Emily Hicks is an educator, cultural critic and artist based in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Her undergraduate education included studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from UC San Diego, where she was a member a study group on aesthetics led by Herbert Marcuse. In 1984, in conjunction with the Olympics in Los Angeles, she co-directed "The Peoples of Los Angeles," an exhibition of holographic portraits. Hicks has been a member of the political art collectives BAW/TAF (Border Art Workshop/Taller de arte fronterizo) and Las Comadres. She has lectured and performed at many universities and cultural institutions in the United States, Mexico, Uruguay, Canada, Italy, Germany, Hungary and Finland. Her work has been reviewed in Artweek, New Art Examiner, Arforum and Art in America. A Professor with a joint appointment in English and Comparative Literature and Chicana and Chicano Studies, she has also taught at UC Irvine, USC and the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico. She participated in the K-12 Curriculum Project as an American Council of Learned Societies grant recipient (1992-95). Hicks was a co-editor of La linea quebrada/The Broken Line. Her book Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (University of Minnesota) was published in 1991. Ninety-five Languages and Seven Forms of Intelligence: Education in the Twenty-first Century (Peter Lang) will be published in 1999.
Question:
Your last book, Border Writing (University of Minnesota, 1991), was about border culture, literature and literary theory. How did you decide to write about critical pedagogy in your new book Ninety-five Languages: Education in the Twenty-first Century (Peter Lang, 1999).
Answer:
In 1984, I participated in the Model Literacy Project at USC. The city of Los Angeles was concerned about is image as it prepared for the Olympics, and USC, which is located in a low-income neighborhood, wanted to make sure that there would not be any "problems" during the games. When the Czech gold medalist Olga Connolly went to officials at USC and explained to them that in Leninist terms, their weakest link was their relationship to the surrounding community, they agreed to fund a literacy program. The students were drawn from the California Conservation Corps. I had read Freire's work and despite being told that his ideas would never work in "the First World," I brought my copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed to faculty meetings for this project. I worked with gang members who were trying to get out, a student who had witnessed a murder in Nickerson Gardens, and both did and did not want me to tell her story, a participant in a drive-by shooting who felt very guilty and broke down in front of me because he believed he had no one in whom he could confide, a young African American woman who directed her group in a reading of Brecht's "Mother Courage" and a young African American man who insisted that I teach him "real" English: Shakespeare. He wrote his own version of "Romeo and Juliet." I learned a tremendous amount about the lives of the students, including that the decision to leave a gang could mean taking the risk of having one's car blown up and that there were multicultural, bilingual gangs with both African American and Latino members. Most importantly, I learned that there were students who would do anything to get an education. One student in my group came bandaged and bruised, with a broken arm, having just been jumped by seven young women at a bus stop on her way to class. I credit all of these students with teaching me to teach, or more accurately, with allowing me to participate in learning. The experience changed me profoundly.
Eight years later, I participated in the K-12 Curriculum Project in San Diego. Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the project included K-1 2 teachers in four cities as well as university faculty members. Activities in San Diego, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston were coordinated through UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles, the University of Minnesota and Harvard. This was a very different experience from the sense of accomplishment I had at USC. My only contact was with teachers, not students. I was dismayed by the attitudes I heard expressed by the Anglo teachers in the city in which I was working as I was heartened by the vision of some of the Los Angeles teachers. My ideas about border theory, especially at first, fell on deaf ears. I took a vow of silence and literally clenched my fists under the conference table as I listened to descriptions by Anglo teachers of Latinas who only cared about their hairstyles, Latino/a parents who had no concern about the education of their children and other comments too depressing to recount. It was only after meeting with the K-6 teachers unofficially that I discovered where innovations were taking place. From K-3 teachers, I learned about multimedia work stations, team-teaching and many other techniques that I now incorporate into my teaching at the university level. The outcome of the three-year project was rewarding in that first, it provided a humbling experience in my continuing education as an activist and second, despite many setbacks, some of my work resonated with that of some of the teachers, particularly Sue Collins and Marie Anderson. In their Los Angeles-based curriculum project, "Team-Based Curriculum: The Emergence of the Chicano," they grapple with both historical and pedagogical issues and discuss three alternative pedagogies, constructivism, critical pedagogy, and feminist pedagogy. They use the concept of the "historical generation" to frame their work. While I toiled away, often quite disillusioned, in a conservative, extremely racist environment, they were trying to figure out how to include Gloria Anzaldua in the high school curriculum.
