 on to retrieving the real history, exploring the Margaret Randall's archives at UNM. I'm Liz Hutchison. I'm a faculty in the Department of History and also director of the Feminist Research Institute, all of which leads me to this precise moment. A reminder that after this panel that I'm about to present, we will have a panel, a conversation by Giaconda Belli and Margaret Randall at 4 p.m. our time. And before I get started and do a brief introduction of our panel, I'd like to welcome a special guest, Margaret Randall, who's also here to greet you. Thank you so much, Liz. Can you hear me, everyone? I hope so. So good afternoon to everyone, participants and guests and special thanks to Naomi Ambrice, Dr. Jessica Fraser, Barbara Corbel, Gabriella Silva, and Dr. Roberto Tejada for coming together for what I know is going to be an exciting panel. And of course to Giaconda Belli for the interview conversation that will happen later this afternoon. I know we're all eager to hear what our panelists have to say, but I do want to take a moment to thank a number of people who's really hard work, especially in this time of pandemic have made this day possible. The University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Studies has curated my archives, photographic, as well as literary for almost two decades now. Thomas Jane is the Center's Director and I thank him for his support. Fran Wilkinson, interim Dean of the University Libraries, as well as the Willard Endowment gave valuable encouragement and support to this event. My appreciation also to all the campus departments and programs, the Lannan Foundation, Sally Bingham and Gay Block, who provided financial aid. No one though has worked harder than Dr. Liz Hutchinson. It was her vision that conceived this celebratory event and her tireless creativity that brought it all together from sparking interest, consulting periodically with me, raising the money to inviting the panelists in Chaconda and dealing with numerous technical details, I think up until just about five minutes ago, right? So my gratitude to all of these individuals and entities as well as to all those behind the scenes. Thank you and now back to you, Liz. Thank you so much, Margaret. I am so grateful also that Margaret was able to thank all of our sponsors and supporters and I thank all of you coming to us from so many parts of the world in the United States as well as New Mexico. I'm going to just briefly give the introduction of panelists in the order that they're going to speak. Our plan is for the first hour to have those presentations followed by discussion led by those questions that you choose to put in the Q&A box in the fabulous Zoom webinar. First in speaking to us will be Gabriela Simba-Guen who comes to us from Mexico City. She has a master's degree in American Literature from El Collegio de San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Following her presentation will be Barbara Corball, a PhD student in the history department at UNM and a fellow at the library who has been processing the recent requisitions of Margaret Randall's photographic and manuscript archives. Following Barbara will be Roberto Tejada, the Hugh Roy and Lily Kranz Cullen distinguished professor in creative writing and art history at the University of Houston. Naomi Ambrice follows, she's a fourth year PhD students in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Finally, Jessica Frazier joins us, a newly minted associate professor at the history of Rhode Island. I'm going to let them do further introductions and get us all started reminding you that you can put questions into the Q&A box in Spanish or in English and we will endeavor to keep this as bilingual an event as possible. Thank you and I hand this over to Gabriela. Thank you. Well, hello everyone. Thanks for being here. I'll introduce myself very briefly. I am an independent scholar in Mexico City. I have a master's degree in American Literature from El Collegio de San Luis at San Luis Potosí, Mexico. And my master's thesis was about the history of the little magazine El Corno en Plumado. Today I will talk about some of Margaret Randall's work in El Corno en Plumado during the 60s and some of its links with her archive at UNM. But first of all, I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Hutchinson and the University of New Mexico for inviting me to this panel. And of course, I would also like to thank my maestra, Margaret Randall, for her generosity and commitment to new scholars. I am very lucky to count myself among these. So I wrote some notes on Margaret's first steps in writing, editing, and translation, specifically while she acted as the editor of a little magazine called El Corno en Plumado during the 60s in Mexico City, which is of great relevance to the Mexican literary landscape. But I would also like to note that at the Margaret Randall archive at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, we can find documents that can complete the whole picture of Margaret's artistic endeavors. For seven years during the 60s, Margaret Randall co-edited El Corno en Plumado with Mexican poet and former husband, Sergio Mondragon. Together, they published uninterruptedly 28 issues every three months until Mondragon left the magazine in October 1968. A month. Hi, we seem to have a frozen screen problem. Gabriela, we are hoping to get you back. There you are. I think I'm having some technical problems. We can hear you. Okay, thank you. Okay, sorry. Okay, so together they publish uninterruptedly 28 issues every three months until Mondragon left the magazine in October 1968. A month in Mexican history that will not be forgotten because of the Tlateloco massacre. When the Mexican armed forces attacked unarmed civilians, most of them students that were protesting the lack of civil rights, freedom of speech, police brutality, et cetera. Thousands were arrested and hundreds lost their lives. October 2nd, 1968, the day it all happened, opened a wound that still hurts in Mexican memory. In July of that year, both Randall and Mondragon expressed their support to the students in the editor's note of El Corno en Plumado. From the moment those words were printed, not only did national institutions withdraw their economic support for the magazine, but the editors were targeted by undercover policemen. Suspicious men parked in front of their home. Policemen dressed as civilians, followed them or left threatening notes in their cars. The small printing presses that they used to print El Corno were rated to sabotage the publishing. Among other things, this drove Mondragon away from Mexico City. He took a job to teach Latin American poetry at the University of Indiana. Margaret Randall stayed in Mexico. Issues 29 to 31, the last ones of the collection, were published because of her perseverance. She wrote over 600 letters to the contributors and friends of El Corno en Plumado asking for their support. She managed to raise money for one more issue, and afterwards she reached an arrangement with a small independent publishing house called Movimiento Editores, that helped with the payment for two more issues. Margaret then was the sole main editor of Issues 29 of El Corno en Plumado, where she was assisted by some other few people, including artists Felipe Airemberg. Issues 30 and 31 were co-edited with American writer Robert Cohen. Even though Margaret Randall was not alone in the editor's shape of El Corno, she was there from the beginning to the end, throughout all the seven and a half years that the magazine lasted. For those of you that do not know El Corno en Plumado, it was a bilingual magazine with an average of 2,000 copies per issue that published both canonic and new voices of poetry from all over the American continent. It belonged to a literary and artistic network in a world where human connections were not aided by digital platforms we take for granted today. The poet Ernesto Cardinal referred to this network as the Troop and American Union. El Corno had over 700 contributors, 20 representatives in 35 countries, and as new research shows, it had over 60 translators. Even though it is true that El Corno was not the only magazine in the 1960s, its value goes beyond the art and the poetry it published. El Corno en Plumado is one of the few artistic bilingual magazines of the era, a magazine that was run by a woman and a man, by an American and a Mexican. Margaret Randall was one of the few women behind the editorship of a literary magazine in Mexico and in Latin America during the 60s. When Margaret co-founded El Corno in 1962, she was very young, she was 25 and a single mother wanting to thrive as a writer in a male dominated culture. This did not stop her. Her enthusiasm and ambition resulted in a unique bilingual literary magazine. Nowadays, Sergio Mondragon states that the outstanding quality of El Corno relied on Margaret Randall's sense of organization and management. I would add that it also relied on her artistic sensibility and her deep sense of justice. In El Corno, Margaret Randall often expressed both statements through her own poems and through her editor's notes, but also with her particular way of editing the magazine. Her editor's notes, sorry, in issues 15 to 31, often stated political thoughts, for example, on Lyndon Jensen's administration or the Cuban Revolution. But in El Corno, we can also find pieces she chose to publish with a very strong position on international politics without sacrificing artistic qualities, such as the poems of issue 18, written by Algerian women that were held prisoners by the French armed forces during Algeria's independence war in 1962. Also, her love and admiration for the Cuban Revolution was often expressed in the magazine, but specifically in issue 23, one of the best issues of