 Welcome, everybody. My name is Christian Pies. I'm an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies Department. I'm also the coordinator of the race, ethnicity and immigration colloquium and I'll say a few things about the Coloquium in a minute and then transition over to introducing our speaker today, Professor of Regal. But a few things, some logistical issues. So first, this event is co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the CRG. They're a wonderful center on campus and they have fantastic programming this semester and next semester. So if you are interested in this talk and similar conversations, please go to the website. Second, we will hold a Q&A at the end of the talk. There is a little box at the bottom that says Q&A. If you are getting questions, as Professor Berg will present for work, please jot them down and then I will go over them and we'll have a nice Q&A conversation regarding the topics discussed. Okay, so let's turn to the race, ethnicity and immigration colloquium, the REI colloquium. This is a colloquium that invites speakers from the Berkeley campus and other institutions to share their research on issues regarding race, ethnicity and immigration, kind of like on the title. One important theme explored by the colloquium is the changing shape of ethnic politics in the country. The second one and closely related is the impact of immigration on the nation and on California's political and economic life. Now, recent census show important changes in the country's ethnic makeup, such as the large increases in Latinx population, the emergence and residents who prefer to identify themselves as biracial and the changing patterns of naturalization among various immigration, immigrant groups. So these are what we consider to be significant changes and a focus of our colloquium. We will have five speakers this year. Professor Berg always an inaugural speaker for this academic year. We will have another speaker this semester and they'll be in December 2. Same time, same time as today. And that will be Professor Sinti Young. So for those of you who are interested on race, ethnicity and immigration, please do keep an eye out for our future email. With that, let me introduce Professor Bregel, who I was just telling her a minute ago how big of a fan I am of her work. I am thrilled and honored that she's with us today, especially given the topic that she'll be presenting on. Professor Bregel is the chair of the Department of Chicano and Central American Studies at UCLA, which is a wonderful change that they just did about a couple years ago. Her research and teaching interest are in Central American migration, families, gender and the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies. Her scholarship analyzing legal consciousness and legal violence explores the structures that produce inequality and the modes of resistance of different sub sectors of the Latino, Latina Latinx immigrants, including undocumented students and transnational families. She is co-author of three books. The first is Sacrificing Families, Navigating Laws, Labor and Love Across Borders. This was published in 2014. She is the co-author of Immigrant Families, published in 2017, and the co-editor of We Are Not Dreamers, Undocumented Scholars, Theorized Undocumented Life in the United States. These are fantastic books. If you are here, you're likely, what I like to call my students, pretty nerdy and politicized. These are wonderful readings for you to do during your break when you're trying to rest, but you're still asking yourself a lot of questions about these issues. So, without any further ado, Professor Bregel, the space is yours. For those of us behind in the back, please do the little clapping thing so that Professor Bregel knows that she's welcome and an invited speaker in our community. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Pies. It's a pleasure to meet you and thank you for inviting me coming to Berkeley. You know, in this case, virtually. It's always an honor. I appreciate so much the engagement in the audiences at Berkeley and I'm really happy to be here. I'm also kind of nervous. I'll just acknowledge that this work that I'm going to share is very different than most of what I've done and I took the invitation as an opportunity to reflect on things that I've been teaching about for years and that I care deeply about in terms of how we do work responsibly, ethically, how do we capture people's humanity in complex ways. And so, I think about qualitative research methods quite a bit. I think about what it means to have been trained in sociology in a particular way and then be in ethnic studies and consider multiple options and when I teach the course on qualitative research methods. Our students are doing lots of different approaches to this. Everything from like digital ethnography to platicas to in-depth interviews, participatory action research, visual ethnographies, archival work. There's so many different ways. These are just some of them of capturing people's experiences and wanting to tell their stories. And regardless of what method people use to gather the information at the base of their work, our conversations in the class always center around matters of ethics, around power, in between the people involved in the audiences as we imagine them, positionality, who you are and what you bring to the research and how that informs the questions you're asking, the information that people are willing to share with you, the big responsibility that we have as researchers to make sure that throughout this process we are caring for and really amplifying the dignity of people in their full humanity. Those are what most of our conversations center around in these classes and the things that I'm thinking about in my work all the time. Through all of that, we're also thinking about who the work is for. And this is a question that I bring up with my students all the time, especially when people get really stuck in the writing of things. It's always important to think about who are you doing this for? How are you going to ensure that people have access to that information? Who are you trying to hold yourself accountable to? Because in our processes of being trained in institutions, we're kind of, I don't want to say tricked, but you know, we're trained to think of ourselves as being accountable only to the academy. And it's important to remember what is it that brought you to these projects and how do you stay accountable to those communities or to yourself or to your family in ways that actually matter for you and are not being influenced by the institution. And so matters of language, what kind of jargon are you using? What format? Are you going to put the information out in? What outlets are you thinking about? All of that informs the work and who's able to read it or see it or hear it and understand it. All of that takes even more work, I think, in the budding field of Central American studies. We know it's been super well documented that there have been long histories and continuing ongoing histories of state terror throughout the Central American Isthmus and for its people, its diaspora outside of the region as well, right? And that state terror has involved other processes that have made it a point to erase those realities because the nation state does not want to accept responsibility for the ways that it harms its people and erasure as a formal nation building process happens. Erasure happens at multiple levels and all of it is made possible. It's justified through dehumanization of the very people who are the targets of that state terror, leading to multiple layers of silences, right? Silence at the level of the nation state in erasing its, you know, horrid practices. Erasure at the level of the human beings who've suffered because if they speak out, they might be in danger. And erasure just in terms of misrepresentations of what happened, leading to multiple layers of trauma as well. Well, so it's a really delicate context in some ways and I want to recognize that that's not all there is that obviously the fact that I'm here telling you this means that there's been survival and there's been practices of resilience and resistance and and so capturing all of it, not wanting to erase either, you know, the traumas and the structural violences that we've lived, but also not wanting to minimize people's entire humanity only to that is part of the work that has to happen and these these conversations that I talk about in class are are even more important when we think about these communities, right? So I'm setting it all up this way and what I want to share with you is a chapter that I wrote for an edited volume that will be titled something along the lines of engendering Central American mujeres testimonios. It's a collection that is being edited by Karina Alma, Alisa Estrada, Esther Hernandez and Jahaira Padilla and I'm really thankful to them for encouraging me to take the space to explore in new ways how I want to continue to tell these stories. So, let me tell you the chapter as I've written it so far is my mother, the painter, and I, it's very much a work in progress so I'd love to hear from all of you about what it brings up for you about what is made visible what is made accessible through this form of storytelling. So my mom, Margot Ábrego, comes from a long line of little girls whose caregivers were unable or unwilling to protect them, mostly because of poverty and patriarchy. Each generation did their best to resist and my mom made a dent in that cycle for me and my sisters. She became an expert at creating beauty out of nothing, of shifting the angle and zoom of her lens to focus on the parts that matter, the actions that heal, and the things that numb. She's not a sappy optimist. On the contrary, one of her most common sayings is, let me warn you that some of this is going to be in Spanish and I'll translate briefly or you'll get it from the context. In this case, la mi estado no existe, friendship doesn't exist. And despite life having proved the adage to her over and over, she is the kindest, most genuinely forgiving person I know. My sisters and I picked up some of those traits with greater precaution and then smaller amounts than her. In my friend circles these days, people think of my mom as an artist, a painter. I do too. But there are moments when those labels and associations with her still surprised me because she didn't start painting until her 40s, when I was in graduate school. I didn't take a class or have any formal training in any kind of art practice. It's as if she birthed herself a new as a painter midway through life. Almost 20 years after she started painting, after hearing her say once that painting is her therapy. I asked her to sit down with me and tell me about how she came to painting, and what is her creative process. As we enter into the interview, let me explain that my mom is an expansive thinker. She's not bound by linear thinking and her expression follows what appear to be various tangents that web together information. In conversations with her locating the logic is entirely the listener's job, and my mind does that well I can take all the scrambled seemingly unrelated little pieces that any speaker expresses and organize them in my mind in a more linear way. The strength and limitation is something that I always thought I had partially inherited from my father who is generally in his life a very structured organized intentional person. This piece though I've come to realize that this ability to make sense of things is something I probably also had to sharpen to better understand my mom. I know it ends up making me too much for some people I provide a lot of context for things, but as an educator and as a writer it has served me well. My mom and I had a chance to be alone and talk in person on May 15 of this year, seven months into her ongoing brutal cancer treatment and 14 months into the COVID lockdown period in LA. I told her a month earlier. I want you to tell me about your paintings. So in this piece, I honor my mother's thought processes. And to disrupt and to challenge my own linear thinking I lay out the threads of the conversation in the order that they happened interwoven with my own memories and thoughts that arose during the interview and much later as I drafted the piece that I'm sharing now. She proceeds to try to remember when my paternal grandmother passed away because she recalls being in recovery from surgery for carpal tunnel during the hospital stay and funeral to arrive at that date, August 2002. And to stop the children she cared for during that time as well. It had to be after I started taking care of Gabrielle, she recalls, and he was born in 2001. My mom remembers each of the children she cared for fondly. She spent most of my childhood caring for relatives and neighbors kids at home with us, and she worked as a nanny and two other families homes later in life. Healing from the carpal tunnel surgery wound she could no longer crochet, which is what she did in her spare time back then. That was the connection. And when I could no longer crochet, I had to do something. But I had always liked it because I remember when I went to school, all my pages were like the date of a color, the subject of another color, and I used the pencil of colors and on top of the little clouds and sun, whenever a teacher asked me to read the book and how it was at night that I went to study, then the man who was in love with me and said the man is the teacher, he was the director of the basic plan and that I was his, like half of the orange, as they say, his half orange, but the older man she loves. But he asked me to read the book because he loved how I cared for him, because of all the colors and on top I painted my flowers, the clouds, the sun and everything, but all in separate colors and it was arranged there, my letter, I don't know what the great bird was. But I remember that the man asked me and then I was always there, as I have always done. But I didn't do it because I don't remember what to paint before. No, I didn't do it because I dedicated myself to try to write and draw in crochet. She stated it almost in passing, without context or much emphasis, she even dismissed it with a slight laugh. I was so focused on getting her to talk about her painting, but in the writing and revising I paused on this part of the interview multiple times. When she was 15 and pregnant with me in the ninth grade school administrators didn't allow her to enroll in classes anymore. So to finish out the year, she went to evening classes where her teacher who was also the principal of the school was sexually harassing her. The creativity she expressed as an adolescent girl became a focal point for the unwanted advances of an adult man in a position of authority for her. Though she later dismisses it as grand paja like fake. She was pleased that he had noticed the detailed nature of her artistic expression. Sadly, the observation was nullified by his intentions. So she stopped exploring drawings and colors for the next 27 years. Crochet a feminized art form in the world I grew up in is mostly appreciated by other women and was likely the safer option to keep herself busy she mastered a particular form of crochet that allowed her to stand out because she figured out how to write letters names and phrases in her crochet doilies that she framed and turned into pillows. Her creativity flourished as and she remembers other women's praise. They came to her and commissioned pieces when they wanted to celebrate new life as in a newborns name, or couples names in personalized artwork. About that art form she tells me she still does it on special occasions, but when her left hand still with carpal tunnel could not hold the yarn for very long. I started with the wave of painting, but I remember that I painted my little ears and I had some paintings and I finished painting but without saying anything she loves, because I wanted to know how to work my mind. But I started for me, it was all for me to try to be changing here and she gestures in the kitchen. I saw that she just wanted to explore for herself when she started painting. My mom who since the age of 15 has dedicated her life to raising children and living up to patriarchal expectations of gendered selflessness needed something that was just for herself. She started painting to figure out how her mind works and to be entertained this began as her space of exploration and self fulfillment of crafting something that she did not have to share with anyone else that would not attract men's undesired attention. She even put her first paintings in 99 cent store frames before she told anyone she was trying this out. This is what that looked like. Another goal was para estar cambiando aquí to be changing things around here for as long as I can remember she's like to change things up. When I was a kid it happened often that I would return home from school only to find that she had completely rearranged the furniture. I was amazed by her ability to think spatially and creatively to move such large things in ways that still function for their purpose couches and beds and dressers. When we got to the US we first slept for months on my grandmother's small living room floor. Then we moved in with my aunt's family all seven of us into a single apartment no bedroom for a year. She had nothing to move around and no space to do it in. The rest of my childhood and into my college years my family lived in a one bedroom apartment where my mom had the chance to move around furniture change the wall decorations. So and put up new curtains with new colors and always keep us looking for what had been moved or replaced in the space. When she started painting and putting her pieces into frames. She suddenly had infinite possibilities. To keep changing her landscape all over the walls of the two bedroom apartment she has lived in since I left to college. So this is the same wall. She continued to paint and she remembers that when we her daughters noticed that she enjoyed it she we started to buy her drawing paper and art journals and painting supplies. Those supplies and anything else she could find became her canvas. One day several years into her process my youngest sister Natalie helped her organize the paintings and they were both incredulous to realize she had a mass over 700 of them. Natalie convinced her and they set up a Facebook page to share it's called being duras de margot abrigo. She created that in 2013 and as of July of this year when I checked she had 2100 followers. Perhaps still burdened by the incident with her teacher and not wanting to attract sexual predators she insists in the interview that she painted solo para estar cambiando. En la cocina solo era para mí la Natalie fue la que las expuso yo no so I tell her yo me acuerdo que empezó con flores solo flores I remember that she started just with flowers. She said ha más mixtear colores las flores son para mí lo más bonito y de repente que iba viendo qué es lo que está sin que vos lo hayas pensado ni eso es lo que me gusta creo yo porque de repente le doy vuelta a la página le mudo para ella. Esta me tiene que decir algo donde está ella si es que quiere que pinta ella y así como esta que acabo de pintar ahí la tenía yo y la miraba y la miraba no miro nada y me voy para el cuarto y no otro día yo le doy vuelta a otro lado la mira y no tiene nada. No pues quizás no es mujer voy a tratar de hacer flores y les empiezo a hacer flores por allá y de repente ahí está bien mi tida la línea una cara de persona y she talks about her process and how it becomes visible to her. In another part of the interview she describes the process of mixing colors as play. Y a veces a veces tengo ganas de jugar, pero como tengo muy sensitivos los dedos, así que chuponiando con el pincel, entonces nomás veo los colores que están allí y yo les sé qué color cualquier color y lo voy poniendo y lo voy poniendo. She enters her process to play through the mixing of colors. Before chemo, the consistency of acrylic paint felt good on her hands. She spread and smeared them on vinyl wood paper or canvas, entering through color her process allows her the agency to slip into beauty. La flores son para mí lo más bonito. Not only is she a talented caregiver to flowers and plants, she's been throughout her life. Lots of orchids that she's had for years, for example. She also produces landscapes of flowers leaves and plants in her paintings creating beauty for herself as she defines it. And then it is as if the composition comes to life to communicate to her how it wants to be developed. It's not always a straightforward process, she can wait days for the message to come through most clearly in the form of lines that reveal themselves and after she has adorned the piece with flowers, women's faces make themselves known on the canvas. But always women's, I know always women. It s eemple mujeres y rara veces yo las veo que están tristes, a veces están tristes y a veces no porque si no tiene cara de llorona yo no la pinto de llorona, porque no es así. así, pero la mezcla del colores es la que no sé, a veces con la mano, a veces con this, she points to a brush, o solo me pongo a echar colores, todos los colores que encuentre y los mezcló y ahí la dejo porque como no se seca rápido vea y ya después voy y la vuelvo en la noche al otro día y ya están, pero a veces voy y la miro y la miro y no tiene nada y le doy vuelta, estoy viendo y viendo y la puedo ver alguna, algo que tiene entonces ahí es donde ya lo, ya lo sigo, ahí están, no más gente seguirlo y ya estuvo. Her patience and compassion guide her even in this process. She uses multiple methods to mix lots of colors onto her canvas and because it dries overnight, this gives her time to let the painting speak to her. A few days later, after the paint dries, she looks for lines and patterns. She draws in the black lines, some of which start to appear before her eyes as silhouettes. She looks for the messages from different angles and she trusts that the lines will appear when they are ready to guide her brush further. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that only women ask to appear in her paintings. She reminds me that she birthed four daughters and she always knew she would only have girls. When my mom first started hanging up her paintings on the kitchen and dining area walls, I was a graduate student living in another unit in the same apartment building as her. Family dinners there were common and I should note that besides being a talented painter, she's also known in my very large extended family as one of the best cooks. In fact, to my mind, cooking is just another arena in which she moves like an artist whipping up magical creations with almost nothing. So at these dinners, my sisters and I started to notice that each of the pieces that was explicitly depicting only flowers also seem to be hiding faces. We said it jokingly at first because she had not drawn the faces but if we looked long enough, the faces did appear and we all saw them. So we began the practice of looking for faces in all of her paintings and sure enough, they were there hidden in the lines of the flowers and the background. And here's some of the early paintings. I don't know if you can see my mouse, but if we'd look, we'd start to see things that looked like faces and eventually she started to just draw them in and actually put them in because we saw them so much. Then the faces became more and more prominent. She initially resisted painting the faces. She wanted to create only flowers but the faces and our observations of them were persistent. I've loved her before, but I don't want to see her face. I don't want to, but I'm going to make the flowers, the colors, the mix of colors, or rays, or something. I'm going to do it, but I insist. I insist on her face and then I have to continue to draw her because I can see her face. The faces insist on being made visible and on some instances have communicated through her dreams. On one occasion, she did a series of about five paintings. She only remembers vaguely now that she had been ordered to paint in a dream. I remember her saying then when she woke up that she had dreamt the images that she needed to paint. She tells me during the interview that a voice told her, Tenés que pintar esto and showed her a movie with the images. In these paintings, the woman is holding a clay container filled with water. Y cuando las pintas siente algo, I ask her, do you feel anything when you paint? Es mucha emoción. Cuando vos la ves, sí, aquí está. She says it's so much emotion to see it when it's there. Her joy is palpable. Each painting is the completion of a kind of puzzle, a beautiful one in which she's creator and vessel of communication, facilitating expression for herself and other anonymous women. The women's emotions can be sorrow or stoicism, contentment or calm. Those are also central characters in her creations. At times, she feels guided by the composition itself to the extent that later she can't believe she produced the piece. A veces digo yo y esta yo la hice. Ves como no me acuerdo que yo la haya hecho, entonces es bonito y te gusta pues. Given how almost magical and otherworldly her process feels, the conversation turned to the many times during my childhood when I heard stories of magical and otherworldly things she had witnessed or dreamt throughout her life, many of which actually happened after she dreamt them and told us about them. I asked her if she thought her paintings were connected to the special sense of hers. A saber no sé porque yo no te digo, esta es la última. She points to a completed painting. Ahí estuve y al papel le daba vuelta para acá y aquí. ¿Qué hay pues? Entonces empecé a hacer esto, mirá. No sé para qué dije yo, pero ahí lo dejé. Esto fue un día. El otro día hice este pedacito. Después el otro pedacito y de repente ahí está, por lo menos no está llorando, dije yo. ¿Cómo cuánto días se tarda? I asked her. Pues me tardé como unos cinco días con ésta porque no le hallaba que era lo que tenía que hacer. ¿Y cómo sabe cuando ya terminó? I asked her. Ya terminó. No sé. ¿Hay algo que te dice? Ya no más porque aquí lo pude haber seguido haciendo y ya no, ya no. Hasta allí llega y ya la puedo ver y ya estuvo. So in this case she told me about this painting that she had just finished when we did the interview and it took her several days. And I asked her how do you know when it's done and she's like you just know, you just know. She may not be convinced that there's something otherworldly about her work, but her pieces have generated notable reactions sometimes on two separate occasions over the last several years. Women have reached out to her two and two in particular who were at the point of wanting to harm themselves and her paintings helped suit them in such a way that they felt that she had saved their lives. Both of them had been experiencing deep anguish when their husbands had left them and both considered ending their lives. Several years ago, there was a South American woman who had set everything up to kill herself and decided to leave a goodbye message on Facebook to her loved ones. When she logged on to the app, the first thing she saw was one of my mom's paintings and it piqued her interest. So she went on to explore my mom's page for two hours immersing herself in the images calmed her down and she realized that her desire to harm herself had passed. She was so grateful that she introduced her daughters to my mom online and she continues to reach out to her every once in a while to tell her that she's the angel who saved her. A similar set of events happened more recently and the woman then reached out to my mom assuming that her art reflected a generous soul. My mom talked her through her sorrows convincing her that beauty is always around her. This woman as it turned out lives only about an hour away and she requested to meet my mom to thank her in person for saving her life. They stay in touch, the woman adding my mom's name to her church prayer groups list to help her survive cancer. El pintar, she says, porque las manos las tengo bien sensitivas pero agarro los pinceles y los mezcló y ahí estoy pedacito por pedacito pero nada en especial sino que vos solo vas llenando los colores. During her cancer treatment as a result of chemotherapy my mom's fingertips have become painfully sensitive. Her practice of painting playfully spreading out many colors onto the canvas with her fingers is now too painful. Wanting not to dwell in her agony I was the one who changed the direction of the conversation here. I asked her if she's considered painting about themes like war and politics the way her her new Central American painter friends sometimes do. Her response. So I asked her and about war and these things and she said so many lives lost and for what I don't know about this topic so it's better to stay quiet and I tell her but you do know about this topic because you lived it. So friendly playful children were also brutally murdered during the war and mothers still birthed their children amid the chaos. Miracles happened to protect the lives of others and there's little time to stop and acknowledge the trauma that then resides in the body. Writing this piece has given me an opportunity to reflect more deeply on this process of learning about El Salvador's political history from my parents. They've never intentionally intentionally broached the subject but as much as they prefer not to remember once we enter into the mental space of the things they live through they allow themselves the opportunity to release some some details. The fragmented stories blurry timelines graphic partial details helped me piece together an incomplete picture of my family and national history. Unexpectedly during the interview my mom told me a story I had never heard before our relative my aunt by marriage worked at the local municipality and she was tasked with documenting murders committed during the war. She photographed the mutilated bodies locating which decapitated head belonged to which body. She also collected rings and other jewelry to help family members identify their fallen loved ones. On one occasion 16 bodies were brought to San Martín and because they did not fit in the municipal offices workers piled them up outside at the park where my mother saw them. Having recently birthed her second daughter my mom was especially impacted by the pregnant mother among the dead. My mom talks about El Salvador and her stories fill the gaps in my mind add flesh to the bones I've been constructing since college readings and poorly made films. That the young men active in church were disappeared because the local mayor hated El Padre. She says the mayor wanted to silence the priest for empowering the youth of the town. Our conversation then we through the details of her leaving of the trip she took with me in my sister to arrive to the Mexico U.S. border of the maneuvering she went through to avoid detention in Mexico of the way she gained legal residency. I learned in that interview that my mom had left me behind with my paternal grandmother in El Salvador a few times over the first five years of my life as a requirement for her immigrant visa and she tells me new details about my birth and those of each of my sisters. Her telling of her life much like her telling of her painting process portrays her as someone being guided by circumstances and people. She's genuinely surprised in those moments of remembering when she made demands took firm steps and ignored others needs and expectations but in re-listening and re-reading her words multiple times it dawns on me how perfect painting is as a medium of expression for her. It makes expansive space for playfulness, malleability, meaning, engagement and beauty all necessary for survival and healing from todo lo que le jode la cabeza a cualquiera. So these are just some examples of her work and I reflect on what it means to be a researcher who is still seeking information and gathering from lots of different sources. I think about what it means to place yourself in a vulnerable position, what it means to highlight and leave a lone Salvadoran Spanish which has been rare in my in my life about capturing complex humanity about making sure you make space for people's dignity as they define it for themselves and those are the themes that I I hope stood out but I am really really curious to hear about what stands out to all of you thank you. Professor Bregel thank you very much for your presentation. We have time for about 40 minutes of Q&A. Before we jump in I just I did realize that I did not include that this talk is being organized by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley so our recording will be available there for anyone who would like to go back to some of the images the fantastic quotes or any other aspect of the talk. So we're going to be collecting if you have any questions there are questions there's a little Q&A bit on the bottom of your of your Zoom video and