 Welcome to the Scoundral and Scamp Theater. I'm Brian Falcone, artistic director here. And so I say I'm so excited to see so many of your faces after I saw on the agenda what you were doing up till 2 a.m. in the morning last night. I'm impressed you're here with us. So thank you so much for coming. Just wanted to do just a quick introduction to the space and historic why as a whole. And this Scoundral and Scamp Theater is actually just about a year old at this point. We just started our second season. And what happened was my wife and I who moved here from the Midwest came out here and saw the saguaros and began hiking and then saw the art scene and said this is where we want to stay. So we had an opportunity to go and open a theater. Basically started the process two years ago and found this wonderful space in here was already a dance theater, Zuzi Dance. And it was held together with love and gaffe tape. So we came in and we renovated and we just finished that just about a year ago. And so we replaced the lights, the blacks, the seating, everything. It's very, very different if you were here before. But the reason behind wanting to do it was we really wanted to create a place for community to happen. And as the net folks might attest, there is a dearth of good performance spaces here in Tucson. And so we wanted to create a space where dance and theater could take place. And so we do our seasons here. We actually have two different seasons we do. We do a season for scoundrels and a season for scamps. Our season for scoundrels is for adults. We just finished Eurydice. Cerebrals Eurydice is part of that season. Our season for scamps is for all ages. And so there we really try to focus on physical theater. We did an original work here called Oath about it. Yes, it just is a few months ago. And then Wolf-Bowar, who's a local physical theater performing artist is gonna be opening the US premiere of Cloud Soup his latest work here in December. We also have a show coming up for you Tucson folks. And just about two weeks are opening. This girl laughs, this girl cries, this girl does nothing. Which is a work by Finnegan Kruckmeyer, who is a wonderful Australian playwright. I'm really excited to do that here in Tucson. So a few more things. Historic why, we're so excited when we saw the agenda of the presenters. They're gonna be joining us here because we're like, they're our neighbors, right? So we have the Calibri Center. We've got the Florence Project right next door. Historic why, built in the 1930s, is now a place of social justice and education and arts organizations. We're one of two theaters in the building. And actually the space you're in right now is actually an old swimming pool. You are all over the shallow end of the swimming pool. And if you have good eyes, when you go back out to the back parking lot, if you look at where the concrete meets the asphalt, you can see the outdoor pool. What's left of that, the pool deck. So it's really cool to go and reinvest in the downtown and reinvent and make new here. So last thing I wanted to say too was we're just so excited by the presenters that are coming up. I just wanted to do a quick shout out to South of Folklife Alliance and Maribel Alvarez because I'm on their board. You won't see me. What if I stand like here? Well, I can like just, as long as you all don't mind me ducking back and forth. Thank you so much, Brian, for letting us use this space and for that introduction. It's really nice to meet our neighbors a little bit. And thank you so much, Alicia, for having us here today. It's really exciting to me to get to speak. I do presentations. My name is Leah. I'm the community engagement coordinator for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. And so most of my job is giving presentations about our work. And I do a lot of school groups. Ooh, Ben, would you log into your computer? I work with a lot of school groups, faith communities, and it's really exciting to me to get to present to a group of artists because I think that a lot of times I focus on academia or education or faith worlds, but art is such an important way to connect to social issues and connect social issues to our wider community. So I'm really grateful for all of you for being here today and for being interested in our work. Well, while Ben figures this out, I'm gonna start hanging out the Florence. So the Florence project is a social and legal service provider and we are the only organization in Arizona that provides services to folks who are in immigrant detention. I think that one of the reasons that we have so many people in detention in this country is because they're really well hidden, which is one of the reasons that I'm really appreciative to all of you for wanting to shed light on this subject. So on any given day in the state of Arizona, over 5,000 people are incarcerated in immigration detention facilities around the state. And over 1,600 of them are under the age of 18. So this map up on the screen there is a little bit dated and actually 1,000 additional beds were just opened up for in another, a new adult detention facility. But Florence and Eloy are two towns that you all probably actually drove past on your way down from Tempe and they are prison towns and there over 3,000 adults are detained in detention facilities. And then here in Tucson and in the Phoenix Metro areas, there are children in shelters for unaccompanied minor immigrants who are detained. And the immigration justice system, unlike the criminal justice system, does not guarantee the right to representation or to free representation. So 90 to 95% of immigrants facing detention proceedings will end up going before a judge alone. In 1989 an immigration judge who was seeing a lot of asylum seekers come through his courtroom and lose their cases ended up making a call out to the legal community in Arizona to step up and provide representation to these folks because if you are in asylum proceedings, you're about 10 times more likely to win your case if you have legal representation. The immigration legal system is extremely confusing even to those of us who work in it. So if you imagine going before a judge as a person whose first language probably isn't English and who isn't familiar with our justice system at all and particularly our immigration justice system, the cards are really stacked against you. So oftentimes having representation in court is the deciding factor of whether or not you're able to stay in the United States. And for most of our clients, deportation is a death sentence. So as I mentioned, the Florence Project is the only organization in Arizona that provides free legal and social services to folks who are detained. And we have a number of different programs. We started in 1989 with an adult program working on a pro se model. So because there are over 5,000 individuals detained in the state of Arizona and because we are the only organization providing these services, we operated originally on a pro se model which empowered individuals in the immigration detention system to defend their own cases in court. So we still operate under that model for the bulk of our adult work and that's the legal orientation program model which is now used as the basis for legal orientations around the country for folks in immigrant detention. And so that means that almost every day some of our legal team is going into detention centers in Eloy, Florence, and child detention facilities as well and offering first orientation for every single person who passes through the facility on what the immigration system is in the United States, how to defend your case and what your different legal remedies could be. In addition to that, we offer individual consultations with every single person who is interested where our attorney or legal assistant will sit down with them and talk to them about their specific options and oftentimes that entails them talking to us about their entire journey to the United States and what provoked that and then us talking them through what their next steps could be. In addition to that, we connect individuals who end up pursuing asylum cases or other forms of relief to stay in the United States with pro bono attorneys so that if somebody really wants representation in court, we try and make sure that that can happen for them. Additionally, we have a mental health team. So there's a lot of trauma involved in the immigration detention system, whether that trauma is the reason that an individual left their home country, whether it happened on the journey or whether the trauma itself is being in the detention facility. Oftentimes, folks end up with very severe mental health ramifications or came because of severe mental health issues. So we have a national qualified representative program where anybody who is deemed incompetent to represent themselves in immigration court is assigned one of our attorneys to support them and defend them throughout their court process. We also have a social services team that provides them more holistic support as well and that oftentimes involves getting them into the nationally qualified representative program. If a judge is not trauma informed or not mental health informed, they oftentimes won't correctly identify whether or not a person is competent to represent themselves in court. And so our legal service and social service providers really advocate for folks to get the support that they need while in detention as well as housing, education, medical services once they are out of detention. And then we also have a children's program. In the shelters, we offer a legal orientation program which looks very similar to the adult program except that we try and make it accessible to a younger audience. So oftentimes the children, when we're trying to teach them about the legal system, we're both trying to educate them on what's gonna happen to them but also make it less terrifying and make them feel equipped to advocate for themselves in a situation that is one of the most scary that they've ever faced. And the way that we do that is by doing role plays of what court looks like. Ooh, Ben, you might have to, oh no, great. By playing with toys, by doing breathing exercises, by using all kinds of practices that make children feel safe and secure. So I always like to end my presentation with stories from our clients because our clients are the center of our work. They are both the reason that we exist and the reason that we have the faith to keep on existing. They inspire us every day. So this is Eugenio and he is one of our NQRP clients. So he was deemed incompetent to represent himself in court. And I wanna share this story that he shared with us. So he grew up in Mexico close to the Mexico border and at the age of 10 his parents separated and his dad began drinking heavily and he ended up being abandoned and oftentimes was caring for his siblings. So by the age of 13 he had to drop out of school to begin working and by the age of 16 he was supporting himself and living on his own. Shortly thereafter he began using drugs and started experiencing severe mental health issues. And though he was able to overcome his drug addiction he continued to have hallucinations to the point where he felt that he was constantly under threat. So he came to the United States seeking mental health support and safety. But unfortunately as soon as he crossed the US Mexico border he was taken into custody and detained for what ended up being a year and a half without access to mental health care. He met one of our attorneys Valentina while he was in detention and while he was in detention his symptoms just grew in severity. So he ended up hearing voices all of the time and had a really hard time connecting with other people who were in the detention facility because he was so affected by his mental health issues. But with the advocacy of Valentina as his attorney and our mental health team he ended up getting an evaluation and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. So our attorney and mental health team helped him get access to his medication, helped him relive his story in order to present it in court with our support and then eventually he was able to win his asylum case and was released from detention to family members in the United States. And he continues