the entire magazine's collections, of the entire magazine's collection that was dedicated to Cuban poetry and entirely translated to English in an attempt to diminish the culture of Locate, the United States government, exercised over the island. She wrote a chronicle for that issue that includes some of the answers from interviews with working women, taxi drivers, and students, among others, during the late 60s in Havana. This is a very interesting piece in many aspects. In the first place, this piece is written in the style that Margaret mastered over the years in her books on oral history from the 70s onwards. Secondly, it is one of Margaret's first attempts to pointedly tear apart misconceptions about the island to an American audience. At dusk, she still carries on to this day. If we look at Margaret's papers at UNM, we can find this same piece published in Edge, an American magazine. It would be interesting to compare these two versions and see what similarities and differences exist and in what circles that magazine was read. What we can find in Margaret Randall's papers concerning this period in her life allows us to take a look at what is usually overshadowed by her role as an editor. I am referring to her work as a contributor to other little magazines. As some of you may know, El Corno has two archives. One is held at New York University and the other one at the University of Texas at Austin. And both contain letters inviting Margaret to contribute in other magazines, but we cannot read the contributions. The advantage that Margaret Randall's papers offer is that it owns rare magazines from different parts of the world where Margaret sent pieces from her days in Mexico where she expressed her perspective on politics and of course, her poetry. To have them gathered in one place is enlightening because we can appreciate on one hand that she was an active part of the network of little magazines spread all over the world, not only as an editor of El Corno, but as a writer and an intellectual. On the other hand, this shows how Margaret acted as a bridge among cultures, especially during these years. Looking through these contributions, we can have a more complete idea of her writings in literary magazines of the time. And perhaps more importantly, we can retrieve real history. I refer here to Margaret's capacity of questioning official narratives. She offers an approach grounded in personal experience and a critical lens through which we can and should relate to history. I have to be honest, I have not been able to visit Margaret's papers at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections due to the pandemic. By browsing through the online catalog, we can get a general idea of what can be discovered. There is still so much of Margaret's greatness that we do not know yet and much of it lies silent in the papers held at UNM. It will be the new scholar's pleasure that has been the object of Margaret's generosity, including myself. To voice the archive and share Margaret's labor, which remains to be of great importance to the compulsory reexamination of the history of the world we live in. Thank you. Hi, Gabriella. Thank you. And I'm following Gabriella. Saludos a todos los presentes, familiares, compañeros y amigos. Greetings to my family, library co-workers, and comrades. Can you hear me? I just wanna make sure. Liz, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, can you see me? Yes, not right now. Okay, let me just, I'm gonna get a little, okay, there we go. Okay, I'm on. I have been asked to speak today because of my work as one of the processing archivists who set up the Randall manuscript documents and photographs at the University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research. Today, I have a title for my brief commentary and I wanna share it with you in order to evoke the social justice movements that are currently fighting for our lives and also to frame this discussion about the Margaret Randall collection from a historian archivist point of view. The title I have here today is Archives that Matter for the 21st Century. The Margaret Randall collection is an archive that matters for the 21st century. Now, more than ever, in the 21st century, we need archives that matter. Historically and to this day, scholars and artists in all fields who search for archives dealing with race, identity, imperialism and state sanctioned violence have been involved in a process of disaster recovery. Our cultural workers oftentimes hit brick walls or end up having to be satisfied with an occasional unexpected discovery of a single document buried in a box of archives. And contrary to what people think, archives do not speak to you. The worst mistake we can make is to anthropomorphize archives because archives are man-made, developed within state sanctions, edifices and constructed to determine who is considered important in a society and what is worth keeping and who is worth saving. In the archives, all lives do not matter. And those who are erased in the archives are the same groups and communities silenced in the institutions and systems that govern our everyday lives. In her most recent memoir, I Never Left Home, Margaret refers to herself as quote, a builder of bridges, unquote. And the Randall collection is another example of the beauty and architecture Margaret uses to make sure that voices that are marginalized, hidden, disappeared in the archives, that these voices who speak on behalf of the dispossessed may be recuperated and preserved for our future generations. Because of how important these archives will be to future understandings of historical events, Margaret's social justice work, advocacy and bridge building with her archival documents will continue long after all of us are sitting here and are gone. In the Randall archive, the list of correspondence embodies the voices of people who need to be heard. These are some of the greatest thinkers of our time who have tried to answer the question of, how do we get out of this imperialistic mess we find ourselves in? Let me speak some of their names found in the correspondence. Huey Newton, Zheokan the Belly, Marge Piercy, Allen Ginsberg, Audrey Lord, Alice Walker, Asada Shakur, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Annette Kaladney, Daisy Zamora, Jane Norling, Judy Jonda, Kathy Bodine, John Nichols, Barrett Price, Al Bhavani, Audrey Enrich, and last, but definitely not least, Ernesto Cardinal may he rest in peace and rest in power. The reason we are speaking about Margaret Randall today is because when Margaret hits a brick wall, she builds a bridge. For example, in her 1980 work, Sandino's Daughters, Margaret created a bridge with the oral histories of women revolutionaries in the Sandinista movement. Seeing the erasure and silencing of women, Margaret created archival materials to preserve the memory and experiences of women engaged in groundbreaking revolutionary movements. Further, knowing that memory is a key to storytelling, she went back a second time in Sandino's Daughters revisited to strengthen this edifice, this bridge, and allow these women to collectively develop more facets of their identities over time as women and as women revolutionaries. That in and of itself is stunningly remarkable and breathtaking in its undertaking. Margaret's photography builds another archival bridge and her photos function as chapter books, books on identities that have been historically left in the dust of patriarchal racial capitalism. In Margaret's photography, she builds narrative bridges between the experiences of subjects and their historical realities. For example, a photo in a cemetery of a simple 19th century tombstone that reads simply nothing else, it says, mother and baby. Mother and baby reminds us that this is not only a grave of a nameless woman who died with the baby and childbirth, but it echoes within the historical narratives of women's lack of reproductive safety, freedom and rights, both then and now. And to quote Margaret, quote, the thing about bridges is that they multiply. When you walk across one, another appears, unquote. So too, this can be said of the depth embodied in Margaret's photography, whether it be of the Cuban Revolution, Sambanista Comodantes, the lyrical beauty of historic places and spaces, or the experiences of the Randall family over time is a site of a global family that changes, evolves and grows. The Randall collection is an example of an archive that matters. I'm getting choked up. It is an example of the kinds of collections that need to be prioritized in the 21st century. State sanctioned archives need to directly participate in the disaster recovery needed to search and find the voices that have been historically marginalized. The Randall collection is an example of an archive that matters in the 21st century and offers us hope and understanding at this historical moment when restorative justice is desperately needed. Margaret, I thank you for the opportunity to have our paths joined. And I look forward to the next bridge that you will build. Thank you everyone for listening. One love. My warmest thanks to Dr. Liz Hutchinson and to my fellow panelists and to all the participants joining us today. I'll dive right in. Poet, archivist, excuse me, poet, artist, activist, lesbian, feminist, cultural innovator, and internationalist. Margaret Randall has led a life aligned with decisive moments of cultural and social unrest. New York City in the late 1950s, Mexico City in the 1960s, Revolutionary Cuba from 1969 through 1980, and Sandinista Nicaragua during the early 1980s with courage, criticality and self-reflection she has sought to restore language twisted by our sociopolitical systems, she writes, in order to provide us a dignity that documents and empowers. In her