Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

From “Spring Break” to “Reading Days”: Contingency, Relations of Power, and Positionalities in Experiences of Overwork During Academic Breaks

Hello Everyone,


I recently co-authored a new article with Dr. Ann Shivers McNair titled “From ‘Spring Break’ to ‘Reading Days’: Contingency, Relations of Power, and Positionalities in Experiences of Overwork During Academic Breaks.” It’s published in Academic Labor: Research and Artistry.

What did we learn about overwork and burnout during the pandemic?

We offer practical advice in higher education for avoiding burnout in the people under your care, students and otherwise.

Comments closed

This Was Santa Rita

Hello Dear (and few) Readers,

This post is to let you know that my first film, “This was Santa Rita,” will be screening at The Loft Cinema (for free), alongside other student films. You can watch it here: https://loftcinema.org/film/whats-up-docs/

This is the first film I have ever made, and I have learned a lot along the way. I learned to opporate a camera, the basics of film editing, structures of film that are different from writing. Overall, what a wonderful experience to take on during covid-19. It’s such a collaborative process that I actually felt connected to my community during this time of isolation. I worked with archivitsts at New Mexico State as well as Utah State University. Tucson local actors (and my neighboors) volunteered to do dramatic readings of the accounts. My friend and collegue, Kathleen,went to Grant County with me to shoot some footage. We shot a lot of bad footage, but thanks to her, we got SOME good footage. My professor Jacob Bricca spent hours giving me feedback and showing me how to use the software. I completely changed the vision of my film twice! I feel so greateful to those who shared their stories with me and to those who helped me put those stories into film.

 

I made many discoveries along the way; first, that I love working with film. I hope I can continue this project and theorize more about the role of film in its relationship with history and memory. I want to learn more about using film as a method in rhetorical studies. I also found bits of the story needing more explantation. Why is the Kneeling Nun so important to this community? What does the Society of Persons Born in Space do for them? How do women remember the town? How have they managed to remain a close-knit community over the years. I hope I will be granted the opportunity soon interview Santa Rita residents and learn more about what the history of the town means to them.

Until then, enjoy the film!

 

Comments closed

Solistagia in Santa Rita

 

We stood silently in the Capilla, the weight of generations of prayers layered on one another pressed down on our shoulders. Jesus stared through us. Three hundred votives flickered in the darkness of the hand-placed stones that built up the walls, and prayers written on notebook paper stuffed the fissures of the hidden fortress, and picture of young boy printed from a laser printer and the blue ink scratched, “Do not remove until June 2007.”

 

Overhead, we heard the bulldozers pushing mounds of earth precariously across the 45-degree angled surface of Hanover Mountain. A crane planted itself firmly at the top, some 80-feet lower now than where the 10-foot wooden cross once stood. It hauled the marrow of the earth up over the hill and into the unknown. Fierro was once a lively mining town. Now it is a name on a map along an unmarked road marred by the decaying remains of homes. The only building preserved against dry rot is El Sancuario de la Pieta at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. People still travel twice per month to attend mass at St. Anthony’s. We had arrived right in time for the ceremony, but the doors were locked and the only chorus to be heard rumbled from the stomach of the mine–the mountain shaved to its core.

 

“There is no church this Sunday,” Zakery said, “They’re moving the mountain.”

This newest eviction in the long line of environmental injustices in the Grant County mining district. The mine that swallowed the town of Santa Rita as its pit expanded was about to engorge the memorial shrine of Fierro too.

The Shrine of Santa Rita sits tucked in a battlefield of dying towns at the intersection of New Mexico highways 152 and 356. In exchange for their loss, the residents of Santa Clara were gifted a 900-square foot lot to fence in their refugee relics: Our Lady of Guadalupe stands in here a terrarium holding a rosary and overlooking a memorial to Grant County Veterans. She herself stands as a memorial praying for the Santa Rita refugees whose lives and homes destroyed. Across the pews, looking south toward exposed rainbow earth, a plaque reads:

In 1960, Kennecott Copper Corporation notified the residents of the town of Santa Rita that they had to evacuate by 1970 due to mining expansion, all houses, buildings, and the Santa Rita Catholic church were either moved or demolished. The Statue of Santa Rita was taken the village of central Miguel Ojinaga. Angel Alvarado and Moy Gonzales asked Kennecott for a section of land, and the statue was brought back with the blessing of the diocesan of El Paso and with the help of other Santa Rita residents. The shrine was built here.

 

The plaque speaks in half-truths about the devastations of the people, as though the plot of land smaller than the average backyard is a gift. The residents of Santa Rita did not evacuate, an optional migration in the event of natural disaster, they were evicted by their Land Lord. As the earth literally fell out from under their feet took, not only where they lived but where they went for spiritual rejuvenation, citizens of Santa Rita were left with nothing. They waited and watched the physical destruction of their town, only to see a symbol of their faith carried off in the process. Our Lady of Guadalupe, a cultural symbol for the Mexicano people sought refuge in El Paso waiting out her trial for permission to return. Now, she mourns over all of the lives lost in Grant County. The physical lives of veterans and the envision of life as it once was. Soon there would be a new memorial statue to honor the 890 women’s auxiliary who put their lives on the line in 1950 to fight for fair working conditions in the same mine. The Santa Rita shrine is a catch-all sanctuary because it is the untouched slice of a “home” they used to know. It is a cultural artifact of the little bit they could salvage.

The Santa Rita Shrine

As Glenn Albrecht explains in “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity” the citizens of Santa Rita grieved as they watched their lands being stripped away. They felt a “relationship between the psychic identity and their home. What these people lacked was the solace of comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’.” The destruction of one’s land is the devastation of one’s identity, especially in a mining town where the earth is tied to their culture. The people call themselves the Salt of the Earth, both in reference to their humble nature and their inseparable identity from the ground that provides for them. The paradox of mining is knowing that you make your money exploiting the same resources you depend on for sustenance. Although the company houses did not belong to the people of Santa Rita, the land always did. When the company asserted its power to repossess all of the lands, they left families defenseless–homesick, mourning.

 

Much like Albrecht notes, “their place-based distress was also connected to a sense of powerlessness and a sense that environmental injustice was being on home.” They watched pit expand to consume their geographic homes, and their vision of home was destroyed as they realize how little power they had over anything. This grief is intensified knowing the Santa Rita citizens where the ones both assaulting and assaulted. They dugs the pit during the day and came home the sleep in houses they would sweep away. They understood that their paychecks would cost the people of Santa Rita their lives as they knew it.

 

Now Santa Rita is a whisper behind a chain-linked fence, and Fierro is dwindling as the pit runs dry. The only hope of saving the central mining district is mountain-top removal.

Comments closed