to work with our social services team and is doing really well living outside of detention. So Alberto is one of our kids' clients. And Alberto's story is pretty different from a lot of our kids' clients at least the end of his story because while most of the kids that we work with came to the United States because they could not conceive of a future for themselves in their country of origin. Alberto last time we saw him was talking about his college plans. So that's because Alberto is now a permanent resident of the United States. But he did not always have those opportunities. He came to the United States because he had been abandoned by his parents. And the story that he told us is that he grew up in Guatemala and he was subject to constant physical violence from his father. He was forced to start working at the age of nine years old and a few years after that his father abandoned him and his sister in the care of his aunt. And his aunt continued the physical abuse unfortunately to the point where by the age of 16 Alberto could no longer bear it and decided to leave. But oftentimes the journey to the United States is as traumatic as the reasons that folks leave. While Alberto was in route to the United States he was kidnapped by a Mexican mafia group and held for 20 days in a facility just south of the U.S. border. He ended up trading all of his possessions for his freedom but he shortly after crossing the border was taken to a child detention facility in the United States. And that's where our team met him. He was a really wonderful and resilient client but no matter what for our kids who are seeking asylum or special immigrant juvenile status which is a special visa for children who are abused or abandoned. The way that they attain those visas is by reliving their trauma in front of a courtroom. So our social workers and legal team supported him through months of reliving the worst moments of his life in order to tell them to a judge. And ultimately he did an amazing job being really brave and sharing his story in front of a whole courtroom. And he did win his special immigrant juvenile case and now is a permanent resident. And so the last time that we saw him this summer he had just graduated from high school and he was enrolled in college for the spring and he plans to be an engineer. So the Florence Project absolutely cannot exist without the support of our community. We are a nonprofit so our ability to provide legal services and social services to folks in immigrant detention depends completely on the support of people who care and know about the immigration detention system. And when I say support I do mean financial support but I think that even more important than that is staying educated and sharing the stories that you hear about folks who are in immigrant detention. I truly believe that the reason that our system exists is because it's so well hidden. So all of you as people who have a stage and have a platform to talk about social issues if you wanna share our stories, if you're interested in joining us in ensuring that everyone has a fair day in court please do you connect with me. I have business cards, I'm happy to share my information. And I would love to think about ways that we can collaborate to make sure that these stories are heard. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Leah, walk over here. So good morning everybody, my name is Ben Clark and I am the Family Network Coordinator at the Colibri Center for Human Rights. We are a nonprofit in this building just like the Florence Project and Scoundron Scamp that works to end migrant disappearance and uphold human dignity on the US Mexico border. And today I'd like to talk to you all a little bit about the context of death and disappearance on the border, how militarization has shaped this landscape and the way that lives are lived and lost and then share with you a few stories as Leah did. Because echoing Leah's words, I think one thing that you all as artists can certainly understand is the importance of narrative shift in the work of cultural and social change. I think in this country we're barraged daily with one narrative of what an immigrant is and it's really essential that we understand that these are complete human beings, the people who are lost were more than just disappeared migrants. So I'll share a little bit about that but I think we have time for questions at the end so we can wait until then for that. As I said, the Colibri Center is a nonprofit with the mission to end disappearance and uphold human dignity on the US-Mexico border. And our work is a mix of advocacy, forensic science and community organizing and emotional support for families. I'll talk a little bit more about our programs later but we started as a small volunteer run project in 2006, essentially collecting missing persons reports from families who were searching for missing loved ones in the efforts to identify the increasing number of remains being found in the Sonoran Desert borderlands. And since then we've grown into an enormous four person nonprofit that still takes missing persons reports, several come in every day and we've expanded to add a DNA program as well as support and solidarity networks for families who have cases with us. I'd also first like to center the families that we work with before I say anything else about the political context and the history of what's happening on the border. Because I think oftentimes, as I mentioned at the beginning, the humanity of those that we work with and those most directly impacted by a militarized and violent border, it's forgotten. These are photos of different chapters of the family network, which is the program that I coordinate. So these are all relatives looking for missing loved ones, some of whom disappeared weeks ago, some of whom have been missing for decades in cities across the country. They come together every couple of months to support each other. So I would really just like us to remember all of those impacted before we go any further. So there's a multi-layered, heart-breaking, invisible eyes, unrelenting, and ultimately very, very preventable human rights crisis happening on our border every single day. Since 1998, over 7,200 people have lost their lives crossing the border. And I would like to frame this statistic by saying that these are only remains that have been recovered. So we estimate that it's thousands and thousands more. This is also a statistic from Border Patrol and that's the only source of unified information of border-wide statistics. The reliability of which is very questionable and they're serious, as a result of multiple FOIA requests, there are multiple reasons to suspect that this is actually a very underrepresented number. Of those, almost 3,000 have died in Southern Arizona. That number is from the office of the medical examiner in Pima County. There's the number of remains that have been found along the border. Over 3,500 people have submitted missing persons reports to Colibri to report their missing loved ones. And at this moment, about 10 minutes south of here in the medical examiner's office, there are over 1,000 remains of people that are still unidentified, meaning tens of thousands of relatives and friends of these people who are left in agony not knowing what happened to that person. This ultimately, this is not an accident. This is the result of a very particular history and design of politics meant to deter migration and ultimately through structural and state violence. So what we've seen over the last 25 years is a rapid increase in the number of deaths and disappearances on our border. And our analysis is that this is a direct result of multiple kind of, a confluence of multiple factors rooted in a new strategy by the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol starting in the mid 1990s called prevention through deterrence. This is a phrase that has gotten a lot more traction lately through the family separation crisis which is still happening. Before these, it was sort of an obscure term but I think now it's more commonly used and people understand that most of this country's anti-migration policies are justified on the basis of deterrence that if we impose harsh enough restrictions on those coming into this country then they'll just decide not to come. What that is is an incredibly short-sighted and superficial understanding of the reasons why people choose to migrate and the force is pushing them northward much of which is a direct result of US for an intervention in countries that they're coming from. So prevention through deterrence, this is actually a snapshot, it might be kind of hard to see for people in the back but this is actually a snapshot of the Border Patrol's strategic plan from 1994 which has sort of set the stage for all of their strategizing and all the militarization that we've seen since. The idea was that, I'm gonna show them that really quickly before going back, up until 1994 there were the primary corridors for migration into the US were through major ports of entry. So Ciudad Juarez, El Paso, Ambos Nogales, Tijuana, San Diego, so people would come through cities. They would come through actual ports of entry and the idea was starting under the Clinton administration, oh, sorry, I meant to mention this at the beginning. This is something that is not a Republican agenda. This is a bipartisan US government philosophy and strategy, so I want us to get beyond party politics to recognize this is embedded in our entire political system. But this began in 1994 by closing and making more difficult entry through those ports of entry and the idea being that given that the desert landscape is so harsh, particularly in the summer months, that people would understand the dangers inherent in trying to cross through these more remote landscapes and thus would be deterred from trying to cross. It's also important to recognize the third bullet point here that it was planned and anticipated that violence would increase as the effects of this strategy were felt. It was understood that this would lead to a more violent border, a more dangerous border, and ultimately a more deathly border. But of course, because the reasons for which people migrate did not change, people continued to migrate and it just meant that they had to cross through more and more dangerous areas. This is part of a broader trend that you all are familiar with of the rapid ramp up in the militarization of our border. This is a bar graph of the number of Border Patrol agents since 1992 and it's hard to see but basically it's gone from 4,000 to over 21,000 in the course of about 25 years. Border Patrol agents are not the only manifestations of what has become an architecture and a system of death and disappearance. There's the wall, there is surveillance technology, there are drones. If you all are spending any time closer to the border or you may have already witnessed it so far, it's present in everyday life in Southern Arizona. And ultimately this militarization and its most drastic consequences leads to death and disappearance. And I wanted to share with you all a quote from Agnes Kalamar who's a special rapporteur to the United Nations for a working committee on the death and disappearance of migrants. And she lays out how the United States is systematically violating international law by designing an anti-migration policy that arbitrarily deprives people of their right to life. So our government is on a daily basis violating international law by intentionally designing a system that deters and kills. And I would echo words that Leah shared earlier that not only is it people who are coming for the first time who fall prey to this system but also people who have lived here their entire lives, people who are deported, who then lose their lives in the attempt to cross the border again because deportation is truly deadly. This graph shows the number of deaths, the number of remains examined by the medical examiner's office in Tucson starting in 1990 and through 2016. And I would point to the jump starting in 2000 when it went from about 19 every year to 71. And then again in 2002 when it went up to 160 and since then it's been an average about 155 a year. There's a project called the Map of Migrant Mortality run by Arizona Open GIS that has tracked