creative and social commitments, in her concern for memory and its vulnerability, the archive of Randall's life in art and action contain embodied evidence of mid to late 20th century intellectual life, U.S. Latin American connectivity in poetry and print culture, art and photography, translation and other forms of reciprocity. The holdings register involvement in the Americas, especially Cuba and Nicaragua, the struggle for women's rights and gender empowerment, as well as Randall's unique experience of immigration and immigration in the hemisphere. The archive contains documents that tell of her confrontation with post-war U.S. American policies, restrictive of domestic and social life, even as she established networks of art advocacy, political debate and cultural dissemination, quote, a moving totality of breaking down of barriers to provide a show place for all that is vital and meaningful in contemporary activity, creativity, social involvement, as related to quote, matters of place, locale, end quote. A moving totality, those words appear to the editor's notes in the 1966 issue of El Corno Emplumado, the groundbreaking literary magazine that Margaret Randall co-edited with Sergio Mondragon in Mexico City from 1962 to 1969. Today, I'd like to describe a few scenes that connect Margaret's contributions to contemporary thought in her commitment to promoting a form of literacy that aligned print culture, poetry, photography, with possible political self-hoods. These identities are rooted in the practical knowledge of displacement, unsettled citizenship, and a style of internationalism, like that of the Cuban revolution, inclined to forge, I quote her, strong connections between the manual and the intellectual, the arts and the sciences, liberation and culture. In El Corno Emplumado, the reproduction of artworks eventually replaced the strictly typographical composition on the cover to each of the journal's first 14 issues, as we're seeing here. The editors had identified a new era for the arts, one that printed in Bauhaus-inspired, all lowercase font, was close to Latin America, I quote from the editor's note, her poets, problems, mystique. While addressing as well the contradictions that inhabited the quote, great empty space between the real positive action on the part of North American youth radicals and creatives and the mass media lie. A black and white image by Mexican cameraman, Rodrigo Moya, featured on the cover of the January 1966 issue of El Corno Emplumado 17. Moya framed the photographic composition to highlight three male youths bearing firearms, backs turned away from the camera with a corner wall serving as a shield as they combat in resistance to the military presence of US Marines on the streets of Santo Domingo. Additionally, that issue's editorial note, a regular feature related how Randall M. Mondragon had returned from a rally in the United States, quote, marching with 30,000 other human beings, artists, housewives, teachers, businessmen against the madness of the US policy in Vietnam. Later issues of the journal demonstrated a growing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and the country's new directions in art and culture. Issue 26 was devoted to Cuban poetry, as Gabriela mentioned, and issue 27 featured photographs by Cuban photographer Mario Garcia Goya, Goya or Mayito of Che and Fidel, Playa Hidon and La Habana. Randall recalls that by 1969, El Corono had lost much of its financial support and print shops were scared away from printing the journal. The editors faced, quote, political reprisals and persecution, eventually forcing Margaret into hiding in the middle of 1969 and eventually out of Mexico to Cuba that year, an episode recounted in her various life accounts, including her memoir, I Never Left Home. In this context, Randall's archive suggests some through lines for research into her own dual practice as writer and photographer. In light of El Corono and Plumado's commitment to poetry as a transmittable force and vehicle for communication, hemispheric and international in scope. Enhancing the journal's critique of US imperialism, its mass media skepticism in the context of the Vietnam War, Mexico student movement and the trauma of Javelorco and Randall's papers and voluminous correspondence with artists and writers during her experience of the Cuban Revolution from 1969 and 1980 and after are linked together. In the last two years of her years in Cuba, Randall apprenticed with Cuban photographer Ramon Martinez-Granval. Even as the archive appears to contain no papers related to Cuban photography, it bears to read the images she produced then in light of a concurrent 1978 exhibition and colloquium that the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía organized in Mexico City. La primera muestra de fotografía latinoamericana contemporánea hecho en América Latina. In its publications, the Consejo Mexicano expressed the energies and attitudes defining tenets of what Idelber Abelar has specified as the dynamic connecting modernization and the prospect of U.S. imperial encroachment to the aesthetic drive of Latin Americanism. Under the mentorship of Martinez-Granval, Margaret viewed photography as did the Consejo Mexicano innovators as an accountability compelled to interpret with images the beauty, conflict, triumph, defeat and longing of a people and to quote aspire accordingly to produce an ambiguous and committed art. This was from their convocatoria. Of her desire to learn photography, Randall has described her visual practice as linked to quote, a search for language that was neither English, my native tongue, which during my years in Latin America, I could rarely share with those closest to me or Spanish, a language I spoke with family and friends but in which I'd never been able to write poetry. End quote. Randall's Cuban photographs serve the artist as a form of alternate speech, the idiom as action and a surrogate homeland. Claims confirmed by poems in Randall's 1978 collection, Carlotta, prose and poetry from Havana. Topically, the photographs in the University of New Mexico collection reflect occasions of public affirmation in socialist public space, including marches in support of the revolution, images of military training, but also of parades, performances, poetry readings and festivals. Closer inspection of the proof sheets and prints that correspond to negatives from her Cuban photographs provide insight into the makeshift conditions for producing negatives and developing prints, material circumstances that defined the era's visual aesthetic. As Margaret has written, quote, in the cube of those years, there were no stores where you could buy packets of powders, you could mix with water to produce developer, stop bath or fixer. We mixed our own from the chemicals we'd get at compound pharmacies when you could get them, end quote. Images like the one we're looking at, girl with shoes, Alamar Javana, 1978, contain what Randall sought in a photograph, quote, the scene and the unseen, the girl on whom I focused and little boy walking behind her who I didn't notice until I took the print from the developing tray. Others like mother and son Havana Sidewalk reveal Randall's eye for depicting the everyday heroics, especially for women and children, parallel to such poems as motherhood, which trace the maternal as the unacknowledged reason of history that's published in Carlotta. Still others, as though in reply to Raul Corrales' iconic picture of a young rebel soldier asleep on a cot in the elegant home of a bourgeois family that had abandoned the island, I'm quoting Margaret, an admitted reference point for Randall, constitute a series of interior views into the private realm and the national vernacular from the perspective of the street level passerby. It stands as well to upstream these portraits of Cuban daily life from a feminist perspective into the 1980s and 1990s alongside Randall's correspondence with artists and writers, Dionne Brand, Lorna de Cervantes, Michelle Cliff, Elaine DeCunning, Diane De Prima, Carolyn Forchet, Joy Harjo, Hedy Jones, June Jordan, Barbara Kingslover, Lucy Lepard, Audrey Lord, Holly Neer, Jay Norling, Lynn Tillman, Alice Walker. Similarly, Randall's portraits of artists and writers associated with Naropa University summer writing program, where she has long served as faculty, to provide insight into poems from her 2019 collection against atrocity. That is through the lines that compel a promissory insistence of what tenacity, determination and clarity can yield, a style of hope in artistic community and sociability. What Randall specifies as art making place and holding time in a history written as we carry on. Photography, no doubt, has structured Margaret Randall's understanding of time at once tethered to community, to the poetic imagination, to the collective process of history and to the long duration of geological dispersion. In her collection, More Than Things, Randall Wonders, is time a mere organizing principle or can we reconceptualize it so that it will not drag us down to our doom? And how may we restore memory to image in order to reclaim a self that empowers, end quote. The poet photographer has posed similar questions in the irrevocable light of climate crisis and the impermanence of human life ways, the uneven death dealing distributions of modern civilization with such massacres and destruction that haunt history and so possess the author of Stone Witness of 2007 to reflect on the inconsequence of self when confronting the ancestral Pueblo insights of Chaco Cliff Palace, Keith Seal. She writes, without time, does timelessness exist? Those poems can be read alongside the sobering view of Depeche Chaco Barthe that climate crisis has destabilized the quote, age old humanist distinction between natural history and human history, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world as anything other than a shared sense of catastrophe, end quote. Randall's poetic line goes the step further to perform what the lens cannot capture, Earth's surface, cultural survival in relation to configurations of mind as a place emptied of boundaries. The future cut off from the present in language as sediment. She writes, water flowing from the rock, then trickling from the rock and finally only dripping from the rock. A smile, a grimace, pain, colors who painted them, what they mean, chiseled lines, who carved the rocks anyway and dolphins, other species, a new taste, inexplicable sadness, loss, renewal, power and empowerment. At the height of her prodigious powers, Margaret Randall has crowned a lifelong commitment to art and activism with an astounding body of work, much of it written in the last 20 years. Using her camera lens as a tool for erasing distance, the photographic instant is meant to resemble the leap over the interrogation mark that makes visible the contradictions of a society's stated aims by way of quote, the things that remind us of where we have been, present even as the words begin to fade, end quote. Margaret Randall continues to extend the foundational work inaugurated with the literary journal El Corro Implumado, devoting energies to translation and advocacy, poetry and photography to leap the interrogation mark, so to speak, that so determines the loss and renewals of power and empowerment. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Saludos. My name is Naomi Ambrice. I'm a PhD student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. I first heard of Margaret Randall during my undergrad years when I came across her book, Women of Cuba. I love the testimonies and Randall's generous and beautiful documentation of Cuban women. When I was accepted to my graduate program at the University of New Mexico, I knew that I wanted to include the Margaret Randall archives in my research. During my first semester of graduate school, our final assignment required me to go into the archives. For this assignment, I looked at the Margaret Randall papers, in particular, her correspondence between her dear activist friend, Audrey Lord. When the boxes were brought out to me, I learned that Randall's collection contained years of correspondence, film, photographs of Randall's life and influences and feminist activists and writer circles in Latin America and the U.S. It was through her archives that I got the first glimpse and learned a little more about her life. I knew that she had studied at the University of New Mexico and that she left for Europe and then moved to Mexico. She began working as a neurohistorian and photographer that took her traveling throughout Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua and Peru, thus devoting the majority of her time in Cuba. She later returned to Albuquerque, New Mexico to lecture in the women's studies and American studies programs, my home department at the University of New Mexico. The other Lord folder contains handwritten and type letters between Randall and Lord that span more than a decade. These documents range from topics about her, their personal lives to details about teaching and feminist reading and writing groups during the late 1970s through the 90s. The document that captivated me the most was the type essay delivered in December 1992 by Randall. This essay was a tribute to Lord a month after her passing in November that same year. Randall's words capture her saddened yet optimism. Moreover, Randall's vivid narrative of her response to Lord's death feels like she's addressing Lord in person. For example, the first sentence of the document addresses Lord directly. Randall states, quote, Audrey, everything seems more fragile since you're gone. It was what you said and how you made sure you filled each diminishing breath in a way that would be useful to us all. Such a rare and powerful legacy, end quote. Here, Randall is admiring Lord's words, thoughts and legacy. In her second paragraph, Randall mentioned Lord's death and her emotional response to it. She notes, quote, when you died, my first emotion was almost one of belief. Such an artist's battle, so many days and weeks and months of suffering. If I truly sat with it, the loss seemed overwhelming. But I chose to envision you at peace. Then too, the poems and essays reassured me. They remained to comfort and go on to teaching, end quote. In this paragraph, Randall's words are genuine and heartfelt. Lord had been battling cancer for many years and throughout this battle, she kept her activism and friendship at the center of her struggles. Thus, Randall's emotional response has a sense of peace and the acceptance of loss of a dear friend and comrade. In the third and last paragraph, Randall tells Lord, her reflections and feelings on a film, she and her partner had recently watched at the theater. This film was based on another famous political activist, minister Malcolm X. She states, quote, Barbara and I saw the film and left the theater in kind of a daze, unwilling even to voice criticism of one aspect or another. We were too busy with the texture and meaning of an era and a man that helped shape who we are. And that's when I began to understand what happens when great teachers are taken from us by bullets or cancer, whatever the enemy hones to murder the best among us. The intention of this essay was to honor and capture Lord's spirit as a true testament to her contributions and legacy. In the spring of 2018, I wrote my second paper titled in the struggle for voice, equality and justice, recovering the Margaret Randall archives. In this paper, I showed the ways the US government has jeopardized, intimidated and challenged citizenship based on an individual's affiliation by focusing on the Margaret Randall's immigration case. I have such great admiration for Randall, not only for the years of activism and service, but for believing in fighting for what is right. They'll be in born in the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, challenged Randall's citizenship due to her involvement with communist countries. After three years of trial in federal courts, Randall's case was appealed and she was granted back her US citizenship. Randall's immigration court folder once again contained correspondence and support of her service and work from people near and afar. This documentation validates not only what she meant to many people, but the importance of her service and work that meant to many others. It also proves to the resiliency of solidarity work that challenges hegemonic structures. The summer of 2016, I was awarded the Latin American Institute Summer Research Grant to go to Casa de las Américas in La Habana, Cuba. The very place Randall helped initiate. It was Randall's books and testimonies in her archives that compelled me to go to Cuba in the first place. Having access, handwritten letters and documents by important feminist figures reminds me of a long feminist struggle for equality and social justice that is still alive and continuing. As I work on my research on bridging the connection between Afro-descendants and mestizo identities in the US Southwest, Mexico and Cuba, I find Randall's work as not only a special collection which have influenced and fueled my own interests, but as an example of how oral histories and testimonies continue to give voice to the unheard and help bridge this struggle for justice and equality for a more just world across physical and imaginary quarters. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me get everything shared. Okay, I'm delighted to be here today at the symposium in honor of Margaret Randall and her work. I'm an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island and I study women's transnational social movements in the late 20th century. My intention for this brief talk is twofold. First, to place Randall's work within the larger context of transnational solidarity, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. And second, to highlight the contributions of her papers and other collections available at the Center for Southwest Research to such analyses. I aim to undertake these two tasks simultaneously. In 2012, I visited the archives at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico to conduct research for my dissertation project. I had decided to study American women's transnational solidarity work, particularly their anti-war activism during the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. And a couple of years before that, I had discovered Margaret Randall's work on Cuban and Nicaraguan women. And as I began my dissertation research, I came across her spirit of the people, which is about her 1974 visit to North Vietnam. So this was after US troops had left South Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. And I wanted to know more about her trip. Thus, I visited UNM with the particular intention of going through Randall's papers. And I also planned to look through some of the radical pamphlets, underground newspapers, and other collections housed at the Center in order to learn more about anti-war and women's activism in the Southwest, including the anti-war activism of Mexican Americans and Chicanas in particular. What I discovered by looking through the collections at the CSWR was the significance of transnational connections between activists and artists and women and feminists across the Americas. In particular, Randall's story and the CSWR archives document the significant amount of attention that various groups pay to revolutionary societies, particularly to Cuba. Randall moved to Cuba in 1969, as others have established, placing her front and center to witness and