[This essay is an introduction to an anthology of essays about creative engagement with communities; it provides a foundation for empowering communities via community dialogue and creative collaboration]

"Maps to the Next World: CREATIVE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTHWEST U.S."
Valerie Martínez, Executive Director and Core Artist, Littleglobe

          “…How to say this: seed, sky-vault,
           mountains, symbiotic hum…

          Benevolent place,
          place of destruction.

          The land cradling us, the land
          the colors of our many faces, skin…

          This place on the tongue,
          on our hands, on the soles
          of our feet, and sweeping
          around us, tracing a circle

          from here to here as we turn
          all the way round…”¹

     The offices of Littleglobe lie at the geographical center of current-day Santa Fe, New Mexico. Five hundred years ago a Tewa village inhabited the site and it was called oga’poge—"olivella shell water place.” Spanish conquistadores occupied the village in 1605 and oga’poge was governed by a succession of sixty Spanish colonial governors for more than 200 years. In 1680 the Pueblo Revolt--“one of the most successful indigenous revolutions on the continent”^2--expelled the Spanish for over a decade. The area was “re-conquested” by the Spanish in 1692, ceded to Mexico in 1821, and acquired by the United States in 1846.

     Since “First Contact,” the story of this place is a story of multiple waves of conquest, migration and convergence, the:

“…merging of people and cultures [from] the A:shiwi people to a Moorish slave and a French friar, Spanish soldiers [from Aragón, Galicia, Andalusia, Castile and Extremadura,  Spain, some with Moorish and Jewish lineages] to their Pima, Papago, Opata, and Tarahumara auxiliaries…to people originating in many other places throughout the world, including Greece, France, Portugal, and even Angola, Africa. Countless streams flowed from this point of contact as a foundation for what would gradually become known as the southwest and New Mexico.”³

     Old-timers fondly recall a time when the plaza, now located on the east side of Santa Fe, was the bustling center of community life. By the 70’s, the city had begun to expand rapidly, primarily to the south. Today, the (very famous and oft-photographed) plaza is peopled primarily by tourists and the “center of community life” lies not in one central location, but in dispersed meeting places, on various days or hours during city fiestas, markets and celebrations, or by happenstance.

     Now, the city’s geographical center is closer to the intersection of Cerrillos Road, St. Michael’s Drive and Osage Avenue, a decidedly less attractive and hardly decipherable “plaza” just a stone’s throw from Littleglobe’s small, adobe rental. The streets, named for what used to be “little hills” (Cerrillos), a Jewish/Christian/Islamic archangel (Michael), and a Siouan-language Native American tribe (Osage) serve as a metaphor for the continuing legacy of convergence and constant state of flux that characterize complex communities.

      This story, too, is echoed everywhere in the U.S. Southwest.

      I begin this collection of essays by Littleglobe core artists, affiliate artists and partners with a brief history because an understanding of people and place is necessary, crucial, and at the very heart of our work in Southwest communities. Without the constant companions and guiding voices of the stories that swirl around us, we are not able to do the work of collaborating with communities through creative engagement.

     Littleglobe’s work is rooted in the following core principles:

• We believe in the transformative power of heartfelt, human connection.
• We believe in creating safe, inclusive spaces where sharing, witnessing and compassion are paramount.
• We believe in the inherent wisdom, knowledge and capacity of communities that emerges from creative engagement.
• We believe that collaborative art-making deepens human connection, grows relationships, and creates lasting community change.
• We believe that artistic rigor honors community work and that artists and communities, working together, are able to create significant works of art.

At the center of our creative practice is listening. In order for people and places to reveal themselves, in order to be shaped by the land and its people, we must be receptive, open, vulnerable, and humble. Southwest communities hold immense knowledge and considerable resources, necessitated and nurtured by hundreds of years of interaction and exchange—sometimes violent, sometimes compassionate, always complex. It is only in listening and cultivating listening that we begin to make space for community knowledge that is the wellspring of social change.

     For over ten years, Littleglobe artists have been working collaboratively with elders, families, youth, adults and intergenerational ensembles in the creation of groundbreaking works of art, performance and collaboration. For the last four years, this work has been primarily with southwest communities. Over a period of many months, Littleglobe artists work with members of communities who would not usually share the same space. These “community ensembles” are gifted with deep connections to culture, land and history while struggling with illness, estrangement, institutionalization, historical trauma, discrimination and/or other challenges (New Mexico continues to rank poorly in areas such as education, poverty and health). Again and again, we have seen these ensembles emerge from sustained creative engagement with a new and renewed sense of both individual and community capacity.

     Littleglobe’s approach to community work resists the service or “helping” model of artists “teaching” in communities. Instead, we find that collaboration is much more honest, engaging and generative. We know that there is great wisdom and creative practice inherent in communities (history offers endless examples) no matter how much they are struggling, and that reconnecting to these forms of knowledge as well as nurturing new capacities is the key to “community development.” That is, we know that community members bring as much or more to the process of community restoration than Littleglobe artists.