the locations of where all of these deaths have occurred. And I would encourage you all to visit this website. I think the spatial representation of this crisis shows that the border is not aligned in the sand. The border goes far north from here and the impacts of death and disappearance are not located exclusively on this fine line that separates us from our southern neighbor. It's the map of migrant mortality from Arizona Open GIS. So what are we doing about it in the face of a dehumanizing and disappearing and deadly border? So Colibri has four primary programs, the Missing Migrants Project, the DNA program, the Family Network, and Historia's Urquero Los. The Missing Migrants Project and the DNA program are the heart of our work. So that's where we collect missing persons reports from families who are searching for missing loved ones. And then for those who are related closely enough to the person who disappeared, which means brothers and sisters, parents and children, we invite them to sample their DNA, which we then compare against the DNA that's been sampled of those thousand plus remains that are still in the medical examiner's office. Sometimes cases are resolved within weeks. As I mentioned, there are several families who've been searching since the early 1970s and still haven't had any answers. The Family Network and Historia's Urquero Los are more on the advocacy and community building side of our work. So the Family Network is a community of mutual support and solidarity among those who are searching for missing loved ones on the border. And that consists of different local groups and cities across the United States, as well as digital networks that connect folks across the Americas and in spaces of support as everyone navigates a very difficult search process. Many of the families we work with are not only grappling with the deep trauma of a missing loved one, but also continued extortion, concerns about documentation status in this country. I mean, the list goes on and on. Historia's Urquero Los is a oral history and testimony gathering project that seeks to center the voices of those most impacted by this crisis on the border and to humanize the families who are searching for their missing loved ones. And I'll talk a little bit about this in a second. How am I doing on time? I don't wanna... All right, I'm gonna skip through this. This is a little bit more about our DNA process, but essentially what happens is a family reports a missing person to us via Facebook, phone, email, in-person. We follow up with an hour and a half long intake interview that addresses everything from the circumstances of the person's disappearance. So for example, where were they crossing? When, what were their plans? Were they crossing with anyone? Do you have contact with those people to forensically relevant information? Like did they have any feelings in their teeth? Had they ever broken a bone? Did they have any unique tattoos on their bodies? Some of the identifications we make rely on those unique physical traits. I'll end with the families. I'm sorry, this is sort of rushed. I wish we could take a little bit more time, but I want to close by asserting that in addition to the narrative that we're barraged with daily about the criminal immigrant, there's also from the kind of liberal media, this narrative of like the helpless, oppressed, just like battered immigrant. And I would really resist that narrative and challenge you all to see the families that we work with as very active agents in the search for justice for their families. These are people who travel across the country, across the border looking for their loved ones. They're people who go to all the hospedages along the border in Northern Mexico asking if anyone has seen their family. They file missing persons reports everywhere. They film videos, they talk to press. These are not people who are just sitting and crying every single day over the loss of their loved one, but people who have taken it upon themselves to seek the truth and answers that they need. So to close I wanna share a couple of brief stories. This is Camarina Santa Cruz and her son Marco Antonio disappeared five years ago. He lived in Nogales his entire life just across the border in Mexico. And after a messy divorce with his family, he entered into a deep depression and was suicidal. And the only thing that he could see as a way out of this was coming to be with his mother, Camarina, who lives in Tucson. For that he crossed the border alone and disappeared and Camarina hasn't heard from him in five years. This is Felix Acinto-Golmes and his brother Pablo. Pablo is from Guatemala and in July of this year he crossed into the United States for the first time. Pablo didn't hear, Felix didn't hear anything from him and three weeks later he was actually identified through circumstantial evidence at Cooley Bree. In those three weeks Felix received over 25 extortion calls asking for thousands of dollars from people who claimed to have his brother hostage. And finally this is Irma Carrillo-Nevarez who is searching for her two children, Yadidra and Julio who disappeared in 1998. Yadidra was pregnant with what was to be Irma's first grandchild. And Irma testified a month ago at a commission before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about deaths and disappearances on the border. And this is her showing a picture of her heart with two holes in it that can't be filled as the absence of her children. I'll close by making an ask of you all. It's really important that we invite and engage all of you into the work of narrative change around migration and immigrants in this country. And Cooley Bree has just launched a campaign called The Vuelvanos or Bring Them Back in an effort to start doing this. We just launched a new website called bringthembackcampaign.org that features testimonies from families that we work with along with a living memorial of photos and names and ages of people who have disappeared. I would really invite you all to share this with your networks. As Leah said, I would love to be in touch with all of you to talk about ways that we can collaborate on projects that seek to humanize and engage people who have been so invisibleized and erased but who are ultimately very active and engaged in their searches. So I'll close there and I guess we can move into questions and answers now. But thank you all again for giving us this chance to share our work with you. Yeah, I don't know how, go ahead. Very few. Yes, so the question was essentially what are the repercussions for the United States government's systematic violation of international humanitarian law in this case? And in the case of the border, which is what I can speak to, very few. And so I showed the photo of the Inter-American Commission hearing. There have been hearings in the United Nations to talk about arbitrary deaths and disappearances caused by border policies and Leah can speak maybe to the component of immigrant detention. But essentially it boils down to sort of the strongly worded condemnation, which ultimately does very little. Which is why we've decided to move from towards centering family voices and appealing to the kind of human emotional component of the actual individual people who were in charge of these policies. So that meant in this case with the Inter-American Commission holding up all of the photos and names of people who have disappeared as the representatives of the United States government like the people in charge of the FBI's forensic unit spoke, which led them to agree to starting a group to compare the forensic information that the United States have with the information that we have. So it's a roundabout way of answering your question by saying that there's very little and ultimately you have to fight for these small victories by using but continually use this condemnation via international law as a somewhat legitimizing foundation to structure what you're saying. But yeah, I wish there were more enforcement mechanisms but there just, there really aren't. Yeah, I can't speak much to international law but I know that written into our immigration policy are what I think most people would identify as basic human rights abuses. And in the way that it's enacted are the things that are not written into it protections that are not written into our immigration justice system such as a public defender, such as that families cannot be separated, result in immense trauma being inflicted on folks who come to this country seeking a safer life or seeking opportunities. I will say that, so for example, one thing that we really learned this summer with the family separation crisis that some of you may or may not be aware of but was very publicly in the news, families have been separated by our immigration policy for centuries. But this summer we saw family separation in a way that we hadn't been seeing it very frequently before, which is that as a result of the, of just sessions, no tolerance, zero tolerance policy, parents and children who arrived at the border together ended up being separated and boarded patrol custody and sent to different ice holding facilities without any tracking of parent-child relationships which resulted in babies being held in detention, babies representing themselves in court. And what we saw was that even with the executive order to end family separation, family separation continues. And the only thing that has provided any sort of accountability is public awareness of what's actually happening in our detention facilities. So I'm very, very grateful for the public outcry around family separation that has resulted in less frequent separation of parents and children, although I will say that the numbers of families that were separated and the families that we saw represented in the news do not even near the quantity or different types of families that are separated on a daily basis at our border. But what we did see was that the community rose in support and there is now community leaders like the Florence Project, like the ACLU, like Kids in Need of Defense coming together to ensure that on an individual level, there is justice for these people. And then on a wider community level, through elections, people have, people are getting to cast their vote right now for what is and isn't fair. So I really think that community awareness of the human rights violations are the way towards accountability. I would, yes, sorry. The question was, and let me know if I'm paraphrasing this all right, how, given that you all come from across the country and that you're not all from a borderlands region, how can you raise awareness about the local implications of this border policy and kind of put pressure on your elected representatives, is that, did I get that right? Or what can be done? Okay, right. What can we do on a national level to address these policies? I think the first step is showing that what's happening on the border is not confined to the border. I think that we have to remind people about this in Coley Bree's work all the time, that the families we work with live in every city, every town, every part of this country. This is not that everything that happens related to immigration happens 60 miles south of here in a little line. So I think that's where you all as artists come in to show especially that you all who are engaged in very community grounded work in the different places around the country that you come from, showing that these are community members that we live alongside. They're people who we have a civic responsibility to stand in solidarity with. I agree with Leah. I mean, I frankly am quite disillusioned about the possibility of national policy change by pursuing a legislative agenda right now. And I think what we can do is really engage in the kind of hearts and minds cultural change work by showing that immigration is everywhere and that not doing like we are all, we are all immigrants, we're all, but I mean, seriously, like we all have a responsibility to people in our communities because the families that we're talking about are families that live very close to all of you. I will say that there are on the legislative end, there are certain promising inroads. Senators Cornyn and Harris are working with migrant justice groups on the border on proposed