Most recently, I have witnessed the struggles of parents, teachers and students from four different elementary schools since my son has entered school. The inequities in funding, the violence and pollution the children must endure, the lack of books and materials, and the physical condition of some o f the schools would lead one to expect that many parents, teachers and administrators would just give up, and yet, I have found unending enthusiasm, especially on the part of the parents, to create something positive with very few resources. At a parent meeting at a school in Barrio Logan, a Latino neighborhood, a father explained in Spanish that he was illiterate, and that his third-grade daughter was teaching him to read. This parent worked all week chopping ice blocks at an ice factory and still found time to bring ice for the snow cones at the school fund-raisers. My son now attends a well-funded magnet school with a primarily African American student population. However, the extra funding comes from the efforts of parents, not the district.
Ninety-five Languages was very easy to write because I feel so strongly about the issues I address. I wanted to inform those privileged educators and students about the conditions in low-income, Latino neighborhoods and to encourage the teachers who are working against tremendous odds as advocates for their students, the teachers in the shunned schools.
I also address theoretical concerns in the book. The final chapter puts forward a model of democracy that links Spinoza's "good" city, described in the Ethics, with the multicultural classroom. This research grew out of my interest in the work of Deleuze and the anarchist Antonio Negri. I discuss new definitions of citizenship and the postmodern state in relation to education.
Question:
Could you elaborate on the connections between Spinoza's Ethics, the state and the multicultural classroom?
Answer:
Darder and Hardt and Negri overlap in that their projects are Foucauldian. A shared concern is that of asking how we are constituted as subjects of knowledge, power and action. For Darder, a critical pedagogy allows this inquiry to take place in the classroom. Hardt and Negri base their theory of a Spinozian democratic state on a historical ontology of the self, a genealogy of the constitution of social being. A multicultural classroom in a border region is a site where these projects might converge.
We can ask what a multicultural state might look like. In Hardt and Negri's model, this state would be fully constituted by the multitude. The multitude would include women, men, bisexuals, lesbians, people with mental illnesses, a multiplicity of ethnicities and members of many other groups. No group would be singled out to be criminalized. The chance encounters that occur today, characterized by violence and fear , could be replaced by organized joyful encounters among gays, undocumented workers, HIV-positive citizens and the homeless. An example of this that I witnessed in 1986 was a parade on the Day of the Dead in the Mission District in San Francisco. Two traditionally hostile groups, gays and Latinos, came together to mourn those who had died of AIDS. Lavish floats functioned as altars. In what Deleuze refers to as "the plane of consistency," there would exist the possibility of organized, pleasant encounters. Deleuze writes this on this multicultural, multigendered, multiethnic" common plane of immanence," there is no longer a subject. There are only affective states of an anonymous force.
What Darder refers to as a deconstruction of fear is described by Spinoza as becoming reasonable, that is, to perceive and comprehend what we have in common with others. This ability will result in the transformation of sad passions into joy-affects and inaction to action. Successful living in the "good" or border city would be the ability to be reasonable in Spinoza's sense, that is, to organize pleasant encounters and to perceive and comprehend common notions. The multiplicity of cultural codes in a border region creates not only the possibility of many forms of conflict, but also, due to the infinite permutations of interactions, many forms of conflict resolution. In Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, the greater our capacity of being affected, the greater our power. Border dwellers have a daily opportunity to become affected in a vast array of ways as their perceptions and interactions are shaped by at least two sets of cultural codes. Teachers and students in a multicultural classroom have a similar, even more complex, opportunity.
Spinoza's common notion can be linked to the holographic model of referential codes. Depending on my referential codes, I may find someone threatening, repulsive, loathsome, less than human, weak, and so on. Religious, class and ethnic factors may contribute to my view. Border dwellers have the opportunity to develop a stereoscopic or holographic vision. The data base of categories, concepts and ideas that might be used to express what is common between two people can theoretically be much greater. The habit of code-switching, necessary to survival in a border region, may strengthen one in terms of ability and agility with regard to perceiving and comprehending common notions.
I am not suggesting that a teacher turn to two students and lecture them with the admonition: "You're both human, now try to get along." The process is much more subtle and multilayered. I have witnessed a transformation of conflic t in a class in which I taught Anzldua's Borderlands. Several Latinos were contemptuous of the book and disruptive during classroom discussion. They had no interest in discussing gender issues and asked various female classmates, rudely, if they were lesbians. One of the students in the same class used his background as a priest and a healer to establish commonality at many levels. First, he was able to gain trust as an ex-Catholic, because they were Catholic. Second, as a Latino male, even though he was gay, they felt more comfortable with him than they did with Anglo feminists. Third, as a healer and someone who had grown up in a neighborhood similar to theirs, he was able to get them to discuss the repressed pain and sadness they had with regard to friends of theirs who had been killed in gang-related violence. These discussions were done in a small group. The shared referential codes kept creating a larger territory of commonality until finally, the anger these students had expressed in their chance encounter with Anzaldua's book was transformed into first sadness and later community and solidarity. At the end of the class, they were participating in class discussions. Their fear of homosexuality was no longer an issue; their concern was explaining to the class the culture in which they had been unable to mourn for the friends they had lost. On the last day of class, when the student-healer built an altar as part of his class presentation, they participated in the accompanying ritual, and the process of passive, sad affects being transformed into active, joyful affects was complete.
Question:
In addition to your work as a teacher and a writer, you are a performance artist. How does performance art relate to your pedagogical concerns?
Answer:
Paulo Freire's work has been helpful to me in this regard because of the use of it made by Augusto Boal in relation to theatre and political consciousness. I began doing performance pieces and installations in Los Angeles in the early 1980s with Daniel J. Martinez and Rachel Rosenthal. My students often participated in the pieces. In 1986, I began collaborating with the multicultural art collectives BAW/TAF (Border Art Workshop/Taller de arte fronterizo) and Las Comadres. I became familiar with the work of Mexican fluxus/conceptual artist Felipe Ehrenberg. He uses journalism, book art, performance art and whatever is at hand to educate his audience politically. This Spring, I am teaching a performance and ethnography workshop off-campus at my gallery/art studio. Students will receive independent study credits.
Question:
A workshop that has to do with performance and ethnography. Could you elaborate?
Answer:
I have to thank a colleague in Chicano and Chicana Studies, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, and the cultural studies critic Norman Denzin for suggesting to me possible connections between these two fields. Del Castillo addresses the situation of the Latina ethnographer doing field work in a Latino/a environment. Lisa Delpit touches on related issues in Teaching Other People's Children. Denzin, who teachers sociology, has his students write analytical, autobiographical pieces, observing themselves as social texts, as part of their training as ethnographers They present their research as multi-media performance pieces. Amazingly, but quite rightly, he is able to teach this material as a methods course. In my own performance art pieces, I have dealt with my own ethnicity as a descendent of Cornish miners (Hicks), Sicilian sailors (Rugguri), Irish ministers (O'Donnell) and English genetic carriers of porphyria and manic depression (Nalley).
Question:
Have you ever done projects with students at the elementary level?
Answer:
In conjunction with the 1997 Border Festival, I did a binational project entitled "The Kids from Perkins and Ecotina/Los ninos de Perkins y Ecotina." It consisted of a very large format 3-D bilingual book, a multimedia performance held on both sides of the border, and a chat room that linked Oaxacan student from an orphanage outside of Tijuana with Latino students on the U.S. side at Perkins Elementary in Barrio Logan. Both groups were bilingual. Spanish was the second language of the Oaxacan students. The Mexican site was the Centro Cultural de Tijuana and the U.S/ site was the computer lab at Perkins. In prepartion for the binational chat room dialogue, I met with both groups separately. We read the book, engaged in a variety of activities, and discussed ecological issues. The students in San Diego had parents who worked at some of the worst offenders in terms of polluting companies. On the day of the event, technical difficulties on both sides caused a delay in setting up the Internet link of about an hour. The topics of conversations in the chat room ranged from violence in the U.S. to an invitation from a Russian immigrant student who had lived in both Tijuana and San Diego. He invited a Oaxacan girl to come to Russia with him. This same student had, a few days earlier, nearly incited a riot. We were very proud of him, but he almost got us thrown out of Perkins. While the students were making a list of ways to fight pollution, he suggested that we disrupt a meeting with a school sponsor that was taking place in the auditorium and return the free notebooks that the company, a major polluter, had provided for students. As much as we applauded his idea, we had to block the door. These were fourth graders.
Question:
What are your current projects?
Answer:
At SDSU, I am part of a committee that has been asked by the administration to "reinvent" the university, our first task being to redesign the undergraduate general education requirements. We have had some success in creating interdisciplinary, team-taught classes that will count as general education courses. We are still facing the challenge of bringing faculty members in the humanities together with those in the sciences. The Department of Nursing has been very supportive of our work.
I am applying for a sabbatical. The research project I want to do is entitled, "National Identity and Cultural Valence in an Ethnically Pluralist Setting." It is based on the premise that the combined impact of economic shifts and ethnic revival are placing the nation-state under multiple pressures. Building on earlier research (Smolicz, 1997), we will explore the relationships among: 1) ethnic identity; 2) creativity; and 3) the formation of communities. We are using the U.S. Mexico border as a laboratory in which to study the way in which Anglos, Latinos and others cross cultural borders and build bridges of communication within the San Diego-Tijuana region. Earlier research in Australia has shown that the school system discourages what Smolicz calls the ability to be multivalenced, that is able to function in more than one cultural environment. Earlier research has shown that the school system discourages such activities. Our methodological approach will be the analysis of documents and memoirs. We will seek to identify evidence related to the writer's self-identification, cultural values the writer has activated in his/her life, and how these cultural values were acquired. I hope to present this work at a sociology conference in Australia in 2000.
A relatively small number of female cultural critics have written about Deleuze, so I am writing a book about the feminist response to the work of Deleuze. I am starting with the feminist critics Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. The link I will make to border culture will be through the category of affective labor. A colleague in Chicana and Chicano Studies, Maria de la Cruz Ibarra, is doing research on the emotional labor performed by Latina caregivers.
I am also working on a short animated film about crossing the U.S.-Mexican border in my performance persona as The Wrestler Bride, and refusing to remove my mask for INS officers. It is based on a true event. In 1986, on the Day of the Dead, I crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego. The most famous Mexican wrestler, El Santo, always refused to reveal his identity. Shortly after another wrestler removed his mask in the ring, El Santo died. When I was asked for my identification and to remove my mask, I gave my faculty card and explained that I was on my way to meet with G.L.O.W. (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) in Los Angeles. I said that I would pull the mask up only in a private room and only for a female officer. I was carrying a portable altar, filled with magical powders, milagros, currency from different countries, a plastic doll's shoe and a card from Botanica Ochun. When I opened it to get my I.D., one of the officers, a Mexican-American, started yelling "Una bruja, a witch." They brought a female officer, took me to a private room, and let me cross. In the film version, I want the viewer to be challenged to question the concepts of identity, citizenship and conflicting belief systems.