     What Littleglobe does bring to the collaboration are relational creative practices (in multiple creative mediums—music, writing, visual art, movement, film, etc) that encourage the emergence of personal and communal stories and other forms of knowledge. With time, these congregate, integrate, collaborate to create works of art and performance that reflect issues, desires and dreams at the heart of community. At the same time, the ensemble—individuals and the whole--experience a powerful sense of ownership, identity and self-determination. After the first phases of the project, Littleglobe and its cross-sector partners continue to work with members of the community to co-facilitate the continuing work of the community.

“In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who
would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing
fields, from the bedrooms and kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire
to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.”⁴

     Both statewide and regionally, there is a need for this kind of collaborative engagement work that involves a wide range of constituencies--children, youth, families, adults and elders as well as artists, planners, organizers, health care workers, educators, and others. This inter- and cross-disciplinary approach is complex, rigorous, and demanding—like Harjo’s illuminated sand map—and requires a range of skills in creative collaboration, civic dialogue, conflict engagement, skills-building, and more.

     Littleglobe is committed to developing, deepening and catalyzing this work through its “Center for Creative Community Engagement (CCCE)”—a learning collaborative that will gather artists, scholars, leaders, and youth; college and university faculty and students, and community-based practitioners for workshops, experiential/on-site community engagement and cross-sector collaboration. The center’s programming is being developed with a wide range of practitioners and organizations through a process of shared learning. We know many are doing remarkable work in the Southwest, elsewhere in the U.S, and internationally, and the CCCE draws on best theory and practice as well as Littleglobe’s experience with communities.

     The center also hopes to encourage important innovations in community engagement work. Littleglobe believes that living and working in the Southwest deepens this work because of the complexities mentioned above. Southwest practitioners must navigate and embrace multiplicity--simultaneous and diverse experiences of time and space, deeply-rooted connections to land and water, the conflation of” truth” with historical lies and imaginary realities, and the ever-shifting psychic landscapes that accompany the mestizaje of identity and race. Roberto Bedoya writes about the necessity of honoring these realities as “cultural stewardship”⁵—embracing the belief systems and ways of life of indigenous and other “non-traditional” communities.

     Liz Lerman emphasizes the need for synthesis:

“Philosophers who admire paradox, rabbis and priests who seek union in opposites, artists rejecting dichotomy, business executives looking for a synthesis, educators hoping to foster learning communities that embrace multiple forms of knowledge and discovery: all of these reflect a desire to find meaning within ambiguity, common purpose amid individual vision and action.”⁶

In simpler terms, complex communities demand complex (and imaginative) approaches to community change. This will be the evolving work of the Littleglobe Center for Creative Community Engagement.

     The CCCE (opening in 2012) also furthers an understanding of “art” as inextricably related to community health. This might be a long journey, for some, from the notion of art as individual vision and commercial action. Instead, the practice of art-making is restored to its ancient origins in community ritual as a means of honoring the land, the people and their cultural beliefs in a web of connection, interdependence, power and beauty. Littleglobe artists are well-aware of the forced dichotomy between “Art” and “community art”—we are professional artists/collaborative artists/community artists who produce art as individuals and in collaboration. We bring rigor to the work no matter how it’s made and with whom, and we defy the notion that “community art” is less important than “fine art.” For all the reasons mentioned above, we know that art-making in communities is deeply rigorous and remarkably complex.

     In addition, the CCCE hopes to influence cultural policy to better embrace the worldviews and realities of diverse communities. Bedoya’s “Color Line in US Cultural Policy” refers to “the absence of a policy frame, a discursive space for the experience and knowledge associated with multiple worldviews.”⁷ Littleglobe has witnessed “first contact” between community leaders (newly-emerging and experiencing a powerful sense of agency) and policy-makers in which differing modes of language and experience (imaginative vs. empirical) have made communication and understanding difficult. These “encounters” mirror the gulfs that sometimes appear when artists/community artists attempt to articulate the significance of creative work/art and its ability to build capacity (“development”) in communities. The survival of artists, cultural workers, arts/culture organizations and multicultural communities will depend on policymakers’ ability to embrace the impact of imaginative/aesthetic/creative work on community development, i.e., the role of the “social imagination” in social change.