legislation about demilitarization and preventing border deaths and disappearance, which is heartening, but it's been several years that they've, or it's been two years now. There have also been expressed commitments on behalf of representatives like Ann Kirkpatrick to convene working groups in Washington DC. She's sorry, she's a congressional candidate for Southern Arizona to convene migration working groups in Washington in the likelihood that she's elected. So there are promising inroads, but I really think the work that we all have to do is showing that the border is everywhere and it's our responsibility to uplift stories because like Leah said, it really was the kind of immense public outcry that threw some sand in the gears of the machine of family separation. So that's I think what we have to be working on now. And just, I've been said that so eloquently and just to add on to that specifically about immigrant detention, detention is everywhere too. We have a lot of immigrants detained in the state of Arizona, a really, really large amount, but there is, and I forget the website, but I can send it later on and maybe that can get sent out to all of you, but there is a website that maps all of the places where folks are detained in immigrant detention facilities around the country and they're in almost every state. So I also wanna say that as I'm saying, like tell the stories, tell the stories. It's really important that if you have a platform to share the stories, they're the stories of actual individuals who want to share those stories with you. So if you're in a state and you can find out where the Immigration Detention Center is and you can find out what organizations are advocating for folks in immigrant detention and you wanna share their stories, their visitation programs, you can support organizations like the Florence Project in other states that are going in there and meeting with individuals and actively lifting up their stories that are being suppressed. I just wanna say one more thing. I guarantee that everywhere that you all come from, there are at least a few groups doing really great work locally to uphold immigrant justice and I would really recommend that you all reach out to them because while both of us work at organizations with a national reach, ultimately we know most intimately our own local context and there are people in your communities who will know better kind of these efforts so. Oh yeah, totally. So we're gonna move into the panel portion which is going to give you an introduction both to Tucson in general and also an orientation around the All Souls procession and our intention was really to try to, as you all do with your work as we do at NET, to really try to provide for you a range of voices with different perspectives on the same subject matter so that we can sort of hear how different people are thinking about the same thing. I'm gonna turn it over to you. Jerry Straubnicki is moderating this panel for us. Jerry is a NET co-founder. He's also a member of the board currently and as I was thinking about, gosh I need somebody from the NET community as an outsider who is really deeply rooted in community storytelling about place to help ask questions and be sort of a stand-in for all of us with a panel. You can see why I ended up where we did. So Mr. Jerry Straubnicki. Thank you. Is this on? Is this thing on? How we doing? That was some really an amazing set of presentations. My heart is full. I know yours is too. I don't wanna leave that. I don't wanna like leave that but we're gonna move on to some other complex conversations. So why don't we all just stand up for a moment? All right. I'd like you to close your eyes. Take one deep breath in and out. Open your eyes. Take another deep breath in and out. And with consent, find a point of contact with someone near you. Some sort of point of contact. Let someone else in together take a deep breath in and one more just for you. In and out and sit down. And let's thank the universe that there are people doing good work. All right. We are short of time. So I'm gonna change carefully negotiated instruction. I'm gonna ask all of my panelists to come up to the table and then we're gonna hear a bit for a moment about Tucson from two experts who live here. Then we're going to get a preview with some complex conversation around the All Souls procession that we will begin experiencing tonight. We're behind. That complex conversation is gonna be just a beginning. We will not finish it here. We will not finish it this weekend but we're gonna keep going. Just a little, just a short story about me. I work in a lot of communities but this is a, I've done a project or projects on the coal fields dealing with an exploitation and environmental damage and opioids in the Appalachian Eastern Kentucky. I've also done projects in a Pennsylvania community sitting atop the Marcellus Shale which suddenly got 2,000 fracking wells in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania. Both are right. Both are quite sure the other is wrong. So I want, and as I enter, as I enter into community we have to put aside our assumption. We have to enter with a point of view of learning and understanding and humility. And we have to enter with respect and open hearts and a desire never to damage. Are we good with that? Good. Okay. That said, I think we're gonna, we have a couple of presentations first from, and I'll ask them to introduce themselves because I'm not gonna presume to do that. These are amazing scholars and artists and community organizers as a group all from right here. So Maribel Alvarez and Debbie Chase, maybe, is it maybe? Maybe. Could have said Mabi. It's definitely maybe. So I'm gonna hand it to them for the first part of this which is an overview of Tucson after which we're gonna do, we're gonna be talking about the all souls procession which we're all gonna experience the rest of this weekend. Y'all ready? Here you go. Thank you so much. Welcome to our beautiful city. How many of you come from out of Arizona, outside of Arizona? Oh. Oh my God. All right. Welcome and bienvenidos. How many of you came from Tempe, Phoenix? Oh, thank you. Thank you. So we decided that we don't wanna take a lot of time from the rest of the conversation. Time is running fast. So we're gonna just share some factoids about Tucson that are important and meaningful to us. Debbie will go a little bit deeper into the particular cultural community. She lives and experience and is building here. Behind us, you're gonna be seeing images of Tucsonans. Every day Tucsonans and does a project we do at the Folklife Festival here called Faces of the Festival and these are portrait studio photos that we take at the festival and people give us consent to use them with their story. So you're gonna be seeing behind us faces of every day Tucsonans that are not here but who agree to photographs. So Tucson is, first of all, the ancestral land of the Tohono O'odham people. The name Tucson is a Tohono O'odham derived word. Called, it's really should be Tukshon. And Tukshon is a specific site here in town. It means the base of the Black Mountain and it's right here close to that town at the base of the Santa Cruz River. Used to have water and run through the middle of town and serve as the main area of establishment for many communities, including the O'odham people. The Tohono O'odham Nation is one of the second largest reservation in land of native people in the United States. So they're the Navajo and it's the size of the state of Connecticut. And it's an important, important community that has a feel and a presence in Tucson in many ways, including the desert, which you, I think some of you experienced, and the mighty Savado, which is the unique ecological region in the world, the Sonoran Desert that extends all the way to the Gulf of Cortezing in Baja. And it's also the colonization here began around the 1600s. I took a little bit later, longer than the rest of Mexico because it's really hard to get up here. The North was very distinct and separated and it created a Norteño culture, which is very independent and very entrepreneurial and very sort of like, you have to be really brave to come all the way up to the North and the Spanish colonizing apparatus took them a while. The railroad came a little bit later here than in many other parts. So you had a very sort of unique lab for the creation of what some scholars years ago used to call the Norteño personality, a sense of independence, fierce independence. Some of the tribes that were here, including the Autan people and the Opatas in Sonora were agriculturalists. So they took very, very well, not because they were passive but because they saw some benefits to some of the crops that the Spanish introduced, including wheat. So Sonora, our state neighboring state, is one of the largest wheat growing region in Mexico and that's why we have flower tortillas here. Large flower tortillas because the wheat that grew in this particular part, which is now heritage wheat we know as Sonora White, also had incredible level of elasticity in the seeds. So it allowed for you to stretch those tortillas in a big way and that becomes sort of an emblematic sign of Tucson. Some of the other tribes were not so friendly. In fact, this region contained two of the fiercest resisters to colonialism in the history of colonialization in Mexico and that was the Apaches and the Yaqui people in Sonora. So it was hostile territory for Spaniards for a long time and many others to come because of these two groups which resisted colonization and in some ways still do. There are 23 federal recognized tribes in Arizona, more than in any other place. It's also the site of the Colorado River, of course, and that's a big thing because the Colorado River is not just the site of the Grand Canyon but it's also what allowed a lot of the development of the control of water policy that allowed the imagined expansion of UC sun cities and things like that on the Sun Belt. So really the colonization of water has been a big topic. This is the land of the vaqueros. We invented cowboys. This is cattle country, wheat and cattle country. So we do the typical meal of a barbecue for Sonorans and Tucsonenses would be carne asada, that's grilled steak with flour tortillas and chile salsa for a little tiny chili we call chiltepin. In just a couple other things, the University of Arizona is one of the first land grant universities that's established in the 1800s immediately after the proclamation of the abolition of slavery and the President Lincoln moved very quickly to establish land grants university which were meant for the training and education of farmers, the children of farmers. The University of Arizona is a land grant university and then there were layer migrations as we will speak today. We have a large Chinese population with a lot of history here, African-American communities with just Debbie will talk about, so I have a large Jewish community and we have a lot of ethnic white that migrated particularly from the Appalachians south and also from the northern states. We have a very unique population in our town known as snowbirds and these are folks who come here to avoid the winter, the really harsh winters in the north. We have, because of that, we have a lot of newcomers to Arizona that don't understand a lot of the history but they're also bringing some level of wealth. Tucson is also a sort of a politically progressive area in some ways, the greatest paradox is that we have incredible social movements here including the Sanctuary Movement that was birthed here in the 1980s to aid the Central American migration from the Central American War that this country waged against Central American in the 80s. Church-based people who provided asylum and help resisted federal immigration policy and that is in contrast to the fact that Tucson is also the Tucson sector is ground zero for the largest number of arrests in immigration and law enforcement built up low-scale or middle-scale militarization. And lastly, I think I will say and I think my colleagues here, these are all, we're all friends and collaborators in many ways. It's a very rich cultural community. It's a community with incredible tradition of festivals at any point of the year, almost any time you will see some