody. For David, music is a force for rebellion. It is a way to impart the unspoken and often repressed stories of those who have shaped what is now U.S.-Mexico borderland.

David grew up traversing the illusive boundary between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. He considers himself a fronterizo: a person who moves fluidly between the U.S.-Mexico border. “But,” he laments, “I spent a large part of my life trying to get as far away from both of these cities as possible.” It took four years at Stanford, two-and-a-half in Jerusalem, and five in France before he realized the cultural richness he had been seeking was in his hometown all along. After moving back to El Paso, David began chronicling the Texas city and its Mexican counterpart by blending genres of history, ethnography, and music. His most recent publication, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, uses a method called “psychogeographic” mapping to tell the untold tales of the Mexican Revolution. Today, David uses his voice to fight the industrial development of El Paso’s historic neighborhood, Duranguito. Through art, activism, and history, David reinvigorates old narratives to inspire new passions for the cities of the border. 

 

By Kate Joss

Meet our Educators: Victoria Blanco

Victoria Blanco

Writer

El Paso, TX

11/1/21 – 11/5/21

 

Standing at a lookout point above a sprawling cityscape, writer Victoria Blanco points out the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. Born and raised in El Paso, Victoria is deeply familiar with the richness and complexity that emerges from the U.S. - Mexico border. The border severs what Victoria calls a “cultural corridor” that runs south from El Paso to Juarez. She explains that this corridor is not only responsible for the flow of goods across the border but “also the flow of stories, of food, of families.”

  During a five-day writing workshop, Victoria emphasized the importance of seeing beyond the dominant narratives that mainstream news sources push about the border. She applies this lens to her writing, too: Victoria spoke to how writing genres are both a helpful framework for writing but can also act as a tool of restriction. She encouraged Semester in the West students to “bend the lines of genre” in their writing to tell stories that hold more nuance. In her own writing, Victoria often combines memoir style storytelling with her anthropological research with indigenous communities in Northern Mexico. 

With family on both sides of the border, Victoria is accustomed to hours-long lines that stand between her and loved ones. Victoria is no stranger to the way the border separates but does not let it confine her movement between the two countries.  “They can build their walls as high as they want,” she tells us, “But I’m going to come here with my kids, I’m going to cross the border, I’m going to go visit my in-laws four blocks away. And I’m never going to stop doing it.”

 

By Alli Shinn

Meet our Guests: Bonnie and Billy Pat McKinney

Billy Pat and Bonnie McKinney

Manager and Wildlife Coordinator, El Carmen Land and Conservation Co.

Terlingua, TX

10/29/2021

 

     Nestled in the heart of the Chihuahuan desert along the Rio Grande lies the old Adams Ranch, a 27,000-acre property that rests on the border of the United States and Mexico. Under the name El Carmen Land and Conservation Company, the ranch is owned by CEMEX USA, a branch of the Mexican multinational concrete and cement manufacturing company, and conservation philanthropist Josiah Austin. The property is managed by Billy Pat and Bonnie McKinney, two Texans passionate about land conservation. Billy Pat, the manager of the ranch, and Bonnie, the wildlife coordinator, work towards restoring this formerly overgrazed land and rebuilding sustainable wildlife populations.

     The ranch was purchased to bridge the gap between Big Bend National Park and Black Gap National Wildlife Area. Bonnie emphasizes the importance of the ranch as a connecting link between contiguous properties and two countries. This piece of unassuming desert brimming with thorny ocotillo and prickly pear cacti on the edge of the Mexican highlands is a known bird migration corridor and habitat for big mammals such as desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and black bear.

     Bonnie and Billy Pat have worked tirelessly since moving to the ranch in 2007 to conserve the land because, as Bonnie highlights, “we need our wildlife, we need our waters, and we need our landscape.” The two desert dwellers know that the limiting factor for wildlife populations in this area is lack of water availability. To help remedy this issue they have initiated the installation of dozens of water guzzlers—tanks that collect and store rainwater to create a supplemental water source for wildlife. These water guzzlers serve as a lifeline for a multitude of species as the climate gets increasingly warmer and drier.  

Billy Pat conveys his and Bonnie’s conservation philosophy simply, saying “We don’t wear angel wings, we just try to dirty our hands and make something happen.”

 

By Claire Warncke