“Listen,
that’s the way you hear.
Pretty soon, you can hear it,
coming far away
deep in the ground, deep down there coming,
the voice of power coming,
closer and closer…

and pretty soon it will come.
It will come,
the moving power of the voice,
the moving power of the earth,
the moving power of the People.
That is the place Indian People talk about.”⁸

     This collection of essays, authored by Littleglobe core team members, affiliate artists and partners (representing a wide range of community practitioners and organizations) are a beginning. They have emerged from eight months of smaller gatherings of artists and cultural workers—most often with food and around a kitchen table—and reflect our learning from and collaboration with a wide range of thinkers and practitioners. The essays, like the communities we work with, are incredibly diverse—the authors’ voices are different and distinct. They present a wide range of philosophical approaches and best practices based on work in different kinds of communities. And the essays, as a whole, ask for different modes of listening and learning.

     What the essays share is a belief in what Barry Lopez calls the “genius of communities”⁹—the knowledge, experience, imagination and capacity that are inherent in groups of people, no matter how fractured, alienated, oppressed. These essays affirm the power of creative engagement to illuminate and activate communities from the deep-inside, out.

     Our communities continue, every day, to teach us remarkably and well. These essays would not be possible without their inspiring and inspired guidance. We are also enormously thankful for the writers who share their wisdom and experience here. We look forward to many years of continued collaboration with our fellow artists and practitioners, with a shared passion for building stronger and more beautiful communities---for ourselves, for each other, and for our children.

NOTES
¹Martínez, Valerie. “And They Called It Horizon” (title poem). And They Called It Horizon: Santa Fe Poems. Sunstone Press, 2010. pp. 41-52.
²Rael-Gálvez, Estevan. “Coyote Convergence: Introduction through Interrogation” (Introduction). Converging Streams: Art of the Hispanic and Native American Southwest. Eds.      William Wroth and Robin Farwell Gavin. Santa Fe: Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, 2009, p. 17.
³Ibid, p. 16.
⁴Harjo, Joy. A Map to the Next World. New York: Norton & Norton, 2000, p. 14.
⁵Bedoya, Roberto. “The Color Line and U.S. Cultural Policy: An Essay with Dialogue.” National Alliance for Media, Art and Culture (NAMAC). http://www.namac.org/node/25774. Accessed June 20, 2011.
⁶Lerman, Liz. Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011, p. 204.
⁷Bedoya, “The Color Line.”
⁸Ortiz, Simon. “That’s the Place Indians Talk About.” Woven Stone. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992, pp. 321-324.
⁹Lopez, Barry. Lecture at the University of New Mexico, February 10, 2011.
 

*     *     *

 

Mire la Mirror: Mexican and Mexican-American Poetry and the National Divide  ©2005

 

              Let’s say the poem is a mirror.  It is perched on the northern border of Mexico (marked by some invisible ribbon or a barbed wire fence) and on the southern border of the United States.   It sits on a gilded pedestal and pivots freely in the breeze below an enormous blue sky.  This place was Mexico on the morning of February2, 1848.  By the time the sun set on that same day, it was the United States.  It was Mexico and then, with a loopy flourish, it was the USA.

            Let’s say there’s a woman, south of this historic spot, and she approaches the mirror.  She turns it on its golden pivot, and looks in.  She sees:

The eye of the great crocodile…

He emerges in the afternoons on the bank of the Cañon that receives the setting sun to

watch the twilight’s bloody fiesta beyond the topmost outlines of the rocky crests.

And there he stays, hypnotized, immobile,

his enormous body more of a rock each time,

his mesmerized eye an ever stonier crevice.  (Bartolomae 45)

 And here’s a man who approaches from the north.  Like her, his blood is indigenous; his blood is Spanish, and they share the distant memory of pyramids, dyed brilliantly and ending in air, and of the noisy unloading of weary men and great ships.  He turns the mirror and looks. He sees a

…dimming light at the

                        chipped kitchen table where the past

 showed in layers of old paint: exile from México, your forced

                        marriage, the Great Depression.

You with a cigarette and a shot of Paul Jones, a brittle voice,

                        telling how your mother died

in the half-light of cheap rented rooms in the Turks’ barrio. (Catacalos 21)

Look again.  The poem-mirror, turned south, shows the woman as crocodile.  The poem-mirror, turned north, shows the man himself, there at the kitchen table.

            This is a parable, the parable of the poem and how it mirrors Mexican and the Mexican-American identity and experience.  I have been struck and struck again, when I read contemporary Mexican poetry, when I read Mexican-American poetry (especially that written and published in the second half of the twentieth century) at the stark difference between the two.  Last year, when I finished reading the newest anthology of contemporary Mexican poetry, Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), the national divide seemed an even greater yaw.

            Put very simply (for now), contemporary Mexican poetry is metaphorical and, to a great extent, mythic—it explores its subject matter symbolically.  The most widely published Mexican-American poetry (and I’ll focus on that published from the 1960’s to the end of the 20^th century) is dominated, for the most part, by the autobiographical narrative.  There are exceptions, of course, but it is safe to say that overall each mode predominates the published poetry of contemporary poets of each nation.   Here are two examples: