Abstract
Historically marginalized populations in the US, although culturally different, have come under similarly intensified macrosocial pressures that have increasingly challenged their resilience and well-being. These populations have been both geographically set apart through discriminatory practices and educationally disadvantaged through exclusionary institutional practice and the imbalanced allocation of public resources. They have inevitably developed as displaced communities – whose access to resources and participation in local decision-making have been systematically limited or blocked. Many of the communities with which UC Links works have found themselves facing this pervasive displacement in ways that bring their university partners into action with them. In this context, the difficulties of coordinating program activity at times challenge their capacity to sustain their work, and at other times have the effect of deepening their collaborations as they co-construct a zone for listening to each other's voices and expanding understandings of each other's perspectives.
TopIntroduction
As the sky darkened and threatened to open up and pour rain one evening in the December of 2019, a small crowd of people began to gather in a narrow backstreet just a block or two from one of the main avenues of a central coastal town in California. Arriving from various directions, the people parked their cars and pickups and made their way into an alleyway behind several small businesses and across the street from a rundown strip mall. As they came together, they greeted each other and began to talk quietly among themselves, some in Spanish and others in English, and still others going back and forth between the two languages. Most of them were family members from the town’s community of Mexican and Central American heritage – parents, grandparents, young people of all ages, uncles and aunts and their friends – but some of the people were Anglos – a few men and women active in local politics and several faculty, staff, and students from the university. Mara and Charles, two of the authors, and Gloria (a pseudonym; all names in this chapter, except those of the authors, are pseudonyms), a faculty member from the local university, began unloading a large quantity of food that they had collected and transported from a local restaurant for the event. The smell of the food, although wrapped in aluminum foil containers, lifted the heads of those who had already arrived at the scene, and the gathering crowd began to talk excitedly about the night’s event.
Men and women approached the vehicles and began to unload and set the food aside for the feast to take place immediately after the main event. Soon the host of the event started gesturing to everyone, waving them inside. The presentation took place inside a large garage, chairs opening onto the alley in the back of some small local shops and businesses. The garage had been cleared out and then filled with folding chairs facing toward the back wall. Everyone tried to crowd into this space, but there were not enough chairs for the number of people in attendance, and soon there was standing room only as all of them, speaking to each other in low friendly voices, politely shouldered their way into the packed space and found a spot to sit or stand.
Several chairs had been placed against the back wall of the garage to face the audience. There, as the crowd settled in, several young people gathered together and took their seats, talking to each other and directing several others toward the garage entrance, where a projector had been set up, to prepare for the documentary screening.
The host of the event said a few words of welcome, then turned to Gloria, who stood up and spoke a few soft-spoken yet urgent words about the occasion for the night’s solemn event. The audience grew quiet and some in the audience whispered to each other and shook their heads or looked down mournfully at their hands as they listened to Gloria, who introduced a student named Santiago, with whom she had developed Youth 4 Justice, the local UC Links program. Together, Santiago and his fellow university students had worked with local K-12 students from neighborhoods of primarily Mexican and Central American descent on various community-oriented projects, including the video documentary to be shown that evening.
Santiago, a graduate student with close ties to the community because of his several years of experience with Youth 4 Justice, stood up, and the audience grew quiet. Santiago began to introduce the two young people sitting in front of the audience. Clara and Elena were sisters, one a middle school student and the other a high school student, who had taken part in the Youth 4 Justice program and had become involved in making a documentary about their community. Their participation had intensified and transformed until ultimately they had taken on the roles of articulating the ideas they wanted the program to address and later acted as producers and directors for the documentary. The two girls spoke quietly about their work and its subject – an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on their community the year before. The audience sat in intense silence. All of them knew about the raid and its impact on the community, and many of them had experienced it themselves. The two girls introduced the film and nodded to the technical people to start the video, which was shown against the bare cinder block wall the audience was facing.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cultural Violence: Sustained tactics of domination exerted through dichotomous thinking (an “us” versus “them” viewpoint that demeans certain social groups as unworthy of regard); dominant narratives that negatively portray those social groups; and the sustained control of public space, placing restrictions or surveillance on those groups’ use of public space.
Poetics of Engagement: The often implicit technical and communicative means and know-how – both vocal and nonverbal, face-to-face and digital – for co-constructing meaningful mutual encounters in ways that recognize the voices of all participants in a joint activity.
Zone of Proximal Estrangement: The field of open meanings that emerges in recognizing and exploring the strangeness of the familiar in everyday experience or artistic expression.
Percepticide: A dominating strategy that renders a population silent and unable to see and hear what is happening around them, thus reinforcing biased presumptions about who can or should participate in civil society.
Structural Violence: Sustained tactics of domination exerted through “percepticide,” forcing people to ignore oppression or violence, and through the mystification of social problems by over-simplifying historical facts and circumstances that give rise to problems.