analyze the revolution there. Like many artists and activists of per generation, Randall writes in her 2009 memoir to change the world that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 struck her like a lightning bolt and she felt drawn towards it. Beginning in the early 1960s, dozens of U.S. citizens traveled to Cuba to observe life under Castro. And by the late 1960s, organized efforts through the Benz Ramos that we shall overcome brigade brought hundreds of U.S. Americans, primarily youths and activists with anti-imperialist, anti-war, and Black power connections to Cuba to participate in various agricultural and construction projects in efforts to forward the revolution. Harvesting sugarcane was what they most often did. While in Cuba, U.S. Americans learned more about socialism and Cuban society and brought back to the United States stories and ideas about how to implement some of the policies and practices in their communities in the U.S. It's important to note that some of these activists who often self-identified as revolutionaries and anti-imperialists did not travel to Cuba. Some did not only travel to Cuba. Some also visited communist China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, for instance. But with Cuba being closer to the United States, more U.S. Americans were able to visit Cuba than many of the other countries. And just as a side note, the U.S. State Department restricted or forbade travel to all of these countries at the time so it wasn't that easy to get to any of them. When it came to visiting Cuba, China, North Korea, or North Vietnam, one of the central questions in feminist circles was how women's rights might be advanced under socialism and after-revolution. And this was often analyzed in contrast to women's limited rights under capitalism. During a 2012 interview with me, Randall recalled being, quote, hit between the eyes, end quote, by feminism when she read work by prominent women's rights thinkers while living in Mexico in the late 1960s. After she moved to Cuba, she took the opportunity to conduct interviews with Cuban women about their day-to-day lives under the revolutionary government. Randall wanted to find out, quote, how socialism might begin to alter the sexual balance of power, end quote. She already knew many of the ways women had achieved equality or were working toward equality with men, education, healthcare, and employment opportunities all pointed toward women's rights gains. Yet Randall observed that women maintained beauty and fashion standards that feminists in the United States have tossed aside and she discerned that the state-supported National Women's Organization, the Federation of Cuban Women, perceived feminism to be an imported etiology that could hinder class solidarity. Randall published Cuban Women Now based on her research in the early 1970s and she continued to pay attention to Cuban women's lives in the post-revolutionary society. And in 1975, articles she commented that while women had gained equality in many realms, access to the job market, equal educational opportunities, and equal pay for equal work, they had yet to overcome cultural barriers that maintain women's responsibilities as caretaker of the family and that sexually objectified women's bodies. Randall's study of Cuban women's lives is a singular, but not the sole example of the ways in which North American European feminists looked to revolutionary contexts to find out how women could best achieve liberation. Hundreds of women from North American Europe traveled to Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, and China to discover whether and in what ways women's liberation accompanied national liberation and hundreds of images of revolutionary womanhood represented by Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Cuban women proliferated in underground press. And this is one rather iconic image of revolutionary womanhood that Vietnamese women came to represent for feminists in North America in Europe. Those who migrated to or visited decolonizing nations to witness developments in women's rights held their breath as they waited to see just how far reaching the revolution would truly be. And Randall's work and analysis contributed to these transnational feminist discussions and her papers and other material at the CSWR offer a window onto this debate and discourse, especially in terms of analyses of post-revolutionary Cuban society. One last contribution that I'm going to mention during this brief talk that the papers at the CSWR made to my research and that Randall's life story speaks to is the transnational nature of anti-Vietnam more activism. In Randall's papers, I discovered this newspaper, Vietnam do so are Ben Sera, South Vietnam will win. This is a national liberation front otherwise known as the Viet Cong publication printed in Cuba. While it had known that North Vietnam had produced multilingual anti-war publications most commonly in French and English for consumption abroad, this was the first Spanish language newspaper I'd come across and the first one printed in the Americas. Usually they were printed in Hanoi and sent abroad. What this newspaper shows is that North Vietnamese officials extended their efforts to create a transnational anti-war movement beyond US citizens who ostensibly could stop the US war by voting in anti-war politicians and beyond former colonial officials in France who arguably held some sway over Washington to encompass a larger body of the world's population including those who were working toward their own socialist societies. Randall had a role to play in this transnational anti-Vietnam war activism as a visitor to North Vietnam in 1974 and also as an English language tutor to a Vietnamese quote-unquote comrat to use her word who participated in the Voice of Vietnam radio in Havana. The Voice of Vietnam radio could blast the North Vietnamese perspective on the US war in Vietnam to the southern shores of the United States likely in hopes of converting more US citizens to oppose US intervention in Vietnam. This Randall's papers and other collections that the CSWR provide evidence of the transnational and multilayered nature of anti-Vietnam war activism. I recently returned to replications of documents I collected from other Randall's papers at the Center for Southwest Research at UNM as well as to an interview I conducted with her in her home in January, 2012 for a chapter I'm writing about women's transnational solidarity for an edited collection. Her story, while unique, points to and embody some of the larger questions and debates of the era and her papers and the other collections at the Senate also ask and suggest answers to recurring questions large and small. Questions about feminism, decolonization, revolution and society. There are certainly no easy answers or solutions that Randall's papers and the other collections of the CSWR allow us to explore thoughts and ideas that continue to shape our perceptions today. Thank you. Hello, we are trying to all get back in our virtual room together. Thank you to our over 150 attendees to the panel. I'd like to invite those of you watching to please enter any questions that you have for the panelists in the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom page. We have a little bit of time for discussion. And so before we turn to audience questions I'd like to quickly ask if any of our panelists would like to ask questions of each other or to elaborate on something that you forgot to say in presenting your wonderful insights into Margaret's work. I mean, I might ask Jessica, this is thank you for all your talks. And I was reminded also reading, I hadn't read Liz, your interview with Margaret until yesterday. And I'm fascinating and really important life accounts and political accounts that she shares there. And Jessica, what your talk reminds me of just the materiality of some of these papers that speak to I think one of the key points that you get to Liz in your interview with Margaret which is the idea to which there was resistance to feminism in definitely in Cuba and in other parts of Latin America. And yet it's that I just can't help but be drawn to that poster that said Margaret Randall and the campaign against sexism in Cuba, right? Maybe you could just say a little bit more about that if there are other findings about this kind of resistance because it is particular to I think to Margaret's particular kind of feminist activism. Sure, yeah. Sorry, I'm also looking at the chat. So there were a few findings in her papers. And I just showed a couple of the kind of the the advertisements of these talks that she was giving and they were in mostly primarily in the late 1970s or mid 1970s that she came back to the United States and was doing these talks that was and what I found was it was more geared to US audiences where US feminists were so looking at women abroad and in some ways doing so or many ways doing so in a very flat way where it was just, oh, they have everything perfect in Cuba and North Vietnam, in China. Everything is perfect there. They have no problems. And so I think what you can see through Margaret's work and through other people who were able to actually spend real time, but Margaret is one of the very rare people who are actually able to spend so many years in Cuba and these other places and then able to kind of resist that narrative of everything in Cuba is wonderful now for women. All of their problems are solved. So I think it is a very important contribution that her papers make and that her story makes is that kind of a unveiling of the sexism behind what is normally shown or what had been shown. I think the other thing that's interesting that perhaps gets eclipsed by Margaret's multi-talents and multidisciplinary approach is