you can ask questions and we'll go from there. Professor Bregel I was hoping if you can just start by sharing with us the process of entering this project I know that you were part of it was informed by your own conversations about ethical research but you could have done that in many different ways and and I'm struck by the term towards a much more personal familial deeply vulnerable stance that you were mentioning at the end so I was hoping maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah so I can't say that it was all intentional I'm sorry my cat has joined he probably sensed that I needed some comfort. It wasn't all intentional in the sense that I'm chair of a department in the middle of a pandemic I have not really had the chance to work on my own research in a long time and then I saw the call for chapters for this volume and I said oh I wish I could but it's not the moment right now to start something new and my colleague Karina Alma really insisted and I thank her for it so I took the summer basically I took the opportunity first to record the interview I talked to my mom she was open to it I told her it'll be a chapter in a book and she she knows Karina and I said Karina's organizing it and so she was open to it and then we had the chance to talk and then I had I saw one of the questions was about the transcription process that was fascinating so one of my graduate students who was my research assistant at the time who's Honduran and Colombian he translated and not translated he transcribed and left all the J's instead of S's which I thought was fascinating because I don't hear it that way because that's just how how we speak but seeing the the transcript that way made me realize how important it is that this be told in this accent you know I didn't leave them in the final chapter but but it certainly influenced my desire to to leave it in in Spanish in that vocabulary that she used and I think ultimately I welcomed the process because these are things that I think about all the time and there's different ways to do work and I find myself increasingly moving away from the way that I that I was trained in in terms of avoiding bias and you know all sorts of things that had to do with remaining as close as possible to objectivity to some notion of object objectivity and really like pull away as far as I could from that and make myself vulnerable and just very explicitly part of what I was writing about of course with my mom's consent throughout the process. Thank you there's several questions around I think related to this topic Karina Chavarria asked she said one much of the comments are actually people are just just really touched by the story moved by your scholarship. Karina Chavarria says thank you Lacey for delving into the trauma and erasure of mourning spaces through your mom's worldview. As mentioned at the beginning you're concerned with the ethics and engaging and opening up wounds in trauma. Could you speak on how you've engaged in this both personal and public reflection on generational trauma? Is this something that you can say that this is like a concern in your work that you'd like to that you've been addressing? Yeah I think like I said those are things that that are at the core of my practice because that it's so important for me to maintain people's dignity and in the research process and I don't know that all research approaches do that right we're familiar with lots of lots of research that doesn't do that and so centering that can look a lot of different ways. I also know scholars who think there's the one right way to do it and it can only be done through pláticas in this particular way or you know and I really I don't believe that I think that there's a special space that is created in qualitative work that allows if you know given who you are and what you're bringing to that space allows people to share things that in many cases they haven't felt safe sharing with anybody else or want there want to shield their families from or you know for various reasons just haven't been able to share anywhere else and I think that there is and people have told me there's also something really powerfully healing about having that space about being in in a conversation where you're not being judged where you're being taken seriously where your perspective is is being allowed in all its different ways right and and so the the goal is that and I think I try to do that in all of my work and in this work it's just a next level of vulnerability because I'm not using you know fake names or you know this is my family this is my mother this is me and my reflections about my childhood and so that that does add a new layer of like what is this accountability and what is this kind of you know what is this as a contribution that it's it's what I'm still figuring out to be honest I mean I when you were describing your mom's process of painting the the conversation and the tentativeness and the ambivalence and the layering of vision and eventually the clarity of purpose and and the realization that things are done I couldn't help but think that that in many ways is what thoughtful scholarship is that there is a a an attempt to make sense of something that is not entirely visible until eventually it is and then you in you're following the text or you're following the and I don't know if that resonated with you or if you were thinking something similar to that I learned a lot about myself through this process I like to think of myself as being like you know linear thinking all that stuff but I realized that's how I write I do not do outlines I can't I just know that I'm gonna start and it will lead me it will lead me to the argument and my students will laugh because I tell this to them all the time like writing is thinking right you can't necessarily know in advance what you're going to say and some people don't work that way and I get it but I I can't so I I see that that parallel process for me with writing for sure thank you you see I have a couple questions and they were they're returning to some of the points brought up earlier Erica Herrera is wondering if you could expand on the emotional process of researching and handling difficult emotions while doing this research this is a question that I get a lot in a lot of for for all of my work and I I kind of jokingly say I really need to do a project on joy one day I think even if I did though I'm realizing that just who I am and what I bring to the space in terms of my energy or something right allows for people to open up about a lot of things that that they're carrying around and and then I have to do something with that in terms of the writing right and that's what comes out that's what you see in the end there's there's a multi-layered process depending on what the project is there's a lot of crying I'm a crier so sometimes I cry during the interviews sometimes I cry as I'm reading the transcripts sometimes I cry as I'm writing I try to release the crying before presentations but that's happened as well that I've cried during a presentation there's a lot of that there's a lot of just sitting with with the stuff sitting with their words sitting with their experiences wanting to honor all of that in the work I saw a really powerful presentation by Fanny Garcia yesterday who's an oral historian and and what she told the audience is anyone doing oral histories should be in therapy you know and I think she's right she's right there's some of that as well because if you are fully present and making the space available for someone else to be that vulnerable you're going to take some of that in as well and there's got to be some intention behind that and that's something I've learned along the way it's not how I was trained it's not what was at the forefront of my mind when I was doing my first few projects but I've learned over the years that I need that space and I need some kind of separate non analytical way to sit with it and do something with that energy because it it is intense thank you Lacy I related to that uh professor Pat Savella is with us and she wanted to know and she's presentation was a lovely process of exploring the silencing imposed on women and how they feel those silences creatively how would you advise emerging scholars so they can explore the silences of others in our communities thank you Pat for being here and for that question that's a good question and I I don't know that there's one single answer right everybody finds their different outlets for how to be creative and how to you know do something to with that energy or with that pain with that trauma that allows them to keep going to to keep being resilient in different ways and for my mom I understand now moving things around the house and you know new curtains and listen to that that she would make and all of that was part of her process cooking as part of her process and now painting and the crochet and you know all of that was part of her process for making sense of what doesn't make sense thank you I'm trying to read the questions are there any questions that I mean you can see them right is there any questions that you right now that is speaking to you that you'd like to to address directly let's see I hadn't been reading translation these are all wonderful people I mean this is fantastic you're all incredible we should all have a cup of coffee after this I know I tried to end with the images to kind of calm us all down again um thank you all for being here I as I'm going through um feels like she's painting divine feminine from Mother Earth there is a lot of art about flowers trees thank you takeaways from writing the piece so along with like all of that trauma and you know hearing these stories the story of the girl always gets to me where she she talks about like she was on her way to the hospital this girl I want to say I don't know she was between nine and 12 came by and very playfully like messed with my mom's hair and was like hopefully you have the boy this time because this was her second child and then my mom went to the hospital just one overnight the next day comes back and it's the girl's funeral and like the way that that messes with your mind as she says right te jode la mente you know um she's I've heard that story so many times but doing it in this way where I'm writing it up and trying to make sense of it allowed me to to kind of access a different way of understanding that madness that she has lived through and that she makes sense of it in some ways to make this life livable you know and there's something really powerful about that that I don't think I had captured in work before in being able to to let her tell her process and then and then the reader will have to make those connections um trying to see what other questions there are several people have asked how your mom is responding to the process of being a key participant in the research project or the the principal figure of a paper and Anayi is asking whether or not she's considered a biographical memoir and I'm also interested in that question I've been asking my mother to write a memoir for her life and I've been asking every single person who's done an oral history with me that they need to write memoirs and like whatever they want to know you know so like so I'm wondering if there's a similar impetus here um I have not taken it there I've just been very you know clear with her I don't know if she's here actually my sister who lives with her um was I don't think was able to make it and so I don't I don't know if she could come but um she's aware she's seen me present I told I asked her when I got this invitation would you be comfortable with me sharing this she said yes um she read the piece and so she's she's aware she's been kind of involved in my process in other ways her painting is the cover of my book my first book as well and and what I wrote about there though it wasn't about our family is is parallel to experiences that she grew up with so she knows that my work touches on things that she's familiar with and um you know I'll share with her reactions that people have about the work and it'll give her a space to kind of talk about her life again um writing this piece was challenging because the first draft of it I had reorganized everything and told the linear story and I realized that's not what she said you know um but it is a lot of work to weave in the context and to make it legible to someone else so I don't know what a longer piece or an entire memoir would look like um but I'm glad that I was able to tell this and the last paragraph where I say and then she talked about these other things each of those things could be you know a paper in and of themselves so maybe maybe that can happen related to the topic Graciela Perez is asking if um you know she asks is this storytelling the trauma the predatory violence and the war so is this storytelling from her art something that you expected did you know there was a bigger message within her work so turning to this this question of the dynamic between you as the interviewer and daughter and her as the speaker and mother were you already expecting this teasing out these multiple layers or were you were you surprised by the term I I did come into it with some ideas about the themes that she was interested in in her process because I've seen it um but I didn't know the level of detail that I would get and I knew because I know her that there would be lots of tangents but I didn't know which ones and certain things surprised me the story about the the teacher um and how he was you know trying to make advances at her and that that seemed even though she didn't phrase it this way it seems that that's what led her away from the the art that form of art for so long so there were some things I expected and there were also surprises I had never heard the story about the you know the bodies at the park for example and that's within central american studies and the desire to know right that felt so so powerful and so relevant because again you know you if you open up the space people will share even if it's a space they don't want to be in and have always tried to avoid and I think it it felt like a safer space because the conversation began with the art and I think there's something there there's a lesson there about how can we begin a conversation with creativity or you know you're telling of what is good in your life and and then maybe there will be tangents that take you to this other information that so many people of my generation and and more are curious about without having to impose it on people directly. Thank you Lacey for that. I wanted to ask you a question that my colleague and wonderful colleague Catherine Choi just asked which is can you say more about the anthology where this work will appear when will it be published is your work part of a particular chapter on methods and I wanted to ask that just so that we don't miss it so that we're all waiting for it and we can read it right and engage with the multiple scholars that will be part of this anthology. Yeah so the the anthology is still in progress it's it's being co-edited by Carina Alma, Alice Estrada, Esther Hernandez and Jahaira Padilla they made a call for pieces early in the year and I know I believe people have submitted their first draft so it's still in progress right now the title of it is engendering Central American mujeres testimonios and it's not meant to be an academic kind of project entirely although I think it will be published by an academic press but there's a lot of a lot of creative writing as well. And could you say more about this academic non-academic I mean I'm struck by it because I'm looking at my notes. You begin by asking the questions you know who are you writing this for and what is the purpose of your work and I'm you know I'm writing on my home and I'm writing on people who I've learned and met and those questions have have been a major set of concerns that are hard that I've had to grapple with and are hard to address that it's a lot I've learned that it's harder so I'm wondering like this relationship between academic and non-academic and and and how that might be a part of those two questions that you you entered in this talk. Yeah and those are not easy I think what I'm learning as I'm in this longer is that there doesn't always have to be the same audience and there I'm grateful for the pieces that I wrote early on in my career that are much more closely aligned with like traditional sociological methods grateful for those because they allowed me to establish a kind of expertise that is recognized in the courtroom honestly like very just practically it means that I can serve as an expert witness in asylum cases and and I'm grateful for that right I wouldn't have been able to do that if I only wrote pieces like this and that matters to me so I you know I want to be able to do those things and I also find it healing and I find it empowering and I find it enjoyable to write in this other way that is more creative and and I think captures more of the messiness I try to capture the messiness in all my work but this kind of like openness of format allows for more exploration of things that aren't just being dictated by a discipline and so I think I'm going to do more of this but I'm not I'm not letting go of the kind of more traditional stuff just because it has its purpose in my life as well so the academic versus non-academic I don't think there's a hard line necessarily and that's part of what I'm trying to figure out in writing something like this I see the themes that I know I teach about you know I see them in here they're just woven in and they're not like you know with subheadings telling you this is you know this is about patriarchy this is you know um and I like that but I I'm still you know exploring myself so I don't know where it'll where it'll go I think um as far as my mom is concerned when I sent her the piece that was finished her response was just wow and so I followed up with her and I said do you feel comfortable with me sharing this yeah do you want me to change anything do you want me to add anything nope you know she's she's just fine with it my children have read it and I saw something in them in their reaction that I really value because they recognized their grandmother in this piece they like it helped them put pieces together and that feels important I want to do work that does that you know and I think um other work has done that I hear it from people who who read it in class and they can relate to it so closely and so it does that for them too this just does it in a different way and it's it's rewarding in a in a different kind of more personal way I guess thank you Lacey for that um I have a question for one of my wonderful undergraduate students uh once you know what advice do you give for undocumented first generation students getting involved in research especially qualitative research so what would be uh you know uh and and you know uh these students are part of a group of undergrads who are doing multiple projects and they're incredibly excited uh so what would you what would be some of your general advice or advice on that on for getting started yeah I work with a lot of students and so those are important questions and I usually will say um it's going to be challenging at some points right so you want to do work that matters to you and that you have a clear sense for yourself because you're gonna forget the process will take you in different directions have a clear sense for yourself about why you're doing this keep coming back to that what led you to this place and keep going back to that to find inspiration to keep going um I also think it's important that students know that there is not only one right white only one right way to do research um sometimes there's this thing that happens that if they learned it in one class from one person they think that's that method that they were taught is the only right way and it isn't it really has to be something that you feel comfortable doing that you gain some kind of reward from doing um whether that's you know emotional or intellectual or whatever right um I think talking to a lot of people about the work and and getting conversations going to help you move ideas around to to figure out what part of this makes sense for you is important um and if you're doing qualitative work and you're dealing with human beings know that human beings are complex and that's a good thing and you want to capture as much of that as you can while also keeping in mind that you're going to have readers and you need to organize the information in a way that makes sense for someone who's not familiar with what you're talking about so that's a lot but those are kind of like at the base of of the doing the work that is fantastic advice which I wish I'd gone early in my career frankly um there are more questions I don't know if you want to pick any of them um I did want to maybe bring your attention to Alma Villa asking uh says that your work reminds them of the somatic work concerning futures and possibilities uh in centering Central American histories and would you tell us more about centering on ideas of desire and healing uh given that there's an element of these in the essay that you presented or the the chapter that you presented with us do you have any thoughts on that um hi Alma thanks for being here um yeah I don't because the writing process is very much like the the painting process that my mom describes it almost feels like I can't I can't tell you this is how to do it it's what what it will be right for some people these are the themes that are going to stand out I I don't know that my mom felt it you know as a healing process I certainly did it was a hard process to work on this emotionally for a bit I mentioned in the piece that this is where I learned that she would leave me as a kid with my paternal grandmother because she had to and I didn't know that I really had no idea that that happened and that sometimes it was for months at a time and I I ended up writing my first book about families that are separated across borders and I think that's not a coincidence on some level right so that the somatic that you ask about like there's definitely this process made me feel affirmed in this growing awareness about how our bodies keep everything right our bodies carry the trauma the joys the the memories even if we're not fully aware of them and I'm not trained in that at all but I'm trying to write about it without that kind of training just at the level of this this is what it feels like this is what it sounds like this is what it looks like and maybe that's an area that I'm going to explore further at some point Lacey on that point my colleague here Gatharia Um asked if you could speak more about the intergenerational conversations that are possible or not possible in Central American families particularly with regards to the historical traumas so kind of related to this conversation on on this history and Wade and Pete so it doesn't appeal yeah that's a really good question and I don't want to make a blanket statement that everyone should go out and you know do this kind of work I don't know that everyone would be willing to do that and and it is something I have to tell my students every time I teach classes where an interview assignment is taking place I see their desire to use the interview as a way to enter into these conversations that people have not been wanting to have and it and they can't do that I tell them if it's if you know this is a topic that they have not wanted to talk about and you can't do that to them because that might harm them they're they're not asking to do this so I try to be careful about that not everyone is prepared to I don't think my mom wanted to and it wasn't the plan to go there about the the traumas but the conversation led to that because I was trying to avoid her current moment of pain right and so once we entered she was able to talk in a lot more detail about that I think people just have to navigate that very carefully what I've seen with my students is they'll read about something and they'll have questions and they will they can bring the reading and and describe it to their parents and see if that opens anything up but I wouldn't want people to force folks into conversations that they're not ready to have especially if they don't have the support to make sense of it all thank you lacy there's a final few questions and we have about 10 more minutes but we can finish a little early depending on how you're feeling but I did want to bring your attention to a question on if there was anything that was particularly hard about interviewing your mom and or have you considered making this into an exhibition given that there are paintings and