sort of outdoor celebration. Last time I counted 60 and that includes anything from sports related like El Tour de Tucson which is a bicycle run to the Festival Eye Direct which is one of the oldest folk-life festivals in the country to some meet yourself model after the American Folklife Festival in the National Law of the Smithsonian that festival's been going on since 74, our festival here and lots of incredible collaborations including some really remarkable literary production in this community. We used to have some pretty famous authors be part of us and our community and actually develop literary works of great importance here in Tucson including the first Native American Pulitzer Prize winner Scott Momade and so forth and so on. So it, it's just a little bit of facto is of Tucson and that's kind of fun. So I'm going to stop there and let you ask questions later. Wow, nothing better than having a folklorist, right? If you want multiple perspective and lots of understanding why don't we pass that mic over for Debbie and it's Debbie's turn more on Tucson from another perspective and then after that we move into all souls discussion. Good afternoon, I'm Debbie Chess maybe definitely right between yes and no. So one of the most interesting things about the, well a little bit about me, I moved here eight years ago from Chicago and one of the first things I noticed when I landed in Tucson is the lack of a very clear presence of African Americans in not only Tucson but the Southwest but that turned out to be a very, that was a kind of a facade of what is really happening in the black community in Tucson. And so when I first moved here I started working with the Loft Cinema as their director of development and community outreach and then was the executive director of the Arts Foundation here and then got an appointment with the University of Arizona and working under Maribel here as a community impact fellow with community engagement in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and in that role I am shepherding forward one of my many jobs is shepherding forward the re-envisioning and re-resurrection of a facility called the Dunbar Pavilion. How many from Tucson here are familiar with the Dunbar? And so, so the Dunbar was the originally the first, the segregated school into some built in 1918. It was the school was actually first established as the colored school for children in 1913 and was on 4th Avenue, not far from where we are here in a bakery in someone's home. And then the facility was built on at 325 West Second Street in the heart of the Dunbar Spring neighborhood and called the Paul Lawrence Dunbar School. So every child from the age, from first grade to eighth grade was educated in this facility and then it was purchased, it was closed down. I also wanna say a built, a structure right next to it was built in 1948 to accommodate a junior high school as the population got larger, children going there got larger and it too was named the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Junior High School. So in 1952, 1951, the state of Arizona handed down the desegregation order and our superintendent at the time decided that in order to ease our community into or to kind of reflect this new vision, this new progressive vision of desegregation, they were going to change the name of the school to erase all leftover, any vestige of desegregation in this community. So they named the school the John Spring Junior High School and depending on who you ask, the real story is that white parents refused to let their children go to a school named after a black poet and so they demanded that the name of the school be changed and it was and so there are now, there are alumni still alive that went to the school that will do not acknowledge the John Spring School. It is the Dunbar Junior High School and the whole facility is the Dunbar Pavilion. So it was closed in 1978, boarded up by Two Side Unified School District, doing shift of demographics and changing and so it sat abandoned for many years. The Neighborhood Association and the Dunbar Spring Neighborhood wanted the buildings torn down because of broken out windows, there's a lot of drug activity, crime activity. A group of alumni, Dunbar alumni said, no, that holds too much history, too much black history for it to be torn down so they formed something called the Dunbar Coalition and it was made up of the Tucson Urban League, the Juneteenth Committee. Who here is familiar with Juneteenth? Oh, that's so good to see. Many people don't, many, many people don't and so the Juneteenth Committee, the Buffalo Soldiers Association, the Dunbar alumni got together, formed a nonprofit and purchased the buildings in 1995 for $25 from Tucson Unified School Districts. Now this represents 55,000 square feet of property sitting on two and a half acres of facility that runs on from Maine and Oracle, for those of you who don't know that, it's a major thoroughfare from down from almost South Tucson to the foothills and so we have a community garden there, there's a commercial kitchen right now, it has houses, an idea school, a private school is there, Barbier Williams Dance Center is there, the Visual and Textile Arts of Tucson and Corey Press. Mari Baus spoke of the great literary work, Corey Press is an organization here that highlights the work of LGBT transgender people of color. And so I am the Dunbar Barber Academy, which is the largest barber academy in the Southwest, graduates the most barbers in the Southwest and so all of that is housed in the Dunbar pavilion now but we still have a lot of work to do in a long way to go and Mari Baus is my ally and many of the people here are my allies and making that happen. Okay, so one of the most important things to think about in terms of the black community here is that the real growth and shift in the black community is actually African immigrant, the African immigrant population here and so one of the ways that we look at how we tell our stories is incorporating that in what it is to be black in Tucson because the real, the population, the demographics is less than 8% here in Tucson of those that are black identified. We're battling a clock, which I hate because I wanna sit here and I wanna listen and I wanna learn. So anyway, right now we're gonna shift to the second part of this, which is to look at all souls and so we need to shift the video to the all souls video team. We have about 35 minutes. Yeah, did you like the images? Let's hear it for the people of Tucson. Really beautiful. So the way this is good, you bet. So Alicia, how much more time we have? Which means we can restore to our previous plan. We can, we can restore to our previous plan. But what's gonna happen is we're gonna see a video, we're gonna hear a three to five minute introduction from each panelist. You should know that we came up with a signaling system because we wanted to make sure all voices were heard and so when we get into the later discussion, which is just gonna be a panel discussion, you will see me giving this when they have a minute left and this when it's wrapped and that's to be fair, not for me to assert my white male straight privilege. Yeah, well, you know, we have to acknowledge what's there. So we're gonna start, I think our order is Adam and then Rachel and then Sarah, right? And then we'll hear again from the folks we've just heard from and then we'll go into a panel discussion here followed by questions and answers and we get to questions and answers. If you all start holding the stage too long, you get the same, right? Because we're smart people in this room. These are good, good people. I'm not that I don't wanna hear you, I just wanna hear everybody and we do that by agreement and rule, okay? So, yes, Madabelle? I realized that I never liked the art to be anonymous. So the photos were taken by Stephen Mechler, who's a local photographer and the project faces of the festival is done by Kimi Isel, who's sitting in the audience with you. So I didn't wanna be anonymous on those. Never too little time for acknowledgement of artists. So we saw Adam's work last night. He will introduce himself. The question that folks have before them for this part is just tell a little bit about yourself and how you entered the all souls procession or chose not to enter the all souls procession. And here we go. Adam, it's all yours. Hi everybody, my name is Adam Cooper Terran. I'm wearing my all souls procession hat for now for this panel. I'm the artistic director lead coordinator for the ancestors project, which is one of the projects within the all souls procession weekend. Some of the images that you're seeing right now are from the event from various years documenting the different aspects of the projects that are beyond just what the procession is, which is a massive procession of over a thousand, hundred thousand people that walk in the streets of Tucson every year. I had more images that I wanted to show. There was another video of stuff. I feel like it's best to maybe just give a brief context of somewhat, some of the history of the all souls procession, what it led to being this big event that happens every year downtown. And now on the west side of Tucson. Basically the event is a public ceremony, ceremony honoring and celebrating the dead. It started in 1990 with a local artist, Susan Johnson, who was grieving the death of her father and created a performance art piece out of her studio, inviting very select few friends and musicians of hers and created sort of a ritual ceremony performance, honoring and celebrating her father's death, doing it through her very artistic practices and in collaboration with other artists. The following year that moved out of the studio and became a walk through her neighborhood. The urge for people to wanna honor and celebrate their own dead became sort of adopted with that. And as the years progressed, more people just kept coming and walking within the Dunbar Springs neighborhood, which is where her studio was based. After probably about the fourth or fifth year, several hundred people were walking through downtown proper beyond the neighborhood, cutting through Fourth Avenue, down Congress, and usually ending at the Franklin Street docks or what used to be one of the other warehouses that was on Stone and Sixth Avenue. I'm sorry, Stone and Sixth Street. And usually these endings and finales would entail working with a lot of different other performance groups. So ultimately the capacity of the event growing required some kind of organizational foundation to support it. And many miles one stomach became the organization to support that. Taking on applying for funds every year through the Arts Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, NEA funds. But the bulk of the funding would come each year from just donations from the public. It's a very grassroots driven project that for all the years that it's been growing more, it's reached a capacity now of almost 150,000 people. Within that, there was a lot of discussions around how to make the event something that was inclusive for everybody. So there was a lot of room for people to participate. And even as a spectator, there was always an invitation where you don't just need it. There's no boundaries within the parade. You can be watching on the street and then just jump right in and walk the rest of the way if you wanted or you could step out and watch again from another vantage point. But the beauty of the event and I think the spiritual power of the event is in this way of allowing the public a space to be able to come in and not just be an observer that they can participate directly and not just through walking. There was plenty of these other workshops that were set up in the years that we've been doing this with different other groups. Like to some puppet works was a big group that would have workshops months leading up to the event where they would allow people to come and make big head puppets in representation of their ancestors or their loved ones. I've seen people make big floats of their dogs, of their pets that they walk through the parade. People make altars along the street. People walk with photos of their loved ones. The ancestors project as its own project allows anyone to submit photos in the months leading up to the