that I think one of the threads that really unites all her work is really she's an ethnographer. I mean, I think there's a kind of ethnographic drive. It's certainly in Naomi and Gabriela and Barbara the way you were looking at, the way in which she's either thinking about community or friendship is all about the kind of the oral testimony about these relationships. So maybe some of you might respond to that in some kind of way. It's very striking to me. I can actually answer that because that's exactly how I read her first book and that's why I looked at her archives to think about my own oral histories and how I wanted to say those narratives and give voice to these people in the way that did justice. So I look at Margaret's work for that particular reason. Absolutely. Yeah, it's almost as if even friendships can be imperiled to disappearance. And I think this comes from living historical trauma. Terrific. Do we have other questions for each other or shall we go to ones that are starting to come in? And then I have one in my back pocket. One of our audience members is asking Gabriela if your written work is available on Margaret is available to the public where people could find that. I'm gonna paste on the chat a link where you can get to read my master thesis on El Corno Emplumado and the other articles I have written are in books that were published here in Mexico and aren't available online. But if you can get to me your emails I can send it to you without a problem. Thank you. There seems to be more interest in this question of feminism as it manifests both in Margaret's life and in this work she did in so many different places. One such question is whether the feminist resistance in Cuba is due to particular social hierarchical cultural system. If so, what is it? How do we explain that? Is that something that people have been able to engage in through Margaret's work? It's a big question. Perhaps if we've stumped our panelists we could ask Margaret for an opinion on that. Meanwhile, if others have questions if you put them in the Q&A that would be great. Could you unmute me and I'll address that question if none of the panelists want to? You are unmuted, please go right ahead. We would like to see you though. Yes, I need to be uninvisibilized as well. There you are. Okay, yeah, it's a really interesting question and I noticed that some form of it has come in the Q&A and in the chat from various people about explaining the attitude of the Cuban party with regard to feminism and how that's evolved over the years. When I first lived in Cuba feminism was really a dirty word and the Cuban party generally followed the international communist sense that the main contradiction in society was the class contradiction. Once that was taken care of everything else would follow such as issues of gender, race, and so forth. And so feminists were looked upon quite, then we looked upon a scans in Cuba at that time and I was one of those feminists. So I suffered that along with a number of other people. It was complicated because as you know Cuba for more than 60 years has suffered a terrible embargo from the United States. It suffered all kinds of covert and overt attacks and it's this little tiny country, island country at 90 miles off our shores. So it was important and it continues to be important for the Cubans to have a unity, a unified population from which to struggle against this threat from the North. And I think that the Cuban hierarchy has long said, well, if feminism is gonna split the ruling class, split men and women, it's really comes from a lack of understanding of what feminism is. So on the one hand, I understood that need for unity. On the other hand, I think it's very much an excuse. It's a patriarchal excuse to not look at issues of gender which are so important in society. It would be so important for Cuba to be able to make a gender analysis of society. And I should say that that gender analysis has been made by a number of Cuban women, the Mahin women in the 90s and so forth. But it's still a long way to go around that issue in Cuba. On the other hand, the things that the Cuban revolution has done for women are extraordinary. So it's a mixed bag and of course, there's not enough time to address it here. I do wanna say that I think things are changing for the better. Okay, thank you so much, Margaret. When in doubt, we turn to you as you know. I thought we could take a question here which has to do with the broader context of Margaret's poetry and her work. And one panelist, participant has asked us, it's not surprising that the panelists who are specialists in domains inhabited by Margaret are of course very familiar with Margaret and with her work. And this author is very familiar as a poet and a poetry event host having hosted Margaret and many other poets at Albuquerque events. Thank you, Billy, for that. How familiar is the general public with Margaret's important work and views and what is being done to increase this familiarity? Maybe that's something our panelists could address either from the perspective of graduate studies and their own trajectories or the work that they've conducted with the Margaret Randall archive and her work over the course of their longer careers. Well, maybe I could just briefly speak to some very recent interests, not only in El Corro Implumado, but also in Margaret's work. But I would point readers to Harris Feinsad and his scholarship and the work that he's done with John Cutler Alba at what is called the Open Door Archive at Northwestern. Which has the complete El Corro Implumado digitized with ephemera and commentary by Margaret and others who are including, for example, some very interesting comments by Felipe Eremberg who sadly passed away recently. So that you get a sense of that life world around the journal. Maybe Margaret might have something to say about this, but I have a feeling that if you've lived outside of the United States, I think that on the map that tends to be so domestic in many, many ways, one can get left out of certain kinds of visibility. But I think Margaret's work is so directly tied to avant-garde practices like Black Mountain and the beat poets of California. And you see it in the index and the table of content of the issues of El Corro Implumado. As a matter of fact, you could just look at the table of contents of the 31 issues and just looking at the North American contributors get a sense of a map of the many geographies of U.S. American poetry. Great. Other thoughts? Yes. Well, I think that Margaret's works are where I have her time. I think that Margaret was really an advanced intellectual and for example, here in Mexico, I have seen during the past six years that I've been working with El Corno, a lot of growing interests in her work. And I see this interest related to interest in feminism that wasn't the same six years ago that is now. And I think that every time people are growing more interested in her work. Also, her view on, well, yeah, her view on feminism, I think that's the most important part that is being, I'm sorry, but my English isn't so good, so I'm sorry. But what I'm trying to say is that Margaret right down here in Mexico is being more recognized with every year we have more interest. And I agree with Roberto that the Open Door Archive has made a really huge difference in that, especially because people are getting to know El Corno more and more and getting to know El Corno also leads to getting to know Margaret Randall. So that's it. That's great. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Jaconda. I was just going to say briefly that I also think that it's the dilemma of someone who is multidisciplinary is often sort of, that mobility makes it difficult to describe, pin down. And the only other thing I would add to what you just said, Gabby, I think it's excellent, is I think there's a growing interest also because of El Corno in Latin America and the United States for DIY publications, little magazine again, the handmade and so forth. Jaconda, por favor. Well, what I wanted to say was that I think for Latin America, Margaret is a classic. You know, it's a person who has united so many expressions and her photography, she's all over the place in Latin America and many books. I mean, we women that were in struggles and fought for our freedom, we really looked at Margaret and thought of Margaret as one of the precursors of all our struggles and also a person who left so much of herself, you know, in our own history. So I think, you know, of course, the visibility of women, we are all made invisible in many cultures and it's a struggle to keep reminding people of the contribution of women to whatever culture and especially in Latin America. But I think that has been changing and among women, I think Margaret, as I said, is a classic and it's a person who has incredible respect and everybody, you know, even when I was going to come and participate with her, I told a few people and they were, wow, Margaret Randall, you're going to talk to her. And, you know, so there is this worship in many people of what Margaret contributed to our knowledge of ourselves, you know, all her books about the Sandinista women, for example, where I think they are the historical record of what we did. I think there is no historical record in Nicaragua to speak of women in particular, but what was their contribution, you know? And now because Daniel Ortega has completely screwed up our country, so we are now in this situation where Sandinismo has become a bad word, you know, in Nicaragua. And so it's really important to think that this is a work, a body of work that is going to remain and that is going to say what this testimony of what women's participation meant in Nicaragua and Cuba and all these countries, you know? Thank you, Tiaconda. I think I have never been so happily zoom-bombed as this full page of wonderful contributors. And you've also gotten a taste of what this afternoon's, this evening's session should bring in the delightful conversation between Margaret and Tiaconda. So I invite you to come back for that. I wanted to turn our attention to a couple of the questions about archives in particular. Here's something there I thought, Barbara, you might have a sense. One audience member would like to know how many of Margaret Randall's archives exist besides the one at UNM? What is the sort of exclusivity or not of where her materials are held? This is something you and I have talked about. Okay, that's like a loaded five-barreled question. So I know that's okay. I haven't been able to read where it is. You know, I'm not, I think we'd have to ask Margaret where everything's being held. I mean, in terms, yeah, because somebody mentioned that was speaking, maybe Roberto, I don't know if it was you or Gabriela, but it was about the fact that there's a full run of stuff at Austin and also where was the other place? There was another university. Right, and then I think Jessica also found other archives. I do not know the full, where the full corpus is located. I'm really familiar with what we have in our holdings because I've touched them and worked with them and put them together. But on the other issue of exclusivity, what is that again? No, that was the same question, whether we put archives elsewhere. I know Margaret has part of an answer here because she knows where her material is. I hope so. And I know that the vast majority of them are here. Is that right, Margaret? That's absolutely right. Yes, there are a few things at Princeton, very, very few. Some of the early El Coordino materials are at New York University. And of course, there's quite a bit of material at Austin, but the vast, vast, vast majority of my archives, both literary and personal and photographic reside at the University of New Mexico. In terms of exclusivity, all of my archives are open to the public with the exception of my journals, which will not be open until I've been dead 30 years. I didn't want to face the music, but all the rest of it is open. And I just want to say to Ishikonda, I've been trying to figure out how to do that on the chat, that you all, and the women in Nicaragua, the women in Latin America, many of the men as well, gave me so much more than I have ever been able to give you. It certainly is a two-way street. I mean, I feel that I've just been so extraordinarily fortunate in my life to have lived among you and learned from you. And I can't say that enough. So, we'll be on the screen in about a half an hour, so I won't go any further. I wanted to bring up something to you. You chose, you chose. Uh-huh. Ishikonda, you're the best. I wanted to bring up something also, there's about the archive. Margaret, the Kathy Bodine correspondence was also, I think, what we say, restricted. Yes. So, Kathy Bodine was with the weather people, let's call them the weather people and the weather men. And they basically, I think you and Kathy had like a huge correspondence over 12 years, I think, when she was up in prison up there in a Canada area or up North. She was in prison in New York and I visited her every week for many years. Then we've had a close friendship for over 20 years. She's been out of prison now for a number of years. That correspondence is also limited or restricted because when I deposited that part of my archive at the university, I didn't want to in any way do anything that would hinder her ability to leave prison. She was there for 22 years. So that may be revised later, but yeah, almost everything is available. And there's another thing too that I wanna bring up. There's 37 binders that Margaret gave us when that Margaret put together. And initially I had this in my talk, then I had to take it out because you know, four pages, that's so tiny and I'm sort of her boss. But the 37 binders were done by Margaret. They were done, Roberto, I was thinking about you when you were doing this about the photography. Oh my God, I just love what you said. It like so cool because I like stared at that stuff for a year and I was like, oh my God in heaven. So anyway, the thing is, is that the 37 binders, that is very important because those are done by Margaret. She set them up in a narrative structure underneath the category. And those reflect, you know, her thinking about what was important in these categories. So me and Cindy, Cindy and I, oh my God, Cindy and I are basically going to reduplicate the way, put it into archival preservation format and then reduplicate how you did that. I think those are really important for people working with your photography. And I want to say another thing too about your photography. Can I ask a question, Barbara? Are those the binders? Are you referring to the binders of my family trips? Yeah, those were, were they all family stuff? Yeah, it's all, they were photograph albums, which they went halfway to the ceiling. And we moved about a year ago and had to just divest of so many things. For reasons of space, we moved to a very tiny condo. And so those are all family trips. And of course they're my photography, but they're not meant to be art photography if you want to make the presentation. No, that's cool. I'm not trying to make that point, but I am saying that it's your thinking that went into how they were constructed. Cause I'm the person who put together the photos. And yeah, sure, I can put a bunch of photos into Cuba. I can put a bunch of photos into San Benistas and Nicaragua and this and that and geography and landscape, but you're the person who put those together. I just think it's important as an archivist to think that way. I remember our conversations, Barbara, I was going to feel privileged for me when you were working on that, but you would email me every several times a week and send me strip sheets, negatives, contact sheets of negatives. And I would try to identify these people in Nicaragua and Cuba and different parts of the world. And it's a good thing that we had those conversations several years ago because I'm not sure I would be able to remember so many of the people today. Hey, I can't remember right now, but I have to tell you, I was telling somebody about you and you would respond back to me. I was saying it was really interesting how you would remember things. How you would like, cause memory is so important when you talk about archives. And then actually to have a human being whose archives I worked on that I can actually talk to, that is such a gift to me. And then to see your kids, I know some of them are on here, I gotta say this, you meet people in the archives and you never once hear their, I met so many people like Gia Kanda, you, I met in the archives and to see you talk and to see you move and you're animated person, that just makes me like my heart, like it makes me so happy. And I feel like I know Margaret's family and I don't, I've never met them. I would know them on the street though, because I see them so much. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you, Barbara. The sort of living engagement with the archive is part of what I think we're trying to communicate here. And along those lines, I'd like to ask a broad question, hoping that Naomi or Jessica might pick this up as to what might be one of the most surprising or sort of beloved elements you discovered in your quest or your encounter with the archives. You mentioned some of them in each of your talks, but I know you didn't have time to really go on and on. So I wonder if there's something else you might want to tell everyone is in these materials that you found revelatory or exciting. Yes, I can go first. Yeah, please. I actually looked at the archives in 2015, started to look at her archives. They were not as wonderfully archived as they are now. So I think I want to also thank you, Liz, for making this happen and Barbara. I was just, at that time, I was not only new to UNM and knowing the Margaret's archives, but when I think even the people in the Southwest and the library didn't know there were these many boxes. So it was kind of, I was there and it was really neat to just kind of actually touch them and see them firsthand. That was something that was really captivating me. And also, again, it was reading her folders and her conversations with many people, not just in the United States but all over the world that were responding to her on this personal level. Again, I was looking at more of the oral history that were there. So for me, it's definitely influenced my research in the way that I conduct my own research. So yeah. Naomi, can I ask a question? Yes. Because I'm fascinated with the relationship between Margaret and Audrey Lorde. I see now I'm understanding Audrey Lorde to be also an internationalist in a similar way because this summer, the lectures that Audrey Lorde gave in Berlin appeared in print. And I wonder if you saw any connections of that in the correspondence of that internationalism. Oh, absolutely. And not only, I mean, I was, for the, or talk here, I shortened my presentation, but I also quoted Audrey Rich and all these women that I looked up to and just I've read for 10 plus years and was exposed to in books and in readings, but never really to actually feel and see the handwritten papers from this correspondence definitely were there. She, I think that folder with Audrey Lorde, they were, I can't recall right now. It's 2015 to five years ago that I saw them, but it was a complete folder of their correspondence for a decade, like I mentioned. So yes, absolutely. Which you mentioned international solidarity, sisterhood. Right, that's great. Thank you. Any other