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 Guests: Gail Hammack

Gail Hammack

Rancher

Wallowa County, OR

8/25/21

Gail Hammack was not born a rancher. She is not a fourth generation Wallowa County resident like her late husband Doug McDaniel. Gail Hammack is a trained educator who traded her corporate job as McDonald’s regional Vice President for a life of cattle ranching. Today, she is a steward of land, of legacy and of love.

In 1998, Gail married Doug and, simultaneously, his cattle-grazing operation in rural Eastern Oregon. Doug—Gail recounts—loved the land immensely. His passionate care for river systems is what ultimately inspired the couple to re-meander the section of Wallowa River flowing through their private property. In the 1950s, the Wallowa was mechanically straightened to build railroads and grazing lots. This environmental surgery had unintended consequences: lacking in natural curvature, the channelized river became too fast-moving and too warm to support ecologically critical fish species such as salmon. In 2003, Gail and Doug—with the help of local resource agencies—began the process of putting the meanders back into their section of the river. The first two phases of the project focused on improving natural resources and restoring the historic fish habitat. They re-routed half-a-mile of Wallowa canal into a mile of winding riverbed. Doug, Gail, and their team geo-engineered the new channel with felled logs and vegetative cover to reintroduce diversity and complexity into the riparian area.

Since Doug’s passing in 2019, Gail has devoted herself to carrying on her husband’s legacy. She owns and operates the cattle operation while simultaneously spearheading Phase Three of the Wallowa River Restoration Project to further improve wildlife habitat, restore healthy riparian processes and inspire other landowners to do the same.

By Kate Joss