event. I collect those photos and we digitally project them at the finale site on large buildings. We used to do it more along the downtown route but now it's pretty much focused to the finale site. And then there's the urn, which is a large vessel that was created as another way that the public can participate by putting the names of their loved ones or things that they wanna let go of or release or process that they leave in this urn that gets to walk through the parade and then at the finale site, it gets elevated and burned in front of 100,000 people. That's those, the ancestors and the urn are kind of like the legacy projects of what the procession is. It's evolved so much over the years in that it's grown so much and it's integrated so many different kinds of people, so many different communities, so many different cultures of people. It's a big smorgasbord of a lot of representation. I know we're gonna get into the delicate conversation of appropriation too, which is something that we've been addressing more frequently over the last few years simply because the event is so big and depending on what angle and what the optics are of how you're looking at it or engaging the procession can be seen from a lot of different angles and some of those angles can be problematic. Some of them can also be very empowering and very enlightening in the ways that I've experienced directly how people have engaged the procession, how they've submitted the photo of their loved one and they see it projected really large. I've seen the effect that that has on somebody. I've seen the effect of how people grieving their loved ones or their pets are processing their event, this whole process of grief. And I think that just speaks more to the greater need of why people need a space to be able to grieve their loved ones. However that gets represented with the utmost sincerity and respect too because the procession in and of itself is not a party, it's a celebration for the dead but with that is like the ceremony and the spirit of that. So that's kind of the context. I want to give. Thank you, Adam. You saw some of Adam's work last night, you'll see more of it all through the weekend apparently. So this is a community that collaborates across many different titles and organizations and it's kind of a beautiful thing. Anyway, Rachel directed one of the pieces we saw last night and she's a scholar and here she is. So I'm on this panel from more of a performance studies scholar perspective and I was invited to be on it because I've written several articles on the Tucson All Souls Procession but Jerry asked us to give a little introduction about how we came to the All Souls Procession or why we are drawn to it. And so my scholarship as a performance studies scholar, I focused for the last 17 years on the Burning Man Festival and I wrote a book called on the edge of utopia performance and ritual at Burning Man and I was very interested in particular of the burning of the effigy. They have a temple that memorializes the dead and is dedicated to suicide. It's a very grassroots event that started with 20 people on the beach and I was specifically interested in fire performance and as a venue for fire arts. And so when I moved to Arizona 12 years ago, I went to the Tucson All Souls Procession for the first time and I was fairly struck by a lot of the parallels and similarities in terms of the 20 people starting out very grassroots with no agenda. This one person at Burning Man was someone grieving a broken relationship and in this case it was Susan Johnson's dad. And I think Burning Man and All Souls are representations of festive sites that are completely grassroots that have no corporate sponsorship and they are sort of have grown and evolved. 20 people, 40 people, 80 people, 100 people up to now 100,000 people. Burning Man is now 70,000 people. So there's something really fascinating about that. But I wanted to bring up three points in terms of sort of a larger macro approach to festival theory and sort of why festivals are important in our society. So the concept of the festival palimpsest is something that I really like to think about. The concept of the palimpsest, if you look at like an old building and you see like an old ad that was there and it was torn down and you see a new ad and you see all these layers of history visible on the surface if you just look past. And so festivals are palimpsest, festival palimpsest. Every festival that exists is sort of this layering of history and memory. So if you go back to the history of All Souls and All Saints Day, it's actually a pagan festival, Samhain, that you went back long before. And the grafting of pagan festivals into Christianity is a lot of our Christian festivals are being grafted from these pagan events. And then in the 16th century with the conquistadors and coming to the conquest of the Americas, they brought over All Souls and All Saints Day to the Americas and they encountered the Aztec, the various festivals of the dead that were already happening here in the Americas and the birth of Die Selzwartos happened, right? So there's already these layerings of grafting of festival upon festival, All Hallows Eve, Halloween. So these three festivals like Halloween, All Souls Day, Die Selzwartos, various festivals are all happening in a three day period across the Americas, in Europe, and so it's interesting to think about spaces of festival palimpsest. The next point I wanna make is that history of festivals is the history of appropriation. There's these layers of appropriation. This is why it makes them such fascinating sites to observe and study is to see these layers. And festivals are spaces for the utopian performative. If you take Jill's Dolan of the utopian performative, she looks at it in terms of performance, but I look at it in terms of festival, that festivals become sites where communities imagine their ideal selves and bring themselves into being, and we see these layers. They become spaces of transformation, a spaces of possibility, a space for shaping and forging identity through gesture, through signs, symbols. Also after 9-11, and I interviewed Nadia and Paul about this, the All Souls became a site for national trauma, for mourning national trauma, vicarious trauma, and a place for public dissent where people could fight against this rally to war and say, no, we're not interested in that. We want to have a different approach. And then finally the last thing I would just say is that, yeah, just that the importance of these public spaces for memorialized death, to remember the dead, to gather in public spaces, and we can't lose sight of the importance of that. And why has this event grown from 20 to 150,000? It's serving some need. Of course, there's lots of complications that come with that, with appropriation, but just the importance of these public spaces as festivals and processions offer us. Thank you, Rachel. It's a complex place, complex thing about perspective. Sarah is an artist and community organizer, and she has the microphone. Here you go. Thank you all for being here, and hi, Joe. I haven't seen them in many, many years. My name is Sarah Gonzalez. I've lived here for 20 years, but I was born and raised in Oklahoma. And a few of the things I really wanted, so many things to say, but one is I also work for Mariposas en Fronteras, and we are a migrant justice group that works with queer and trans folks that are currently in immigration detention and also recently released. So I just wanted to say we like the Florence Project, but they are not the only ones doing social service work with migrants. And it's really important to say that because queer and trans folks really get left off the radar a lot of the time. And I also run my own consulting, talking about these very issues of social inequity across the country. I also work at the U of A just to say I get the honor of being educated by my community. So at the university, I work in the cultural resource centers with all of the cultural resource centers and run a youth poetry slam in town and La Pilita Cultural Center. So because of all of those endeavors, I get to meet lots of different folks and I listen to them and their stories and hear what's going on. I think my work that I'm very fascinated by is how do we create a space in an environment where we can talk about these kinds of things where the idea is not yes, we should do this or no we should not do this, but more of a both and we should be doing this and we should be doing this, right? So what does that look like? And some of the guiding principles, what are those? And we take some from the Zapatistas and one of them is that we have to walk and ask questions at the same time. So sometimes we say like, oh you're stopping this really important work, this crisis work at the border or this all souls that's really feeding people's needs to talk about death and it's not about that. It's like we can do that work and figure out what else is it that we need to be doing because we'll never get to the expert level and be very wary of people who say they are experts at anything. So I always think about power and impact, our identities, we should always be saying like where do I have privilege? I have privilege as an adult running a youth organization and so my youth are very comfortable saying hey I don't like when you did that or what is adultism because I bring it up as a person with privilege. So anytime that's in our work we should always be talking about, oh, you know, again not a condemnation but sometimes we're so stressed that we hear that first. So if we have folks talking about immigration and crisis at the border and there are two white people they should say we're white people and here's why we're here because there's folks of color in our org and this is really taxing and so we do this kind of saying the stories and stuff. So anyway, how do we get there, right? How do we say oh that's awesome, yes, let's think about that more and that's the work that I'm interested in. I think, I sometimes people are like, so does Roll Feisty, but I'm not. I just want us to all do better, right? I congratulate what we're doing and what can we do better because there's inequity that's there and at our best we will accidentally perpetuate inequity when we don't mean to and at our worst if we're not questioning things then people who gain power and are never questioned and have a lot of privilege end up being the most violent of people and traumatize our community. So for all souls, I don't choose to participate. I have gone before and there are folks in Tucson and mostly in South Tucson where there's a large Mexican American, Latinx population who choose not to go because of how it's so closely related to Day of the Dead or Dia de los Muertos and so for all of those reasons of it's a sacred tradition and even if it looks like celebration it's still sacred and you have people who have no idea what it is embodying that and buying things from Walmart, right? Our stories like that when there's lots of folks making that here locally and so folks have gone, I never tell anyone they shouldn't go but you should go and experience and choose for yourself but folks that I know and love dearly who go have just this different analysis of what they want and what they need and for them it's just sort of things that you can't control of like an Asian American woman that had gone and watched people dress up as dead geishas, right? So things that we run into with Halloween as well it's like that serves to at who's, we mourn but at who's expense, right? So who gets to participate in those spaces? So that's what I'll start off with. You had another 30 seconds. Oh, okay, well then I will say, well just when that last 30 seconds is what happens when there's an inaccurate representation or not a representation is that it's a tool of dehumanization, right? And that tool is very used to eradicate people. So anything that we talk about within culture appropriation and then I'll say these are the four questions that I got from the Wing Luke Museum when they did an exhibit on tribal tattoos and one is who is running it and it should be from the source community? Who profits from the event? Were you invited by the source community and is it a religious or spiritual practice that deserves