there's a nice you know I'm interested in that question I want to go to that exhibition myself so any thoughts on those two it's so interesting I didn't you know putting together the presentation was also that kind of process where two things you know happen where I thought should I have slides or no slides maybe it'll help people focus but I was thinking of the words and then I realized no they need to see the paintings and then I started I went crazy with you know just picking a few and organizing it and I just got the latest you know version of the software that gives you suggestions and makes it look really beautiful so that took up a lot of time but I've never thought about doing an exhibition I think she would be open to it I don't I don't know how that would work this is all new territory for me I can see how it would be useful to pair the things together and I know that I'm hoping that in the chapter they'll include some of the pictures as well thank you I you know I think there's let's see I'm looking at the questions everybody if your question hasn't been answered and you would like them to be answered I would request that you just paste it again so that we see it I think we've gotten most of it Silvia Rodriguez Vega asked if you know for those who are interested in talking with family members about their lives do you have some takeaways you can share do you find this especially tricky because it is a family member versus a stranger and I'm actually interested in that question myself so any thoughts on that professor? Yeah so as a scholar who's who's researched families for a while now it does make me nervous to encourage people to do that mostly because one of the projects that I did years ago um involved interviewing three people per family and I didn't however worked best in some cases the families worked together in other cases I did three separate interviews at three separate moments in different places and in those cases I was always taken aback by you know I would so this project was with DACA recipients and their families and I usually would start with the DACA recipient and then they would I'd tell them you know can I also interview two other relatives and um on a number of occasions they got on the phone right away and would kind of vouch for me with their parents or their siblings and then I'd set up a time and then drive out to go meet them and I'd show up to the person's home it was usually the mothers who were willing to do it um they would open up their home they've never met me they just had the you know the their their child vouch for me and then within minutes right they'd have food sometimes or we'd have something to drink and we'd sit in their kitchen or wherever within in one case I remember even looking at my watch within 10 minutes of sitting down to talk this woman was sharing some really really difficult you know painful memories about what she had gone through and crossing the border and she told me I've never shared this with my family they don't know this that happens all the time in interviews right the fact that they're talking to someone who they don't know who's not gonna judge them who doesn't have a history of dynamics and they're not responsible for and all of that allows for a space to to release some of these things right in a non-judgmental a space that's non-judgmental um I don't know how that goes when it's someone that you know I don't know what my mom withheld for me right I don't I don't know we already have established dynamics and that means there's certain things that we we're not going to touch that maybe she would with someone else right I think the reality of research is that each of us is limited in some ways no matter what method you're using no matter who you are and so you you get what you get right you get depending on who's involved in that interaction in that space that you've created and you'll probably gain some things and depending on what analytical lens you're coming in with and you'll see things you're you won't necessarily get the same kinds of things that you'll get with strangers and it's just a matter of being aware of that I also know you know with my mom if someone else had interviewed her for this I don't know that they would have made all the connections that I was able to make because I grew up hearing some of these stories right and I can say oh that girl was the girl that she didn't explain it in the thing you know um so it it so much of it is about who you are what dynamic you have with the person you're talking to and and your analytical lens that will really just heighten some things and not others thank you lacy that was actually really useful for me too those distinctions that you're pointing out I think we have one final questions that I think we'll we'll finish off and maybe round out our conversation today and that is coming from Andy Castro what are your thoughts around how we can preserve and share these stories with youth especially after generation of erasure and silencing and part of it the premise is that these stories are quite powerful for for for younger people children of Salvadoran immigrants next generation hi Andy that is um a great question and I think it's a project that needs to happen you know just like this volume that that this chapter is going to go into you know that might be a good resource um working on it right we we have to do this this is what Central American Studies is trying to do now how do we get the information out how do we do it in a way that reflects back to us that complexity of who who we see ourselves as that has not been reflected anywhere else up until now um I don't have any plans to do that but I think it's something to think about to to figure out how we make accessible in that way and I think people are doing it in different ways on social media and through storytelling in short films and you know nontraditional sorts of media people are trying to get these things out and it a lot of what needs to happen is to empower people to recognize that these are stories that should be told right because so often that happens too where my students will come in and and say I didn't even realize this was something we could study or talk about so that part of the process has to happen and more people need to be telling their stories um and that that's my hope that Professor Grego I want to thank you for a heartfelt thoughtful and incredibly helpful presentation um we are honored and just deeply indebted at your scholarship and for this conversation uh for those who are I want to say that I want to thank um some dear friends Alicia Bonaparte and and Lynn Posey Maddox because they were the ones who encouraged me to share this I thought oh I have to share scholarship and I don't know I haven't worked on anything and they're like you have this paper you know um so yeah thanks to them this is we're we're incredibly happy that you shared it with us if you're still a participant please say thank you to Professor Grego uh share your thoughts on how you're feeling what you're thinking um you know how is this helping you if you are an undergrad and you're still with us after an hour and a half you need to send me an email you are obviously a researcher at heart and we can get you connected with some awesome comrade professors who will be able to guide you in this process this long process of researching and discovery uh again this uh talk is the race is the inaugural talk of this year for race ethnicity and immigration colloquium it's part of the institute of governmental studies it is co-sponsored by the Center for um Race and Gender uh you can see that we have a mailing list on the chat if you have please join us we'll be able to provide you more information on these similar talks like these and keep you part of the conversation uh oh last bit I want to thank Melanie Collins who is the person dealing with all the tech uh she got she was able to broke me in when things kind of were going all over the place so it's because of her that we are even able to have this conversation so thank you to you Melanie um with that I hope all of you have a wonderful Thursday and a much restful weekend again Professor Grego muchas gracias thank you for your yes thank you all thank you for being here bye everybody