discoveries or favorite tales from the archive? It's quiet. Then I do have one from an audience member here. This might pertain to a couple of the presentations. What are the current digital equivalents of literary magazines like a Gorno that you think following the footsteps of that magazine's legacy today, bilingual, transnational, and so forth? Our Gorno experts here want to respond. Yes, well, there are a lot of magazines that took inspiration in El Gorno Emplumado. In Mexico City, we have several from the 70s. I can think of maybe FEM Magazine that was a feminist magazine during the 70s, run by women. But there are also new magazines that are digital, that take their inspiration directly from El Gorno with this view of internationalism, like Roberto was saying. I can think of Pajinas Salmon is one of them that is run by a Mexican student. And also, I don't remember the name, but there is another one that Margaret told me about this magazine last year, but I can recall the name. Do you remember Margaret? No, I've been trying very hard as you've been talking to. Remember, the name is definitely modeled on El Gorno Emplumado and it has the same kind of book format and if everything is in English and Spanish, which is very exciting. Roberto, of course, was involved with Mandorla, which is an extraordinary magazine, sadly no longer. I think one of the sad things, I mean, I think there's so much to be said for the digital format, but it's sad to me in a way that we're sort of getting away from some of the paper issues of magazines because they were important objects in and of themselves. You can't hold a digital magazine in your hands no matter how hard you try. So they all have their place, but yeah, I think there's quite a few. I remember maybe 15 years ago being at the Guadalajara Book fair and there was a, they showed the film about El Gorno Emplumado and the room was just packed. There must have been about 300 people there and in the Q and A after the film, at least 20 young Mexican editors and poets commented publicly that they were doing projects modeled on El Gorno. So that was exciting for me to hear as well. Margaret. And Gabriela, is the magazine Erizo, the one you're thinking of? That's it, that's it. I'll put the website on the, I think so, yes. There it is in the chat. I would also just mention, because the question was about the digital, there are not so much maybe modeled on El Gorno necessarily, but a very interesting journal called Asymptote that is published out of Singapore, I believe that is where one of its basis is, but there are editors all over the world and it's devoted entirely to translation. And of course, using the medium of the internet and the digital as a way of really having a kind of reach that, although I'm so glad Gabriela, that you mentioned, you think to 1961 and 2000 copies of that journal were being sent. I mean, it's really unthinkable. I mean, it's an extraordinary feat. When I think back about the fact that we didn't have the internet, we didn't have, it took three to four months for a poet in Buenos Aires or Santiago de Chile to send that, I mean, it took three or four months for their poems to get to us. And then three or four months for us to return to them the news of whether we were gonna publish or not the poems. I mean, that's half a year. And when I think back to the kinds of resources that we had back then, I can hardly believe we did this, but I did want to say something else. And it's, I think I've lost it, but I've lost what I wanted to say, but yeah. Can I interject here? And have you say something about linotype, which is one of my favorite subjects because I think we've forgotten it. We use these little, these tiny little linotype print shops in Mexico City when they made the film about El Corno, it was hard for the filmmakers to find one that still existed because they're all gone. And it was the old linotype method and the old hot lad, and we had so many incredible experiences with those linotype shop, with those shops, those print shops. I remember in particular one instance in which we had a centerfold of photographs of very sexually suggestive sculptures by Shinkishi Tejiri, the great Japanese sculptor, and with women's bodies, nude bodies. And it was, the printer was so scandalized that he threw those signatures out into the street and we had to pick them up. He would not publish El Corno anymore. And then we had to go find a new print shop, you know? And then that happened for political reasons too, towards the end, when the government began to prosecute the, or threaten those little print shops, we had to go from one to another, you know, to find a place to print the magazine. So it was all very artisanal in terms of today's world, but quite wonderful. Yeah. Terrific. We do have one question that came in sort of sideways on email for Gabriela and I think it could also be extended to the international context for Jessica. Could you say, this was initially for Gabriela, could you say a bit more about the significance of El Corno Emplimado for the Mexican cultural landscape of the 60s? It seems that this goes beyond just the student movement of 1968, even if part of the buildup to it. And I would ask the same, but for Jessica as well to think about your findings with respect to the impact of Margaret's literary and political work internationally in that period, how you scope that work, that impact. Gabriela? Yes, of course El Corno Emplimado goes beyond the 68 movement. If we think about it, the Corno first issue was published in 1962. So from 62 to 68, there are six years of difference and what they published before what was going on on this, on 68, it's really valuable. El Corno had its detractors. A lot of Mexican intellectuals that were a little conservative didn't like the magazine and they used to talk bad about the magazine in these diaries that were very distributed. But El Corno also, what it has proven with time is that it really influenced some of the young writers in the movement. For example, the writers of the group called Espiga Motinada like Juan Manuelos, Martinez, et cetera. And for example, also the group called the Infrarrealistas that they were associated to Roberto Vuelanio. And yeah, in the moment, El Corno, I think that wasn't very well understood by the critics, by the canonic critics, but in the underground culture in Mexico, it was very well received. Especially because it had translations of the beatnik poets that were very well received by the readers of El Corno and that you couldn't get that kind of literature anywhere else but in El Corno. And you have them in Spanish and that was very valuable. But yes, it goes beyond the 68 movement because it has a lot that goes right before the 68. That's great. If I could just briefly add, if you haven't watched the documentary, I put it into the chat on El Corno. It has some excellent interviews and there's some that give you a sense of the attitudes around El Corno. So even an editor, a progressive editor like Humberto Batti from Uno Mas Uno, they were all suspicious of El Corno because they couldn't believe that it was so well produced. They were convinced it was produced by the State Department, by the US State Department, right? So he tells these stories and it gives you a sense of how it was seen from very different points of view because of its novelty. Yeah, nice. Yeah. And to your question, Liz, that's more broader about the reception of Margaret Randall's work outside of Mexico and outside of this time period. I think you can see something that Gabriella mentioned too is a lot of her work is covered in the underground press. So we do see it in various publications, The Cuban Woman Now and the Sandistas' Daughters, and not just in 1968 too, but later in the 1970s and 1980s, her publications are being covered. And then going back to one of your first questions actually about graduate studies, Cuban Woman Now and Sandistas' Daughters is something that people study in graduate school now to learn how to do oral history. So it's still something that we still use and it's actually, we use it as a methodology, which is an interesting crossover, I think, from something that is showing revolution and what women's lives are like under revolution to something that now is used to show us how to do this type of research. So I think that's an interesting crossover that she has been able to do. Yeah, that's certainly true of my classes, as I've told Margaret many times. My copies of Sandinas' Daughters are very battered at this point. I think we're coming up on the end of our session and I want to thank all of the panelists for their fine work, for to Diaconda and Margaret for participating to our wonderful sign language interpreters for their work and for the Veritable Army of Helpers who aren't shown on the screen. Thanks to everyone. We will be coming back to this exact same Zoom link at much later, but what I'll put up now is a reminder that the Diaconda Belly Conversation with Margaret Randall will be streamed on YouTube at 4 p.m. our time and that link is available in your registration materials as well as it will be on this slide while it's playing. We come back at approximately 5.40 in the afternoon to again have a live discussion with Diaconda Belly and Margaret Randall and I look forward very much to some of the questions that came through and the question and answer will be mulling over in the meantime because they are really questions for our speakers in the afternoon and we hope to bring you some answers at that point. So with that I will thank everyone concluding here on time and please in 15 minutes go to the YouTube link and you will be able to view the wonderful conversation between Margaret and Diaconda. Thank you everyone so much and we hope to see you very soon.