greater impact? Just a reminder for those of you with Net in Seattle the Wing was one of our partners on that event and you might have seen that information there. We're still learning though, thank you. I'm gonna toss it to Madabelle or Debbie. Do you wanna go on this or should we open to, here, take it. Well, I wonder if because of the time we should also entertain some questions. We should probably pass that mic on. But time-wise we're good. We got about close to half an hour thanks to the audience, our participants' willingness. So I think we could go to panel discussion for about 15 minutes and then questions for 15 minutes. Are we good with that? Well, yeah, why don't you go ahead, please, please, please, they're really, really good. I know, sorry. Who is running it? It should be the source community. Who profits from the event? Were you invited by the source community and is it a religious or spiritual practice that deserves greater respect? So we're gonna go to panel discussion now where panelists can ask each other questions or and if that doesn't work so well, we'll get questions from you guys and we'll get responses. It is important for us, all of us, to realize we're making a safe space here and we have parachuted into this community, most of us, right, and so we don't wanna damage. All these people might not agree with each other on certain topics, eh? But they work together all the time and so we're not supposed to be the abrasive, the sandpaper. You can tell there's wisdom here. We should just listen, take it in, and before it's over, I'll offer a possible tool you might use to take in the festival through the rest of the weekend, how to assess something, how to look in different ways. So that said, there's multiple ways to look at these things, multiple ways to look at these things and we've heard a multiple of voices here and I don't wanna, I'll give this to anybody who wants it. How do we keep it as healthy as possible given that it's a non-curated event and people do shit? You will see those things and perhaps, Adam, you know the parts of it that are curated and the parts of it that are not and maybe you can start with that but we need to think about that and then our responsibility as artists on the long term to raise consciousness but what parts are curated and what not? Any of the projects that are hosted in the months leading up to the event, culminating in the engagement with the IRN and the Ancestors Project, I feel like, are the most curated, the grand finale spectacle that happens at the end of the parade is another curated part of that that usually entails a performance with different groups. They usually bring a music group along to, every year it's always a different group. Those are kind of like the most curated aspects of it that I feel have some semblance of control and also, yeah, there's other parts to those that even get lost in the planning and preparation of it. Rachel, could you talk about control of festival and what that is? Well, I think what's really unique about this festival, if you've ever seen the Macy's Day Parade or one of these big events, you know, processions or parades, they're highly policed and there's barricades, like you're officially part of the Macy's Day Parade or you're not. Like, you can't just jump into the Macy's Day Parade. You'll make national news if you do that. One thing that I think is really powerful about the All Souls procession is the porousness of it that people can jump in and out of the procession at any point and I think they don't, there has to be some, there has to be a lot of police presence which is just because of the nature of the people, so many people gathering all in space but the notion to regulate the content, I don't know, I mean, you can probably speak to that better but, yeah. Yeah, there's never been, there's a guide that we post that we spread out and educate the public around. It's not really telling people how to express themselves. There's this concept of creating the total autonomous zone where it's like the space where people can't express themselves but because we don't police that. I try to leave it to the intelligence and the sincerity and respect of people as humans to be able to kind of regulate that or check themselves but yeah, when Sadita's telling a story about how someone felt like that they were being misrepresented or that the way that somebody else was representing or wanting to express themselves in the parade was an offense to them, yeah, it's challenging because we don't really hear about that until like after, if there is a debris that involves the community to talk back at us, when those usually happen, it's like a one-time event when the way that the organizers kind of plan it, it's a challenge to try to get all of these perspectives too when people are having these different experiences because the organization isn't very big either. It's like a handful of people sort of running it, yeah. I'm gonna, Sarah, I'm not to put you on the spot but I'm moved by the yes and that you offered. Have you in your years here seen change in this procession and if not, what could change and how? Well, I think some of it is that, I know that was the one anecdotal story but it's the consistent story of like folks who are like, well, I'm gonna go check it out and they come back like a little traumatized from it so that's a consistent story, right? And that's what I do in my consulting work. Hey, if you wanna hire me. It's to work with groups and say like, one is how do you set structures that catches inequity before it gets to a certain level, right? And then one is when an inequity pops up, how do you deal with it? What is that process, right? Because if we don't have a process, then it will continue to happen. And some of the stuff that Adam said is important about educating. So if you're an organization, what are your values to be very clear about what those values are? So when folks do something that's against those values, then you're like, well, we told you who we were and like this isn't a space for you. Community discussions are always very helpful, hiring group of advisors that you get so busy with stuff and it's good to have folks that are representative of the community kind of advising, reflection and feedback is something that I see in all of my work that we don't do very much of because we're just going, going, going and it's finally done. You're like, great, I want to do sleep. And then you're on to the next thing, but reflection is incredibly important because that's when those stories will come back. And then just being explicit about the messaging, how that they're, maybe it's because of where we are, it's related to Dia de los Martos and we have to acknowledge that. Now we have responses from both Debbie and Maribel. Yeah, a comment on that is that a few years ago, I tried to bring together a group at the Dunbar to march in the procession and memorialize, this was the Trayvon Martin, this was the, you know, the rash of killings of African-American men that I felt was a really wonderful opportunity. Now I do not speak for the black community. You know, this is just one experience of trying to bring together folks with a very real and connected interest and the general sentiment was that it was a Mexican celebration procession and that this was not a way that that particular community wanted to participate in acknowledging the tragedy of those events. And so, and I think that that is a, it speaks to many things. It speaks to the black and brown relationship here. It also speaks to the narrative around what the procession is and exactly, you know, doing what you tried to really understand and unpack what the procession is. Maribel, thank you. The phrase cultural appropriation is problematic in many ways because it's a shortcut to point the finger to a very set of assumptions and it's not a space of ethical negotiation or engagement. It's just a dead end. It's like calling somebody your racist. No, I'm not. But you are, but I'm not. But you are, but I'm not. Or you're white and you are brown and you're black. I mean, all of these things, the phrase cultural appropriation stands in the way of the way that, like those questions that I mentioned, specifically try to raise a whole different level of engagement with the ethics of the practice. In the phrase cultural appropriation, there are three implied concepts. First, culture, which is the culture. With day of the dead, it's very problematic because it comes with their indigenous communities in Mexico who would claim this tradition who were actually appropriated by the Mexican state and their Mexican state. So the Mexican state in its apparatus of colonialism appropriated that and then the Catholic church appropriated it, so where is the culture? And I totally agree that there's lots of examples. The Navajo Nation sued urban outfitters for the use of the word Navajo in selling Navajo panties and lighters. This is true. And there were certain clear parameters of appropriation in a way that identified a particular culture. Day of the Dead is problematic. The culture of the Old Souls Parade is an invented tradition. It's what's called, it's an invented tradition. It's festival culture. It's more pagan than day of the dead. It's more, it has circus culture in it. It has pageant culture in it. Then the second part of cultural appropriation is property. Is that to appropriate is to take ownership of a property. So you, in the best cases of scholars and native communities trying to establish a sense of a line, a line of appropriation, they have to first establish the injury. Where is the injury and to whom? I believe there should be spaces in our community to have those conversations. As you all know, I spend more time criticizing the festival I produce and actually spend producing it. And those of you who know me know that that's an agonizing process for me. But I do believe we should have the conversation but the question of property comes with injury. Not only on a legalistic basis and when you go to the procession, you'll see that people are appropriating histories of their own in very different ways. One of the things that is distinct about culture, festival culture in Tucson, is that people are, it's not just white people celebrating some sort of native tradition. It's native people are there too. Chicanos are there too, representing their own interpretation of the day of the dead. And there are outliers who are kind of weird. Okay, what was that all about? And there should be space through the year to talk about those things and to document them and to create dialogue. And last, appropriation worries me in the sense of agency. Because if you police what culture I cannot, if I tell you you cannot take my culture, then pretty soon you're gonna tell me that I can't take that either, that I can't play with that. So it becomes a series of really stiff propositions about how do we invent who we are and how do we live collectively. Now, doesn't mean that everything is for the taking, absolutely, but it means that as ethnic people of color, we also don't wanna be, because you know what is the other side of that appropriation debate? Stay in your place. Stay in your place and do what you do. And you can't do anything else. So that's the flip side. And I know that nine out of 10, that message has been used against me to go and enter the spaces where I wanna appropriate. Theory, literature, intellectual practice, that has been used against me. So I wanna appropriate the tradition of European philosophy. I wanna appropriate it, you know? So as a woman of color, as a queer woman of color, I wanna appropriate histories that are not mine and transform them. So it can work, it can cut both ways and that's dangerous and makes me nervous. All this, all this is true. We keep hearing the words permission and agency, though, and I wanna just keep that on the table. Yeah, people will steal, people will appropriate, take property. Rachel, one minute and then we'll get some questions. Just a quick thing. One thing that I think is unique about the All Souls procession is this finale where Flemschen puts on this huge fire, aerial, stilt extravaganza, which is a beautiful piece of theater. If you look at what they're doing, I've been following Flemschen for 20 years. And the urn was something that they got a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant for $5,000 grant to do in 2005 and then it's become a tradition. So they're these invented, like you said, invented traditions that have come out of the festival. So I'm curious, this is really a question for people who know the procession better than I do. When you hear about Susan Johnson's, I wanna celebrate, I wanna honor my dad and I'm gonna get a shopping cart and put flowers in it and build this large art installation and push the shopping cart down the street and then 20 friends follow her. At that point, Dia Celos Muertos is not in that scenario, right? There's a couple years where she was going off the All Souls Day, which is historically been celebrated since back to Pagan times 2000 years. At what point, that tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell's concept of the tipping point, at what point did the creep of this sort of like, of the sort of fusion or the appearance of Dia Celos Muertos sort of imagery into the event? Maybe you know more about that. Meanwhile, think of your questions. We'll probably have time for two or three, okay? Probably one in the last five years, I think once the procession went past like the 70,000 person mark and then it got to like 100,000 people and now that's over 100,000. Yeah, I think it's just the scale of that and that kind of like skyrocketed in just the last five years or so. All right, we've got time for just a couple of questions. I'm gonna have to restate the question. Let's start here and then there and so we've got our first two and three. I wanted to talk about, there's a documentary called The Language You Crying and it's a documentary about a scholar who went to the Gullah Islands and interviewed this woman who knew the songs from a child and she didn't know that the song had to do with ancestry and so they found that there are people, or Mindy people from Sierra Leone and that the song that she was singing as a child that they thought was a child nursery rhyme in indigenous language was actually a song that was done during a ritual at the grave site when our ancestors are buried and the song in translation was saying, don't forget my name. So the point of me saying this is that when it comes to ancestral worship, ancestral worship, it is an indigenous way of life globally and that it really concerns me around the word death because in most indigenous cultures, that word doesn't even exist. That is more of a European term that comes from a finality where we just believe in transition. So I just thought it was important to say that, especially in relation to the black and brown relationships and what colonization and enslavement has done to us. Thank you. Do we have a response from anybody on the panel on that or should we take the next? Thank you for adding that to our mix. We had a question up here and I can't reach you so I'll try to restate it. Oh hi Rebecca. So this would go to Adam so we should make sure you, yeah, as best you can. You're not the only person that does this. There's another 999,999 people that do it. I'll try to. But given that, just to restate the question, it's kind of a calling in of John O'Neill. Who is this for and what do you want them to get out of it in all those things? Who is it for? What, how intentional is what they want to get out? Is what you want those people to get out of it in terms of education, in terms of alterculture, et cetera, can you respond to that in two minutes? So, you got all weekend Adam, we see you again. He's at pretty much everything we're doing so just keep bugging him. To address the intention to create a space for people, for the public to be able to express their grief around death, that's kind of like the primary intention. The second part of that of how people end up sharing those cultural expressions of grief and death or of transitioning into other spaces beyond, that's kind of an indirect outcome of what the event does. There are groups that have come together to collectively grieve a particular thing or an idea even and they've made a float that is like an altar to democracy and the death of democracy. That was one piece that a group of people decided to create for the procession and they walked through that. Other people have, families have come together to honor a particular death of a loved one or of a son or a child that died. Tonight at the park, there's gonna be a whole event for children, procession of little angels. That's like where all the community comes out and makes altars that are dedicated to children. Some of them are made by different groups and families collectively. There isn't really a specific textbook or space in how to train or educate anyone on how to make an altar per se, but in those spaces as other people come, I think by observing and through the kind of osmosis of the experience, like other people begin to see, like, oh, I could put a photo on here. Oh, I could put a piece of art on here. I could put flowers and I think whenever the workshops are ongoing that people are engaging to make other things, aside from altars too, like there's other projects and other artistic things that come out of these workshops, depending on who's teaching them, there's always space for not just learning about how to grieve, but also how to express that artistically and then through that process, conversations happen, stories are being passed around, people are collectively sharing their grief experiences in those spaces, but those are usually private and not, or they're smaller scale, they're not talked about that much, but they happen like months leading up to the event. We hope I answered enough of those. And you'll all have, most of us will have the opportunity to experience it personally. We have one last question and I'm gonna, so I don't have to restate it. Great, it's really more of a comment. I just want first of all to say thank you. It is so rare to have the opportunity to have this honest dialogue with all of the complexities of our perspectives and feelings and processing over things that are fundamentally challenging about being in this country and being from where we're from and all of the diversity of what that is. And so thank you for just putting that out there in that way, it was just remarkable. And the quick final thing is, because I love this conversation so fundamentally and deeply personally, you said a word at the very end. It just slipped out of your mouth in the last thing that you were saying and it was the word transformation and the yes and that you say, or how are we going to go forward from where we are? And that's the idea that for me is compelling, the most compelling as we tease through this complexity. So if I leave you with a question, it's that. What is that? Yeah, if you can do it in 30 seconds because we're out of time with one last thing. I think I want to acknowledge the fact that the growth of two things, the growth of the, also has created internal problems for the organizers. It's not an easy thing to do. They have had to face a change that came from the five-year mark that you mentioned. It's also very curious because that is the time span when corporate America got a whole day of the dead as a big thing that became popular. So there is a larger context of which is feeding some of these other sort of language and discourse around the festival. I can tell you the organizers struggle with the fact of how to then now contain and retain some of the authenticity of this sort of hybrid practice that is very Tucson in a lot of ways. When I have friends on the South side and they say, boy, I went and that was not at all a day of the dead celebration. My answer always is no, it wasn't. It's not supposed to be at all. In fact, the day of the dead images that you see are usually brought in by our own people bringing some sort of participation of the day of the dead interpretation. And then in the last five years, this more of a corporate messaging thing that has evolved. And that both in terms of size and closing the streets and hiring police and pouring barricades is also complicated. And I don't think we spend enough time sometimes in how is it that an intention gets translated to the actual production of these cultural works that we curate in words that are really sometimes problematic? Thank you, I didn't mean to grab for that. Okay, one more thing to add, but before I do that, what a discussion. It's just the beginning. Nothing here is solved. Nothing will be solved this weekend or after. Yeah, I tell you what, is this a conversation that you go on the road? And can I tell you something else, just a secret? There was a lot of discussion about whether we should do this at all, whether certain people wanted to participate. The huge courage to have this conversation here and your courage to participate. Hand. Okay. This'll just take one minute, but when I transitioned from kind of a European conservatory way of working and seeing to working in community, I had to figure out how to look at things and I realized that I had not been trained for that. So I'm gonna just offer this. Just seven As, we talked about that word appropriation, but that's not one of them. Agency, we talked about it a lot. Who is making the choices? Are they close to the issue? Is it of that culture, of that place? Authenticity, is it real? Is it the thing you can touch? Artistry. We'll see good masks, we'll see lousy masks. Based upon whatever your cultural construct of a lousy mask is, or a good mask. These are not solid things, but you have to ask yourself that. Accuracy. If it means to be factual, is it? Is it telling the facts properly? I have this one. And I did that because if you see something that's inaccurate, it makes the work not work, right? Audacity. Doing things in ways that nobody has ever seen them done before. And I cannot wait to see the audacity of this event tomorrow. Audience, who's it for? What do you want him to get out of it? You know, my King Lear's not gonna work for the preschool audience. It didn't. Accessibility. Is it accessible? Physically accessible? Is it accessible to people with special needs? Is it accessible in terms of understanding for the audience you want? Do these seven things, these seven As, and you have a way of looking. A way of making and a way of analyzing. So I offer that. Use it if you will. Yay! Thank you to Jerry. Thank you to our panelists again. Everything that Jerry said about courage and the whole conversation and planning that led to this, I would also add the word generosity. Huge generosity. Thank you for the co-decision about adding time. That means, however, that you need to be intentional about your next movements. Those of you who signed up for dine-arounds, I especially am talking to you. Once we break, and there's an announcement after mine, so hold on for a second. Once we break, I'm gonna ask you to make your way quickly into your groups and the lobbies. Those of you who are hosting the dine-arounds, see me and I will hand you your sheets and give you a note about what you need to know. Shareen is finally gonna get to give an announcement. Shareen is usually our Shareen on the scene who does all announcements, and she's so busy doing everything else that she hasn't been able to, so. Shareen on the scene, one time appearance! I'm going to make this very brief. At 7 p.m., there will be a shuttle at Armory Park that will start to take people over to the Barrio Stories. It is gonna go between 7 to 8 p.m. So it's a 15-person shuttle. If you want to meet there and it'll go back and forth within that hour, me, Park and Nicole, Park and Nicole, raise your hands in case people haven't met either in the back, will be at the address that's in your program. That's the address the van shuttle has. There's a building there that's on the west side of the park. It's the community center, and there's diagonal parking spots. That's where we'll be, and we'll be organizing that shuttle to take people over to Barrio Stories starting at 7. You're more than welcome to get to Barrio Stories yourself and not come there if you don't want to. And then afterward, from 10 to 10 30, at Barrio Stories, the same shuttle will take people back to the hotel, if need be. That is my announcement. Go do your thing. See you at sessions.